There are moments when the great Paris machine stutters. In which everyone can no longer pretend that lives are racing past one another smoothly. January 19th was such a moment. The well-known photographer René Robert suffers a heart attack in the middle of Paris. He remains lying on the pavement, near the Place de la République. People walk past him for nine hours, and the next morning a homeless person calls the emergency doctor. It was too late, 85-year-old René Robert had frozen to death.
Since then, the difficult to bear feelings have been mixed up. Mourn René Robert’s family and all those who care about his work. The others cannot help but wonder if they would have gone further. And they have to wonder why the city only cringe when a celebrity is among those you see through. As if the shocking thing about the René Robert case was that he didn’t die the death he was meant to. Not in his bed or in the hospital, but next to the other overlooked ones. More than 600 homeless people die on the streets of Paris every year. They will be recorded in a collective report when winter ends. As if the city were taking stock of the cold – how many degrees was it and how many people we left alone with it.
In Paris, it is almost impossible to switch back from the streets to a secure life
On one of those nights when my son was a baby and barely slept, I took him to the park next to our house at 6am. There was someone on every bench. A former homeless Parisian told me that he always tried to be up before seven-thirty. So that the kids on the ground running to school never see him. He had a son himself.
The last time I fully realized what a shitty show I was part of was walking down Rue de Rivoli. I was in a hurry. A man lay barefoot on one of the exhaust ducts that blow warm air up from the subway tunnel. He held a mobile phone in his hand, the display lit his face. In Paris, it is almost impossible to switch back from the streets to a secure life. Owning a mobile phone, on the other hand, is very easy. There is free WiFi everywhere in the city, and there are sockets for charging at the bus stops. So you can lie on the ground and freeze and click through the colourful, warm lives of others.
Shortly after René Robert froze to death, I dreamed that I was attending a meeting of a French presidential candidate. The contestant performed with a choir and sang “Heal the World” by Michael Jackson. In the dream I made notes. When I woke up again, I just caught my subconscious. “Are you serious?” I asked. “I’m really not the problem here,” my subconscious replied. And that was true.