Letter from Paris: Dispossessed gather at the Gare du Nord

It is quiet in the shadow of the imposing church of St Vincent de Paul on Rue de Belzunce in the 10th arrondissement. It is the middle of the day and the bells ring on the hour but just now the gates are closed, the doors beyond them locked and around the building, a handful of solitary men sit and largely stare, quietly into space.

One asks politely for a cigarette and shrugs good-naturedly when I say I don’t smoke. Another urinates with only the faintest hint of embarrassment against the gate post of a small park a few feet from creche.

They might all well be seeking a little respite from the chaos that reigns a couple of hundred metres away in and around the Gare du Nord, Europe’s busiest train station and a magnet for the dispossessed, not just of the neighbourhood or the northern part of the city, it seems, but from far beyond as well.

As at many major stations across Europe, the poverty here is obvious. There are countless homeless people wandering about the area by day and sleeping in makeshift beds in doorways by night.

Alcoholism and drug use is a major problem and there is an old fashioned, bricks and mortar sex trade. Crime rates – everything from pick-pocketing to violent assaults – are high and though the police presence is low-key outside of the part of the station used by the high speed trains to London and mainland Europe, officialdom is never too far away with the staff from agencies who try to work with people on the streets starting to appear as the evenings close in.

It is a far cry from Versailles where the Irish squad and the media spent most of the last few weeks. Largely Catholic and almost exclusively white, Versailles is the epitome of bourgeois.

Very pleasant

It’s a very pleasant place to stay but, like its famous chateau, it always somehow felt as if it were part of France’s past.

Gare du Nord is different. The problems may be somewhat timeless but the ethnicity of the people puts us firmly in the modern day.

Around 700,000 people pass through the station every day but the ones you see on the benches and in doorways are almost exclusively Arab or black. So too are the youths who come in from the suburbs to the north – St Denis or Clichy-Sous-Bois – to hang out.

The latter has a population of around 30,000, many of them Muslim and of North African origin with, in 1999, 28 per cent having been born outside the EU. The corresponding figure in Versailles was three per cent.

The disparity in unemployment rates would be just as large although the percentage figure in some of the northern banlieues (a term for suburbs but one that has become increasingly pejorative) would be far higher than 28 in parts, with social and economic exclusion a huge problem.

In October 2005, the underlying enmity became obvious for the rest of France to see when rioting erupted in those northern suburbs and spread far beyond, causing a state of emergency to be declared across the country. Two years later there was trouble on a smaller scale in the station itself when a Congolese man was set upon by police after being arrested for fare dodging. There is still an edge to the place.

Outward support

On Stade de France match days thousands of supporters flood through the Gare du Nord on the way to the stadium, some five kilometres away but at other times, the place and its people seem no more engaged with Euro2016 than they were out in refined Versailles. There is bunting in the restaurants okay but little sense of support for the French squad – which includes two players from the nearby suburbs,

Blaise Matuidi

and

Mussa Sissoko

.

The British business people who pass through the station after travelling on the Eurostar have criticised the state of the station and one, Andy Street MD of John Lewis, last year described the place as "the squalor pit of Europe".

Rather proud

Asked about it at the time, the station’s director,

Jeremie Zegeurman

, said the people in and around it, “reflect the diversity of the populations it brings together,” and, while acknowledging that the situation was less than ideal, suggested it was “something to be rather proud of”.

A revamp costing hundreds of millions of euro is planned, though, and so travellers might get their wish of stepping off the train in the same sort of glistening, modern shopping centre that they got on in London. St Pancras is, of course, quite beautifu but it has been cleansed of the sort of people that you still see at Gare du Nord with the process advancing in the surrounding area around the station too.

It might all make for a more pleasurable journey but Street and co. might just have realised over the last week or so that just because you banish those who suffer from disaffection to the banlieues or some other part of the country, it really doesn’t make the condition go away and some day, when you’re least expecting it, it will come back to bite you.