Who’d have thought anything could push a global pandemic out of the lead story spot? Well, a nine-minute video of a US cop murdering a black man has and it’s sparked protests around the world. In Paris yesterday an estimated 20,000 people defied a ban on protests to link the killing to French police racism.
Huge crowds outside the Palais de Justice for Adama Traoré and George Floyd. https://t.co/gvolcXUMly
— Megan Clement (@MegClement) June 2, 2020
But stop! There’s none of that there here! Not according to Paris Préfet de Police Didier Lallement, who is concerned that such an accusation has hurt the feelings of his troops.
The Paris police force “is not violent, nor racist: it acts within the framework of the right to liberty for all”, he claimed in an email to the capital’s 27,500 cops.
The family of Adama Traoré beg to differ. They organised yesterday’s demo four years after his death in police custody.
Three official reports have cleared the three cops who pinned him to the ground. But a counter-inquiry commissioned by the family on Tuesday blamed their robust technique of detention.
Thanks to the family’s persistence, Traoré’s case has become a focus for “accusations of violence and racism, repeated endlessly by social networks and certain activist groups”, as Lallement puts it.
Regular deaths and injuries in the banlieue, along with videos of racial abuse and brutality, tend to bear those accusations out.
Some French people can get a little self-righteous about racism in the US. After all, wasn’t this the country where black GIs found welcome relief from the Jim Crow South at the end of World War II and where artists like Miles Davis and James Baldwin came to breathe freer creative air?
But they had the advantages of not being from former colonies or living on deprived estates in the banlieue.
“I realise that the Algerian is the nigger in Paris,” Baldwin commented after spending some time here.
Traoré’s family came to France from Mali, a former French colony in sub-Saharan Africa.
Back to the virus. Yesterday was the beginning of phase 2 of post-lockdown.
In Champigny the market had already opened, in a depleted form and the shoppers turned out, mostly wearing masks, and met up with friends
.
Some of the cafés had employed a flexible interpretation of the rules by offering drinks “to take away” under phase 1.
In Ile de France, which is the last orange for not-too-good area left in the country, they can now serve en terasse but not Inside.
Schoolkids and the un- or undereployed are sunning themselves on the banks of the Marne, or even on the river itself.
My afternoon walk took me to the former Pathé studios at Joinville-le-Pont, now a collection of workplaces, some apparently still linked to the film industry, and flats.
They were once frequented by Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Jean Renoir and other luminaries. They drank in the guingettes, the restaurants along the riverside, and added some glamour to this town on the outskirts of Paris.
Our late neighbour, Claude, was a house painter. He worked on the site once and told me they had conveyor belts going across it to transport the film and special double doors to prevent light entering the processing laboratories.
The 1946 film Les Portes de la Nuit was partly filmed there. This shot is a reconstruction of the overhead metro at La Chapelle in Paris, the set designed by Alexandre Trauner.
Trauner was a Hungarian who fled the far-right, anti-Semitic Horthy regime in 1929 and left a photographic record of the streets of Paris in the 1930s due to his research for his work. Here’s one of his preparatory sketches for another film, Le Jour se lève.
Asylum-seekers, eh?
France’s Covid-19 death toll officially stands at 28,940, 107 in 24 hours. 14,208 people are in hospital, down 260 yesterday, 1,253 patients are in intensive care, down 49, and 68,812 have been discharged, 372 in 24 hours.
