The side of the Paris Olympics they don’t want you to see
Over the past 18 months, French authorities embarked on a mission to clear the streets of Paris, busting squats and breaking up homeless encampments in the shadow of Olympic venues, writes Lawrence Ostlere, displacing thousands in an effort to hide the crisis from the world’s eyes
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Nation is a metro station in the east of Paris, away from the city’s carefully curated Olympic trail. There are no giant pink signs pointing the way to the nearest venue here. On the platform, a man and his dog slump on a rotten mattress. At the top of the stairs another man is lying motionless on the street, his phone spilled from his pocket, looking half-dead.
The station serves Place de la Nation, a giant leafy roundabout with a pedestrianised ring and a dozen boulevards spoked off in every direction. It is a bustling, diverse space, and at 6pm on a humid August evening, up one of these streets, people are beginning to gather.
There are men, women and children of all ages, including babies in prams. They hail from Chad, Sudan, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Somalia and Afghanistan. By 6.30pm there are nearly 100 refugees here, waiting.
Then a truck pulls in and parks up. In a few minutes, volunteers for Medecins du Monde have created a makeshift doctor’s surgery using the rear of the truck and a pop-up tent, complete with an on-street waiting room. Another organisation, Utopia 56, arrives with food supplies: soup and bread, boxes of pasta, yoghurt, fruit and water.
It is a nightly congregation of people with different stories to tell. One woman escaped domestic abuse in Algeria a decade ago and has been homeless in Paris ever since. “I cannot go back because my husband is in the military,” Faiza says. “Women in Algeria have no rights.” She slept in metro stations for nine years before finding Utopia 56, which has been helping her find temporary accommodation for the past few months. “The people here have humanity,” she smiles.
A Senegalese woman has full-time work but it doesn’t pay enough for her and her teenage daughter to rent in Paris. They come here together but spend most nights apart, taking whatever beds Utopia can find them.
Boys and girls come here alone after losing parents and fleeing war, after terrifying journeys across the Mediterranean. Medecins du Monde deploys a psychologist alongside two doctors and a nurse because they all carry trauma.
***
Five miles from the bright Olympic lights of the Stade de France, this is the side of Paris they didn’t want you to see. Over the past 18 months, authorities embarked on an aggressive clear-up of the city’s streets. In a two-pronged move, the state first busted squats full of refugees and put them on buses to towns far away from the capital; then, as the Games drew close, police broke up improvised “tent cities” that lay in the way of Olympic sites.
The housing crisis is not new in Paris but the workers and volunteers here say the situation has been made much worse in the run-up to the Games. Around 12,500 people on the margins of Parisian life – largely homeless immigrants and some sex workers – were cleared from the streets of Paris in the 12 months from May 2023 to the brink of the Games, according to a report by a cohort of 80 humanitarian organisations titled Revers de la Medaille (the other side of the medal).
In March last year, the French state established a new “sas” system, creating 10 emergency shelters in far-flung parts of France to disperse people from the capital. Sas translates to a small watertight room with two doors, like a holding area, and it becomes clear speaking to the workers here that it is a pretty good description.
A few weeks later, riot police evicted hundreds of refugees from the biggest squat in Paris, in an old building next to the Olympic village where the world’s elite athletes now stay. Around 500 people from Sudan and Chad had lived in the building for three years. Most were on government waiting lists for asylum or social housing. Life was hard but they had laid down roots of survival. Many had jobs and places in schools.
“On 26 April, the police arrived,” says Paul Alauzy, who coordinates Medecins du Monde’s medical watch. “It was really intense. They pushed us into the squat with shields. We had inhabitants screaming, ‘We have mothers and kids, calm down, we are ready to leave!’”
The police ushered 50 “volunteers” onto a bus destined for a sas in Toulouse, 350 miles south. “I’d been doing this job for six years and it was the first time I was seeing a bus going that far away,” says Alauzy. The rest were taken to temporary shelters on the outskirts of Paris for a week, after which many ended up on the street. Some were cleared from another squat in Vitry-sur-Seine in April.
“This is, for me, where the social cleansing linked to the Olympics started,” he says. “I was like, ‘Oh, so this is how it’s going to be’.”
People were given a maximum of three weeks in the sas. After that, they were either settled in the new area – with “some good results but the majority bad results”, Alauzy says – or relocated to emergency shelters nearby. The state says the average stay in emergency shelters is 62 nights, though workers here have come across many who were given only a few nights and then “kicked out” onto the street and told to call an unresponsive phone line each day to regain a place.
As refugees began to fear being sent to a sas, Utopia’s accommodation programme – giving the homeless a night here and there in the private homes of Parisians (often students) who offer up empty rooms – became far busier.
“Some of them have children in school in Paris,” says Utopia’s Charlotte Kwantes, pointing to the families gathered on the street. “Some of them have work in Paris. Some of them have heavy medical care in Paris. So when the police come at 6am and say, ‘now you have to go to blah blah’, to another town where they know no one, where they have no connection, where they don’t know the [support] organisations there...
