Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (21 page)

ne spring night as I sipped a glass of white wine with friends on their houseboat near the Eiffel Tower I watched an old riverboat labor upstream loaded with sand. “What a life,” I said to no one in particular. My hosts, successful middle-aged professionals, shrugged their shoulders.

“I wouldn’t know,” said one of them as he fed the barbecue. “They live in a world apart …”

It struck me as strange to share a river in the center of Paris yet know nothing about the people who depend upon your watery home for their livelihood. But it wasn’t until several years after this incident that I attempted to find out how the other half—the
bateliers
or freight-boat people of the Seine—live and work.

Upstream a few hundred yards from the Pont d’Austerlitz in the 13th arrondissement laundry fluttered from the riverboats moored to the sun-baked banks. I walked by them slowly, trying to catch someone’s eye. Ruddy-cheeked children romped on the iron decks, scrambling among the potted geraniums, bicycles, and coiled rope. What I gathered were the children’s parents patiently swabbed or scraped the family
péniche
, a vintage vessel locked in a losing battle against rust. But, as I learned, battle the boat people must: their source of livelihood is also their home, a universe measuring about 120 feet long by 15 feet wide. These craft, most of them Freycinet-class
péniches
from the 1920s and ’30s, weren’t at all like the luxury houseboats I’d visited near the Eiffel Tower or Notre-Dame, and the people on them proved to be shy, distrustful even. As it turned out, they had reason to be.

Like many children, I once dreamed of lazy days on a riverboat. When I first moved to Paris I would often pause to watch the brightly painted, snub-nosed
péniches
gliding past the Pont des Arts, the tip of the Île Saint-Louis or the Île de la Grande Jatte. To outsiders like me the lifestyle of Paris’
bateliers
looks footloose and fancy-free, a never-ending vacation spent sailing through Impressionist landscapes. When finally I got on board and talked to working boat owners, I discovered the truth: the river wears you down and exposes you daily to the danger of drowning and collision, or being injured by machinery and loads. Earnings are minimal, hardships abundant. Since the best spots on the quays of central Paris are taken these days by luxury houseboats, the mooring points that are left for industrial craft are often in noisy, seedy areas populated by fauna lifted from the pages of Simenon. If ever it was one, the vacation is now over for the nomadic riverboat people of the Seine, transporters of sand, gravel, flour, potatoes, fuel oil, and other unglamorous commodities. As Jean and Élianne, the sixty-something couple I got to know best, told me, they and their antiquated craft are struggling against the flow of history.

In the age of the TGV and container truck, riverboats haul bulk goods at a sea snail’s pace. They are not only slow but inflexible, bound by the rivers and canals they ply. Largely because of this, the
bateliers
themselves are an anachronism, a vaguely suspect people—waterborne gypsies in a sedentary world. Traditionally they work in husband-and-wife or tightly knit family teams, rarely receive higher education, and often marry among themselves. Their living quarters, like those of Jean and Élianne, may appear cozy when viewed from the quayside but are in reality cramped and primitively equipped, with whole families crowded into cabins the size of a landlubber’s modest living room. In summer the
bateliers
roast; in winter they freeze. Year round they’re exposed to the elements, so that by adulthood they often look like ancient mariners.

At the age of six, riverboat children are placed in state-run boarding schools, where they don’t mix easily with terrestrial tykes. Once they’ve done their mandatory schooling, they move home to the boat, some of them eventually taking over from their parents. A flotilla of specialized doctors, lawyers, and priests, strategically established in riverside centers in and around Paris, caters to the needs of these nomads, further isolating them, perhaps without intention, from the general populace. Endlessly cruising the nearly five thousand miles of navigable waterways that vein France, and sometimes sailing on to Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, or Germany, their floating villages band together and break apart.

Until January 1, 2000, several times a week Paris’s boat people crowded into the
bourse d’affrétement
, the local freight exchange on the Quai d’Austerlitz, with the hope of being assigned a cargo. By law, all river and canal traffic in the country had to be channeled through government-run freight exchanges. They set tariffs and regulated many of the boat people’s day-to-day activities. An administrative relic of the 1930s, the exchange operated on a first-in, first-out basis. As soon as they’d unloaded their corn or coal or gravel, the boat people had to sign the roll and wait to be called. And wait they did. On a typical day back in the 1990s, a hundred empty boats bobbed side-by-side on the rough-and-ready Quai d’Austerlitz with only a handful of shipments slated to go. Most foreign boats that unloaded in Paris sailed home empty. Together with a variety of evolving technological and social factors, this roll-call system almost killed off France’s boat people. Their numbers fell from more than five thousand in the 1970s to under three thousand today; only a few hundred currently live and work in and around Paris.

But the
bateliers
are unlikely to disappear and may even make a comeback.

Both of them bespectacled, bent and bronzed, Jean and Élianne invited me one day onto their 350-ton Freycinet riverboat named
Gondole
, a rare honor. Descended from Alsatian boat families whose roots run as deep as the rivers they were born on, the couple lived their halcyon days on the Seine, Moselle, and Rhine in the 1960s, when French river and canal shipping peaked at more than one hundred million tons per year. By the mid-1990s that figure had shrunk dramatically and the distances covered by riverboats had regressed to pre-1930s levels. The reasons for the decline are many. Mining has all but disappeared in France, explained Jean. Coal has been phased out as a fuel. Heavy industry and manufacturing have given way to high technology, and new factories have sprung up near highways, not canals or rivers. Smaller shipments, delivered directly by truck or train, are easier to handle and more economical to stock than bulk loads. To make matters worse, the aging riverside silos and warehouses of yesteryear have rusted and crumbled, and many smaller canals are now encumbered by debris. The cost of restoring waterway infrastructure is high, on the order of several hundreds of millions of dollars.

