Selling on the Sly

Some vendeurs à la sauvette, Quai Jacques Chirac, 7th Arr.

I've lived in tourist-dense places pretty much my entire adult life. If you don't work in the hospitality industry, there is no direct upside to having masses of people descend on your city. I can accept that tourism might bring a place some net-positive indirect effects--local tax revenues, construction jobs when attractions and hotels are being built--but I guarantee it's more complicated than the tourism industry and economists generally would have you believe. Just look as San Francisco for an example of how revenues from tourism don't boost investments in infrastructure or local services.

But if you are lucky enough to live anywhere that is interesting for its local culture, its natural beauty, or its architectural heritage, tourists are like the hangover you must inevitably endure from enjoying booze. Except, in principle, you can quit drinking booze when the hangovers become too miserable. 

Paris' 7th Arrondissement is without a doubt the most tourist-dense place I've ever lived, maybe the most tourist-dense place on the planet with the possible exception of Disney theme parks (one of which is just an hour away by commuter train, which probably explains why so many tourists in Paris pack their children to a city that otherwise has nothing for anyone too young to window shop at luxury stores or smoke cigarettes while sipping an Aperol Spritz at a café). By far the biggest draw in the 7th Arr. is the Eiffel Tower, which sits at the edge of the Champ de Mars, a former military parade ground with grassy lawns and semi-paved promenades. You can buy tickets to take a ride up the tower's elevator, but the main action for tourists is using the Champ's long, unobstructed view of the tower as a backdrop for photos of themselves, or just hanging out on the lawns for a picnic.

Admit it: you'd drag your disappointed children halfway around the world for a photo of this.

It is no surprise that a publicly-accessible, outdoor tourist space generates its own, very local, economic sector: les vendeurs à la sauvette, or "sellers on the sly." Every day, at pretty much all hours, vendeurs wade into the crowds trying to sell them cheap tchocthkes such as tiny Eiffel Tower keychains (five for one euro) or larger models with twinkling LEDs. They also sell padlocks that couples can write their names on with a Sharpie and then snap onto the railings of the nearby bridges as a deranged symbol of their love (like for chaining things together?). Umbrellas are on offer during Paris' long rainy season (so long, in fact that I can no longer remember when it begins or ends), while the (very short) summer picnic season brings out bottles of water and inexpensive wines, with or without plastic cups.

This is all illegal, of course. The prefecture of police recently directed an aggressive crackdown in advance of the 2024 Olympics--although one wonders why, since the entire Champ de Mars and the Eiffel Tower will be off limits to non-ticket holders once the games begin in July. Even as they prepare for the games, more and more of the Champ is already a fenced-off construction zone.

The view from outside the wire. No selfie for you.

But the anti-deliquances efforts that began in late 2023 also shine a light on the larger issue of migration from the global south to the global north. Tourism seems to create an extreme low-end of commercial activity that you just don't see in places where manufacturing or "knowledge work" (ugh) are the main economic action. There will always be low-paid fast food work in downtowns, and tourist areas have these as well as jobs cleaning hotel rooms. But what you don't get outside of a factory or in a financial district are people wandering around trying to sell trinkets for pennies, or crappy, single-use umbrellas. Even the most desperately poor know that there just won't be customers.

Tourist places congregate exactly the kinds of people who will buy cheap little novelties and keepsakes. It's not that tourists are made temporarily stupid by travel; it's that they are enjoying themselves, and a little souvenir (literally, "to remember" in the French) might remind them of that later (and at five for one euro, you can buy a few to spread around the office and remind your co-workers that you went to Paris). And who hasn't found themselves on vacation and suddenly (or in Paris, invariably) caught out in the rain? And a cold bottle of white wine, brought right to you, at a rock bottom price, could only improve an impromptu picnic. 

This creates opportunities for the most desperately poor--and in Europe, as in the US, the most desperately poor come from abroad, usually sans papiers (i.e., undocumented). The Champ de Mars vendors principally come from West Africa and from South Asia. As reported in the daily newspaper Le Parisien (which seems to cover the à la sauvette issue more consistently than other French news outlets), different ethnic groups work different business lines; souvenirs are sold almost exclusively by Africans, while Indians and Pakistanis sell beverages. Related to this, jeux de bonneteau (e.g. confidence games like three-card monty) are operated by organized gangs of ethnic Romanians, with alleged links to overseas organized crime networks.

Even casual visitors to the Champ would not need a journalist to tell them that this is true. As diverse as Paris is, vendeurs are very conspicuous by their skin color and by how they operate. Souvenir vendeurs work the Champ in large numbers year-round, in all weather, carrying their wares on wire rings or in satchels that double as blankets for spreading goods on the ground, and which fold up quickly again by pulling on a drawstring. When the police sweep the park, vendeurs signal each other by text, and end up congregating along the nearby quai until it is safe to return to work. Sometimes no signal is needed: the sight of one vendeur running out of the park will others follow, sometimes stashing their inventory in garbage bins (poubelles) or under the lids of telecom boxes and sewer grates along the way.

Beverage vendeurs are seasonal; in picnic weather, vans filled with cases of wine, soda, beer and water bottles pull up close to the Champ to supply buckets that sellers--some of which are also cached in the park's scrubby bushes for easy resupply. It is worth noting that for the tens of thousands of daily park visitors, Champ de Mars has only a single, one-seater toilet that self-cleans between uses (which means that for anyone who needs facilities, it is like having twice as many people in line ahead of them). Not surprisingly, the same bushes where potables are often cached are often used as outdoor toilets. While this situation might have a sort of "circle of life" elegance, it nonetheless prompted a spate of "ick" stories in the news that focused on public health issues.

