WOID XVII-18. La vie en rouge

Monday, June 25, 2007 1:34 pm

It seems just a matter of time until the big tour buses come lumbering up the rue de Belleville in Paris to take photos of the doorway where, according to legend, the great chantoosie Edith Piaf was born. Maybe not right away. Belleville - actually Belleville-Ménilmontant, the old, tough, working-class area bordered by Belleville - is a legendary Parisian working-class district, a gritty version of Montmartre. Unlike Montmartre it's not quite ready to be packaged and sold; in fact, it may yet see considerable trouble.

Belleville-Ménilmontant constitutes what sociologists call a liminary area: in the eighteenth century it was just outside the walls of Paris, which meant that the wine was cheaper and surveillance, loose. By the late nineteenth century it was a solid working-class area: the budding factories lay right over the hill. When the uprising of the Commune began in 1871 it started in Montmartre but it ended in Belleville. The revolutionary writer Jules Vallès tells how his buddies set up a defense at the bottom of the rue de Belleville, on the second floor of a shop called La Vielleuse, only to be wiped out by machinegun fire. Today if you walk into the café by the same name at the same spot you can still see the shop sign for La Vielleuse, cracked in a World War One bombardment.

Except today it's a different kind of proletarian: Chinese, Vietnamese, African, Maghrebi, Sephardic: poor, working, small shopkeepers. At the bottom of the rue de Belleville Africans and Arabs sell junk on the sidewalk, food and clothes in stalls. As you walk up the rue there's a large number of Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants. Many of the old buildings have immigrant tenants and, on occasion, owners; as do the winding streets that cut sideways over the hill towards rue de Ménilmontant. From this area during the Occupation, the Mamouchian Group (communists, Jews and foreigners) conducted sabotage and assassinations against the Nazis until they were rounded up and executed after a notorious show trial - "because your names are hard to pronounce," the poet Aragon put it. Most of the elementary schools have panels and inscriptions detailing the long list of children deported by the Nazis.

Plus ça change - if you'll pardon my French. Over the past year the old French tradition of rafles au faciès may have been revived all over Belleville, that is, it would have seemed to have been revived, were it not illegal, hence unlikely to have happened according to French law: rounding up "foreign-looking" people off the street, checking ID to sort out illegal immigrants. A few months ago the cops started turning up at the gates of elementary schools, an excellent place to snag the parents when they pick up the kids. When parents and immigrant support groups started gathering in protest the cops brought in attack dogs, supposedly German shepherds, which the French, out of national pride, prefer to call "Alsatian shepherds."

It would be easy to think of these police interventions as provocations, and logical to assume the provocations would increase after the right-winger Sarkozy's election three weeks ago. On the rue Belleville, at the schools, police operations have been conducted in the midst of large groups of people. Sure enough, on June 20 the cops entered the Celtic, one of the series of cafés strung out along the rue de Belleville - entered it at 7:00 pm, when the streets are mobbed with people coming home for dinner, or shopping for dinner, or going out to meet with friends. The cops then moved on to the grocery store next door, by which time a crowd of two hundred or so collected, at which the cops called in more cops who, according to Brett Cline, an American journalist, popped open the gas canisters. This in an area which in the early evening looks like a proletarian version of Times Square.

Reckless? A few days earlier, June 17 at 4:00, a young black man, Lamine Dieng, was pulled in by the police after a quarrel with his girlfriend. About thirty-six hours later his family was informed he had died of a heart attack. This past Sunday a dignified procession, five- to eight hundred strong, marched through the streets of Ménilmontant, demanding an explanation.

The French are a revolutionarily sentimental lot. Despite the best efforts of organic intellectuals, French or American, to persuade them it's all over they tend to get ideas, especially in an area like Belleville with its narrow streets, its courtyards leading to more courtyards, and a population that's going to have strong feelings when they go to water the flowerpots at the window and there's a cop chasing their neighbor's cousin three floors below. No doubt the politically active, in this neighborhood and elsewhere, have thought about this. Maybe the cops have thought about this, too.

- Hoipolloi Cassidy