2023-08-01 11:43:33
Updated Tuesday, August 1, 2023 – 11:43
The ‘bouquinistes’, who have been installed by the river for 450 years, rebel against the decision to remove them from the scene of the opening ceremony
The bookstores, at the height of the Pont Royal. STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN / AFP The Bievre, the secret river of Paris that returns to light Paris, 2024 City without ring road
Every morning, on the quays of the Seine, hundreds of dealers open their stalls selling second-hand books, vintage Moulin Rouge posters and watercolors of Notre Dame cathedral as it has been done for 400 years. Until now: the daily ball of the bouquinistes, the booksellers/antique dealers of the French capital, will suspend their work in the summer of 2024 because the City Council has decided to remove them from the landscape for the duration of the 2024 Olympic Games.
Around 570 green cans (green boxes, in reference to the color of their structures), that is to say 59% of the stalls of the largest open-air bookstore in the world, will be dismantled during the Games. According to the Paris Police Prefecture, this solution is essential for the security of a place or event exposed to the risk of terrorist acts, as he wrote in a notification sent to the sellers on July 25.
There is a reason for the measure: in Paris, and for the first time in history, the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games will not take place in a stadium, but in a river, the Seine, which has been beautifully sanitized for it. For a century, since 1923, bathing in it has been prohibited due to sewage contamination that emptied into its stream. Thanks to the cleanup efforts, this ban will be lifted in 2024.
In that new Seine, 116 boats will transport 10,000 athletes in the parade on July 26, 2024. The fleet will sail a six kilometer route, from the Austerlitz bridge, in the east of the capital, to the Ina bridge, at the foot of the Trocadero, in the west. According to the Mayor of Paris, in addition to being a risk, the stalls would block the view of the parade.
The sellers have not been slow to react: Would we have moved the Eiffel Tower if it obstructed the view?, asks Albert Abid, who has been selling books in a stall for about 10 years, in an interview with Le Parisien. We feel like flies on a cake. they scare us, declares a bookseller to Europe 1 radio. And another colleague challenges the City Council in the pages of Marianne: In three decades, my boxes have never moved. I don’t see why that should change now.
Book stalls have been on the quays of the Seine for 450 years. The tradition of the bouquinistes began in the 16th century, when some peddlers of books began to proliferate. in the Pont Neuf. Its activity was prohibited in 1649, under pressure from the city’s booksellers, but then they returned with a license.
During the French Revolution, the bouquinistes flourished and their owners became rich selling the books from the looting of the aristocratic and clerical libraries. In the early 19th century, under Napoleon I, they were accorded the same status as the city’s conventional merchants.
Today, the booksellers occupy more than three kilometers of banks of the Seine and about 900 stalls are exploited. We are an important symbol of Paris […]. Wanting to erase ourselves from the landscape when the celebration of these Games should be the celebration of Paris seems meaningless to me, Jrme Callais, president of the Cultural Association of the Bouquinistes de Paris, declared in Ouest France.
In a statement issued on Thursday, July 27, 2023, the Paris City Council assured its support for the booksellers and recognized that their activity is part of the identity of the quays of the Seine. In the same statement, the city announced that it would take charge of dismantling the stalls and would offer vendors who wished to settle in a Village des Bouquinistes (Booksellers’ Village), in a literary neighborhood near the Seine. However, disassembling the boxes inevitably means damaging them, explains the seller Pierre Dalous in Le Parisien, and this is confirmed by Jrme Callais to AFP: the boxes are too fragile to be transported. They’re old. If you move them, you run the risk of losing a screw here or there, creating gaps between the pieces and, therefore, breaking the waterproofing… That’s the worst thing that could happen to us.
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