Breakfast in Paris
Northern Paris has been transformed by increased border control between Britain and Europe. This text is written from within one small facet of those transformations.
Day Break. The container sits behind a chain-link fence. The fence is surrounded by other, higher fences. A headlamp moves in the dark, weaving back and forth through the metal links. A homeless cat sits waiting. The gulls are still asleep, white patches in the gloom, tucked into themselves and dotted apart from one another like a sentence tailing off in doubt or implication. Later they may be joined by a solitary heron, who walks amongst them, huge, elegant and indifferent. Steam pours now from the open hatch in the container, a bright square in the dark. A large tarpaulin awning has been pulled taut and fastened against the wind. Rain threatens; the headlight comes and goes, undeterred. I reach for my phone to light up the small numerals in the padlock, clumsy as I push them into sequence with my thumb, holding the padlock and chain in the one hand, the phone in the other. I nod hello to the gathering of men standing in the dark, apart from one another like the gulls, hunched over too, some wrapped in covers carrying bags, strange shapes, black in the early morning. I mumble something about it being time. I push the gate open, fixing the lock again, but winding the chain round only one side of the gate now. Not quite a crowd, the men walk past me like workers flowing through broad factory gates, or people mounting the gang plank onto a ship. The wind whips the flag. There are big tables and benches in a row and wooden decking. Overhead is a string of lights, now shining weakly in the dark. This could be a small ocean liner or a very large yacht, but it is attached to a bridge and the bridge spans railway lines. We’re one kilometer from Paris according to the sign intended for the drivers as they pass under this last bridge before entering the cavernous hall of the Gare de l’Est or the Gare du Nord, where all the lines draw equal behind the imposing façades that look towards the imperial city. But by any other map, this is Paris. We’re already fully within its walls. Yet, as I turn to follow the flow, I imagine a little lurch as if stepping onto a strange raft, only very minimally attached to the infrastructures of life around it.
In a short while a free breakfast will be served. Sometimes hundreds of people come, sometimes it’s closer to one hundred. There are patterns, ebbs and flows, but each day is a surprise. I wheel my shopping cart full of day-old bread towards the square of light at the end of the deck. I can hear the sparrows all around. The ground is wet. The greetings shared in the steamy brightness of the container are quick and warm. It will soon be time. I unload the bread. The haul is good today, but that too is always an unknown.
This is the backyard of the stations, named informally the Cour du Maroc for the immigrant Moroccan workers who laboured here, part of the last area in the city where goods get made and circulated in large quantities, though today the main good that is being made is housing, more and more apartment blocks in what is already one of the most densely populated areas in the city and by extension in Europe. It became a large public park about fifteen years ago, the result of a ten-year long campaign to obtain the full extent of the land that had sat abandoned, rich in wild grasses and rotting sidings, behind the long walls of dirty millstone. The walls came down. For a brief period, the park was as the local campaigners had wanted, open, an extension of homes to be shared in what is also the poorest district in the city. But the fences went up again. Now to start the day together in shared domesticity with a warm drink and slices of baguette with jam or chocolate spread, we have to juggle with padlocks and codes: 1871, the date of the Paris Commune, 1962, the end of the war in Algeria, someone’s birthday, a small series of four digits, lightly chosen, not even a mantra, which are the key to this craft.
At times the whole scene can feel like a fabulation. A conceit entertained to avoid the reality of the abandonment that this place also signifies… as a first, last and on-going resort for people who may be trying to stay on the move against all odds or who are already at the end of those efforts and resigned to a precarious reality in and around Paris. And a means too, for those who wrestle with the padlocks, to redefine the gatekeeping capacity that has fallen to this daily gathering, a gathering that has been happening for more than eight years now – that’s thousands of free breakfasts – which, by the simple multiplier of the numbers that form an approximate queue every morning, is a billowing spirit of hundreds of thousands of people from all over the globe that rises from this space and its multicoloured teapots each time the breakfast unfolds. Some, from positions of activism or of institutional power, criticize it for its lack of seriousness, for its failure to grasp ‘the bigger picture,’ and perhaps worse: for the way it keeps going on this unsustainable basis, holding people just on the edge.
It started as a shopping trolley, gradually evolved to picnic tables, found its own system for social distancing so as to carry on uninterrupted through the COVID-19 pandemic, and continues to fold itself away every day, disappearing into a box to be opened up the next day, again and again. There is no mandate, no agreement, no delegation of this responsibility for opening the park, for laying out the food. No risk assessment, either. The numbers that we fumble with in the dark have a minimal awkwardness. A small initiation may be necessary, but they always line up in the end, clicking into sequence and allowing us to yank the padlock free. If the improbability of pushing wide open the gates before the park employees arrive in an environment that bristles with fences can feel like the beginning of an adventure, it is also a resolve harboured by each person from within the different degrees of withdrawal or privacy that their own situation affords them, near and far, to get up, to go out to where there is none of that reprieve, to where the threat of the police is constant, to reconvene a moment of publicness within a public space. It is also a tacit acknowledgement by the local authorities that they have ceded this space, provisionally perhaps, to a public that acts outside explicit jurisdiction.
