You are in:
- Archives » 2007 » March 2007
Camp Chaos
Canal Saint Martin, in Paris. Lovely place for a stroll. It used to be a grubby, working class neighbourhood but in the past ten years a rash of new cafés and boutiques has announced the arrival of the Paris bourgeois bohemian, or bobo.
You'd think these left-leaning, anti-establishment arty types would be delighted by the opportunity to show their social solidarity with France's latest good cause: Homelessness.
You might be wrong.
Over Christmas, a group calling itself Les Enfants de Don Quichotte drew attention to Paris's homelessness crisis by encouraging sympathisers to join the growing encampement of tents lining the sides of the canal.
In fine weather, these spots are a great place to walk the dog, or sit with a beer and sandwich from one of the neighbourhood cafés. As winter approached, however, a bidonville (or shantytown) of tents grew along the canalside. These are familiar images throughout Paris: Homeless charities hand out the tents, which then go up over the heating vents on the Metro or along the banks and under the bridges of the Seine river.
At its peak, 280 tents lined the canal: Mostly homeless people, but some supporters spent a night sleeping rough in a show of solidarity. France's media descended, stirring up French passions for the plight of the homeless and making a hero of resting actor Augustin Legrand, founder of Les Enfants de Don Quichotte (the Children of Don Quixote).
It didn't hurt that France's most popular man, the priest Abbé Pierre, died over the winter: He had been a lifelong advocate of the homeless, and had worked to secure laws such as the one which makes it illegal for a landlord to eject a tenant from his property during the winter months.
Taking up the Abbé's mantle, the pressure group succeeded in having quite a few of the homeless housed. Copycat demonstrations launched in cities across France, and were dutifully covered by television crews.
Quick to spot a political gain, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin promised to make housing a legal right; Nicolas Sarkozy promised no-one would have to sleep rough within two years of him becoming President. Ségolène Royal spoke of "a vast plan" to tackle homelessness while on a photo-opp tour of the friendlier end of the Paris camp.
The Prime Minister made emergency beds ready over winter and many of the protestors were housed in disused army barracks.
Only 80 or so protestors remain.
It was a successful campaign, but no-one asked the residents their feelings on having several hundred homeless people and their supporters camping on their doorstep.
The Economist reports that businesses - mainly the cafés lining the canal - have complained about falling takings since the protest started. A resident's association says "the area has become more dangerous, with campers fighting, drinking and openly taking drugs."
Your correspondent paid a visit to the site after Christmas and he can add, at the risk of sounding callous, that 200-odd tents housing several hundred homeless people looks, sounds and smells much as you might imagine.
Two men died of methadone overdoses in Paris last week: Another 28 year old died of a combination of alcohol and methadone poisoning in the Strasbourg camp two days later. A 36 year old died in the camp on the beach in Nice last night - alcohol and methadone are suspected to have played a part in his death too.
Les Enfants de Don Quichotte blames the government for not housing "the most vulnerable" quickly enough. Certainly, it appears that the authorities, including local town halls and police forces, are eager to close down the camps. Judicial orders have been served in Aix-en-Provence to close the camp; other towns are watching eagerly to see if this strategy works. So far, the movement responded to the order to move from the square by shifting their encampment several metres to the other side of the street.
For their part, members of the movement complain of heavy-handed policing. Some in Paris claim to be on hunger strike at the "general indifference" of the public to their plight.
Not all were French homeless: Le Monde reports on several men at the camp who fled Iran and were stopping off en route for Britain. Several others, the newspaper says, had refused all offers of housing from charities and the authorities. One young couple turned down offers to stay in a hotel because the hotel would not allow their three dogs to spend the night with them.
Some local authorities, such as the Toulouse Town Hall, have complained of the pressure group putting obstacles in the way of a solution. Dog-on-a-string "extreme left activists are blamed for infiltrating the movement and causing trouble in the encampements.
There are certainly divisions within the movement, with long-term housing activists claiming Les Enfants are a media-friendly political stunt. Enfants organisers say they are working for a realistic vision of a solution to the problem, and add that they have achieved concrete results while some soi-disant campaigners have failed to win any concessions for two decades.
As only a few hardcore protestors (and those homeless people who were camped on the canal before Les Enfants arrived) remain, the organisers can reflect on a successful campaign. Housing is to become another human right in France, though how the bill will finally be implemented and who will be eligible for its protection will prove more difficult to consider. Despite the demise of Abbé Pierre, the plight of France's estimated 85,000-150,000 homeless remains a national issue.
The complaints of residents notwithstanding, it is not only France's eternally-outraged social activists who are concerned with homelessness. Of the four deaths in the camps, it is sadly likely that the victims might have overdosed anyway; perhaps more lives were saved when hundreds of homeless people were housed. The mild winter, of course, could also be said to have kept the death toll down.
What of winter 2007-2008?
