Paris: Protest du Jour

protestation: protest

travailleurs: workers

sans: without

papiers: papers (either plain ol' paper or documents...just as we use the word papers in the US)

travailleurs sans papiers: undocumented workers, illegal aliens

Paris serves as a booming capital city and a meeting place for the world. Throughout its history Paris has become the home and haven to a long list of exiles and political dissidents such as the Ayatollah Khomeini, Baby Doc Duvalier, Lenin, etc. Like Washington, DC, there seems to be a different protest here every day.

This weekend there was a major street march in Montparnasse denouncing Israel's attack on the Gaza relief flotilla. There was a much smaller gathering in the Trocodero I encountered of Peruvians trying to save the Amazon.

Yesterday -and into the night- however, I encountered a big protest gathering by the travailleurs sans papiers -a group of sub-Saharan Africans living and working in France as undocumented workers. They gathered yesterday in front of the Opera Bastille.  Some of the men were asking pedestrians for donations. Others sang and played on drums.

Later in the night when I walked by -because the Metro stop is next to the Opera, perhaps 100-200 men were sleeping on the sidewalks in front of the Opera. It was a strange and sad sight. It underscores the debate going on in almost every prosperous industrialized country -in China with North Koreans, in France with Africans, in the US with Mexicans- around what to do with undocumented workers. As in the US, these low-paid, low-skill immigrants do a lot of the dirty work in France. So, they are needed in the labor market to some extent but are the first fired when the economy goes into recession.

Paris: The Paris of Two Revolutions -French and American

mec: a guy

sympa: nice, short for sympathiquemec sympa: nice guy

pére: father

patrie: country, fatherland...or motherland

If England is the United States' mother, than in many ways France is our father. The French king funded the American Revolutionary Army. Our Founders' ideas were influenced by French philosophers such as Voltaire and Rousseau with their ideas on reason and government. From General Lafayette to architects like Latrobe and L'Enfant, the French fought with the colonists against the British and helped in designing the architecture and government of the new American republic.

Alas for poor King Louis XVI, he supported regime change in the British colonies, and it came back to bite him.  Louis XVI nearly emptied the country's coffers to fund the American Revolution  and helped set off the French Revolution!

So, one Saturday I set off to explore the Paris of the two revolutions -French and American.

I started near my apartment at La Bastille (lah bah-stee in French compared to the usual American pronunciation of la bah-still) . During the period of the French Revolution, this now pleasant and bustling plaza was a prison. On 14 July 1789 (to use the French convention when listing dates), French middle and working class people -angry over the failure of the government to deal with a severe economic crisis brought on by debt from funding the American Revolution- decided to storm the Bastille. It had become a symbol of royal tyranny but was an odd target. It contained only 7 prisoners: 4 forgers, 2 mentally ill people, and an aristocrat imprisoned for debauchery. 

(Odd historical fact: supposedly the Marquis de Sade had been transferred from the Bastille only a week or so before it was stormed.) 

In large part, historians say the French people saw the expense of keeping a huge castle-fortress staffed to house 7 prisoners as misguided. Anyhow, they stormed the castle. 98 of the revolutionaries were killed. The incensed crowd later dragged the warden from the jail; beating him. Overcome by the abuse, the warden finally asked the crowd to kill him, kicked a guy in the nuts, and was promptly stabbed to death.

July 14th is now National Day/Bastille Day, France's 4th of July.

Place de la Bastille: The Bastille is Paris' most looked-for and not-found monument ;) Many people don't realize it was torn down in the late 1700s after the Revolution. Today the Place de la Bastille (Bastille Plaza) is on prison's site. A big memorial (to a later political event) is in the center of the plaza. The July Column is topped by the Génie de la Liberté, the Spirit of Liberty. The Spirit is apparently a nude boy carrying the torch of civilization and the broken chains of his former servitude. Oh, and he's gold...really bright gold.  And he kind of looks like Cupid.  I often wondered if his servitude was to one of those awful online dating sites!

On the plaza are various shops, an outdoor market, and the Opera Bastille.  The Opera is a huge, modern glass building which sometimes seems an odd fit with the surrounding architecture.  The Boulevard Richard Lenoir is one of the key roads running into the Place.  On Thursdays there is a large and wonderful outdoor market on Blvd. Richard Lenoir featuring fresh produce, meat, olives, and clothing.  The produce tends to often be more affordable than in the local supermarkets and is usually at the peak of ripeness.

I hoped on the Metro and was off first to Chinatown, then the Luxembourg Gardens for a picnic with my traveling companion (Tig), and then onward with my Revolutionary Tour.

My second stop on Revolutionary Tour brought me to another kind of Tour ...La Tour Eiffel (The Eiffel Tower). And did I mention I walked for TEN HOURS Saturday in 85 F heat? A lot of my pictures from the Eiffel Tour are too awful to even post! ha  Still, everyone inevitably must see Paris' main landmark.  It is beautiful but also perhaps the most touristy -and in ways the most dangerous- spot in the city due to pickpockets. 

So, I stopped for a nice ice cream and crossed the Pont d'Iena, the bridge across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower to the Trocodero Fountains. The bridge is named for Napolean's defeat of the Prussians in the Battle of Jena.