Is publicness what it is about? Between flights of fancy and staying present to what is also intolerable in this space, does publicness name the fragile tether that keeps this scene attached to the bridge? Sometimes the resolve comes accompanied by ideas that are more obvious rationalizations for actions of this sort: solidarity, hospitality, critique of the inequities of neoliberal capitalism, or le Macronisme. These concepts situate this small, daily undertaking in a more declarative frame. When the free breakfasts started in the midst of a phase of massive urban encampments in Paris when the asylum system was completely saturated, in 2016, 2017, 2018, the notion of solidarity was at the fore. And this impulse has lasted in the gathering’s name, Les P’tits déjeuners solidaires, though most often the reference is now just to ‘Les P’tits déjs.’ It stemmed in that context from a smaller fight, one engaged via a school occupation to prevent the deportation of a father without papers. Solidarity said something about being unmovable, not giving up the ground shared with that father of Chinese origin, which was in the school premises and the right to live with your child. Later the notion of hospitality was more readily invoked, and that perhaps reflected the ever-increasing politicization of immigration in public discourse, as well as a philosophical tradition in France that runs from Kant through to Derrida. Something of the inevitable asymmetry of this scene where a crew of local residents and homeowners greets people from the street is expressed more openly in the idea of hospitality than in that of solidarity. We might hear more readily too, as a result, the danger that it can always tip over into a compensatory pursuit that prefers not to look too long at the systemic exclusions. If solidarity says we stand on the same ground, hospitality makes it ‘ours’ to open, while activating ideas of reciprocal hospitalities, of ‘chez nous’ and ‘chez vous,’ in our place and in your place, in a world of distinct lands.
Some eschew all that sort of talk, with its easy proximity to more institutional discourses, and say simply, more quietly, that ‘c’est normal.’ But where is the normal: in the fact of providing minimal sustenance when and where possible? Perhaps…. In heading out into the dark without certainty of who else will be present to make the breakfast, of how many people will turn up to eat it, of whether the bread will be plentiful enough, of the possibility that in the night the police have woken people with brutal injunctions to move on, slashing tents, destroying possessions, that tensions will be running high. That anything can happen and often does, when the environment around is so hostile and there is so little to go on? The norm is like the raft, it rises and falls, and really ‘c’est normal’ just means not letting it go under. It speaks with the shadow of crisis at its back.
Does the concept of publicness help straddle the perilous analogy between the small craft at sea and a small effort in a local neighbourhood, albeit poor, in a wealthy global city? It says something about being in the eye or the ken of all, without necessarily calling on a particular response or take-up. It says something about availability, accessibility. The public park is there for us all. And the small boats are somewhere else altogether. Much of the debate about where they are is basely political. Its language is recriminatory or strategic. But some of it, particularly in literary or artistic contexts, deals in the higher-flown questions of what is at stake in the representation of lives cast at sea, obliged to cross deserts and mountains at the mercy of traffickers. What sort of visibility is the right visibility?
In his presentation of his recent novel re-narrating the capsize of a boat caught between French and British jurisdiction in the Channel in November 2021, Vincent Delecroix suggests that the experience on the boat, which sank with only two survivors, is inaccessible to him (Naufrage, Gallimard, 2023). So he wrote his ‘fiction’ from the point of view of the woman lifeguard who had phone contact with the victims until they could speak no more. Pushing the gates open before the morning has even started is stepping out across that phone line and affirming that the small boats are right here, just down the road. That they are the space where publicness matters. That it is a matter of imagination.
The local authorities would rather have publicness be a series of rules and regulations: dogs only in certain areas, no fires, no loud music after dusk. If the P’tits déjs manages to steer clear of becoming an additional regulation in a public park, it is only because it lets loose the possibility of seeing it all in another light… and then steps into it. The tables are set up, the ropes are strung between the trees to create a sense of direction for the queue. It’s cold, people have slept rough and now they’re waiting for a warm drink. It is time, the queue shifts slowly forward. Some people say hello, some can’t be bothered. The bread slices and the other offerings of the day are arranged to make the choice appealing. We’re all imagining that it can be better. We’re all hanging determinedly onto that belief. The gulls swirl around, low and huge, calling raucously to one another in the morning light.
Pictures and Text by Anna-Louise Milne
One of the features of the P’tits Déjs Soldiaires is that participants write about what happens on an almost daily basis in the ever-evolving forms of a ‘compte-rendu’ or the minutes of the breakfast. They are frequently re-posted anonymously on Facebook and can be read here.
Most of what is served is donated locally, but people from all over the world who have passed through sometimes continue their support through monetary donations, which you can make here.