A corner of France stands up against bulldozers
PERPIGNAN, France — First it was the 20 old houses demolished several years ago. Then 13 more 19th-century houses came down in June, wrought-iron balconies and all, leaving only bare asphalt baking in the summer heat in Perpignan, a city near France’s border with Spain and close to the Mediterranean coast.
Finally, the residents of the city’s old Saint Jacques district had endured enough. Well over 50 dwellings in their neighborhood had been reduced to rubble since 2015.
Late last month, they gathered in the district’s ancient square high on a hill, as a city excavator was making another mess of bricks and jagged wall fragments nearby.
Dozens marched from there down to the prefecture, the central government’s representative, demanding to be heard. City Hall backed down. The excavator was withdrawn, the demolitions left at a standstill.
What made the events exceptional was not just that this was a stand by one of the poorest neighborhoods in France. It was also a protest by a unique population, one the French media and academics universally refer to as les gitans, or Gypsies.
The Gypsies of Perpignan, who speak Catalan, appear to be distinct culturally from the broader population of Roma, sometimes also referred to as Gypsies, but they are in many ways no less maligned and marginalized in France.
With some 3,000 to 5,000 inhabitants, Saint Jacques is urban France’s largest Gypsy neighborhood, a festering sore of poverty and unemployment, a place normally drawing few allies.
Yet in its fight against the destruction of its neighborhood, the community found help from local preservationists and allied itself with North African neighbors — a group it has clashed with in the past. The community also mobilized its youth, 90 percent of whom are jobless and many of whom hang out in the streets after the sun has set.
“If you kick an angry dog, he’ll bite you and he won’t let go,” said Alain Giménez, a community leader, as others who had gathered in the raffish Place du Puig, or “Hill Square” in the local Catalan, nodded their assent.
“So, what are we here, nothing? They say we’re dirty,” said Giménez, who calls himself Nounourse, or teddy bear, mocking his own portliness. “The problem is, they don’t talk to us, they just say we are dirty.”
The truce achieved with the city over the demolitions is only temporary, said Jean-Bernard Mathon, head of the local preservation society. At least 37 more buildings in Saint Jacques were slated to come down, he said.
“What we want is the rehabilitation of the old core,” Mathon said. “What they want to do is demolish. But they have rebuilt nothing. It’s hideous.”
Saint Jacques, dilapidated, crumbling and now threatened, even drew the backing of President Emmanuel Macron’s special emissary on historical preservation, the French television personality Stéphane Bern.
Bern wrote on social media that he was “scandalized and shocked by the images of destruction in the center of Perpignan,” and he promised his “support and solidarity.”
The preservationists point to the delicate balcony railings, the incised roof moldings, the occasional centuries-old doorway and the intricate medieval street grid, and urge renovation rather than demolition.
Yet in a country with more historical districts than it knows what to do with or has the money to pay for, Saint Jacques is something of an ugly duckling.
The district, a frontier within a frontier — Spain is only 20 miles away — is vulnerable, and the Catalan Gypsies, historically victims of discrimination, feel threatened, too.