City Disappearing Before Your Very Eyes

More Paris Spleen

Aug 05, 2023

And so now they’re after the booksellers along the banks of the Seine ? What next ? Parisians shake their heads in disbelief.

Wandering around Paris is an art. I don’t mean the way the flâneur goes about it, in the self-styled isolation of aesthetic highlights he alone appreciates. He never meets anybody. The old store with books piled to the ceiling, threatening to tumble through the windows onto the street has the flavour of the neighborhood around Saint Sulpice but inside is an older man, a bit bent with age but with lively eyes, who made it his life’s work to collect documents from the 17^th and 18^th centuries, among them the doléances written by residents of the towns during the Revolution. There’s a photo on his cluttered desk of him standing with the President, who came in to buy a first edition of Confucius in French when Xi was in town a few years back. A conversation about that encounter unfolds…

Towns during the Revolution were tasked with recording complaints about current conditions. The Bray, a small region in the Seine-Maritime. (Author’s collection).

Wander over to the river, which acts like a magnet for people in every town that has one, Paris especially with its thirty seven bridges and stories for each one. (The old joke about Pont Neuf is that there are always three birds flying across it, a priest, a thief and a prostitute, one chasing the other and the other chasing the third – in any order you like.) Along the Seine in the center of town there are the bouquinistes on both banks along the walls, where you can mix with the idle crowds, drifters, cigarette pinchers, out of work scholars looking for a debate, parties interested in a particular subject or author, browsers, loners looking for that one book they read years ago. It’s one of the glories of Paris, built by humans, made on a human scale. I knew a homeless man, a Tunisian refugee, who collected books tossed on the street and made his own stall under Pont Neuf where he slept every night. I regret not getting his photo but he was either acting shy, angry, drunk or all three and he’s gone now, disappeared during the pandemic…

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Maybe you know the story of how they came to be where they are : a Dutch ship ran aground on the banks of the Seine sometime in the 17^th century, and when its goods were salvaged, they turned out to be books, freshly printed in the Low Countries but now soggy and near ruin. Rescuers piled the books on the parapets along the river to dry out, people gathered to talk and before you know it, someone had built stalls along the quais. That’s the story anyway and whether it’s true or not hardly matters. Long before UNESCO was around to designate the bouquinistes part of the ‘Immaterial Heritage of Humanity,’ this was part of the charm and indeed, utility of Paris, a place to find a rare edition of Shakespeare in French or a book on la cuisine bourguigonne. (That one would be at one of the stalls between Ponts de Sully and de la Tournelle.) Ezra Pound isn’t the only writer to find what he wasn’t looking for along the quais at the bouquinistes but the Renaissance translation of Homer he chanced upon inspired his first Canto. (To cite an example from the Anglo world.)

The new class doesn’t see the point. The well-educated factotums in City Hall, so adept at creating shopping malls and turning Place de la Republique into a skate park, see something that impedes the steady movement of crowds and a cluttered image on your TV set during the upcoming Olympics. They want the book sellers to relocate. Only temporarily, of course.

So it too may all be gone soon, and only Parisians will remember. Tourists won’t – they’re busy pulling their suitcases on wheels as they hurry by. The government will announce an ‘interim solution,’ saying they’re ‘studying their options,’ Everything is on the table, they say. Why not a better, more productive place that will produce more sales for the booksellers ? A place inside, protected from the weather. Crowds around the booksellers clog the sidewalks, making right of way difficult for some – the handicapped, for instance. (No studies cited.) Not to worry – nothing final decided yet. A spokeswoman will announce a ‘temporary solution.’ That’s the way they run the show these days.

For those not up on recent Paris history, the city had a hard-working mayor for over a dozen years in the first part of this century, long-time Socialist Bertrand Delanoe, a tireless, publicity-shy official who rode shotgun on an immense bureaucratic beast and managed to keep the city clean and moving. Yes, dear progressives, there were bike lanes then, maybe not enough of them but they weren’t the psychotic, dangerous, concrete inventions of posh boys and girls who hate other people’s cars. Because never forget, the class the progressives despise is the working class of whatever color, who drive into Paris like they own the place when they’d be better off in the neighboring banlieus, far from the pretty people who’ve got it made.

So the booksellers along the quais are currently in the sights of the More Perfect Paris crew. Last weekend I met Jérôme Callais, whose card calls him a ‘bibliotherapist,’ one of the booksellers up in arms about the latest exercise in doublethink from the Hôtel de Ville.

