Paul from Paris

Earlier this year, robbers struck a sushi restaurant in Paris’ Latin Quarter. Then restaurant employees gave chase, caught up with the robbers, and beat them until the police arrived.

On the other side of this pretty and peaceful street, there’s the Fortis Bank. The bank that was robbed yesterday.

It was an unusual robbery.

To begin with, the robbers got away with nothing. As reported by Le Parisien (unparalleled for crime reports), a guy and a girl entered the bank, armed. A silent alarm alerted the police. The pair of robbers couldn’t find any cash among the tellers. A bank without cash! The robbers didnt believe such a thing was possible. They demanded access to the bank’s vault. As police commandos approached, the robbers took flight, leaving by an emergency exit.

A spectacular manhunt ensued. A helicopter flew over the Latin Quarter. Streets were blocked off. Police searched, building by building. Finally, the pair was apprehended, followed a bit later by a third accomplice.

The arrests brought to light another unusual aspect of the robbery: all the robbers were minors, all age 17.

The guy has an impressive rap sheet, with 41 (!) convictions for theft from 2006 to 2008. The girl had only minor prior contacts with law enforcement. No word on the third accomplice.

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall passed away last month, at home in Santa Fe.

I’m grateful to Hall for The Silent Language, The Hidden Dimension, and The Dance of Life. (Hall wrote other books, but these are the ones I know.) And I’m indebted to Hall for expressing novel ideas clearly, and for using evidence from everyday life.

As a modest gesture in memory of Edward T. Hall, this post aims to spread an observation about time and life in France: what sets the rhythm or beat of French life today is the school calendar.

I think that others have made this observation before me (and I’d be happy to cite them if they’d send me references). Original or not, here are the points that I’d like to make about the pace of French life:

• The year really begins with the rentrée, the “re-entry” period when the school year begins. In terms of how people think and act, this means something. It certainly means more than the start of the calendar year or a religious calendar (with the possible exception of rosh hashanah, the Jewish new year, which falls soon after the French rentrée). It’s also an odd inversion of the agricultural year: the beginning coincides with fall harvests, not plantings.
• The rentrée is meaningful for all families with school-age children. But it’s extended to basically all of society. It’s when publishers release new titles. It’s a time when people make resolutions (to lose weight, to join a gym, to subscribe to a magazine), when business and government make plans. It’s part clean slate, part new beginning, part the building of a new level or the writing of a new chapter.
• The school year lasts about ten months, just a bit longer than a human pregnancy. This makes necessary a summer recess (in July and August) and a tradition of summer vacation: without a recess, there couldn’t be a rentrée and a new beginning.

Royan is a lovely town on the French Atlantic coast. It’s been a summer
seaside resort for more than a century. It’s busy, but quiet and
peaceful, the sort of place where there are lots of grandmothers in
residence.

To hear Royan residents and visitors, the place has been overrun by rabble, the no-good hoodlums that preoccupy president Sarkozy.

Towards the end of July, about a dozen youths from Epinay-sous-Sénart, a housing project south of Paris, appeared in Royan. According to Le Parisien, the visitors were “arrogant” and “provocative” from the start. They squatted an abandoned building and reportedly dealt drugs.

As time went on, the situation apparently worsened. Royan businesses complained of harassment and louche behavior, reportedly including shoplifting.

The situation hit bottom in the night of August 5, when youths were denied admission to a Royan nightclub. A scuffle ensued with a bouncer, then the youths demanded reparations for a broken pair of sunglasses (the need for which is debatable in the middle of the night).

Earlier this week, a vigilante mob of merchants tried to run the youths out of town. The youths took refuge in a vacant building and were finally removed by the police, who escorted them to Saintes and put them on the first train bound for Paris.

A few youths stayed behind, because they had court dates. Two youths were convicted of assaulting a merchant; one was sentenced to community service, the other to two months in jail. And the youth who scuffled with the nightclub bouncer has been convicted of attempted extortion (for the allegedly broken sunglasses) and sentenced to four months in jail.

The first story is terribly sad, but the second has a happy ending.

On the île de Ré, on the French Atlantic coast, the town of Saint Martin features a superb fortress conceived by Vauban and a lovely port, used today by pleasure craft. The port is ringed by open-air restaurants that as a rule are filled with diners every day, throughout the summer. On a recent Sunday evening, a couple took their grandson to dinner. Around 8:00 pm, the boy left the table to play by the port. Then he disappeared.

The grandparents realized that the boy had disappeared when they paid their bill. They alerted the gendarmes at 9:15 pm, and around 10:00 pm a group of 15 gendarmes started searching for the boy. At 7:45 Monday morning, the boy's body was found, three to four meters underneath a pontoon in the port.

In the Bouches-du-Rhône, in the town of Eygalières, a band of happy children arrived Monday evening at the grandparents' farmhouse. Around 8:00 pm, two-year-old Gauthier disappeared. His worried grandparents alerted the authorities. The gendarmes called up 36 men, and the fire department added another 36 men. A reconnaissance plane with infrared cameras was readied, as was a helicopter.

Around 9:00 the following morning, Gauthier turned up, near the farmhouse. He hadn't gone far, and suffered no injury more severe than a scratch.

In both cases, the child was said to have disappeared. This is false: children do not become invisible or vanish. The circumstances were more likely: grandparents were distracted or not used to having young charges; children were away from their parents, in a novel setting. Something or someone wandered: maybe it was the grandparents' attention, maybe it was the child.

And in both cases, law enforcement seems to be playing a numbers game, throwing large numbers of men at a problem, with no result. Partly this reflects a too-quick suspicion of foul play. But mostly it demonstrates a vain struggle to overcome the asset most quickly lost in a search: time.