19 August, '24 & '44
Ralentir, the pavement advises motorists. Slow down. Paris doesn’t need to be told.Â
These are not the summer doldrums. This is the moment when the rats have Paris to ourselves and can stroll down avenues and even boulevards like Caesar, someone who, for a stretch of time impossible to measure, owns his part of the world. The whores have fled town after the big athletic show, everyone is at the beach — except for us losers who keep working, who have no invites to Normandy or Provence. The fragile old dame, more an integral part of the city than the zombies racing past with headphones on and packs on their backs, whispered something like, I wanted to take advantage of the calm, and she did. (She’ll probably outlive me at the going rate, say what.) The pool at Place Verlaine was closed, problème technique. I decided to keep going on shaky legs, taking breaks every time I saw a bench but still getting around. I’m not in good shape, okay, big deal. Â
The thing about Paris is the intersecting time zones. Not the stop lights, not the bureaucratic division into twenty districts or opening and closing hours which change on a whim and the extravagant season-long list of saints’ days, and definitely not the endless queues to get into the big shows, the police giving your bag the once over although we know it’s just for show. It’s the fault lines, the sense, everywhere around, of intense stories lurking that might pitch you into another era where things happened, maybe still are happening.Â
I’m standing here rubbing the bust of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, nose and forehead, which is what I do on rue Cujas at the little hotel where he wrote No One Writes To The Colonel. A little strength, Gabu. A little genius so I can pull everything I’ve planned off, brother. If you can spare it. Â
So I sit down on a bench and it gives me a point of view. Or I get a coffee at the welcoming little hole in the wall at the beginning of Saint Jacques, chat up two Neapolitan girls, wonder if Deha is around, lean against the wall out of the sun and with eyes closed run my fingers in what can only be the groove left by a bullet. When exactly ?
August 19 is the day it all began. The Uprising. Everyone celebrates on the 25th and this year will be the 80th anniversary, so all the goody two shoes will be out in force giving speeches, stealing a little glory for themselves. It doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to the nameless men and women behind some 600 barricades that appeared out of nowhere in the morning, when the gendarmes résistants took back the préfecture that faces Notre Dame. Across the river the Latin Quarter, a warren of resistance. The object was, not unlike the Bastille before it, to get inside and get to the weapon stockade. Not much as it turned out but even pistols will do.Â
7 a.m. The esplanade in front of Notre Dame. Striking officers, thrown out of police headquarters days before, gather. How to get inside ? Straight out of Jean-Pierre Melville, an officer leaves the front door unlocked for them. Once inside, they commandeer the préfecture. The Allies are two hundred kilometers away, Hemingway in the dirt bitching at Le Clerc on top of a tank. Meanwhile, the hard work is getting done, Nazis (actual Nazis, not make believe) mass to retake police HQ with tanks. Paris’s first molotov cocktail gets thrown, and the men in the windows across the river fire away, chipping pieces of stone off old lady Notre Dame. You can still run your fingers in those, too.
The image below could be Béatrice Briant, who organized the group of volontiers at Huchette and St. Jacques. Hard to find any images that are definitely her. But she’s still there in spirit.Â
For a six minutes of astonishment in a journal of that day’s events:Â
https://x.com/Gaullisme_Fr/status/1825424386263777401
The footage is miraculous, the combined efforts of what must have been dozens of cameramen who raced out to the street risking their lives to record the day that Paris rebelled against the overwhelming presence of the invader. Only a short clip that tells a story straight out of Melville as edited by late-in-life Godard. If you don’t participate in one of the internet’s last slugfests, insultoramas and useful data combines that is X, there must be plenty of sources of documentary footage elsewhere. Leave a note below if you find.
Churlish to annoy you with subscription pleas after being absent most of the summer with health issues — a cracked skull to be precise. (But no blood, the doctors told me yesterday. That’s meant to be a good thing.) The old Soviet version of house arrest was to pack writers off to rooms with pen and paper, with nobody except the landlady to listen to his collected works. That drives most of us insane, some slowly, others quickly. It gets the blood flowing to be noticed. There’s a lot of competition out there, the internet hills are full of wild bazookas all firing at once. But if you made it this far, you can clear your throat and say, All right. That you can do without denting your bank account.