Though in excellent condition,
Gondole
was slated for demolition, part of the government’s restructuring program for the industry, a program that itself was scrapped a few years ago in favor of a kinder, gentler approach. As we sat in the boat’s main room, shaded by lace curtains through which I glimpsed eastern Paris’s glassy new skyscrapers, Jean told me about the now-defunct plan that had almost sent the
bateliers
to the bottom. Early retirement had been offered to boat owners willing to decommission and destroy their craft. No new Freycinet-type boats could be built, only larger-capacity industrial boats and modern riverboats able theoretically to compete with trains and trucks. All retirees’ craft, no matter how worthy, had to be junked. Thousands were in fact destroyed in the 1980s and ’90s in what many
bateliers
termed a government-sponsored genocide.

Scrapping their boats proved a heart-rending experience for
bateliers
such as Jean and Élianne. And as several other prospective retirees told me, the government’s golden handshake was less than twenty-four-karat. The standard compensation was approximately eighty dollars for every ton of a boat’s cargo capacity, worth, all told, about thirty-five thousand dollars for a typical Freycinet. “A lot of boat owners are bitter,” said Jean softly. “But we have no regrets. We had a good life, and we were free to go wherever we wanted, whenever we wanted, though it’s all over now.”

A red-faced boatman probably in his late thirties joined us and voiced his disagreement. “It may be over for you, but I’ve just bought another boat, and when my son is old enough he’s going to take it over.”

A clutch of sullen mariners gathered around and began to debate the relative merits of the government’s restructuring programs. As one realist put it, only massive intervention by the Ministry of Transportation to revamp infrastructure, and a concerted campaign to convince industry to reintegrate boats and barges into new distribution networks, could reverse the tide.

That is precisely what is currently going on, under the direction of a new agency, the VNF (Voies Navigables de France). Its revised “multiuse” waterway management philosophy, explained a spokesman I met on the quays, is to continue to exploit the country’s main canals and rivers for commercial traffic, while slowly repairing a select few secondary waterways. Many have already been converted for pleasure craft or to power small hydroelectric generating plants, however, and it would be uneconomical to convert them back for freight. Younger boatmen are still being encouraged to transform their families’ antiquated craft into tour boats, floating restaurants, or container carriers, or to increase their cargo capacity to a potentially competitive one thousand tons or more—an expensive and risky move.

Bad news is always good for someone. As the roads and freeways of France, especially those in Paris, come to a standstill with traffic, and air pollution reaches record peaks, the demand for river-based freight transportation is increasing. The upswing also comes thanks to construction work on long-term projects such as the Austerlitz-Rive Gauche (Left Bank) redevelopment scheme, and to a push by environmental lobbies to revive low-carbon shipping. Whether this is a bubble or a true tidal shift remains to be seen, but long-term prospects appear excellent. At the dawn of the second decade of the twenty-first century tonnage figures are on the rise.

The VNF publishes impressive statistics proving why waterway transport is both economical and environmentally friendly. According to official reports one twelve-thousand-ton push-tug convoy, for example, represents the equivalent of 342 thirty-five-ton trucks, which if strung bumper to bumper would clog and choke about fourteen miles of Paris roadway. Boats consume less fuel, pollute less, and have fewer accidents on average than other forms of transport. And it still costs less per ton per mile to ship cement, landfill, or wheat in an industrial push-tug or thousand-ton riverboat than in a freight train or truck.

That’s great, say the boat people I’ve talked to, but it doesn’t ensure smooth sailing ahead. Industrial push-tugs are beyond the reach of most individual owners and represent the antithesis of the traditional boat person’s way of life, with its emphasis on freedom of movement. Because of their length and tonnage, push-tugs are able to ply only the deep-water channels of the Seine, Saône, Rhine, and Rhône, a phenomenon known in the trade as being “a prisoner of a river basin.” Their routes are fixed. Working hours are regulated. Crews rarely own their craft and almost never live aboard; there is no purpose-built family cabin on such ships. So there are no husband-and-wife or family teams on them, either. Much the same applies to the huge thousand-ton riverboats, which do not fit in standard locks and are unable to use the four thousand miles or so of small waterways open only to the old Freycinet-class
péniche
. Ironically, because of their relative versatility, converted Freycinets may prove to be the way forward.

Having talked to scores of boatmen over a period of weeks, I could not refuse their invitation to take part in the big annual
pardon de la batellerie
, the blessing of the fleet, held each June in a town called Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. Twenty miles downstream from Paris and still in its suburbs, with regular commuter trains, Conflans nonetheless felt a thousand leagues from the Quai d’Austerlitz. Fish were jumping at the wide, murky confluence of the Seine and the Oise rivers where the town is sited. Boys and old men baited their hooks in silence and watched the boats slip by. Lashed to the wharves were row upon row of Freycinets, block-long riverboats, tugs, and push-tugs—just about every kind of inland watercraft I could imagine. Some were half-submerged with their heavy loads of gravel or grain. Others, bearded with moss, had been transformed into the houseboats of retirees.

Conflans, population thirty thousand, is not only the mecca of the boat people of the Seine. It’s also an important shipping center for Belgians, Dutchmen, and Germans. Popular cafés boast names like
Le Batelier
. There are floating time-tunnel dance halls festooned with flowers where boat people play accordions and sing folksy songs from decades past. On a hill overlooking the Seine is the Château du Prieuré. It houses the Musée de la Batellerie, the repository of boat-people’s history. And rising near the now-defunct freight exchange is a huge winged Statue of Liberty holding high a wreath to commemorate the boat people who fell in the two world wars. Mariners salute her as they pass.