Parisian City Hall employees remove a book box from a Paris wharf, on Friday, November 17, 2023. The operation was expected, closely watched, and was supposed to give an overview of one of the issues related to the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games. On the evening of Friday, November 17, a “feasibility test” was carried out to dismantle four of the emblematic book boxes of booksellers established on the banks of the Seine, which the Paris police prefecture has requested to be removed – nearly 600 out of 900 existing – for security reasons, before the opening ceremony on July 26, 2024, which will take place on the river. Under the eyes of a small group of dismayed booksellers, about twenty city employees, accompanied by a moving company, carried out this removal – which took several hours – after carefully emptying the hundreds of books that had piled up in the boxes. One by one, these large iconic green wooden rectangles of Paris were lifted by a crane and delicately torn off the parapet. For this test, the selected boxes had been fixed to the wharf for fifty years, but the oldest of the approximately 900 Parisian boxes are 150 years old, and booksellers feared that their removal would spell the end of these facilities, often weakened by years and bad weather. “It’s like pulling a tooth! All this for four hours of ceremony! What wars have not been able to do, the Olympics will succeed: make us disappear,” regretted Michel Bouetard, secretary general of the Association of Booksellers, interviewed by Agence-France-Presse (AFP). “All this is excessive. If they remove them, we will never know when they will come back,” added Jérôme Callais, the president of the association. “But if they persist in wanting to remove them, we will go to litigation.” “The test was done in a rather clean way.” For several months, the question of these small green boxes that have become one of the symbols of Paris has taken on a political dimension. And several Parisian elected officials had come to support the 230 booksellers, many of whom have no other income, and are worried about “several weeks of inactivity” during the Olympics. “We are against it, all this is decided in order to be able to do advertising on the quays,” said Corine Faugeron, president of the Green Group on the Paris Council; when others have appealed to Emmanuel Macron. Saturday morning, the City of Paris hailed the successful trial. “We now have the certainty that we can move, that is to say, deposit and then put the boxes back in good conditions and in a reasonable time,” said Pierre Rabadan, deputy in charge of sport and the Olympics at the city hall. Now we must “review the number of boxes” to be removed and “detail the time it will take.” At his side, the police prefect, Laurent Nunez, insisted that the boxes be removed “only when strictly necessary, especially for security reasons,” specifying that he wanted to continue the reflection “in very close consultation with the booksellers,” and highlighting their “importance for the attraction of the capital.” After being hoisted onto a truck without incident, the four boxes subject to the feasibility test were restored to their place on the parapet, Friday around midnight. And their books were placed inside. “The test was done in a rather clean way, admitted the president of the Association of Booksellers, Jérôme Callais, on Saturday. They were lucky, the boxes were of very good quality, very solid, this will not be the case for all of them.” Among the many issues related to the organization of the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics on the Seine – where it usually takes place in a stadium – the question of book boxes is probably not entirely resolved. But the first attempt to dismantle did not confirm those who anticipated the destruction of these objects that have become part of Parisian life.
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