“There is a two-out-of-three chance that they end up on the street anyway. After a whole year where the state proposed this kind of solution, people just stopped accepting them. They just stopped getting on the bus leading to these new towns, and they prefer to stay in Paris.”
The system wasn’t totally flawed. Alauzy cites a young Afghan sent to Rennes who was given shelter and enrolled in French classes, and he sent a text two weeks ago saying he was happy to be off the streets of Paris. But there are many negative stories too. “I had one guy from Sudan who was sent to Bordeaux. After the sas, he was sent to a small village, it was the first time he was alone, with no Arabic speakers, so he just lost it. He came back to Paris and became a mute. He was lying down in one of the settlements and I couldn’t even speak to him.”
An Ethiopian man living under Charles de Gaulle bridge had papers and a job at a fast-food restaurant. He was told by authorities to move to Strasbourg. “He was told, ‘It’s a beautiful city’,” Alauzy says. “He said, ‘I don’t care, even if I’m homeless, I have a job so I need to stay, I cannot take the risk’. It’s insane to treat people like that.”
Kwantes adds: “The system of trying to dispatch people all over France is not a bad system. But it’s done in the interest of the logistics of dispatching people. It’s just logistics for the state. It’s not in the interest of people.”
***
With two weeks to go before the Olympics began, there were still large groups of homeless people living in tent cities around Paris. And so began days of dismantlement. Starting on 15 July, police broke up 10 makeshift encampments one by one, including several on the banks of the Seine along the route of the opening ceremony. Around 500 people were displaced in just four days.
Regardless of asylum status, everyone was offered a spot in new temporary sites around the outskirts of Paris, mainly in empty gyms and disused hotels. They were granted accommodation for 30 nights, ending a few days after the Olympic closing ceremony on 11 August.
“It’s magical,” Alauzy laughs, “because for a year they sent the people away, and just when the Games arrive they find it’s possible to have a place in the region of Paris. They needed to achieve their work ... and it worked. The streets are clean in Paris. There’s nobody in it.”
Some of the encampments contained unaccompanied children who had set up along the Seine to be near the organisations in the centre of Paris that support them.
The City of Paris is currently housing a population of several hundred children displaced by the state’s pre-Games policy, in gymnasiums and other emergency shelters. It is only temporary, and the organisations here are concerned about what will happen after the Olympics. The gyms will soon be reclaimed for school sports classes in September.
Those children will not be able to return to the encampments where they had been surviving together on the streets of Paris.
“They replaced a tent city with picnic tables, they replaced a tent city with a big wall of cement,” says Alauzy. “Another tent city was replaced with a huge cement block, another with just rocks and barriers. So the social inheritance of the Games will suffer here, and the homeless population will suffer. When they come back to the streets, they won’t be able to go back to those places in Paris. They will have to seek refuge further away from the capital.”
He compares the treatment of the mostly African and Asian migrants on the streets to those escaping war in Ukraine, who have a dedicated centre that offers guaranteed housing. The centre even has a place for pets. “In France, we welcome better a dog from Ukraine than a kid from Sudan.”
***
The City of Paris declined an interview to discuss the future of the displaced children. It issued a statement outlining its commitments to unaccompanied minors, saying: “The City of Paris never has and never will evict those it shelters.”
The International Olympic Committee did not answer a question about whether its ethics committee has looked into the ramifications of the Games. It passed the query to the City of Paris, which sent another statement stressing how “Paris has placed the issue of homeless people at the heart” of the Olympics.
“No homeless person will be ‘evicted’ by the City without a solution being proposed,” it said. It pointed to the temporary sites it has created and urged the government to respond to the concerns raised in the Revers de la Medaille report.
Kwandes believes the City of Paris is at least trying, especially in its responsibility for homeless children. But Alauzy was left unimpressed after meeting Paris 2024 committee members in the build-up to the Olympics who told him they had no one directly in charge of these issues. Given the history of displacement at every Games in living memory, it was a startling revelation.
He met state officials too but sensed a reluctance to seize the moment for positive change. “I’m really convinced that the French government doesn’t want to set a precedent. They want to keep treating the migrants, sex workers and homeless the same way they always did. They say they are doing a lot and they cannot do more. They are convinced that if they do more, all the misery of the world will come here.”
Alauzy grew up in a small rural town and moved to Paris to study. He was struck by homelessness on the streets and wanted to do something about it. There is plenty of misery in the world but he sees Paris as a place of hope. “We have people coming from everywhere. We hear about a war or a coup, and soon they come. It is like the crossroads of the world.”
That is how the Olympics sees itself, too. “Games wide open,” says the slogan for Paris 2024. But on the ground, what inevitably develops is a battle over space, over how it is used and who it is for. The Olympics is a $10bn stage-managed spectacle, and nothing was going to get in its way.
Utopia 56 and Medecins du Monde used to hold their nightly support by the City Hall. Now, that same space is filled by an Olympic fan park. That is why they are here, off the Games’ beaten track, out of sight.
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