The Trocodero Fountains though were covered up by some sort of astroturf stuff. Maybe a game in the French Open tennis championship was going to be played there? So, I watched the other tourists taking shots of the Tower, the African men from Mali selling miniature Eiffel Towers, and the Spanish-speaking, Peruvian collective holding a protest to save the Amazon.

Then I walked farther down the Seine to a neighborhood called Passy. At the time of the American Revolution, Passy was a village between Paris and the royal court at Versailles. So, it was convenient for diplomats such as Benjamin Franklin who took up residence here in 1776 as the American ambassador. The French LOVED Benjamin Franklin and arguably he charmed the French into supporting the American revolution. A friend of his gave him a place to stay in Passy, and he lived here from 1776 to 1785 when he went home to Philly. Thomas Jefferson replaced him as ambassador and said following in Ben's footsteps as ambassador was a humbling experience.

Benjamin Franklin is probably my favorite Revolutionary figure (American). What a brilliant man. When he opened his printing press in Philadelphia, he made a point of getting up early and pushing a heavy cart of paper through the streets so that people would think he was hardworking and bring him their business. His marketing worked.

There is now a rue Benjamin Franklin, a statue of Ben, and a plaque commemorating Franklin in Passy. The estate where he lived, the Hôtel de Valentinois, is now an upscale apartment/condo building. Passy is still home to many diplomats including the Embassy of Senegal. It has become a very upscale Parisian neighborhood for the rich too.

While Franklin had been ambassador to the French monarchy, he was held in such high esteem that when he died during the French Revolution, the French National Assembly retired for the day upon receiving the news. We Americans think of him in the context of our own revolution, but his writings and scientific experiments while in Paris had an influence here too.

Boy, I was exhausted. Paris is no city for the handicapped. Every Metro stop usually involves several flights of stairs. I probably walked 40-60 flights of stairs on Saturday. And the heat was tres horrible. But, dear readers, I marched on to complete my tour with a final stop: the Chapelle Expiatoire.

Having failed to escape France at the start of the Revolution, King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette were imprisoned in the Conciergerie in central Paris near Notre Dame Cathedral. The king was executed by guillotine in January of 1793. The following October the Queen was tried and executed as well. Like many other victims of the French Revolution, their bodies were dumped in mass graves in northwest Paris. A Royalist physician living next to the cemetery, however, marked where their bodies were buried and eventually bought the cemetery. When the monarchy was re-established, he sold the land to the new king who had the royal bodies removed and re-interred in St. Denis, a cathedral in a northern Paris suburb (today) that is the traditional burial place of French royalty. The Chapelle Expiatoire was built as a memorial to the resting place of the royal couple's bodies for 21 years.

The chapel is surrounded by a park with free wifi and a lot of teenage couples making out.

After that I trudged on to look at the Opera -formerly the Paris Opera but now the Opera Garnier, ate at a McDonald's and then headed home to La Bastille.

Paris and Its Layout: Understanding the City's Basic Geography

arrondissement:  a city jurisdiction similar to a zip code but with more of a neighborhood identity

Paris is divided into 20 arrondissements. Similar in size to zip codes in American cities, they are more like a neighborhood. Each has its own distinctive identity.  While in Washington, DC, you might tell new friends that you live in Cathedral Heights or Adams-Morgan, Parisians generally ask in which arrondissement you live.

The 1st arrondissement covers the downtown area around the Louvre and each subsequent arrondissement is numbered in a clockwise spiral out from the 1st.

I lived my first time in Paris on rue Popincourt which is in the 11th arrondissement. Parisians also call this neighborhood La Bastille after the nearby Place de la Bastille, the former site of the French prison whose storming by the people marked the start of the French Revolution. The prison is long gone, but the plaza features an ultra-modern glass opera house, restaurants, and shops.

According to Wikipedia, the 11th is the most densely populated neighborhood in Europe. It has traditionally been a residential and more middle/working class neighborhood that is quickly becoming chic with young Parisians.

Most tourist hotels and rental apartments are in the 1st through 10th arrondissements as well the 18th arrondissement, the Montmartre area.

The Cardinal Directions:  The heart of the city is defined by the Periphery Road or Boulevard Périphérique.  Apartments, hotels, and housing are much cheaper outside the Périphérique in Paris' vast suburbs.  If you think of Paris in terms of a circle with four cardinal directions, the Périphérique defines the circle.  North is anchored by the butte of Montmartre with its gleaming white Sacré Coeur Basilica.  South is defined by the Montparnasse Tower, an oddly out-of-place skyscraper dominating the southern Parisian skyline.  La Défense marks the West.  The Défense area actually lies outside the Périphérique, but its La Grande Arche -more a giant square frame than an arch- provides a handy architectural point on the skyline.  

On the east there is not a handy architectural feature to mark the area.  Père Lachaise Cemetery provides an eastern landmark.  Outside the Périphérique to the east is also the large Bois de Vincennes, or Vincennes Woods.  

The River and Its Banks:  Cutting through the city is the River Seine.  Its banks are defined by what bank appears to the left and right if you are floating and facing downriver.  Thus, the Rive Gauche, or Left Bank, makes up most of the southern part of Paris.  Its counterpart, the Rive Droit, or Right Bank, is the larger northern section.

With these key landmarks, you can more easily locate your position in the city.