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francofile chronicles

May, 28th 1999 "June Lentils at the Place de la République"

by David Applefield

It´s one of those mild early summer evenings in Paris, perfect for taking yourself out for a soul-searching stroll. I decide to take the kids for a few spins on a mange, one of Paris´s great lingering legacies. We wander over to Place de la République, perhaps the most schizophrenic of all of Paris´s major places. Schizophrenic because it is so many things at once and takes on bits of the quartiers that converge on it from all sides-the Marais, the Grands Boulevards, the Bastille, the up-and-coming parts of the 11th, the heavily-accented flavors of the immigrant communities....

(There´s no real translation for Place in English; a Place geometrically is not a Square, psychically not a circle, functionally not a roundabout or intersection, and it´s much bigger and more complex than the English notion of "place"- as in Peyton Place.)

Place de la République has one of those massive sculptures in its center, the kind that you can go by a hundred times without realizing just how impressive the structure really is. The 1883 bronze lion commemorating Universal Suffrage is an incredible piece of work. Place de la Nation, too, has an astonishingly beautiful statue at its center, and the more obscure Place Felix Eboué is graced with a magical, albeit forgotten and often dry, sculpted fountain at its core.

The mange at République is wonderful because it is one of only a handful of Belle Epoch survivors, like the carrousels at Les Halles and the merry-go-round at Trocadéro, which keeps us linked to a glorious and artful past. But the one at République is special in that its clientele are still proletariat locals who roll their own cigarettes while their kids twirl around, sport unfashionable haircuts, shop at the Tati store on the corner, reuse the popular plastic bags forever, and have little reason to leave the quartier.

Although there´s a Holiday Inn on the Place, a McDo, a Bistro Romain, a Darty, and about ten other chains of mass consumption, there´s something about Place de la République that´s impervious to a global market and wholly indifferent to even the latest trends of the New Paris.

The mange is 10 francs a turn but for 50 francs we get eight tours, and we climb on the tired painted horses with worn leather bridles and tarnished brass stirrups. (The pleasure for adults to ride an old mange despite the invading melody of La Macarena is indescribable.) As we begin to spin, I notice in the fenced-off park in the middle of the Place a long and orderly line quietly but swiftly forming. In a matter of minutes, there are a hundred or so simple people, men and women cloaked in diverse ways of disguising their hunger, with plain dignity and a common objective.

The "Resto du Coeur" van, a mobile soup kitchen promoted by the late comic Coluche, is parked on the Place, and a score of cheerful volunteers are routinely setting up tables to distribute the evening dinner. As we spin past every twenty seconds or so I watch the scene build itself and the line grow in length and girth while it maintains a characteristic sense of patience. Styrofoam bowls of what I make out to be hot lentils or dark beans are being readied for distribution.

As the plaster horses drive us up and down and I watch the happy, absorbed faces of my little ones, my thoughts tether back and forth between a vague pride that we live in a society where helpful programs like these exist and an acidy shame that here in Paris near the end of the second millennium, far from the harsh Kosova-Macedonian border camps or the barren stretches of the Sudan or the desperate outskirts of the Iraqi capital, here, on this warm evening in Paris, beneath a bronze tribute to Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, common Parisians in tattered shoes and thread-bare jackets need hand-outs of lentil soup. I watch now the plastic spoons rising to eager lips. These people are eating with hunger. Hunger.

My kids want Barbe � Papa, cotton candy, the most frivolous of all the junk food, but yield to a promise of pizza a bit later, and we head home. "It was probably the statistic that I had heard earlier in the day that made the park scene seem so poignant..." (Continued)