Mais oui, the garbage collectors of Paris are still on strike, part of massive demonstrations opposing French President Emmanuel Macron’s effort to raise the national retirement age. Mountains of trash — more than 9,500 tons as of March 23 — now tower over the city’s streets and boulevards. There is a history to this strike that stretches back far beyond the start of the current turmoil, and it carries the whiff of revolution.
The ragpickers’ descendants
Indeed, that history’s road starts with the revolution of 1848. This year marks the 175th anniversary of Le Chiffonnier de Paris, or “The Ragpicker of Paris.” Penned by the leftwing firebrand Félix Pyat, the five-act play transformed the chiffonnier into the emblem of urban unrest. No surprise, then, that the Orléanist monarchy tried to censor the play, especially after Pyat declared, “All the sovereigns of the old world, kings, priests, and masters, have given place to the new sovereign, the People of Paris.”
The éboueur, or garbage collector, is the ragpicker’s modern descendant. Thus the strike recalls the famous observation made by French journalist Jean-Baptiste Karr: Plus ca change, plus c’est la même chose. (Not so coincidentally, Karr coined this phrase in 1849, as the glamor of the previous year’s revolution was already fading.) Take trash — which is precisely what the chiffonniers did in 19th-century Paris. A guild with its own hierarchy and rules, they sorted through the refuse that residents left nightly on the streets outside their buildings. While they collected paper, twine, bones, and bread crumbs, what the ragpickers most prized were, well, discarded rags. These were recycled into paper to feed the burgeoning publishing industries.
Scribbling on that same paper, journalists and novelists merged the dismal reality of a professional class of ragpickers with the dire fantasy of a dangerous class of revolutionaries. Portrayed not just as creatures of the miasma exhaled by the city’s waste, but as carriers of political subversion, ragpickers were seen to threaten both the health of the body politic and that of the human body. Pyat, however, was not alone in portraying the ragpickers as victims of society and not as criminals. His contemporary Eugène Sue did the same in his best-selling Les Mystères de Paris. In his even better selling Les Misèrables, Victor Hugo argued that the Paris sewers, so closely tied to the world of the ragpicker, were in fact the conscience of the city — the dank archives where the possessions of the high and low are stored.
A source of unseen stability
Not for long, though. In 1883, the city’s police prefect, Eugène Poubelle, ordered residents to place their refuse in designated containers at a designated hour to be collected by designated city workers. While this law killed their profession, the chiffonniers trashed Poubelle’s reputation by giving the prefect’s name to the trash bins he introduced. Who else among us can claim immortality by having garbage tossed into a bin named after us?
Like yesterday’s chiffoniers, today’s éboueurs and éboueuses — women have increasingly joined the ranks of the profession — spur the same conflicting images and emotions. On one hand, we recognize the vital role these workers play in protecting us from the dangers tied to trash. On the other hand, we hesitate to give them our hand, given their association with the very things that repel us. Of course, these men and women are not invisible; we do see them. But as the sociologist Stéphane Le Lay observes, we do our darndest to make them invisible. As invisible, to be clear, as we wish to make the rotting and rejected material they are tasked to cart away.
In a tweet two weeks ago, an association of trash collectors echoed Le Lay’s point: “You never see us when we’re around, but when we’re not around, the entire city collapses.” Of course, as anyone who has lived in Paris can attest, it is hard not to see the sanitation teams. Garbed in bright green uniforms, they stride alongside the equally green trucks that hoist and empty the trash containers. It is also hard not to see that many if not most of them are of North African or sub-Saharan origin, and that their task is Sisyphean: heaving endless rows of heavy bags into the bins of their trucks.
The toll is already heavy
Harder to see are the things they see and feel. Just as with Jean Valjean’s journey through the sewers, so too with the daily trek of the éboueurs across the city. In the city’s bourgeois neighborhoods, remarked one worker, they see “beautiful things that are practically new,” while in the poor neighborhoods they try not to see the “rotten stuff” they toss into the mechanical maws of their trucks.
Outsiders also cannot see the toll the work takes on the body, ranging from back injuries through to lacerated limbs and bacterial contamination. However, the claim, made by leftwing politicians and pundits alike, that a trash collector’s life expectancy is approximately 17 years shorter than that of a white-collar worker, seems to be as fictitious as the Valjeans, Fantines and Javerts invented by Hugo. According to one respected study, there simply is not enough demographic evidence to justify such a conclusion. Yet studies do show they are twice as likely to suffer serious injury as most other workers.
Unlike the chiffonnier, the éboueur has yet to be taken up as a character, much less a hero, by a novelist. But the trash collectors were in fact heroes during the pandemic, recalls the veteran éboueur Brahim Sidibé. Along with nurses and doctors, “we were first responders.” He turns pale at the prospect of adding two more years, from age 62 to 64, to again serve as a first responder. “I don’t want to die behind my garbage truck.” It might not take Hugo’s genius to begin to imagine what it means, both for the éboueur and us, to extend his retirement age by two years when he has already extended himself in ways most of us have not.
Robert Zaretsky teaches in the Honors College, University of Houston. His most recent book is “Victories Never Last: Reading and Caregiving in a Time of Plague.” The views expressed are the author's own.
