In the shadow of the Summer Games, protests highlight the struggle to provide homes for France’s migrant community.
As a pink sun sets on the Place de la Bastille in the center of Paris, a group of protestors play Malian music from the ’60s and dance in a circle, while some slowly set up small red tents for the night. Next to the Olympic rings installed by the city for the 2024 Summer Games, the group hoists a big yellow banner onto the sidewalk’s trees. It reads “Stop the Repression, Stop the Speculation, Right to Housing!”
In the past few weeks, international news outlets have reported on what organizers have warned about for years; in preparation for the games, President Emmanuel Macron’s administration has gradually forced thousands of unhoused migrants onto buses, displacing them to smaller towns across France to clear the streets for the Olympic venues and to house the athletes and tourists. Unfortunately, this practice of mass evictions and clearance of marginalized and unhoused people ahead of the Olympics follows the all too familiar approach taken by prior host cities like Beijing, Rio, and Tokyo.
In light of the displacement, it’s important to also tell the story of those fighting to stay, like the Bastille campers.
The group are all migrants without a fixed home. Many have been on a waiting list for public housing for years—some for over a decade—and in the meantime, they live between friends’ couches, hotels, the street, or abandoned buildings. Rolling a cigarette, one of the elders of the group tells me, “Our goal is to occupy a public place and remind both the city and the people who pass by that we are here to stay, we need housing, and we are prepared to go till the end.” I gesture toward the rings and ask what he thinks of the Olympics. He says, “I have no illusions. It’s for their pockets at our expense.”
Le Revers de la Medaille, a collective of 90 organizations focused on defending the interests of Paris’s most vulnerable during the Olympics, estimates that from April 2023 to May 2024 the city evicted approximately 12,545 people (of which 3,434 were children) from squats in abandoned buildings, tent cities, and other historic alternative tier-lieues—third spaces and informal settlements. The government claims the evictions are unrelated to the games, but this wave of evictions is a 38 percent increase from the year before.
And that’s just the official count. Organizers on the ground argue that the figure does not include the thousands of additional illegal or “self-evictions,” where hotels ended contracts so they could renovate before the influx of Olympic tourists or landlords gave illegal eviction notices to their tenants so they could turn their homes into Airbnbs. “The evictions have been revolting,” says Passynia Mondo, a spokesperson from the housing advocacy organization Droit au Logement. “For families, it happens overnight. People are asked to leave the community where they have a job, where their kids are in school. They are not given a choice.”
In France, individuals are legally guaranteed a “rapid rehousing” shelter or social housing placement by the state when evicted or identified as experiencing homelessness. Despite this right, a majority of migrants find themselves without housing upon arrival or placed in detention centers, facing probable deportation. The cities they’ve been relocated to lack the resources or political will to facilitate access to schooling or employment. In February, the conservative mayor Serge Grouard of Orléans, a town in central France, denounced Macron’s government for sending his town more than 500 migrants without warning or resources. “It’s not Orléans’s vocation to host Paris’s crack hill,” he said, in a racist reference to the migrant enclave Porte de la Chapelle in Paris. On the left, Philippe Salmon, the ecologist mayor of Bruz, a small town in Brittany, condemned the state’s attempts to set up a reception center on a polluted and dangerous site, which he called “undignified conditions” for the migrants.
But you can’t just make people disappear!” says Orane Lamas, an organizer from CNDH RomeEurope, a collective focused on informal settlements. “They won’t just leave the country. They find another solution but with more precarity, more of their personal belongings ruined, further from their support networks, and with more risk of violence.”
The Place de la Bastille campers have been there for over six weeks. Catching his breath between dances, one protestor, Eric, tells me, “I work for the mayor’s office as a security guard and have been on the street since October 2022. I sleep in the metro station by Tuileries, but they’ve shut it all down for the Olympics. I was lucky to find the camp at Bastille. It’s not always easy, but I like Paris. My family is here, my work is here. I need to stay.”
On April 6, just over a mile north of Bastille, after a series of encampment sweeps in the weeks prior, a group of approximately 170 unaccompanied, unhoused minors primarily from the Ivory Coast and New Guinea occupied La Maison des Métallos, a 19th-century community cultural center that hosts exhibitions and events. They established the squat to demand housing and signal to the city and its residents the high number of public buildings that could be repurposed to shelter, including the Saint-Denis Olympic Village buildings themselves (where roughly one in three residents are migrants). After several successful eviction defenses and building a movement of support across electoral and community groups, the minors agreed to leave on July 3 after the city committed to their demands: shelter for the entirety of the games in Paris, and to not be separated from each other.
On Bastille Day, as the mainstream outlets boomed with videos of the military parade and the Olympic flame being passed around Paris to hordes of tourist onlookers, the minors organized an internationalist march around the city. Dressed in traditional clothes, and carrying instruments and flags from West Africa to Lebanon, they contextualized their housing fight in the broader struggle of anti-colonialism. They called for an end to evictions and an end to the repression of migrant’s social protections, among other demands. The collective made clear what their fight represents in a recent statement: “We have shown that we are the solution, that we belong here…and that dignified housing in the heart of Paris is possible.”
Images via SOPA Images/Getty
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