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From La Sorbonne to Université de Saint-Denis

Published on May 20, 2006 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Places, Spaces

For those who read French, I can recommend Le Bondy Blog. A couple of journalists from the Swiss magazine L’Hebdo settled in the banlieue Bondy during the November revolts, and stayed there for more than 4 months. Before they left, 8 local youth got training in journalism and took over the blog after the professionals. Every post they write – be it miniskirts or soldiers from the colonies helping out France during the war – initiates a lively debate. I had just read Hanane Kaddour’s very instructive post on how geography determines which university you can apply for when I had the opportunity to have a closer look at 4 different university locales in the Paris area in just a few days.
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I didn’t know about this sectorisation of the universities before I read this post, and I have to say that that knowledge gave an extra edge to my trip from La Sorbonne to Université de Saint-Denis. I suspect the amphitheatre I visited at Sorbonne must have been one of the more prestigious ones, because prestigious it was indeed. I don’t think the Royal Palace in Oslo have a hall that could match this amphitheatre. Along the walls the French greatnesses were lined up; Molière, Descartes, Racine… In the ceiling, there was a painting of a man reading a huge book amidst antiquity ruins, and over his head the Muses, presumably, and some angels were playing. There were red carpets on the floor and the desks were made of dark, visibly old and worn, wood.

I would never dream of mocking such a presence of history. Far from it. One of the few, or probably only, collective identities I’ve ever felt any affiliation with is that I’m almost a little bit proud of having been a pupil at Norway’s oldest school. We were impregnated with such an identity from the moment we started there. It’s almost a thousand years old and it’s connected to a cathedral (too grand for it’s city ☺ ). On the walls of the cathedral, a pupil three-four hundred years ago has made a tag (in Latin of course) about a gay teacher, which our (gay) teacher showed us. (Here I’ll not fall into the trap of more nostalgia).

The day after we were at Sorbonne the seminar I attended moved to the old Faculté de Médecin, which is in another grandiose building in the Latin Quarter. High ceilings, broad marble stairs, busts, statues, a memorial for medicine students and teachers lost in the First World War, tapestries and Greek myths… It was all very nice. And then I cycled home and took the metro to its final destination, in Saint-Denis.

The people seemed very nice. There was an “Intercultural festival” going on when I was there, so in the vestibule they sold food – French and North African – and played North African music. But I was quite surprised of how dilapidated and worn out the buildings seemed. And there were security guards walking around, and a huge security post right in the entrance hall. The women’s toilet didn’t have a sign – I don’t know if that was intentional – and the walls in the booths were full of holes filled with toilet paper. And the amphitheatre was full of graffiti! I almost had to laugh because the contrast from the central Parisian etablissements I had just left was so great. I didn’t take any photos because that would feel, I don’t know, strange… but I hope to go back, as I said, there seemed to be interesting things going on there. (And the Wikipendia entry on the Paris 8 university shows that it’s been a hotbed for radicalism since it was established far away from the city by de Gaulle after 1968 :D – they even say “tu” to eachother…)

The fourth and last teaching establishment I’ve been to the last week was not a university like Sorbonne and Saint-Denis, but a Grande Ecole, which is supposed to be more elitist (but I don’t know the ranging of La Sorbonne (Pantheon) within this). It was the EHESS – Ecole de hautes études en science sociale – which I’ve mentioned here before. This building is 1950-60s style and in the centre of Paris, but not in the Latin Quarter. Funnily, EHESS was full of graffiti as well. It was occupied long time ago during the protests against the CPE and there were photos available on the internet showing the vandalism, or what to call it, right after the squatters were thrown out. But that is months ago, and the harsh juridical repression in various CPE law cases have already been going on for a long time. But for some reason they haven’t yet removed the scribble, not even what’s written with chalk. I wonder why.

I understand Bondy Blog’s Hanane Kaddour’s concern about being geographically limited to Saint-Denis or some other banlieue university. Especially since which university, or rather Grande Ecole, you go to, have everything to say when you try to get a job afterwards. But at the same time I like the other France as well (and Saint-Denis’ Philosophy department is founded by Michel Foucault!). So why can’t the two of them – the old and historical and the new and vibrant – just come a little closer together?