As you can imagine, vending à la sauvette is not lucrative. In 2019, Le Parisien interviewed an undocumented souvenir vendeur who subsisted on about 200 euros a month--much more than the 40 euros he could earn in his native Gabon. It's possible that business has picked up since the end of pandemic restrictions has released pent up demand to get out and travel. But any boom the vendeurs have seen may bust soon. Last October,  Laurent Nuñez, Paris' police chief (préfet de police), announced the city's plan to "totally eradicate all delinquency, selling on the sly, and jeux de bonneteau. This was done with a police sweep that netted between 100 and 200 kg of confiscated merchandise.

Les forces de l'ordre (the forces of order) assemble at the Champ for enforcement operations.

Police confiscating vendeurs' merchandise in the Champ de Mars.

Incidentally, since it's our usual place to walk the dog, I'm sure I was in the park on 23 October, the night of the crackdown/press conference. On a promenade that crosses one of the park's allées,  I noticed what I thought was a truly rare sight in Paris: a police officer working alone, without at least two or three partners. Then I noticed officers from the CRS national police posted at all the nearby criss-crossing allées. CRS units specialize riots and crowd control, and that night they were dressed for action in motocross pads and body armor. Other CRS officers were posted at the neighborhood street entrances to the park. My guess is--and was at the time--that the police were waiting to block and apprehend any vendeurs driven towards them by their comrades working from the other end of the park. Police in Paris don't have a great reputation for a measured response when it comes to crowd operations, so Sugar and I didn't hang around to find out.

Whatever happened that night, there has not been any noticeable decrease in vendeurs since then--though there has been sustained police activity. Interactions between the opposing sides are also more lively these days, with more active, broad daylight chases--with vendeurs sometimes escaping by running into four lanes of traffic--more convoys of police vans on the scene, and larger groups of vendeurs waiting it out on the quai.

And the vendeurs have good reasons to run. Police officers have the discretion to either arrest offenders, issue citations which are payable on the spot (using the same bank card readers one finds in every store and restaurant over here), or give verbal warnings. In every case, the vendeur's inventory gets confiscated. This means that they now have no way of paying back their wholesale suppliers. An arrest would certainly mean deportation.

Police at all levels seem sympathetic to the vendeurs. One commissioner pointed out that there was no immigrant smuggling "mafia," but that vendeurs come to France simply to earn a subsistence. The wholesalers themselves, however, are in the crosshairs of a police department dedicated to fighting organized crime, which arrested several distributers last summer, and described a pyramidal network with "the Chinese" at the top. To paraphrase an officer patrolling the Trocadero, another popular tourist area just across the river Seine from the Champ de Mars, "I'm not got going to chase someone and have them fall over the edge of the parapet [the Trocadero's high walls] ... To get killed for a 20 cent Eiffel Tower? No way." 

Certainly, the government has a responsibility to uphold law and order, even when infractions seem relatively innocuous. Yet it's hard to imagine that any amount of enforcement could "totally" or even marginally eradicate illegal vending in tourists areas. At best, it will just push it further away from the central tourists areas--which preparations for the Olympics are accomplishing already, as the tourists themselves get dispersed to the outskirts of the Eiffel Tower. The efforts speak less to a serious concern for public safety, and more to a concerted effort at reminding everyone of just how disruptive the Olympics will be--for the government that is struggling to get things ready in time for the the summer, for everyday Parisiens who will see their freedom of movement severely impacted during the games, for the undocumented vendeurs whose very existence constitute a potential embarrassment in front of the world media, and for "regular" tourists without Olympics tickets or VIP access who will get only a blinkered, highly controlled version of Paris during their visit this summer. Everyone will share the pain, with the possible exception of the International Olympic Committee. 

A rough translation of one the many public service announcements that appear around town: "The Games are coming. Escape if you can. You're welcome for the privilege of Hosting the Olympics."

It's also hard to ignore how the aggressive, very public policing of vendeurs dovetails with the larger political issue of undocumented migrants. Like in the US and in the rest of western Europe, immigration from the global south (legal or otherwise) reveals one of the sharpest dividing lines in French politics. It is now taken as conventional wisdom (but is perhaps correct anyway) that Président Emmanuel Macron's electoral victories in 2017 and 2022 reflected a last-second dodge by voters who preferred his En Marche (now Renaissance) party platform to Marine Le Pen's avowedly anti-immigrant Rassemblement National (RN). The RN was previously known as the Front National (FN), a party founded in 1972 by Marine's father Jean-Marie Le Pen, a populist politician and former Foreign Legion officer who has expressed sympathies for Petain's Vichy government during WWII. Le Pen was later ejected (by his daughter) from FN for trivializing Nazi gas chambers as a "detail of history," and on two occasions has been convicted under both French and German law for Holocaust denial.

There is no indication that the crackdown on vendeurs à la sauvette represents a crass attempt at pandering to future voters who might prefer Renaissance or its allies, but are still uneasy with the influx of migrants to Europe. If this represents a category of French voters, they just barely broke for Macron in the 2022 Presidential and only then in a runoff. But it's not likely to alienate these voters, either. It is probably also a coincidence that against the backdrop of intense police activity in the neighborhood, I've seen supporters of the far-right, nationalist Reconquête movement distributing flyers in advance of June's elections to represent France at the European Union. Reconquête posters also go up overnight, but don't last more than a day or so before being shredded. Maybe that is just an indicator that French attitudes about immigration are pretty much like French politics: complicated.

Putting your face on a dumpster is almost never a smart political move.