No open bistro? Never mind. Eric Hazan receives at his home, an apartment with walls covered with books and paintings, opening onto a small cobbled courtyard, a stone’s throw from the Belleville metro in Paris. To accompany the coffee, he went to get some croissants at the local bakery. “She’s neither bad nor great, he specifies: 12 out of 20. “ Unless that’s the grade he gives to the whole city …
This indomitable capital, the old publisher and ultra-left writer adores and loathes it all at the same time. Take Belleville. A poor and cosmopolitan neighborhood, but threatened with gentrification. In the very street, “Three galleries have opened, with œshabby works, Eric Hazan groans. It’s worrying. ” He wants to improve the city. The crossroads between the street and the Boulevard de Belleville, for example, why not make it a real place and give it the name of Frantz Fanon, the Martinican author of Damned of the Earth ? At the same time, it would be necessary to rename the tracks whose name resonates “Like an urban dishonor”, he says, citing avenue Mac-Mahon – “Capitular general and notorious moron” – or rue Thiers.
“A writing frenzy”
During confinement last spring, Eric Hazan was stuck in his apartment. “I was seized by a writing frenzy”, he says, as his antique Italian metal coffee maker begins to hiss. A little book came out of it, The Tumulte of Paris, delicious wandering through the streets of the capital, illustrated with photos taken by his daughter Cléo, and published in his own house, La Fabrique éditions (136 pages, 12 euros). “When I publish elsewhere, my two associates shout at me”, he slips.
“When I was 15, I was lucky to have Communist friends. It is to them that I owe my political commitment, opposed to that of my parents, of the readers of the “World” who voted socialist. “
The stated objective was very positive: “I wanted to defend Paris against those who see it as a museum city, lifeless, gentrified”. But we don’t remake ourselves. At 84, Hazan is a pedestrian from Paris who grumbles as much as he smiles. The left bank where he lived for a long time has become “A dreary super-display”, he describes. The “greening” advocated by the Town Hall? “It’s taking a place that asks nothing of anyone and disfiguring it. ” As for the new metro entrances, they look like junk “Designed by designers from the prison administration”, plague this nostalgic for Guimard.
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