I’ve left the digression to the end this time: When I was checking a word on Britannica.com I learnt that it’s Malcolm X’ birthday today (1925-1965). His autobiography (written by Alex Haley) is a very, very good book about identity politics, as well as history, jazz and other things, and I can strongly recommend it. When I was writing now, one particular scene from the book, as well as the film (by Spike Lee) came to mind. Malcolm was the best pupil in class, and for a while neither he nor the others seemed to take much notice that he was the only black boy there. However, the teacher did. So, one day he asked his brightest and perhaps favourite pupil what he wanted to do when he grew up, and the young boy answered “lawyer”. But the teacher thought, perhaps rightly, that that could never happen in a segregated America, so he suggested that Malcolm opted for carpentry instead. A suggestion that, as far as I remember, terminated Malcolm’s formal schooling.

For those who read French, I can recommend Le Bondy Blog. A couple of journalists from the Swiss magazine L’Hebdo settled in the banlieue Bondy during the November revolts, and stayed there for more than 4 months. Before they left,…

1st of May in Paris

Published on May 3, 2006 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, History, Places, Politics, Spaces

1st of May, in the morning, I cycled through the quiet streets to a bridge by the Louvre Museum. At the Pont du Carrousel, there is a commemorative plate for Brahim Bourram, who 11 years ago, on this day, drowned after he was thrown into the river Seine by skinheads coming from the annual Front National demonstration. Paris Major Delanoë had put down flowers, and every year MRAP – (Movement against racism and for the friendship between the peoples) – arrange a commemorative ceremony. General secretary Mouloud Aounit didn’t have a microphone, and I was too far away to hear what actually was said, but MRAP has posted a statement on their webpage, which I shall quote from as it speaks directly to the current situation in France:
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This crime should remind us tragically that the words always precede actions, that words – the discourses of hate, exclusion – can lead to the irreparable. Brahim Bouarram, Ibrahim Ali, Imed Bouhoud, Ilan Halimi and many others have paid their life for the freedom of racist speech.

At this 1st of May 2006, when the verbal violence of racist speech is given expression in a build-up between the president of the Front National, Philippe de Villiers [president of the right wing Movement pour la France] and Nicolas Sarkozy, it is the duty of all antiracists to remind that if this process is let to develop, it meanst to take the risk of making these individuals accomplices in putting words into action. [my translation, read the whole press release in French here]

The communiqué ends by an appeal for vigilance and civic resistance.

And from here this blog post could take many directions. I’d like to write about this typically French habit of appealing to the duty of the citoyens, MRAPs interesting – and in my opinion laudable – position and (lost) court case in the Mohammed caricature incident, the sombre and complicated issue of racially motivated murders, the recent media appearances of de Villiers (speaking of an islamisation of France and the need for a francisation) and of course this “build-up of violent speec” (violence des propos racistes s’exprime dans une surenchère). The latter issue I’ll expand on very soon in a post with the catchy title Liberté, Égalité, tes papiers! (stolen from an anti disposable immigration flyer). The present post shall however continue recounting 1st of May, as I experienced it.

Three years ago, at the moment the commemorative plate for the murdered Brahim Bouarram was inaugurated by Major Delanoë (see this article from 2003 on Paris Indymedia (in French)), Le Pen used (according to the media) the occasion to make an ironic remark on a nearby gathering: “That bridge will soon resemble our great religious sites, because it seems that every year a commemorative plaque will be put up to thank the little hoodlums petits voyous who every year allow themselves to slander the Front national.” (I’ve found other quotes as well from Front National concerning this event, which I don’t think should be forgotten).

This attempt by Front National to clean up their public image and to put the blame on others continues: A news report from this year’s 1st of May FN procession showed how an FN member (a representative to the European Parliament) told an aggressive man shouting “France for the French” to leave the cortege, remarking that he didn’t want this behaviour in front of the journalists and the “leftwing media” and suggesting – or even saying? – that this was a provocateur paid for by the Interior Ministry. The FN themselves had distributed blue posters shaped like France proclaiming: “Aimez-la où quittez-là!” for this annual procession in honour of Jeanne d’Arc
(I haven’t yet looked into the relationship between FN, Jeanne d’Arc and the 1st of May, see Wikipendia (in French)).
As I don’t look like an Arab (which was the unfortunate fate of Brahim Bourram), I thought it safe to go and have a look at this procession. However, I didn’t and as this is such a sombre subject, I’ll not make a joke about why it turned out that way.

This blog post was supposed to be about 1st of May, but I’ve already written almost two pages about the far right. For my part, the 1st of May celebration ended on a happier antiracist note with “rock against Sarko” by a classical French punk band at Place de la Nation. But before I wrap it all up with that story, I shall say a few words about the other processions I missed that day, just to give an idea of the things going on in Paris on mayday.

