Although Parisians are justifiably ashamed of some things that went on under the Occupation, they don’t want today’s flâneurs to forget the city’s proudest moment in August 1944.
‘Excusez-moi, où est le …?
Amongst the most prominent features of Paris’s pavements are the kiosques. And as visitors to the city struggle to work out which street nameplate is actually correct, many of them assume that the kiosk selling maps, postcards and newspapers is a mini tourist-information office. Big mistake.
The kiosquier will almost certainly know the area inside out, because the kiosks in the centre of Paris are awarded by a city commission to the most experienced newspaper sellers, who have worked in the city’s streets for years. Even so, he (and it’s rarely a she) will probably not want to share his knowledge with a lost tourist.
Sales of daily newspapers are suffering because of the rise of the freebies, and Paris’s 300 or so kiosquiers have seen their income fall drastically over the past few years. They’re paid on a commission-only basis—they get 18 per cent of each sale, which is eroded away by the French tax and social security system to roughly 10 per cent net profit. Out of this they have to pay a rent for their kiosk of about 500 euros a year. And they earn nothing from the adverts on the sides of their kiosks, unless the poster is promoting a magazine that will boost turnover. They are generally not full of the joys of spring, even in spring.
Asking directions of a kiosquier is therefore a bit like asking Karl Lagerfeld to sew on a button or a lion tamer to catch a mouse. It’s an insult to his vast knowledge of the neighbourhood and its inhabitants, and he has about a million better things to do to earn his living.
And rather like Karl Lagerfeld and lion tamers, the kiosquiers often have strong personalities. Standing alone in a cabin in the street from dawn till long after dusk breeds a special sort of person. The kiosquiers express themselves not only in the way they serve their customers but also through the positioning of certain lesser-known papers and magazines. The big-selling publications will obviously be prominently displayed, but look carefully and you might see more obscure publications sharing space with Le Monde or Paris Match. These will often be political, anarchist even, and are usually satirical, with the kiosquiers using their public location to take a swing at the establishment. My local kiosquier cuts out the most viciously anti-government cartoons and sticks them above the display of daily newspapers.
The kiosquiers are loners, like truck drivers, except that it is more difficult for them to take rest stops. They can’t just lock up and take a toilet break (which, incidentally, is why so few women choose to do the job). A friend of mine once tried to buy a newspaper just after the morning rush, held out her money to the kiosquier, and was asked to ‘wait just a moment’. Looking into the kiosk, she saw that the newspaper seller was taking a pee in an Évian bottle. Needless to say, she told him to keep the change.
All of which explains why it is probably best to ask a passer-by for directions rather than going for the obvious target. Unless, of course, you notice a big advertising poster for Paris Match revealing some huge scandal concerning Carla Bruni, Johnny Hallyday or another big-name celebrity. Then the kiosquier might just be in a good enough mood to point you in the right direction.
A clean machine
According to my city map, Paris has 5,975 streets. This means that it has twice as many pavements. Or more than twice, because some bigger roads also have gardens down the middle, or a wide central reservation where markets are held, with a pavement either side.
Paris employs approximately 4,950 workers to keep all these pavements clean by emptying bins, sweeping out gutters, spraying the ground, collecting bottles, picking up dumped furniture, clearing market-day debris, and generally making sure that the city’s densely packed population doesn’t turn Paris into a landfill site.
According to city statistics, these workers sweep more than 2,400 kilometres of pavements every day, and empty the 30,000-odd transparent plastic sacks that have replaced the opaque green bins that used to hang on streetlamps until Paris decided that non-see-through bins were ideal hiding places for a terrorist bomb.
There are also some 380 green machines of various sizes and shapes sucking, sweeping and squirting rubbish off the streets and pavements. The machines come in a dizzying variety of models. There are, for example, the tiny one-person modules that crawl along like a hunched robot, sweeping up rubbish with twin brushes. Then there are the water tanks on wheels that allow a green-uniformed, hose-toting Robocop to stride along a street spraying Parisians’ ankles.** There are also truck-sized vehicles that perform both of these functions simultaneously. All of them are cursed by Parisians for holding up traffic or soaking their new shoes, but without them the city would be uninhabitable.
I am always amazed by the scene when my local food market winds down at about 2 p.m. on Sundays and Thursdays. The crowds have dispersed, the awnings have been collected, the stallholders have packed up or abandoned their unsold goods. Meanwhile, a small army of green uniforms gathers and gets to work. The cardboard boxes are fed into a crusher. The wooden crates are stacked and collected. The non-recyclable refuse is swept by machine and human hand into piles and thrown on to waiting trucks. Less than an hour later, you would never even know that there had been a market, apart from the gleam of the still-wet tarmac on the square. The market itself probably hasn’t changed much in a century or more (except for the presence of exotic fruit and non-native