Jérôme Callais at his stall on Quai Conti

The logic goes like this : Paris is hosting the international Olympics next year, at the start of which is an Opening Ceremony that will take place, in part, in the streets of Paris along the riverside. Although that ceremony is only four hours long, it will be broadcast around the world, so Paris had best put on its best face. Security is also a concern, although it’s hard to understand how the bouquinistes pose a threat. (Might some grungy person be searching for something to read when our Perfect Specimens jog by, torches aloft ?) A clean city without grime or visual eccentricities, something that allows the imposing grandeur of our architecture to impress the denizens of igloos, huts and highrises wherever they may be on the planet. If they’re watching the opening ceremony at all.

Let’s leave aside all the arguments against the Olympics themselves, the charges of bribery in the selection of host cities; corruption widely documented in the worldwide tentacles of its organization; the construction of facilities which will lie more or less abandoned once the Olympics are over; the subsequent devastating effect on real estate prices and the cost of living which could be called the Olympic Effect, from which Barcelona (for one) has never really recovered, all of which Anne Hidalgo, Paris’s mayor, might have learned if she’d had the slightest interest. Let’s even leave aside the fact of Hidalgo’s rampant unpopularity, a performance so devastatingly miniscule in last year’s presidential primaries that if a normal human being was confronted with the result, it would provoke a momentary crisis of amour-propre. Even her son announced he was going to vote for someone else. During her reign, a half dozen organizations have come to life (SOS Paris, Saccage Paris, etc.) dedicated to protesting her administration’s neglect of the city’s heritage… Leave all that for another day. For Anne Hidalgo, an adjoint in the Delanoe administration who saw her chances and took them, ‘Brought the 2024 Olympics to Paris, 2024’ will be her political tombstone.

Cover of a back issue of the satirical Saccage (Vandalizing) Paris.

What does it mean when you want to erase one of the city’s most emblematic scenes, one known around the world, charming and intellectually stimulating, for a four-hour televised stunt ? Did someone in the Olympic Committee insist, or alas, did some brave coördinator in the admin offer ? Genius like this must be rewarded, which is where the satirical mags come in.

Paris is a dirty, lively world unto itself: I mean that very real city apart from the museums and those annoying double-decker buses stuffed with tourists that bear down on you like enraged rhinos at feeding time. The city stinks, especially after a long festive weekend. It was clean and the lives lived here messy but now those roles are reversed. Everywhere is trash and decay, semi-abandoned works projects, new bike lanes that introduce dangerous curbs in the middle of the street, with the physical plant falling apart and trees felled right and left, while cell phone zombies and scooters mow you down on the sidewalk. As to the trees, it’s no joke : Hidalgo’s administration has its eyes on trees planted during the Napoleonic period alongside the Tour Eiffel (to be replaced by concrete bunker Visitor Centers) and the grounds alongside and behind Notre Dame, to name but two hotly-contested projects. Green my ass ! Something there is in City Hall that doesn’t care for a tree. An astonishing transformation has taken place over the last twelve years.

Would the booksellers return to the quais ? What guarantee do we have ? None. ‘Only temporary,’ is a handy justification for those in power. You can hear the ideological factory gearing up in City Hall to justify it. Perhaps, like the anarchic, 24-hour a day, seven days a week les Halles, ‘belly of Paris’ and the world’s greatest food market, the book sellers will be banished to a more ‘suitable’ location, somewhere discretely out of town because, after all, apart from a few tourist chatchkas, it’s only Parisians who frequent the bouquinistes in search of a certain second-hand novel or cookbook, or a history (I discovered the first four volumes of La Grand Histoire des Francais sous l’Occupation last weekend). Better they should go to a too well-lit bookstore that pays taxes on every purchase, except those books aren’t there.

Let an actual bouquiniste have a say :

You’ll pardon my rough French and enjoy his elegant native version, as with bon esprit, Jérôme Callais argues that after 400 years of being here, the bouquinistes intend to put up a fight.

O to be a spy in the Woke World of today’s Paris City Hall ! What conversations they must be having there that with a slight twist would make malicious material for a novel or a film. The goody two shoes of the Hidalgo regime who, not content with bringing the Olympics to Paris next year, are busy dismantling the world we know and love, that city of inexhaustible heritage and joie de vivre, all in pursuit of a ’fifteen-minute city’ for the executive class, replacing the quartiers intimes which existed long before the brand stores barged in. If there’s one thing the Woke know how to do, it’s forceably rearrange other people’s lives.

We won’t get that novel for a few years yet. (Some quiet rat keeping his head down in the Hôtel de Ville, incredulous at what’s happening, will take notes.) Meanwhile a bit of Paris disappears every day, by measure and protocol and one brilliant idea after another.

Stay tuned. Next up : trees.

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