First, I missed when one of the major labour unions (La Force Ouvrière) put flowers on the Communards’ Wall (Mur de Fédéres) at my local cemetery, the Père Lachaise. Then in the afternoon, I missed half of the major procession going from Place de la République to Place de la Nation. (I though the procession would pass by Bastille, but they went the straight axis République – Nation via Boulevard Voltaire (surely no unintentional symbolism here- I’ll come back to this symbolic axis of republicanism later, in which I think also Quilombo (the libertairian bookshop situated in rue Voltaire) has its place – I’ve just learnt that Quilombo was the name of antislavery settlements in Brazil, and Voltaire deserves a little reminder of the history of antislavery movements… I’ll maybe write why at a later occasion)).

The second half of this major 1st of May manif was dominated by transnational leftwing parties – Turks, Latin-Americans (going all together), Tamils (performing the Ramayana!) and Kurds…

The last event I missed, I skipped by my own choice, although I regret it a little now. 2nd of May the temperature returned to over 20°, but it was really chilly, grey and rainy on the 1st (and even worse the day before when I skipped two street parties; one for some sans-papiers families ejected from a squat and who now lives in a square, another just locally in Ménilmontant). The Euromayday organises Mayday parades all over Europe, and the phenomenon shows amongst other things the rapid dispersion of ideas, in this case counter movements, through the internet. Suddenly precarity has become a word in English (se a US-American blog post on this and the interesting recent Wikipendia entry), and even in Norway some left-wing radicals have adopted the notion of a génération précaire, stemming from the CPE-movement in France. (In January when I wrote the post on insecurity à la français this was not yet the case). But as I’m – and maybe eventual readers as well are – getting a bit fed up by this text now, I’ll end here. We’ll probably have the chance to delve into French punk concerts, the internet and protest movements and what else, later. I’m already preparing the part three of My blog, my project and I, – this time on… oh, yes, as always these days… politics and I.

1st of May, in the morning, I cycled through the quiet streets to a bridge by the Louvre Museum. At the Pont du Carrousel, there is a commemorative plate for Brahim Bourram, who 11 years ago, on this day, drowned…

Marseille (communications)

Published on April 29, 2006 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Peculiarities, Places

I’ve spent Easter time in Marseille. In 3 hours and 10 minutes the TGV takes you more than 800 km south from Paris to the Mediterranean city, through the French countryside, past a few villages, a castle or two on top of a cliff, a viaduct, blooming apple orchards, the river Rhone and loads of white cows. “Quite why, you might wonder,” the Guardian wrote in the heat of the CPE-affaire, “is a country with wonderful infrastructure, beautiful towns and countryside, world-class companies and highly productive workers tearing itself apart again?” I do find that paradox intriguing, and the comfort of the Train Grande Vitesse was an apt opportunity to give the transportational part of it a thought. Most major train itineraries in France take around 3 hours, an infrastructural feat I – perhaps because I come from a country made of massive granite – find very fascinating. I wonder how people can bother to take domestic planes at all from the capital in this country, not to mention to London, when they can just jump on the efficient metro to one of the grandiose railway stations and get on a double-decker TGV, and get off at an equally grandiose station at their destination a few hours later. (Public transport in this country is one of the very few things that run on time – after 6 months here I still haven’t figured out exactly when the TV news starts, and I’m still not sure how delayed the conference, demo, meeting etc. will be – but public transport is reliable indeed, as long as there isn’t a strike or a manif blocking the way).
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Thinking of what I have planned writing about from Marseille I realise that this post could equally been titled “communication” (…which I add at this moment…). “Communication” can stand for all the three features that we noticed in particular on our weeklong holiday in Marseille. All the three of them are common in Paris as well, but in Marseille they’re somehow amplified:

First: I’ve got the impression that les Marsaillais are quite chatty. In Paris too people say things to strangers in public spaces. (This is perhaps normal in many countries in the world, but again, Norway is not only made of granite, it’s also very sparsely populated so we haven’t really discovered the finesse of human interaction yet ;-) ) I’ve written earlier that many people speak to themselves on meetings and conferences, apparently in order to get contact with their side-person so they have someone to share their opinions with (expressing opinions is undoubtedly very important in France). In public spaces people aren’t usually trying to enter into long term exchanges, they’re just saying a few words: In the supermarket today a boy around twenty commented that my nutritional intake today surely would be well-balances (I had some cartons of juice and a big bag of salad in my shopping basked, in order to fight of a threatening cold. He bought a packet of biscuits). And if people – kids, youth or adults – double you on a narrow pavement, chances are that they would say Pardon! or Excusez-moi! as they pass. If I carry flowers from the market, someone will possibly make a joke, usuallyare they for me? But particularly I appreciate all the passers-bys giving a Bon appétit! when they see someone eat in public. A couple of days ago, when we had lunch on the pavement outside a local bistrot someone even shouted bon appétit from a passing car.

