Street vendors, pickpockets, rubbish… Is the Champ-de-Mars “delivered to incivility of all kinds”?


Street vendors, scammers at games of “chance”, pickpockets, rubbish and rats… Residents of Champ-de-Mars (7th) keep shouting their exasperation in the face of insecurity and degradation suffered by this green space at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.

Everyone has their own story. Between this resident of avenue Emile Deschanel who fears for her safety when she returns home, this other who takes pity on tourists who systematically fall into the trap of “bonneteau” players or even the latter who also points out the problems of dirt related to mass tourism.

“Since the confinement, delinquency has increased there with in particular the marked presence of bosses of the bonneteau”, underlines for its part the association of the Friends of the Champ-de-Mars, which lists the “multitudes of barracks”, the “ myriads of street vendors” and “gambling scammers” and which reminds us that the site “is, in fact, the only large Parisian garden to remain open at night”.

But how can you imagine closing this particularly touristic site which goes from the Ecole Militaire to the Pont d’Iéna, even though the Eiffel Tower – which welcomes nearly 7 million tourists a year – is open from 9 a.m. until 11 p.m. (time of last entry)? Not to mention the onlookers who walk there night and day without entering the glass enclosure installed around the Iron Lady, the day after the attacks.

Towards a closure of the Champ-de-Mars at night?

Already in mid-April, the mayor of the 7th arrondissement of Paris Rachida Dati demanded from the Parisian municipality that the Champ-de-Mars benefit from “a status of heritage protection in order to sanctify it”. “Abandoned, overused for event purposes, given over to incivility of all kinds, this garden is deteriorating day by day”, had notably regretted the city councilor.

Deeming “essential to safeguard the historical heritage of this site and to protect it by a national legal system”, the former Keeper of the Seals indeed recommends today “the creation of a PSMV [Plan de sauvegarde et de mise en valeur, ndlr] for the perimeter of the Champ de Mars and its surroundings”.

The only way, according to him, to offer “the best guarantee of protection against the accelerated degradation which this garden has suffered” and which would thus fit “in coherence with the history of the 7th, part of which is already governed by a PSMV”.

A request for protection previously formulated with the Minister of Culture Roselyne Bachelot, to which she would have – according to Rachida Dati – responded favorably. But whose implementation still requires the agreement of the Parisian municipality.

In the meantime, the mayor of the 7th arrondissement has expressed her wish to see the Champ-de-Mars closed at night “for obvious security reasons and for ecological reasons”. Questioned on this subject by Le Parisien on April 15, she indeed explained that the lawns were “very degraded due to their overexploitation, in particular commercial”.

A Champ-de-Mars to rethink in any case

“The City of Paris wants to transform this classified site into a place of permanent commercial events to the detriment of local residents and despite my alerts”, she still let know on Twitter, arguing that only the State could “still stop this project” and claiming to have “filed an administrative appeal” alongside the mayors of the 15th and 16th arrondissements Philippe Goujon and Francis Szpiner.

Because the problem does not stop at the insecurity of the places, which “results” according to the association of the Friends of the Champ-de-Mars “from the laissez-faire which characterizes the Champ-de-Mars for a few years”. But would rather be the consequence of a lack of consensus around a promising project which would have made it possible to promote it but which, for lack of common political action, naturally deteriorated.

In fact, the decision to let the ephemeral Grand Palais – which replaces the Grand Palais today under construction until 2024 – organize events around its enclosure makes residents cringe, who deplore with photos and videos posted on social networks the deterioration of the site.

And if the Parisian municipality intends to take things in hand, with its project for a “large Eiffel Tower site” in particular, the work of which should begin “in the second half of 2022”, the fact remains that it only concerns the southern part of the site and is particularly disparaged, described for example as “ecological bloopers” by the Friends of the Champ-de-Mars association.





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