University for poor is new Paris radical chic

A fierce drama is being played out in the heart of Paris that illustrates in a small way the soul-searching and confusion afflicting pre-election France. The cast includes two university professors, a sacked bishop, an assortment of citizens, a politician or two, and since last Saturday, two bus-loads of riot police.

The scene is a pretty street in the Latin Quarter, lined with small restaurants and boutiques, not far from where the protesters of 1968 dug out their cobble-stones. Usually, the Rue du Dragon is a haunt for students and strollers. Now, access is controlled by unsmiling CRS riot police, reinforcements wait in buses and barriers are in place.

All this because No 7 has a huge banner over the door proclaiming: Droits devant! ("Rights first") The house has been occupied by squatters for some time, but the dispute is not primarily about squatters.

It is about the project devised by a group of intellectuals to set up an open-access "university" - Droits devant! - for the poor and homeless in an adjoining street.

The "university" was to have been opened last weekend in a disused school. More than 1,000 people were expected to turn up; food and drink had been ordered, and celebrities invited. The founders say they made last-minute improvements to the building to satisfy safety requirements. Despite that, the police banned the opening, citing security reasons, and stopped people entering the building. When an attempt was made to transfer the festivities to the street, scuffles broke out and some people were injured.

The inauguration has now been scheduled for next weekend, but there are no signs that the Paris authorities will change their mind.

The leading lights of Droits devant! are two professors - a cancer specialist, Leon Schwartzenberg, and a geneticist, Albert Jacquard, and Monsignor Jacques Gaillot, the liberal bishop recently dismissed by the Vatican from the See of Evreux after failing to condemn married priests, contraception and homosexuality. All belong to the organisation Droit au logement, which campaigns for the homeless and is seen as being on the political left. At the weekend, they were joined by leaders of the Greens and the Communists.

Supporters of Droits devant! believe the authorities want to prevent the establishment of a permanent centre for the homeless and under-privileged in one of the most affluent parts of Paris. Some also offer an intellectual theory: knowledge is power, andthe authorities do not want power slipping from the caste that has traditionally held it. Professor Jacquard describes the "university" as a place where the homeless and others can obtain "administrative, legal and social help".

He says that it will affirm people's rights not just to a roof over their heads but to "health, work, citizenship and education".

With or without its intellectual justification, No 7 rue du Dragon has become something of a national cause celebre. This may be partly because concern for the homeless - not in the past an especially popular cause - now seems to go beyond the political left.

Shortly before Christmas, Jacques Chirac, the Mayor of Paris and a presidential contender on the right, judged it politic to find 200 empty flats for homeless people and proposed measures to requisition unused buildings for housing.

Politicians may also be interested in homelessness because it is a cause which finds support among otherwise the politically apathetic young. A girl present at the weekend protest said she was there because the Droits devant! project had the merit of being effective. But the attention paid to events at rue du Dragon seems also to reflect a more general concern in France that too many people are falling through the social net and out of society altogether. The term les exclus is heard repeatedly in discussions on the state of the country and always with a tinge of worry and a sense of responsibility.

The word denotes not so much an "underclass" but people who, for whatever reason, are excluded from the social mainstream. It includes middle class people who lose their livelihoods through redundancy or family break-up as well as the young unemployed orunemployable.

It is an issue that presidential campaigners are starting to address and much more will be heard of it before the election is over.