What news
item in France this past week most deserves your attention?
Explosives
planted in a Paris department store? Yet another financial scandal? Renault’s
outlook for the first quarter of 2009? Parliamentary debate on shops opening on
Sunday? High school students demonstrating in the streets?
No. The
event in France this past week that most deserves attention was: the European
Summit on Private Security. The French Interior Ministry hosted the summit,
which was organized by the Confederation of European Security Services and the Institut National des Hautes Etudes de Sécurité. The organizers have published
an informative white paper (introduced by the French Interior minister and prefaced by the French president, for whom the subject matters).
The event
merits attentions because it offers a comparative snapshot and presents a
policy question on the scope of the public sector.
Throughout
the European Union today, private security employs 1.7 million in some 50 000
firms that together generate 15 billion euros in revenue. In some EU member
states, there are now more private security agents than there are police
officers: Luxembourg, Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and
the United Kingdom. This is a diverse group, including countries both rich and
poor, large and small.
These
numbers suggest more than hypothetical cost savings between civil service
police and private security guards. A broader policy evolution is underway.
Increasingly, private security not only guards building or transports
valuables, but also handles traffic offenses and deals with transporting
prisoners.
I met with a project team on Monday. The team included representatives from France, China, Russia, Tunisia, and Brazil. English was the working language.
None of the companies or products involved are high-profile household names, or thought of as especially international in scope. The meeting was held in a provincial town, removed from the Paris area.
Being able to work with cosmopolitan project teams is a major draw for me. It's something that I've found in France. It's something that I hadn't expected but that I welcome.
Paris long had a belly at its center: the central market, in French les halles.
In the 19th century, twelve pavilions housed the markets, pictured here in Victor Baltard and Félix Gallet’s Monographie des Halles Centrales de Paris (1863).
In the 1970s, a massive urban renewal project took out the market and put in a commuter train station and a shopping complex. The commuter train station has not weathered the test of time well. Public safety especially seems lacking; there may be secret exits that I’ve never seen, but I can’t imagine how the station could be evacuated at rush hour, for example in case of fire. The shopping complex, managed by Unibail-Rodamco, welcomes huge crowds of shoppers. Therein lies a paradox: the shopping complex seems to be a Paris destination for suburbanites, but is so crowded that some Parisians –like me!– take pains to avoid it.
the City of Paris will soon be filing a building permit to undertake major renovations to the site, which expected to be finished in 2013. The project has been dubbed the Canopy –Canopée– and its lead architects are Patrick Berger and Jacques Arziutti.
The signature element of the Canopy is a giant glass roof. As I see it, the Canopy design will give the complex less of a sunken, subterranean feel. What I can’t measure from artists’ drawings is how this massive, undulating roof will alter the look and feel of central Paris.
French electric utility EDF ran a public service advertisement on sustainable development in 2007 set on Easter Island. The beautifully filmed spot seemed to point blame for deforestation at the Easter Islanders themselves. This bothered the Chilean government, which administers Easter Island and which voiced its objections in France.
From this misunderstanding a lovely exhibition has been born, now through next February at the EDF Foundation in Paris. The Louise Leiris gallery has also published a significant catalogue of Rapa Nui art and artefacts, in French and in English: Trésors de l’ïle de Pâques / Treasures of Easter Island, with text by researchers Catherine and Michel Orliac.
I encourage anyone in Paris this Winter to visit the exhibition. Entry is free, and it’s especially good for families with children. The exhibition is small in scale. This is a strong point, because the scale of Rapa Nui culture makes it possible for the exhibition to brief visitors thoroughly on the history, geography, and ecology of Easter Island and its inhabitants. Easter Island itself is not large, and few colonists made the journey to it. Easter Island is among the most remote places that are inhabited, and the Polynesian seafarers who colonized the island were superlative navigators.
What intrigued me most was an historical aside: in the 1860s, Peruvian slavers landed on Easter Island and captured over a thousand people, perhaps half the population.
And the exhibition corrects the impression that the Rapa Nui were somehow responsible for their decline, with research showing that the climate changed dramatically and durably, becoming much cooler.
I have two regrets about the exhibition. First, promotional efforts can best be described as low-key. The cosy exhibition space was full (but not crowded) when I visited, but aside from a press kit I found little to help me spread the word and encourage others to visit. Second, the exhibition is comprehensive in scope and brought together many objects in private collections. I wish that the EDF Foundation would make exhibition content available through the Internet. I think in particular of children, whose curiosity may be piqued by the statues for which Easter Island is famous and who would be eager to learn more, but who are not likely customers of fine art books.
In yesterday's post, I recounted and reacted to a recent attack on a French military cemetery where soldiers from the First World War are interred.
From comments, either I was off the mark, or I wasn't emphatic enough.
The damage done was not a property crime, perpetrated by vandals.
It was a hate crime, directed against Muslim and Jewish soldiers who fought under the French flag in the First World War. The crime aimed at erasing from collective memory these veterans' service and sacrifice. It was timed carefully to coincide with a Muslim holiday that commemorates Abraham's sacrifice, when it's common to visit graves of deceased family members.
I question and criticize the tepid response from French officials. But I don't think the French failings were simply a matter of poor policing and inadequate fencing. That they were, but the failings of French officialdom are deeper and more serious: at a battlefield memorial, the French state carries a special responsibility as custodian of a collective memory. This duty has been neglected or carried out poorly.
And I think it would be a mistake to make the criminals into the heroes of their own imagined story. Of course, police work should lead to the identification and prosecution of suspects. But I would welcome more a recollection of the steep human cost of the First World War and the diverse backgrounds of French veterans in that conflict.