Foldable pocket bike at the beach in Marseille

These examples are from Paris, but my impression is that the Marseillais talk even more to strangers. When I stayed in France some years ago, I spoke more French in one week in Marseille than I had done the previous 4 months in Paris. This time, apart from all the ordinary bon appétit it was our small foldable pocket bikes that made quite a few Marseillais talk to us. Even a busdriver leaned out of the window at a red light and said he had always wanted such a bike and now he would like to know where we had got them. All the interest our bikes generated would probably have inspired someone a little more entrepreneurial than us to start a local import firm and live happily for the rest of our lives down there.

The second feature we noticed about Marseille is how calm people are in the traffic. It’s quite a Zen experience to cycle in Marseille, – but also in Paris, I should add, which I noticed when I unfolded my little green pocket bike and started cycling here as well. The contrast couldn’t have been bigger to cycling in London, which is almost an extreme sport experience (at least at the time I was there, which was just before Major Livingstone got to power). The bikes here are often older and of a more classical city bike posture than the typical off road or hybrid bikes in Oslo or London. That makes people sit more straight and almost backward leaning. In addition, many cycle really slow. And all kinds of people cycle; from elderly men and ladies to kids via businessmen. But this is Paris I’m talking about again. In Marseille there aren’t that many people on bikes, and the infrastructure for bikes are much worse than in the capital, with no bicycle lanes and at the moment the whole city centre is just a construction site for the new pride, the tramway. But despite all this, the drivers have surprisingly a lot of patience with us cyclists (perhaps they were just staring at our attractive foldable pocket bikes?).

I find it surprising that the city traffic in France give this Zen impression at the moment, because that was certainly not how I remember it from my first visits to Paris in the late 1980s.

Initially, I was thinking of writing a comparison between “multicultural” Belleville (social demographer Patrick Simon’s description) and cosmopolitan Marseille, but the only thing I’ll say about the cosmopolitan feature of the city for now is that les Marseillais apparently see it as some kind of public duty to make metissée babies. It wasn’t even the anthropologist, who is supposed to notice such things, but her companion who remarked the high number of people of mixed origins in the city of 2600 years of immigration.

Contrat premiere embauche – Protesting à la français

Published on March 8, 2006 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Peculiarities, Places, Politics, Spaces

Initially, I hadn’t planned to go to the major demonstration against the CPE (“contract ‘first employment'”) as it only tangentially touches the focus of my fieldwork (tangentially, as the CPE – Contrat Première Embauche – is part of Prime minister Villepin’s plan for égalité des chances: youth unemployment is high in France and even higher in the Zones sensible which is in need of the equal opportunities). But as the echoes of the chanted slogans reached all the way to my flat – situated at least 20 minutes away from the standard demo route Place de la République/Bastille/Place de la Nation – and I saw the diverted traffic as I leaned out of the window, I realised that the scale of the event made it worth defying the heavy rain and head for Nation.
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The ten minutes walk down Avenue Philippe Auguste, I was thinking about how different French politics are from what I’m used to. The implementation of the CPE is a good example. In L’Assemblée Nationale the politicians can speak loudly, clap, make noise and sometimes shout, and – most exotically – even express themselves with eloquence. In this, France is similar to Britain. The importance they give to demonstrations is however different.

One month ago, there was a discussion in the National Assembly on the government plan of implementing the CPE and other “equal opportunity” measures, which went something like this: A socialist politician shouted to prime minister Villepin (the architect of the CPE): – You should listen to the streets! (alluding to the first demonstration against the CPE taking place at the time). Villepin, Monsieur l’éloquence personally, replied, with oratorical pathos: I am listening to the streets… – but I also hear the ones who are not down at the streets (pointing to the rather feeble support for the demo). Demonstrations have thus an important political role to play in this country. (I’d like to give some other examples, but as this is meant to be a quick post, I’ll leave it for another time).

