“IT’S A great view,” says Simon Cottin-Marx, a 23-year-old with dark-rimmed glasses and an incipient beard, as he looks out over the rooftops of central Paris and picks out the French tricolour in the foreground. “That’s the Élysée Palace, just there.”
With evident pride, Mr Cottin-Marx and his friends are giving a tour of their new lodgings – an eight-storey office building on avenue Matignon, in a chic corner of the eighth arrondissement. The group are among 30 young people who quietly occupied the site on December 27th, established their right not to be expelled and then, in recent days, announced that they had set up the most prestigious squat in Paris.
The activists belong to Jeudi Noir (Black Thursday), a collective that campaigns for more social housing and a tax on vacant buildings to address what it sees as a crisis facing students and young people in the city. Their speciality is occupying empty buildings: many of the squatters here spent most of last year living in an empty 17th-century mansion on the exclusive Place des Vosges.
At the entrance to 22 avenue Matignon, five police vans and dozens of officers stand guard, preventing anyone other than “residents”, politicians and journalists from entering. The security reflects the squat’s sensitive location – close enough to the Élysée that President Nicolas Sarkozy “can see us when he shaves in the morning”, as one activist puts it, and just a short distance from the interior ministry. “It’s a highly symbolic building at the heart of state power,” says Mr Cottin-Marx.
The block belongs to the insurance company Axa but has been vacant for the past four years. The activists say the door was unlocked and they managed to get the electricity and water supply running within hours. Mattresses have been laid out on each of the floors and the reception area has become a makeshift kitchen, with coffee and biscuits on offer for visitors.
In a city where 10 per cent of apartments lie empty and rents are prohibitively high, says activist Lila Gasmi (29), young people face “a real battle” to navigate an expensive, bureaucratic system and secure a place to live.
“I didn’t have someone to vouch for me – my Dad is dead and my mother couldn’t act as guarantor,” says Ms Gasmi, who works in theatre and has been a member of Jeudi Noir (the name refers to the day on which Paris’s main classified ads title appears) since 2006. “There was a sense of solidarity about it, and you felt less alone.”
Ms Gasmi spent almost a year in the Place des Vosges squat, from where she and 13 others were eventually expelled and ordered to pay €90,000. “We can’t pay it.”
The squatters at avenue Matignon cannot be expelled until a legal process initiated by the local prefecture and Axa comes to an end. In the meantime, prominent left-wing politicians have been quick to show their support for a popular cause. Yesterday it was Socialist Party spokesman Benoît Hamon’s turn to drop by.
“Here you have a fine building that belongs to a large French company, which is speculating and making money from it,” Mr Hamon said. “That’s what is unacceptable – that you can make money on the back of the fact that people have nowhere to live.”