Writing True Stories by Patti Miller

Author:Patti Miller [Patti Miller]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2017-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

Reading

Ransacking ParisPatti Miller

The rue Simart was a kind of littoral, I suppose, a shore between privilege and disadvantage, often delineated by race instead of class. The raging boy was white, and so were most of the clochards, street beggars, but all the sans papiers, refugees without legal status, and many of the poor were Africans or Arabs from former French colonies: Mali, Senegal, Algeria, the Sudan. Algerians have been in Paris longer, a lot of them coming to escape the civil war in the 1960s and are more likely to have jobs and small businesses—allez chez Arab meant ‘go to the corner shop’. When shonky apartment buildings burn down and lives are lost, most of the names of the dead are African. Most lived in wretched state housing towers, called HLM, in the banlieu, outer suburbs, but there is a large African quartier on the other side of boulevard Barbès. They are ‘the people’ now, the disadvantaged and the oppressed.

Montaigne, Stendhal, Rousseau, de Beauvoir all wrote about ‘the people’, Rousseau especially: ‘An inextinguishable hatred grew in my heart against the oppression to which the unhappy people are subject and against their oppressors.’ And Montaigne lived in a peasant household until he was weaned because his father wanted him to have sympathy for ‘the people’. Stendhal, in an age of revolutions, defended the people but was honest, more than once, about his distaste: ‘I loathe to have dealings with the hoi-polloi while at the same time under the name of the people, I long passionately for their happiness.’

Madame de Sévigné—I’m sorry to say because I did come to like her over coffee—wasn’t sympathetic even in theory; she describes the punishment of the leader of a people’s insurrection in Brittany where she came from:

The day before yesterday, a ruffian who had called the tune and begun the thieving of the official stamped paper, was broken on the wheel; when he was dead he was quartered and his four quarters put on view at the four corners of the town … Sixty burghers have been arrested: tomorrow the hangings begin. This province is a fine example to the others, and particularly that they should respect their governors.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.