Europe 1 with AFP / Photo credit: MIGUEL MEDINA / AFP 2:31 p.m., January 19, 2024

Paris second-hand booksellers will challenge in court the announced dismantling of hundreds of their boxes along the Seine in preparation for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games on July 26.

428 boxes must be dismantled from the quays of the Seine for security reasons, justifies the police headquarters.

Book sellers in Paris will challenge in court the announced dismantling of hundreds of their boxes along the Seine in preparation for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games on July 26, they announced to AFP on Friday.

During the general assembly of the Cultural Association of Booksellers of Paris, nearly 130 of them (out of around 180 members) decided to take “legal action in the administrative court” to contest this operation, indicated the president, Jérôme Callais.

“The fact that this action was voted unanimously by the members (...) is commensurate with the challenges and dramatic consequences that such a withdrawal would have,” their lawyer, Matthieu Chirez, commented for AFP.

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On Monday, the police headquarters, which justifies this withdrawal of "a few days" by security requirements, took a step towards the second-hand booksellers by agreeing "to sacrifice certain areas which will therefore not be open to the public (...) this which can save more than 170 boxes".

The number of dismantled boxes would thus only reach 428 instead of 604, "or less than half (47%)" of the 932 stowed at the quays of the Seine, the prefecture had specified.

Booksellers fear “considerable damage”

Despite this proposal, which for him amounts to an "amicable compromise", Jérôme Callais estimated that the second-hand booksellers had "nothing to lose" by going before the judge.

The second-hand booksellers will ask him for "non-removal" of the boxes or, "as a last resort", for compensation and "dignified and respectful treatment" of their small open-air bookstores, listed as French intangible cultural heritage, the first step towards a possible recognition as a UNESCO world heritage site.

The Paris town hall, which supported this approach, now arouses the distrust of second-hand booksellers because it is they who will be responsible for removing and replacing the boxes.

Booksellers fear, according to Jérôme Callais, that this operation will cause “considerable damage”.

“The bookseller who loses his exploded boxes will find himself without income and without compensation,” he insisted.