It is not yet 10 p.m. when two hooded men appear in the hall of the town hall where the elected PS of Saint-Denis meet, like every Monday evening. In their hands, handguns. In their mouths, threats to kill everyone. “Where are the seats?” We are on May 15, 2006. In 48 hours the final of the Champions League will take place at the Stade de France, between Barcelona and Arsenal. The two robbers know that the municipality has a hundred and fifty official tickets, to distribute within local associations.
“At that precise moment, we were in the mayor’s office allocating places. At the time, they were being negotiated at crazy prices”, recalls Gilles Smadja, then chief of staff to the mayor of Saint-Denis, Didier Paillard. Proof that the thugs were relatively well informed, not enough however since they were in the wrong room. To convince the municipal councilors to deliver the precious tickets to them, the attackers will even take aim at a deputy mayor, starting to count. “One, Two…” In the end, they won’t go to three and leave empty-handed. This news item constitutes a form of precedent, or, depending on the point of view, an exception to the rule which wanted, until Saturday May 28, 2022, that the finals at the Stade de France take place in joy and good humor. . “We organized the biggest events at the Stade de France and there was never a problem, there was never a tag. Hence my amazement at what happened”, reacts Patrick Braouezec , mayor of Saint-Denis between 1991 and 2004 then president of the public establishment Plaine Commune until 2020.
That evening, on the sidelines of the Real Madrid-Liverpool match and the failures of the police organization, numerous attacks took place in front of the stadium, according to the account of several witnesses. “Many supporters were assaulted, harassed, robbed and robbed with violence,” Real Madrid said in a statement, for example. Clashes that prompted Eric Zemmour to denounce, as he often did, “the advent of scum who lay down the law”. Stéphane Troussel, the president of the departmental council of Seine-Saint-Denis then replied that he did not accept that “the far right is unleashed against its favorite object of hatred, Seine-Saint-Denis and its inhabitants. “.
“A policy that opens up”
Until then, the mixed history of Stade de France and Seine-Saint-Denis had rather been made up of a lot of pride, even if some hopes were disappointed. In their report devoted to the action of the State in Seine-Saint-Denis, in May 2018, the deputies François Cornut-Gentille and Rodrigue Kokouendo recall the sentence pronounced by the Prime Minister Alain Juppé at the time of the construction of the large stadium , in 1995: “The installation of a flagship facility can be an opportunity to give decisive impetus to a city policy. A policy which opens up, which brings people together, which restores pride and ensures real development”. The parliamentarians note with irony that “the impetus remained on the athletics track of the Stade de France”.
Twenty-seven years later, Seine-Saint-Denis remains the department where the population has the lowest standard of living in metropolitan France, with a poverty rate of 28.6%. “But the installation of the Stadium has allowed the creation of a new neighborhood and has restored self-esteem to all the inhabitants of the suburbs”, considers Patrick Braouezec. The former deputy remembers that at the start, the Grand Stade, as it was then called, was to be located in Sénart, the new town located between Essonne and Seine-et-Marne. But Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris, found the place too far from Paris. When the right came back to power in 1993, the decision was made to settle in Saint-Denis instead. “We asked to have motorway coverage, two RERs and conditions for social ascent for the inhabitants”, relates Patrick Braouezec. “For the first time, the suburbs were being told that it was worthy of hosting a major international event,” he adds. From the inauguration of the stadium, a dynamic is set in motion. “Large companies are settling nearby, the Stade de France is giving birth to a new district, the Plain”, says Gilles Smadja, who does not deny that this more affluent sector remains a little cut off from the city center of Saint-Denis. and neighboring towns.
To give the local associations a taste of the benefits of the large stadium, festive events and distribution of places are invariably carried out in Saint-Denis and in the adjacent towns. “It helped to calm things down,” said Patrick Braouezec. A tradition still maintained today: in a speech on June 3, Mathieu Hanotin, the current mayor of Saint-Denis, affirms that “until around 7 p.m., this Saturday, May 28, the reception of the Champions League final had a real festive flavor in Saint-Denis”. He recalls the football tournament organized in parallel in the city in the presence of Zinedine Zidane, the “big draw” to obtain the precious tickets, the organization of a “fan zone” of Real Madrid supporters in the city center , without any particular problem.
“We know them our darlings”
So what happened around the Stade de France? Stéphane Troussel saw gatherings of “thugs from all over Ile-de-France”. Patrick Braouezec leans him for the windfall effect: “We know our darlings, when there is a fault, they rush into it”. Having sensed the police in trouble, bands would have taken the opportunity to wreak havoc. Gilles Smadja also leans towards this hypothesis, arguing “that the Champions League final is a special case, incomparable to a Nice-Nantes type match, which does not electrify the crowds”. He adds “when there are English teams, we know that these finals are at risk”. His reasoning? With British fans having a culture of tickets bought on the black market, at the last minute, their arrival attracts those who hope to do business. The story of Bilal, a hairdresser from Saint-Denis, who returned without a ticket to the Stade de France, attests that some residents took advantage of the situation, without premeditation. Near Do not touch My friendCyril Hanouna’s show on C8, he explained that he went to the stadium “out of curiosity”, before taking advantage of the rush to embed himself in the enclosure.
Today, the fever of Saturday May 28 seems to be on the way to falling. The France-Denmark match, Saturday June 4, took place in a peaceful atmosphere. After the Real Madrid-Liverpool incidents, 48 people were taken into custody and six of them were tried in immediate appearance. Not enough, however, for the associations of Liverpool and Real supporters, who are asking for apologies, explanations and an investigation into the malfunctions.