Middle-class protesters join sleep-in on behalf of French homeless

Middle-class protesters join sleep-in on behalf of French homeless
By Craig S. Smith

Tuesday, January 2, 2007
PARIS
Hundreds of people emerged from tents beside this city's Canal Saint-Martin to greet the chilly New Year with a hot lunch from a nearby soup kitchen. But not all of them were homeless.

Dozens of otherwise well-housed, middle-class French people have been spending nights in tents along the canal in solidarity with the country's growing number of "sans domicile fixe," the French euphemism for people living on the street.

The bleak yet determinedly cheerful sleep-in is meant to embarrass the French government into doing something about the problem.

"Each person should have the minimum dignity in a country as rich as this," said Bleunwenn Manrot, a 28-year-old woman with a newsboy cap on her head and a toothbrush in her hand. Manrot drove more than six hours with friends from her home in Carhaix, Brittany, to spend New Year's Eve along the canal.

The demonstration has drawn enough media attention over the holidays for President Jacques Chirac to acknowledge it Sunday during his traditional New Year's address to the nation. He asked the government to work in the coming weeks to "put in place a truly enforceable right to housing" that would give the homeless the legal means to demand a place to live.

Given France's well-funded social services, the homeless problem in the country is relatively mild: The French government statistics bureau estimated the number of people living without a fixed address at 86,000 for all of France in 2004, about equal to the number of homeless in Los Angeles alone.

But even that number is disturbing for the socially active segment of France's population. In December 2005, a French charitable organization called Médecins du Monde, or Doctors of the World, began distributing nylon pup tents to people who sleep on Paris's storied sidewalks and beneath its fabled bridges. The movement took hold and since then the tents have become a fixture in odd corners of the city.

In an effort to increase pressure on politicians, another group, Don Quixote's Children, marshaled some of the tent dwellers last year to set up their tents along the Canal Saint-Martin in the heart of "bo-bo" (short for bourgeois-bohemian) Paris. Since mid- December, the encampment has become a happening in one of Paris's most happening neighborhoods.

"There are 250 tents now," said Jean- Baptiste Legrand, president of the organization. "The people keep coming, and the tents are full."

The protest has started to spread to other French cities, including Orléans, Toulouse and Lyon, and has been picked up by politicians as campaigning for the presidential election in the spring gets under way.

François Hollande, leader of the Socialist Party, and Bertrand Delanoë, the Socialist mayor of Paris, have both signed the group's petition calling for a solution to the housing problem. Both of the leading presidential candidates — Nicolas Sarkozy of the governing Union for a Popular Movement and Ségolène Royal of the Socialists — support the cause.

Catherine Vautrin, minister for social cohesion, met with Legrand and other members of his group and announced last week a tenfold increase in spending to help the homeless — from €7 million to €70 million, or $92 million. She said the money would allow homeless shelters to stay open around the clock on weekends and extend their weekday opening by three hours a day.

But a legally enforceable right to housing is the biggest prize sought by

campaigners including Don Quixote's Children, and they remain skeptical of Chirac's promise. France already has a hard time housing new immigrants and asylum-seekers. Fires in overcrowded, substandard lodgings have caused scandals in recent years. Finding a place for the hard-core homeless is certain to complicate those problems.

"Chirac's speech means nothing," Manrot said. Her boyfriend, Franck Renardineau, a painter, sculptor and musician with a nose ring and pointed beard, was standing beside her.

There are signs that the long camp- out will continue. Organizers have arranged portable toilets and a soup kitchen. Vans carrying blankets and other supplies arrive regularly, much of the material donated by Parisians. Volunteers sweep the canal-side cobblestones to keep the area clean.

"I like the protest because it's nonviolent; it's a citizens' appeal," said Renaud Huvé, 39, a photographer who was planning to sleep in one of the tents.

So far, the authorities have been tolerant, though they have quietly evicted tent dwellers before when the media were not watching. The police broke up one encampment under a bridge further north along the canal in October.

Magali Marx, 23, a sales assistant in a clothing shop, expressed the laissez- faire attitude of the neighborhood's residents as she passed by. "It's a bit of a pain for the people who want to walk along the side of the canal," she said. "But then these people don't have a roof."

The government says that a third of the country's homeless hold jobs.

The homeless who make up the bulk of the canal-side campers are thankful for the attention.

"Let's hope it makes a difference," said Jean, a middle-aged man who said he had been living on the streets of Paris for eight years.