The French capital is preparing to host the Olympic Games in the summer of 2024. With the now well established unpopularity of the Socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, there is increasing controversy over the city’s ability to host the Games under the conditions and choices made by the team in place. The recent decision to dismantle all the bookshops that had been set up along the banks of the Seine for hundreds of years to facilitate the opening ceremony has aroused the anger of Parisians and lovers of Paris.
One of the highlights of hosting the Olympic Games in Paris is supposed to be the Opening Ceremony, which for the first time in the history of the Games will be held not on land in a stadium but entirely on the Seine. In order to facilitate the organisation of the ceremony, the Paris Prefecture of Police would like to have the 200 or so book stalls set up along the banks of the Seine dismantled. The event will open on July 26th, 2024. On July 25th, just one year in advance, the prefecture sent a letter to all the booksellers, asking them to “remove” the traditional green boxes in which they sell their second-hand books for “essential” safety reasons.
The prefecture is relying in particular on an article of the code of internal security, which provides for a perimeter where “access and movement of people are regulated” in order to ensure the security of a “place or event exposed to a risk of acts of terrorism.” Another reason given by the Town Hall was that the bookshops would “obstruct the view” on the day of the ceremony.
The tug-of-war between the local authorities and the people began immediately. The representative of the Association Culturelle des Bouquinistes de Paris, Jérôme Callais, assured the mayor’s office that the booksellers have “no intention of moving.” For him, it makes absolutely no sense to do away with the bookshops during the Games. He told AFP:
We’re a major symbol of Paris, we’ve been here for 450 years. Wanting to erase us from the landscape when the celebration of these games should be the celebration of Paris seems a bit crazy.
“They want to take us off the quays for four hours of ceremony. It’s mind-boggling, it makes no sense. We’re occupying an area that doesn’t even represent 1/10th of the high quays available to attend the ceremony. To do that, at least two-thirds of the boxes have to disappear, with all the risks that implies,” he points out, underlining that the boxes are fragile and that some “have not been moved for 30, 40 or even 70 years.”
To reassure these open-air booksellers, the city of Paris, in agreement with the prefecture, has assured them that the move is only temporary, and that everything will be done to ensure that the booksellers can resume their activities in the best possible conditions once the games are over. The city council has stated that the booksellers “are part of the identity of the quays of the Seine,” and would like to see them eventually nominated as intangible heritage by UNESCO (bearing in mind that the banks of the Seine are already listed as tangible heritage). The city council has also offered to take charge of removing and replacing the boxes, as well as renovating “at its own expense” those that have been “damaged” in the process—considering that around 60% of the boxes have to be moved. But these words are not likely to reassure the booksellers, who would have preferred an alternative solution—validated by the town hall but refused by the prefecture—namely, to keep the boxes closed and in their places, for the duration of the games.
Given the countless scandals that have rocked the capital with regard to the preservation of Parisian heritage, the booksellers are worried about the future. They fear that they will be driven off the quays of the Seine for good. For some of them, close to retirement, they fear that the temporary closure will turn into a permanent closure. Nor are they happy about the proposal to set up a “village of booksellers” not far from the Seine: passers-by and tourists know booksellers and where to find them, and will certainly not make the trip to a place artificially created for the occasion and devoid of soul.
For Arnaud Genevois, “soulless” is the most serious aspect of the project, as he explains in the columns of Le Figaro:
Let’s make the Olympic Games in Paris without Paris, without booksellers, without cafés or terraces, without Parisians, without all those trees spoiling the view, etc., these Games will be ‘safe’, yes, like a Potemkin village. Spending tourists, clean-cut athletes, perhaps a few pickpockets too, and the Seine, indifferent to all this postmodern [B]arnum for which it serves as justification, will be enough to make the Olympic Games ‘successful’ and ‘different’.
—‘different’ Games that have succeeded in turning a large proportion of Parisians against them even before they begin: July 2024 promises to be a stormy month.
