They call themselves Houtre, TFR and Sery, signatures that they endlessly display on the walls of Paris and its suburbs. Until now, the Paris City Hall was content to tirelessly remove their graffiti with a high-pressure cleaner or under layers of fresh paint. This relative tolerance is over. For the first time, two files were transmitted to the prosecution, Wednesday March 30, announced the same day Emmanuel Grégoire, the first deputy of Anne Hidalgo. To clearly indicate the symbolic importance of these first two cases, a letter co-signed with two other deputies, Nicolas Nordman (security) and Colombe Brossel (cleanliness), was sent to the new Paris prosecutor, Laure Beccuau.
“For several months, the situation has been sufficiently worrying for us to devote increased resources to it”, justifies Emmanuel Grégoire. In his eyes, the proliferation of graffiti in Paris constitutes a “plague”. The practice is certainly nothing new. Place des Vosges, in the heart of the Marais, one can still read, engraved in the stone, the inscription « 1764 Nicolas » attributed to Nicolas Restif de La Bretonne. The future author of Nights in Paris was then 30 years old. But with social media, “a form of competition, of marking territory”, accentuated the movement, believes Emmanuel Grégoire. Some authors reproduce their signature in dozens, hundreds of copies, and brag about it, especially on Instagram.
“A small number of individuals, perhaps forty or fifty, thus contributes to seriously deteriorating the city”, says the first deputy. This is the case of “Sery”, whose municipal services have spotted more than 350 tags in the 5e arrondissement. Or the one that the town hall suspects of signing alternately “Houtre” and “TFR”, with more than 200 tags to his credit in the same arrondissement. These are the two cases, meticulously documented, whose files have been sent to the courts by elected Parisians.
8 million euros per year
“We thus hope to dissuade those who imagine passing on to posterity by these tags”, and “to put a stop to this very narcissistic practice”, says Emmanuel Grégoire. The City has also recently increased by about 50% the budget devoted to the removal of tags, bringing it to about 8 million euros per year. A budget essentially entrusted to private companies.
The abounding graffiti and the action deemed too weak by the town hall on this ground have for months been one of the angles of attack of Saccage Paris. “The ambiguity of the town hall in the face of tags is total”, writes one of the figures of the movement, the journalist Didier Rykner, in The Disappearance of Paris (Les Belles lettres, 238 pages, 19 euros). On one side, the team that runs the city « encourage » graffiti, he says, with for example a message from deputy Penelope Komitès presenting as a “treasure for street art lovers” the signatures left by Trane, Seno, See, PCP, etc., on the sides of the small belt. The other, “She fights them, weakly, well obliged to act in the face of protests from local residents”, adds Didier Rykner.
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