From Paris to La Courneuve, three kilometers where everything ends and everything begins – Le Monde

By Louise Couvelaire and Guillaume Herbaut / Agence Vu

Posted today at 2:00 a.m., updated at 8:05 a.m.

Reserved for our subscribers

Fragments of FranceThe area around Avenue Jean-Jaurès, the former RN2, concentrates part of the city’s misery. 110 nationalities meet there, precarious workers, petty delinquents, often recently arrived in France, and who put down their luggage here, waiting for something better.

It is a world apart. Worlds apart. At the gates of Paris, and yet thousands of kilometers from Parisians. This is where they land, along this ribbon of asphalt that stretches for three kilometers between the Porte de La Villette, in Paris, and the place du 8-Mai-1945, in La Courneuve, passing through Aubervilliers to the west and Pantin to the east, in Seine-Saint-Denis. On the avenue Jean-Jaurès, ex-RN2 with four lanes, noisy, swarming, worn, broke, we hear Arabic, Mandarin, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Bengali, Bambara, Swahili, sometimes a few words of English, little of French.

More than 110 nationalities coexist here, and nearly half of the population lives below the poverty line. Men and women, children alone, from all over the world for a better life, often with a phone number in their pocket, that of a cousin, a friend, a guy from the village, an uncle from a neighbor. In this transit hall saturated with misery, we stay a few weeks, a few months, or a few years. We come across downgraded trades, undeclared odd jobs, petty fools and petty schemes, petty crime and great violence.

100 “Fragments of France”

Six months before the presidential election, The world paints a unique portrait of the country. 100 journalists and 100 photographers crisscrossed the field in September to portray today’s France. A nuanced picture, sometimes tender, often hard, always far from prejudices. These 100 reports are to be found in a large digital format.

“Hot corn, hot corn, hot corn!” “ That afternoon, at the Quatre-Chemins crossroads, straddling the towns of Aubervilliers and Pantin, Fatoumata, 42, sets up her small business of corn and frosted bissap, an infusion of hibiscus flower . 50 cents on the cob, 1.50 euros per 50 cl bottle. Arrived from Mali in 2006, Fatoumata (she wishes to remain anonymous, like the other people mentioned by their first name only) launched her business this summer. With the crisis due to Covid-19, she lost her job as a maid in a hotel in La Défense, the Hauts-de-Seine business district, at the other end of Paris.

One of the many street vendors of Aubervilliers (Seine-Saint-Denis), September 21, 2021.

From now on, every morning, around 7 a.m., she comes down from her apartment to buy her merchandise at “A man who comes to deliver the neighborhood by truck”. She does not know his name, just his prices: 19 euros for a hundred ears. After having boiled them, she shoves everything in a large plastic bag which she slips into her cart, grabs her small cooler for the drinks and goes to stand at Quatre-Chemins, around 3 pm. She stays there for several hours, standing, leaning against a wall, until she has sold everything, or until the police show up – her business is prohibited, for reasons of hygiene in particular. At the end of the day, she does not count her earnings: “I go straight to the supermarket. “ To feed her five children.

You have 87.97% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.

1 thought on “From Paris to La Courneuve, three kilometers where everything ends and everything begins – Le Monde”