As I arrived at Nation, I noticed that 7 of the 8 boulevard and avenues running into the square were lined with the CRS – riot police – standing around, looking after their helmets, shields, batons and other riot gear… (The 8th street was of course the one where the protesters entered). I don’t think such demonstrations, full of healthy (though leftwing) pupils and students and more or less bourgeois labour unionists often turn violent, but the Republic obviously wants to put her measures at display. – So also with her boulevards and avenues, constructed broad and straight as they were in order to easily suppress popular rebellion…

I think about the republic and her broad boulevards, full of politics, as I linger for a while in Place the la Nation: I once participated in a tiny little demonstration in London (I think there were 16 000, which would hardly count as a demo in a country where hundreds of thousands take to the streets many times a year) making City a drum’n’bass dance party and consequently a no-go area for the police for hours… as the narrow and winding streets of City is not made for riot police.

After taking some blurred, grey and rainy photos of the last part of the demo down Rue du Faubourg Saint Antoine from Bastille, I hurried home in order to change shoes, socks, trousers and umbrella (ready for the dustbin) before I went to a neighbourhood democracy meeting in a nearby school, which of course turned out to be full of people discussing, objecting and protesting and talking about art and the importance of preserving small-scale artisan affairs for hours…

Initially, I hadn’t planned to go to the major demonstration against the CPE ("contract 'first employment'") as it only tangentially touches the focus of my fieldwork (tangentially, as the CPE – Contrat Première Embauche – is part of Prime minister…

“The martyrs of Charonne”

Published on February 9, 2006 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Fieldwork, History, Places

Yesterday, I had planned an academic expedition to L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales again, this time for a lecture on the sociological use of documentaries where they would also screen a “cinema verité” film on young Parisians’ vision on happiness from 1960 (Chronique d’un été). But chances wanted that I should stay in the neighbourhood and, in fact, be witnessing the making of a documentary on recent French history.
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Not long ago, I had included the communist newspaper L’humanité to my RSS desktop reader (that every morning kindly fills my laptop with hundreds of news in English and French). L’humanité appears for some reason high on that list of news, just under BBC and À toutes les victimes. In this instance that was luck, because about 20 minutes from the time I was turning on my computer and having my morning coffee there were to take place a commemoration ceremony for 9 people who died due to police brutality in a demonstration 8th of February 1962, during the Algerian war… It had happened at Métro Charonne, just 10 minutes from where I live. And I had no idea about it…

(The Internet was conspicuously silent on the ceremony to take place, but I found out that Indymedia had published a text the one day that I was unable to access the web (or even leaving the bed due to some stomach ailment anthropologists possibly are subjected to experience qua anthropologists in the field, wherever that field might be).)

What is the point of this long intro? Apart from making a (methodological) point of the importance of serendipity in fieldwork, I of course also want to make a claim about the invisibility of certain facts in the collective memory and history of this country.

In the autumn, I learnt that on 17th of October 1961 the Parisian police threw more than 200 (we will never know the exact number) peaceful Algerian demonstrators into the river. The recentness of such a brutality in a European capital is shocking to me. So is the lack of attention devoted to it. After the commemoration ceremony yesterday, I scrutinised the buildings around the metro entrance to see if there were a memorial plaque there. I found nothing that would remind the passer-byes of what had happened just some 40 years ago (but it seems there is one on the inside of the station, I’ll have to go and check…). However, at the open debate/meeting at the town hall afterwards I was to hear that the intersection between Boulevard Voltaire and Rue Charonne is to be named Place de 8 février 1962.

After the crushing of the demonstrators (150 wounded, in addition to the 9 deaths) the police tried to make up the most ridiculous lies, as they had after La nuit noire, 17th October 1961. However, between 500 000 and 1 million people participated in the funeral cortège to the cemetery Père Lachaise. But the chief of police, Maurice Papon continued in his job for years afterwards… (The same Papon – and this is something I must admit I don’t understand – had also had a high position during the Vichy Nazi collaborating government and taking part in sending more than 1500 French Jews to extinction…) These facts are known to the French today, but I must admit that they are so shocking to me that I don’t understand why they haven’t got more attention.

The French state has probably known better than most that l’oubli (forgetfulness, oblivion, omission, oversight) is fundamental for any nation (Ernest Renan, 1882: Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?) But over and over again the recent years, not to say months, it has become apparent that this long lasting and biased oblivion has to come to an end.

(As I write this, France 2 is broadcasting a critical American documentary on the laïque (secular) French state, at the moment focusing on the controversy around the Muslim headscarf. I hear a veiled girl say; “Integration, that’s finished. That was our parents’ generation. I am French. I’m born here”).

Yesterday, I had planned an academic expedition to L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales again, this time for a lecture on the sociological use of documentaries where they would also screen a “cinema verité” film on young Parisians’ vision…