Did you ever have one of those books on your shelf, one you just had to buy and been meaning to read for years? On my shelf that book was the Roissy Express: A Journey Through the Paris Suburbs (1994) by former French publisher François Maspero filled with wonderful photographs by his collaborator (and traveling companion) Anaïk Frantz. Inspired by my imminent research trip to Paris, I finally took it down.
Most visitors to Paris, landing at Charles de Gaulle, take the RER train into a Metro station and catch either a cab or a subway to finish their journey. Parisians Maspero and Frantz started at Charles de Gaulle and went out into the suburbs, pledging not to go back into the city for a month. They walked, they bused, they struggled (public transportation between suburbs is scanty) to get from one place to another to see what life is like in the belt of settlements that surround the French capital.
Unlike in the U.S. where the gentrification of the inner city is a fairly recent development, European upper classes have always inhabited the center of their cities. Public housing was for the outskirts, and, in Paris, the northern suburbs were stigmatized as full of crime and even fuller of North and Sub-Saharan Africans. Maspero and Frantz were fully sympathetic with those Africans, and the Spaniards, Italians, Portuguese, Poles, and “real” Frenchmen who live in the ring around Paris. Yes, the two adventurers scurried with silent, weary workers from commuter stations, through moonscapes strewn with drug paraphernalia and graffiti, to ugly high rises of boxy apartments with paper-thin walls. And, as they did, they pointed out that the problem was not so much the drugs or the graffiti artists as it was—and continues to be—unemployment.
But they also recorded other aspects of the suburbs. Men fishing along the canals, bikers on wooded paths, towns made up of pavilions or small detached houses, gardens: People who happily make their lives north of Paris, where there is “space.” Some residents remembered when they had been surrounded by rich farmland, now eaten up by development. None could recall the time, before sewers, when part of this region was a nightly dumping ground for the excreta of Paris (although many did fear that the north had become a dumping ground for human beings).
When Maspero and Frantz took the commuter trains south, the contrast between rich and poor—those living in public housing and pavilions—was even sharper. Here are parks and traditional towns, real communities, many founded for and still inhabited by artists and the intelligentsia.
As a graduate student in Paris I only went as far north as St. Denis, just beyond the city limits, to see the great national cathedral, which is of the same era but much less crowded than Notre Dame. I’ve urged others to go there, but tourists don’t take the time even though I tell them that they will see “real” working class Paris. As for the southern suburbs, names like Robinson and Massy Palaiseau still echo in my brain. I lived in the Cité Universitaire, the dormitory complex for foreign students, at the edge of the city. Late at night when we got off the metro, we would hear the final call for the last RERs to these mysterious places and hear the muffled sounds of feet hurrying to catch them. Maspero and Frantz have shown me, in words and photos, what lies beyond the borders. Perhaps when I sojourn in Paris this month, I will follow their call.
