Paris Bookstalls Are Told to Relocate During Next Year’s Olympics

Today, the roughly 230 open-air booksellers, stationed along the Seine for about two miles, make up the largest open-air book market in Europe. About 170 of the stalls will be required to close for at least two weeks during the Paris Games, according to a copy of a document that city officials showed bouquinistes at a meeting last month.

After the empty arenas of the Olympics in Tokyo, postponed to 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic, and in Beijing in 2022, organizers in Paris are aiming to bring back grandeur to the Games, which begin July 26. Beach volleyball will be played at the base of the Eiffel Tower. Equestrian events will be held in the gardens of the Château de Versailles. The opening ceremony will take place not in a stadium, but along the Seine, with thousands of Olympic athletes riding on a flotilla of 160 boats before hundreds of thousands of spectators on the river’s banks.

The ceremony’s unusual format poses logistical and security headaches, for both the International Olympic Committee and the Paris police, who said they had concerns that bombs could be hidden in the stalls.

In Paris, with its perfectly preserved mid-19th-century facades, there is more concern about preserving traditions and elements of the city during the Olympic Games than in other cities. Tony Travers, a professor at the London School of Economics and an expert on local government and design, said he could not recall comparable instances of tension before the London 2012 Olympics, the last time a city in Europe hosted the Summer Games. That may have been because many Olympic events in London took place in a part of East London that had been full of abandoned warehouses, not in the heart of the city, he said.

In Paris, several booksellers, still recovering from lost income during the Yellow Vest protests and the pandemic, when tourism dropped, said that it would be devastating to lose several weeks of income during the peak summer tourist season. The city allows bouquinistes to sell rent-free, but some have had to resort to selling cheap souvenirs rather than books to earn a living.