The operation was expected, closely scrutinized, and was supposed to give an overview of one of the issues linked to the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games (OG) in Paris. On the evening of Friday, November 17, a “feasibility test” was deployed to dismantle four of the emblematic second-hand booksellers’ book boxes established on the quays of the Seine, which the Paris police headquarters is demanding be dismantled – nearly 600 of them. 900 existing – for security reasons, before the opening ceremony on July 26, 2024, which will take place on the river.
Under the eyes of a small group of dismayed second-hand booksellers, around twenty city agents, accompanied by a moving company, carried out this removal – which took several hours – after having carefully emptied the hundreds of books which piled up in the boxes. One by one, these large rectangles of wagon green wood, emblematic of the French capital, were lifted by a crane, and delicately torn from the parapet.
For this trial, the boxes selected had been attached to the quay for fifty years, but the oldest of the approximately 900 Parisian boxes are 150 years old, and second-hand booksellers feared that their removal would spell the death knell for this equipment, often weakened by the years and bad weather.
“It’s like pulling teeth! All this for four hours of ceremony! What the wars failed to do, the Olympics will achieve: make us disappear,” regretted Michel Bouetard, secretary general of the Booksellers’ Association, interviewed by Agence-France-Presse (AFP). “This is all blown out of proportion. If we remove them, we never know when they will come back,” added Jérôme Callais, the president of the association. “But if they persist in wanting to remove them, we will go to litigation. »
“The test was done pretty cleanly.”
For several months, the question of these little green boxes which have become one of the symbols of Paris has taken a political turn. And several Parisian elected officials came to support the approximately 230 booksellers, many of whom have no other income, and are worried about the idea of ??“several weeks of inactivity” during the Olympics. “We are against it, all this is decided to be able to advertise on the quays,” said Corine Faugeron, president of the Les Ecologistes group at the Paris Council; when others called on Emmanuel Macron.
Saturday morning, the Paris town hall welcomed the good progress of the test. “Today we are certain that we can move, that is to say place and then put back the boxes in good conditions and in a reasonable time,” assured Pierre Rabadan, the deputy in charge of sport and of the Olympics at the town hall. We must now “take stock of the number of boxes” to be removed and “detail the time it will take”. At his side, the prefect of police, Laurent Nunez, insisted that the removal of the boxes would be requested “only when it is strictly necessary, in particular for security reasons”, specifying that he wanted to continue the reflection “in very close connection with the second-hand booksellers”, and highlighting their “importance for the appeal of the capital”.
After being hoisted onto a truck without incident, the four boxes subject to the feasibility test found their place on the parapet, Friday around midnight. And their books placed back inside. “The test was done in a rather clean manner,” admitted the president of the Booksellers’ Association, Jérôme Callais, on Saturday. They were lucky, the boxes were of very good quality, very solid, that won’t be the case for all of them. » Among the many issues linked to the organization of the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics on the Seine – where it usually takes place in a stadium – the question of book boxes is undoubtedly not entirely set. But the first dismantling attempt did not prove right those who anticipated the destruction of these objects which had become an integral part of Parisian life.
