WHITE NIGHTS

DOWN AND OUT AFTER DARK

Jacques Prevert and Auto. Photo by Danielle Ros.

           “Three matches, one by one, struck in the night," wrote Jacques Prévert in one of his best-known poems. "The first to see the whole of your face/The second to see your eyes/The last to see your mouth/And the complete and utter darkness to remember them all/While holding you in my arms.”

           A photograph showed Prévert alone at a café table with his dog Auto.  It captured him well, except on one point; it's daylight. Prévert was a creature of the night. Darkness inspired his best work, including the lyrics for Les Feuilles Mortes/Autumn Leaves, which Joseph Kosma set to music for the 1946 film Prévert scripted also, Les Portes de la Nuit/The Gates of Night, a gaunt, despairing account of scores settled in the wake of the occupation.

           So filled is the Paris night with these resonances of history - with tales of lost and ancient loves, of violence, carnage, war and retribution - that successive city administrations have urged citizens to stay out after dark to appreciate it. These initiatives have not always ended well.

           The latest dates from 1982, when François Mitterand's innovative Culture Minister Jack Lang inaugurated the first Fête de la Musique.  Parisians were encouraged to spend the night in the streets either listening to or performing music. The result was often cacophonous but the event soon became a fixture of the artistic calendar.  Similar initiatives followed: a Fête du Cinema with cheap seats for all-night screenings; a Fête de la Poesie, celebrating poetry and small press publishers.

In 2001,  Mayor Bertrand Delanoë designated a night in early October as an annual Nuit Blanche or White Night. Shops, museums and theatres would be encouraged to stay open and citizens invited to roam the streets from dusk to dawn. Critics caviled that white nights in Russia and northern Scandinavia were not "declared"  but took place naturally.   From June 11 and July 2, around St Petersburg, the sun hovers just below the horizon, bathing the city in pearly luminescence. Though similar conditions produce the same effect across Scandinavia, where it’s called “the midnight sun,” Feodor Dostoievsky’s Belye nochi/White Nights was the first book to record the introspection bordering on despair that a ceaseless day can induce. 

M. Delanoë's concept, loaded with incentives for people to stay up past their bedtime and bring their credit cards with them, was in line with other attempts to re-animate the streets  which, after hours, were increasingly deserted.  He even announced his intention to do so himself and welcome in person anyone who cared to drop by the Hotel de Ville. In 2002,  an out-of-work computer technician turned up and, announcing he didn’t like either homosexuals or politicians, stabbed him, fortunately not seriously. After that, the mayor, while no less hospitable, travelled with a bodyguard. 

Encouraged by other cities having followed Paris's lead - the idea was picked up by Rome, Montreal, Toronto, Brussels, Madrid, Lima, Malaga, Taipei, Seoul and Leeds (Leeds?) - Anne Hidalgo, one-time deputy to Delanoë, and his successor, carried on the scheme, which accorded with her policy of removing cars from the city, encouraging bicycles, filling public squares with "urban forests" and reserving as many streets as possible for pedestrian use. Committed to investing €1.5 million in enlivening the night with eye-catching spectacle,the  Nuit Blanche artistic director promised to turn the city into “a large exuberant garden, invested with unusual scenes, populated by rare forms and crossed by intriguing creatures.” Mayor Hidalgo assured the public that “Parisians will throng the streets,” indifferent to the fact that many quartiers of Paris are unthrongable, if not downright hostile, and that some of those intriguing creatures might mean one harm.  

 Sceptics agree that one should need no mandate to go out in Paris at night. Jacques Prévert didn't. Any evening, one can walk as he did to the banks of the Seine, take a seat at one of the cafés that remain open until 2am, and watch the moon over the Grand Palais or wait for that moment each hour when the Eiffel Tower comes alive with a million flickering lights. There will be music from the buskers who work the cafés on Place Dauphine, and perhaps one's eyes will meet those of another on the other side of the terrasse. “My God, a moment of bliss," wrote Dostoievsky. "Why, isn't that enough for a whole lifetime?”