In the majestic setting of the 17th-century Place des Vosges, once home to Victor Hugo, a group of students and activists are taking a stand against the French housing crisis, writes RUADHÁN Mac CORMAIC, Paris Correspondent
AT FIRST GLANCE, Margaux Le Duc’s living space has most of the trappings of the stereotypical student flat. The old couch is strewn with books and clothes and beside it, there’s a clapped-out heater and a rickety wooden table with a few empty beer bottles balancing on it. Under the window, a laptop glows from beneath a mound of papers, textbooks and accumulated junk.
But the illusion doesn’t hold for long. The fittings are strikingly, incongruously ornate, while over our heads, a row of magnificent wooden beams crosses the high ceiling. Then there are the enormous windows, giving a view over a great enclosed courtyard on one side and over one of the most exquisite and expensive patches of land in Paris on the other.
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A vast 17th-century building with 18 separate apartments, listed rooms, period painted beams and a spectacular view over the Place des Vosges, Le Duc and 31 other young people live in what must be the world’s most desirable squat.
The activists belong to Jeudi Noir, a group that seeks to draw attention to the difficulty students and low-paid young people face in finding accommodation in Paris, and to the fact that there are thousands of buildings lying empty across the French capital.
Dressed in jeans and a bottle-green hoodie and sipping her morning coffee, Le Duc explains that the group of 32 (of whom 25 are students) occupied the 1,300 sq m mansion at Place des Vosges last October, after noticing that it appeared vacant. They pushed open the wooden door leading on to the courtyard and found that nearly all the inner doors had been left open.
The €20 million building was the birthplace of the Marquise de Sévigné, an aristocrat celebrated for the wit of her letters. Victor Hugo once lived next door, and Paris Singer, a descendant of the sewing machine dynasty, rented it at the turn of the 20th century. But for more than 40 years, it has lain empty.
The building’s owner is Béatrice Cottin, an 87-year-old who bought it in 1963 with the intention of turning it into a foundation for Asian languages. She spent millions restoring it, but ran out of money while the work was being carried out, and none of the apartments have been touched since the workmen left.
When Cottin, who now lives in a retirement home, heard that squatters had occupied her house, she paid them a visit. “She was a little scared, but she was surprised to see who we were,” Le Duc recalls. “She was surprised to see there were so many girls. So she was somewhat reassured. She wanted to see how we were looking after her building, but once she was reassured about who we were, that we weren’t here to vandalise but to live and that we were taking care of it.”
On a tour of the building, Le Duc is keen to show how much cleaning and repair work she and her fellow activists have done since their arrival. No-smoking signs have been pinned to the doors of rooms that have period paintings, while the squatters have cleared floors of pigeon-droppings, unblocked gutters and set up a small cinema on the ground floor, where they hope to show films for free to the public.
Jeudi Noir (or Black Thursday, so called because that is the day of publication of France’s main classified ads weekly), claims Cottin did not wish to involve the police or the courts and preferred to settle the situation quietly. However, a trustee who has legal control over her estate instituted legal action to have the squatters removed.
Lawyers for the trustee say the group had no right to occupy the building, that Cottin still regards the mansion as her home, and is seeking €69,000 in compensation from the activists for each month of the occupation. A Parisian court is to give its verdict on Monday.
Whatever the outcome, however, the occupation has already ignited a debate over the state of the rental housing market in Paris. Rents in the capital are extremely high, and the stacks of paperwork required of tenants mean those without a regular income can find it impossible to satisfy landlords. One of the squatters, Stéphane Roques, is a freelance literary translator who says he has been turned away countless times because he cannot furnish consecutive monthly pay slips.
“For students, it’s a big problem,” says Le Duc, a student. “It costs €550 for a garret of about 11sq m in Paris, in the attic with a toilet on the landing.” Since coming to Paris nine months ago, she has spent time in emergency state-funded accommodation, and this is her third time in a squat, she says.
Jeudi Noir, whose campaign has received the support of some prominent politicians on the left, says the state should supervise and control rents in the city and point to a law that prevents retailers from discounting books below a certain level in order to protect small bookshops. “Housing is an essential need, and it shouldn’t be left to capitalism, for its price to be decided by the market,” Le Duc says.
The Fondation Abbé Pierre, a charity, estimates that about 100,000 people live on the streets in France and that a further 900,000 live in some form of temporary accommodation. When a census was carried out in Paris in 1999, it found 136,000 housing units were vacant, though some landlords say empty buildings are common because they already face so many legal constraints – tenants cannot be evicted during winter, for example – and this means it can be easier just to leave an apartment empty than to rent it out.
As the long-awaited verdict in the Place des Vosges case approaches, Le Duc’s housemate, Francis (25) admits he is looking forward to some sort of resolution on Monday. “There’s a sense of community, being here together . . . but living here is stressful,” he says. “We have no hot water, so to wash we have to boil water or go to the public baths. There are positive sides to it, but we’d all prefer to have places to ourselves, where we could pay a reasonable rent and have the conveniences of modern life. It might be beautiful and historic here, but it’s not easy.”
