PARIS — With their bright yellow awnings and sagging iron
shelves, the Gibert Jeune bookstores, which sell cheap secondhand books, have
been a fixture of the Latin Quarter in Paris for over a century, a mainstay of
the neighborhood’s shabby-chic intellectual life and beloved by tourists, too.
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“So old and unchangeable,” said Anny Louchart, 74, a
longtime customer who was recently rummaging through boxes of paperbacks at one
of the stores, her voice filled with nostalgia.
But a sales assistant told Louchart that four of the store’s
seven outposts in the area, including the one she stood in, would soon close,
hard hit by a drop in sales because of the pandemic.
“It closes down,” she said, “and with it a part of the
neighborhood collapses.”
The fate of the Gibert Jeune bookstores, some of which date
to the late 19th century, is just the latest in a series of emblematic closings
that have eroded the cultural identity of the Latin Quarter as the hub of
Parisian letters, home to countless writers, philosophers, artists,
revolutionaries and students.
The gentrification that many Parisians fear is robbing their
city of its soul has not spared the Latin Quarter, where fashion stores and
fast-food restaurants have taken over many of the spaces once occupied by
ancient cafes, bookstores and movie theaters. The neighborhood’s appeal has
driven up rents, causing a once-vibrant student life to crumble.
Figures from urban planning agency Apur show that 42 percent
of the Latin Quarter’s bookstores have vanished in the past 20 years, and
Paris’ open-air booksellers are also fighting for survival.
But the news of the closings of the Gibert Jeune bookstores
— an institution that seemed immortal to many people — has sounded an unusual
alarm. It strikes at the very heart of the neighborhood’s identity: access to
culture at an affordable price.
Three Gibert Jeune stores just closed, and the fourth was
expected to follow suit in the next few days.
“It is this bookstore that best embodied the spirit of the
Latin Quarter,” said Éric Anceau, a historian teaching at the Sorbonne, the
renowned university founded in the heart of the Latin Quarter in 1253. The name
of the area derives from the use of Latin as the language of study by Sorbonne
students in the Middle Ages.
On a recent afternoon, Ingrid Ernst, an energetic retired
urban planner, was touring the area. Every street corner she stopped at was an
opportunity to point to a cafe that had made way for a supermarket or to a
record dealer turned luxury hotel.
“It’s the classic gentrification process,” Ernst, 69, said
as she grumbled about the proliferation of elevators in the nearby buildings, a
sign of “full-speed gentrification.”
Ernst said she would no longer be able to afford the small
attic studio she rented when she settled in the Latin Quarter in 1972, when it
still bubbled with the energy of the student-led “May 1968” protests that took
place there.
The Latin Quarter is home to many universities but fewer and
fewer students. They have been driven away by the neighborhood’s housing
prices, some of Paris’ highest, and by the creation of new campuses on the
outskirts of the capital to meet greater demand.
“It’s almost impossible to live here as a student,” said
Constance Pena, 19, sitting on a bench near the Sorbonne, who had come all the
way from a western suburb to study in a nearby library.
Gone are the days when Ernest Hemingway wrote that Paris and
its Latin Quarter allowed “a way of living well and working, no matter how poor
you were.”
Michel Carmona, a historian and geographer specializing in
Paris, said that the cultural erosion of the Latin Quarter started in the 1980s
and was intertwined with the gradual decline of student life. “Cheap bookstores,
cafes and movie theaters are primarily for students,” he said.
He added that residents of the neighborhood were
increasingly “transit people” — wealthy foreigners eager to have a pied-à-terre
or tourists renting Airbnb apartments.
At the heart of this dynamic lies a paradox: Gentrification
uproots the same bohemian charm that draws people to the Latin Quarter.
Anceau, the historian, said the atmosphere in the
neighborhood had been “apocalyptic” since the start of the pandemic. The gloom
that has settled over Paris has been perhaps most conspicuous in the Latin
Quarter, whose very heart — the cafes, restaurants, theaters and museums —
stopped beating amid government lockdown restrictions to fight coronavirus
infections.
The temporary shutdown of these cultural pillars has
resonated among local residents as a dress rehearsal for the near future. Cafes
and theaters have not reopened since the fall, when a second wave of infections
was taking hold in France, and many fear that some will have gone out of
business by the time restrictions are lifted.
On the Rue Champollion, a cobbled, narrow street close to
the Sorbonne, the lines of film buffs that once stretched out on the sidewalks
in the middle of the day are nowhere to be found today. The three art-house
movie theaters there were closed for the lockdown
One of the theaters, Le Champo, has been displaying extracts
from its guest book — “the memory box,” as it called them — behind its closed
windows. A 2018 message left by prolific screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, who
died last month, read: “For Le Champo! So many years later … and how many more
years to come?”
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