Paris - Homeless in the neighbourhood
October 29th 2007 18:00
History, monuments, palaces, chic boutiques, bars, restaurants, gardens with graveled paths, sculpted trees and hedges, fountains – this is Palais Royal. It’s a quaint little quartier, steeped in the ambience of old Paris. But charm and atmosphere mean little to the SDF, sans domicile fixe (without fixed address, or homeless) of the Premier Arrondissement. An eighteenth century colonnade, an arched passage, a Galerie from the Belle Epoque, is just a place to shelter from the sun and rain, or to sleep under shadow of the night.
He sits all day on the pavement in front of the colonnades outside Galerie Colbert on Rue des Petits Champs, with his cases packed beside him. People and cars pass, buses stop, but not for him. As I stoop to drop some coins in his little basket, the kind that might sit on any French table filled with bread, his eyes lock on mine accusingly. I can’t look away. He’s talking, pointing, angrily, urgently. I don’t understand his words, they’re rushed, garbled, neither French, nor English, but his story is plain, it’s one of pain, loss, grievance, blame and grief. I tear myself away, feeling useless, sorry, guilty. He shouts after me as I hurry across the road. From a corner table in chic Café Pistache, I watch him, still muttering and gesticulating furiously, spread his grubby bedding against the back wall, under the arch, and stack his cases close around him for the night.
Just a block away, not far from the designer stores of Rue Etienne Marcel a row of people in sleeping bags and tents spreads along the pavement – women and children mainly. A young father tells their story. He is passionate, determined and articulate.
Unlike the man from Galerie Colbert, these are not beggars without jobs, but workers in casual, unskilled and extremely low paid employment. They are, nonetheless, SDF, moving from cheap hotel to cheap hotel or from foyer (hostel) to foyer, unable to find let alone afford a permanent home. For three weeks now they have camped on the corner opposite La Bourse, the majestic Treasury building, on Rue du Quatre Septembre, and they plan to stay there, until the government makes more HLM (Habitations de loyer moyen) or low cost, public housing, available to the thousands of families in their situation.
Les miserables, the poor, the beggars and the homeless have always been part of the paris landscape. For some la manche, begging, is a way of life and they earn a reasonable living from the coins that drop into their cups or their caps. Others have arrived on the streets by a route paved with alcohol, drugs or gambling and the coins they receive just add to their tragedy. Now, as France plunges into bankruptcy, there is a new kind of miserable on the Paris streets, like the campers of La Bourse, homeless, not by choice or through any fault of their own - a deserving poor. But deserving or undeserving, winter is descending rapidly, the days are drawing in, the nights are lengthening, the temperatures are dropping and the people on the streets are growing more desperate and more vulnerable.
Sleeping under the colonnades at Palais Royal
He sits all day on the pavement in front of the colonnades outside Galerie Colbert on Rue des Petits Champs, with his cases packed beside him. People and cars pass, buses stop, but not for him. As I stoop to drop some coins in his little basket, the kind that might sit on any French table filled with bread, his eyes lock on mine accusingly. I can’t look away. He’s talking, pointing, angrily, urgently. I don’t understand his words, they’re rushed, garbled, neither French, nor English, but his story is plain, it’s one of pain, loss, grievance, blame and grief. I tear myself away, feeling useless, sorry, guilty. He shouts after me as I hurry across the road. From a corner table in chic Café Pistache, I watch him, still muttering and gesticulating furiously, spread his grubby bedding against the back wall, under the arch, and stack his cases close around him for the night.
A home on Rue des Petits Champs
Just a block away, not far from the designer stores of Rue Etienne Marcel a row of people in sleeping bags and tents spreads along the pavement – women and children mainly. A young father tells their story. He is passionate, determined and articulate.
Campers opposite La Bourse
Unlike the man from Galerie Colbert, these are not beggars without jobs, but workers in casual, unskilled and extremely low paid employment. They are, nonetheless, SDF, moving from cheap hotel to cheap hotel or from foyer (hostel) to foyer, unable to find let alone afford a permanent home. For three weeks now they have camped on the corner opposite La Bourse, the majestic Treasury building, on Rue du Quatre Septembre, and they plan to stay there, until the government makes more HLM (Habitations de loyer moyen) or low cost, public housing, available to the thousands of families in their situation.
Les miserables, the poor, the beggars and the homeless have always been part of the paris landscape. For some la manche, begging, is a way of life and they earn a reasonable living from the coins that drop into their cups or their caps. Others have arrived on the streets by a route paved with alcohol, drugs or gambling and the coins they receive just add to their tragedy. Now, as France plunges into bankruptcy, there is a new kind of miserable on the Paris streets, like the campers of La Bourse, homeless, not by choice or through any fault of their own - a deserving poor. But deserving or undeserving, winter is descending rapidly, the days are drawing in, the nights are lengthening, the temperatures are dropping and the people on the streets are growing more desperate and more vulnerable.
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