| Crowd Control Paris Style |
Mid afternoon on this year's 4th of July [2001] I listened to a National Public Radio interview with a security official at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The official told the reporter how her staff was applying stricter measures than ever before in light of warnings about possible terrorist activity on our national holiday.
The official gave one example of how they were trying to balance between enforcing more controls while trying not to make people feel too constrained. They put up snow fences instead of fixed fencing, as a gentler way to establish a perimeter without making people feel like they were caged.
This bit of crowd-control psychology from our nation's capitol gave me a flashback to my only visit to France in 1997. It reminded me of how my grown son and I experienced Parisian methods of crowd control first hand during Bastille Day, France's Fete National (national holiday of independence).
Because of the astute manipulation of the gendarmes on Bastille Day in Paris, even though we set out to attend two events, we were prevented from arriving at either event--without any kind of direct confrontation, almost without us realizing what was going on. Even though Americans might not accept all of the techniques we saw practiced that day, security officials in the USA might be able to learn a few things from those French gendarmes about finesse.
We were in France for the first time. We had gone first to the south of France to attend a yoga retreat. During the retreat week, we stayed in an ancient farmhouse and practiced yoga in a little studio built by a local yoga teacher in the middle of vineyards. When the retreat was over, we drove to Paris and registered in a small hotel in the Montparnasse district to stay for another week before returning to the U.S.
On Bastille Day morning, I persuaded my late-sleeping son to get up early (early for him means before noon) so we could go view a military parade down the Champs-Elysees, from the Arc de Triomphe towards the Louvre Museum.
As I got ready to go to the parade, I found myself singing La Marseillaise, the French national anthem. "Allons enfants de la Patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé." ("Let us go, children of the fatherland, the day of glory has arrived.") Since I first started taking French as a sophomore in high school, and reading existential philosophers and studying art history, I had always been what is called a Francophile. I loved France and all things French. My six years of language study 30 years earlier had been finally put to use during this trip, and I had been greatly enjoying actually talking to people and being understood in French.
Now at last, I was having a chance to put the Marseillaise to use. I was going to celebrate the beginning of the French republic, here in Paris with the French, where it all happened.
We left our hotel and walked a few blocks to the closest entrance into the sweltering hot and sometimes smelly subway, Le Metro. During one of our dashes down a long tunnel connecting one metro line to the other, we caught two young guys spraying grafitti on the tunnel wall. They were startled, but when they saw we were Americans, they called "USA the best" to us as we went by. Puzzled by the encounter, not sure what to do, if anything, we kept going. Finally we arrived at the Metro stop for the Champs Elysee. On the street at the top of the stairs from the station platform, we found gendarmes leaning on temporary iron fences.
The gendarmes motioned for us to proceed in a certain direction. But the direction to which they pointed seemed wrong, because it appeared to take us away from the parade route. But Monsieur, I said in French to one of them, we want to watch the parade. The gendarme's face did not register any expression, and he would not reply, just impatiently motioned for us to keep going.
Having no choice, we went in the direction indicated. All along the way crowds were packed tightly onto the sidewalks behind rows of the temporary fences. At one point I tried to take an alternate route back to the Champs Elysee, but was stopped and turned back by another gendarme.
Blocks later, many more blocks away from the Champs Elysee, we squeezed in with the crowds in front of a famous building called La Madeleine. We were there for hours. Eventually, small bands of police and firemen paraded by. While we waited for the big show that never appeared the main parade was going on without us. Only a small portion of the parade was routed in our direction. The tanks and the big artillery were marching on the main route, hopelessly out of our reach.
We thought that we would have better luck that evening if we left early. So, about three hours before the fireworks were scheduled to start, we took the metro again, this time towards the Tour Eiffel. But the subway train did not stop when it got to the station nearest the Eiffel Tower. Or at the next stop after that. The first stop where we were allowed to exit turned out to be on the wrong side of the Seine away from the tower. No problem, I figured, we will simply take one of the bridges back. But the bridges were lined with gendarmes and we were not allowed to pass.
Baffled at being turned back again from yet another destination, we sat down at an outside table for dinner at the first restaurant we noticed. It was Chinese. We reasoned that we would be able to go later to watch the fireworks from across the river when it got dark.
On top of everything else that was not working out to my satisfaction that day, the food was very bad. It took a long time to get our meal. The egg roll's skin was made from wheat flour (instead of rice flour), fried hard and slightly blackened. The vegetables in the chow mein were stewed instead of stir-fried.
Some people liked the place. A French couple with a little white dog next to us told us they had been coming to that restaurant for years. It meant a lot to them that the waiter (just barely) acknowledged their acquaintance.
I was glum about this setback too. Here I was in Paris, trying to celebrate Bastille Day. Not only was I missing out on all the action, I was eating bad Chinese food. Merde!
And as it turned out, when the fireworks started, we weren't allowed to get any closer. Even there on the street in front of the restaurant, miles away from the action again, two young gendarmes were lounging on some more of the ever-present portable fences. Talking with them was useless.
When I tried to go past their barricade, they stopped me again. So I resignedly returned to my seat at the Chinese restaurant. The only time the gendarmes emerged from their pose of distant boredom was when two young girls came to them and asked them something. Then they were distinctly interested.
Our sidewalk table at the restaurant gave us a view of buildings across the street and down into a side street. I amused myself by sketching the street scene. The only fireworks we saw that evening were the printed ones on a street sign advertising the July sales (Soldes). Only a few sparks from the fireworks across the river floated up into the patch of sky we could see over the mansard windows and the roofs on the side street.
How do they do it? The crowd control methods as I saw them practiced in Paris require huge amounts of pre-planning, large numbers of police, not to speak of miles of temporary fences. After a predetermined maximum number of people show up for an event, anyone that arrives afterwards is not sent home but simply diverted to some other area. No explanations are ever given.
Last Updated (format): December 22, 2003