PARIS IN FLAMES.FILM AT 11.

ON LIVING WITH VIOLENCE

        Nanterre last night.

   As often happens during times of unrest, friends overseas enquire anxiously if we're affected, and request an informed update.

           I really wish I could help. But it's a truism that the spectator sees more than the participant, and I'm sure that, when the merde hits the ventilateur, President Macron, like the rest of us, turns on the TV.

           Nanterre, the location of the current unpleasantness, is on the other side of Paris. It's dominated by the high-rise apartment buildings known as HLMs -  habitations à loyer modéré (low rent residences),  to live in which is probably as disspiriting an experience as it was to the residents of New York's Bedford-Stuyvesant. Similar extreme reactions are to be expected.

         HLMs in Nanterre. 

If it's any reassurance to friends and potential visitors, past experience suggests that the street violence is unlikely to spread to the areas of interest to tourists. The police and CRS - the National Guard - have had ample experience. Some years ago, at the urging of a friend from out of town, I took him to watch a demonstration. As shop windows started to get broken and groups of young men in ski masks began dangerously to appear, we lost touch.  A few hours later, however, he arrived back home, after, he explained, having been scooped up, politely but firmly, by some heavily armoured CRS men and bundled into the back of a van where he joined a dozen other bewildered foreigners. They were whisked to a quieter part of town and deposited on the sidewalk with a warning to be more careful in future.

           Hopefully the present disturbances will subside, as they have in the past. On the other hand, it's worth remembering that, in March 1968, also in Nanterre, students, led by one Daniel Cohn-Bendit, aka Danny the Red,  occupied the university, one of the sparks that led to the evenements of May 1968, which brought the country to a standstill and reverberated around the world.

           On Friday 13, 2015, gunmen and suicide bombers rampaged through parts of Paris popular with young people and tourists. Attacks on the Bataclan concert hall, a major stadium, restaurants and bars left 130 dead and hundreds wounded. I wrote the following about that evening. Perhaps it's worth reprinting it here.

ONE ORDINARY DAY, WITH KALASHNIKOVS.

In Musée des Beaux Arts, his poem suggested by the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,  W.H. Auden reflected on the almost casual way Pieter Bruegel showed the rash experimenter's end. A ship sails by. In the foreground, a plowman gets on with his day. All you see of Icarus and his melting wings is a pair of legs disappearing into the sunny waters. To Auden, it embodied a truth about disaster.

About suffering they were never wrong, 
           The Old Masters; how well they understood 
           Its human position; how it takes place 
           While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

So if you ask about our Friday 13th, 2015, I'd have to tell you that it was mainly about cats and a new DVD player.

In mid-afternoon, the DVD player took precedence. The old one having expired, our daughter Louise and I took a crowded bus to Montparnasse and, after plunging through waves of people at least as tumultuous as those that engulfed Icarus, emerged with a new and surprisingly cheap Sony. Whereupon Louise left me to carry it home while she went off "on a stroll."

The bus back was no less crowded than the one that brought us to Montparnasse, and the ride complicated by having to peer against the sunset at the fitfully-lit destination panels. Typically, the French tell everything but explain nothing. To make it too easy is to kill the fun.

Arriving home brought the evening's first note of disaster. Just as I opened our door, a neighbor knocked to tell me that, while the owner was in Japan,  burglars had broken down the door to the fourth-floor apartment once occupied by Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the original Shakespeare and Company bookshop, and publisher of Ulysses.  

This might have been a moment to reflect on Auden's assertion that momentous events are often overlooked. However, as Louise had arrived back just in time, we became more concerned on capturing our neighbor's two cats which, having escaped through the smashed door, were prowling the stairs.

As the sun set - and, as I would later reflect, men and women on the far side of the city buckled on their explosive vests and checked their Kalashnikovs - we were busy isolating the visiting felines from our own Scotty, while at the same time calling our neighbor in Kyoto with the bad news, and contacting her housekeeper (who speaks only Rumanian) in order to track down our neighbor's son, the polar explorer Sebastian Copeland. You would not think a two-meter tall person could be hard to find, but Paris, though charmingly open - too open, in hindsight - can, as we would learn that night, harbor all manner of secrets.

By the time we'd eaten a quick dinner, the worst appeared to be over. The tearful calls to and from Japan were completed, the stolen jewelry lamented. As a carpenter boarded up the splintered door and replaced the lock, a gendarme from the Préfecture suggested the thieves were probably the same eastern European gang that burgled the building last year.

 But what about the expensive new security gate and video interphone we'd installed after that attack?

He shrugged. "We think they climbed over the wall from the courtyard next door."

Ridiculously in retrospect, I remember feeling insulted by the obviousness of their method, the lack of finesse. Smash, kick, kill. The crude solutions of lesser minds.

Only then, with all apparently dealt with and under control, the cats contented, even the new DVD player installed, did my sister-in-law call.

"Is Louise there?" she asked anxiously. "Are you safe?" And the television began to ooze the horror that would dominate the night.

I sat and watched for hours while Louise rang around her friends, with whom she'd often attended concerts at the Bataclan. Happily, all were safe.

Disbelief muffled understanding. This couldn't be happening here.  Journalists assigned to the story appeared to succumb to the same numbness. Posted only a couple of blocks from the Bataclan, the BBC's chief correspondent rambled to camera on the improbabilities of the attacks, unaware that police had already burst in to find the hundred dead - the horror taking place, just as Auden said,  "while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along."

Maybe it was the thought of Bruegel and Auden and the old masters that made me dig out the DVDs of Civilization, the 1969 BBC documentary series in which art historian Kenneth Clark assessed the intellectual progress of man. I hadn't watched it in decades, but on this night it was as consoling as the bible to a believer.

Clark, standing alone on the sunny bank of the Seine, with Notre Dame behind him, began by suggesting that it was "a good moment to look at some of the ways that man has shown himself to be an intelligent, creative, orderly and compassionate animal." Even more so than half a century ago, this made just as much sense.

I watched for hours as he enumerated barely a fraction of the works of the creative mind - Chartres, Florence, Dutch painting, English music; Wren, Bach, Picasso: each a further proof that civilization cannot be extinguished,  least of all by so crude a tool as physical violence. War, plague, bigotry, fanaticism and genocide might stifle but they can never destroy. Not the human spirit, and certainly not Paris.