Every morning, on the quays of the Seine, hundreds of merchants open their stalls selling second-hand books, posters vintage of the Moulin Rouge y watercolors of Notre Dame cathedral as it has been done for 400 years. So far: the daily ball of the bouquinistes, the French capital’s booksellers/antique dealers, will suspend their work in the summer of 2024 because the City Council has decided to remove them from the landscape for the duration of the 2024 Olympics.
about 570 green boxes (green boxes, in reference to the color of their structures), that is, 59% of the stalls of the largest open-air bookstore in the world, will be dismantled during the Games. According to the Paris Police Prefecture, this solution is a “must have” for the security of a “place or event exposed to the risk of terrorist acts”, as he wrote in a notification sent to sellers on July 25.
There is a reason for the measure: in Paris, and for the first time in history, the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games will not take place in a stadium, but in a river, the Seine, which has been carefully sanitized for it. For a century, since 1923, bathing in it has been prohibited due to sewage pollution that emptied into its stream. Thanks to the cleanup efforts, this ban will be lifted in 2024.
In that new Seine, 116 boats will transport 10,000 athletes in the parade on July 26, 2024. The fleet will navigate a six-kilometre route, from the Austerlitz bridge, in the east of the capital, to the Iéna bridge, at the foot of the Trocadero, in the west. According to the Paris City Hall, in addition to being a risk, the stalls would block the view of the parade.
The sellers have not been slow to react: “Would we have moved the Eiffel Tower if it blocked the view?” asks Albert Abid, who has been selling books in a stall for about 10 years, in an interview with The Parisian. «We feel like flies on a cake. they scare us», declares a bookseller on Europe 1 radio. And another colleague challenges the City Council on the pages of Marianne: «In three decades, my boxes have never been moved. I don’t see why that should change now.”