Gold-leafed books with engravings, 200-year-old leather-bound books, books so rare and precious they are wrapped carefully in cellophane before being nestled into place inside an antique wooden box set on the Seine’s stony shoulder for students, intellectuals, power brokers and tourists to browse.
For centuries, the wooden bookstalls have been a fixture in the heart of Paris, and so when the city’s police, citing security concerns, ordered them closed during this summer’s Olympic Games, an uproar ensued. Now President Emmanuel Macron has stepped in.
In a decision that resounded across the city this week, Mr. Maron deemed the booksellers “a living heritage of the capital” and said they could stay.
The relief was obvious, and not only among the bouquinistes, who had threatened legal action and barricades before their stalls, but also among cultured, romantic and intellectual Parisians, some of whom signed an opinion column defending the booksellers in Le Monde last August. It began with a citation from Albert Camus: “Everything that degrades culture shortens the paths that lead to servitude.”
“The Seine, our main river, flows in between rows of books,” said Alexandre Jardin, a French writer who was among those who signed the column. “To think the bouquinistes are just booksellers is to understand nothing. They speak to the very identity of Paris and its profound ties to literature. Paris is a city born from the dreams of writers.”
The decision to remove a living symbol of Paris from the country’s geographic heart and soul just as France was welcoming the entire world for the Olympic Games was so absurd that it clearly stemmed from bureaucrats — “the enemies of poetry,” Mr. Jardin said. It was only natural, he said, that Mr. Macron had set things right.
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