As the Olympic Games approach, democracies are cruelly beginning to resemble dictatorships. If it is appropriate to have a new look, to take out the silverware, to shine the table, to present yourself in your best attire when you receive guests, it nevertheless gets stuck when you hide cousins and problem children, when you lies about the reality of your job – you present yourself as the manager of a store when you are the handler. It’s not a big deal, you tell me. It can even be touching, but it is often brutal. I still remember, as a teenager, a visit from my family exiled in the United States, to whom my family exiled in Paris had lied by saying that my parents and I lived in the provinces: they wanted to hide us, out of shame, out of snobbery , out of a desire to maintain the illusion that we were still a big family from Tehran.
On the scale of a city, it is much more violent. This is how, like in Beijing in 2008 or in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, Paris hides its poor, its migrants, its drugged unaccompanied minors from the Trocadéro. What will the State and the City of Paris do with the swarming rats and mice? Will they be moved to Nice? The mystery remains.
“Orléans is not intended to host the crack hill of Paris”: the formula is strong, it comes from the mayor of Orléans, Serge Grouard, who held a press conference to explain that, “in the absence of official information, [il a] cross-referenced some figures collected from associations and the Orléans municipal social action center. It is thus proven that, every three weeks, a bus arrives in Orléans from Paris, with between 35 and 50 people on board. This system seems to have been working since May 2023. All this is done on the sly.” The cities of Strasbourg, Angers and Toulouse have also seen buses of “undesirables” arrive from Paris. Migrants and homeless people have been caught in charge for the first days, before being abandoned to their fate, due to lack of space in an accommodation center and lack of funding. Many return to Paris. One of the many problems raised by this forced displacement of part of the Parisian population, is that it was done quietly, without warning the mayors concerned, without anticipation, without collaboration. The State would be responsible, but the City of Paris is not capable of provide a lasting solution to a real problem, whether it be drug addiction, the homeless or migrants… Sending hot potatoes could be an Olympic discipline.
Anne Hidalgo put her own mask on Paris
Who knows why I thought of Paris as a world city when I discovered this dismal affair of the dust of poverty under the carpet of the City of Lights. In the Parisian century, which from 1850 to 1950 was what Hollywood was after the war, a purveyor of enchantment, a catalyst of fantasies and hopes, a world city where the distant gazes full of sparks of those who imagined converged one day set foot on its cobblestones and live a transgressive love story like one could only experience in Paris, or those who flocked there, painters, musicians, international artists, to find a setting, an atmosphere, favorable possibilities to creative freedom. Even the Prince of Wales, future Edward VII, if he was passionate about brothels, was just as passionate about Parisian concert halls and cafés, by this Parisian lifestyle which would make any pink-haired progressive nostalgic.
What remains of this swept Paris is a museum city, where people pose more than live there, a city that has become the ideal cinema setting for the tribulations of an American woman in high heels and haute couture, who feeds on croissants and the banks of the Seine, smiling at all costs at the beauty of a Paris now drowned in political ambitions which no longer have anything poetic about them.
“Masks stick to the skin in the long run. Hypocrisy ends up being in good faith,” wrote the Goncourts. Anne Hidalgo ended up believing in her own enchantment, to believe that her Paris, where life is good, really existed, hiding the dirt, the noise, the violence, the difficulty of getting around, the ugliness. Anne Hidalgo put her own mask on Paris, and believes that it is really “bullshit” to leave Paris during the Olympics. Courage ! Let’s run away!
Abnousse Shalmani, committed against the obsession with identity, is a writer and journalist
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