2023-08-09 12:00:01
“Anything that degrades culture shortens the paths that lead to servitude” : this reflection of one of the greatest French writers of the XXe century, Albert Camus, Nobel Prize in Literature [1957]has clearly not been sufficiently taken into consideration, nor meditated upon at its fair value, by those who, little inclined to cherish, if not to respect, their cultural heritage in what is most historical, rich and popular, manage today, in 2023, the city of Paris!
Because how to understand this fatal decision, on the part of the Prefecture of Police of the City of Light, according to which the famous and old (their existence is more than four hundred and fifty years old) booksellers of the banks of the Seine should be dislodged and their fragile boxes dismantled? (600 out of 950), for security reasons (which no one denies here the issue) in the face of the terrorist threat or urban violence, during the Olympic Games [JO] of 2024? They constitute the largest open-air bookstore in the world and one of the most romantic walks in Paris, listed as a French intangible cultural heritage.
Until a potential bankruptcy
Beyond the questioning of what we believed to be endowed with an inviolable cultural status, with the programmed disappearance of these magnificent book boxes – theoretically temporary disappearance: the time of these Olympic Games –, it is a whole side of economic life which risks proving to be dramatic, in the middle of the tourist season, for these modest booksellers. They will suddenly be deprived, without compensation and up to a potential economic bankruptcy, of a large part of their financial income necessary to simply survive.
This plea in favor of the booksellers of Paris is also, more generally, in defense of culture in what is most noble on the educational level, highest on the moral level and most precious on the historical level, in the face of to the obtuse permanence of its destruction.
The Olympic law of exception, voted in order to allow the execution of what is impossible in normal times, is one of the favorite weapons of all businessmen wishing to appropriate public space. Democracy then withdraws, and then culture, regardless of the city and the host country of the Olympic Barnum, is promptly attacked. Because the intelligence of the arts, whether literary or not, is opposed to the spectacle of the industrialization of sports bodies which only aim for performance. Olympic history is dotted with terrible examples.
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