Roger Kaplan, a part-time Parisian and Weekly Standard contributor, reflects on the Charlie Hebdo murders:
You know the Rue Serpollet, it’s on the east side near Bagnolet, in the 20th arrondissement, last refuge, practically, of the old Parisian working class, almost gone now from the capital. But to be more precise, in terms of urban geography, it is getting close to Montreuil and Vincennes, more mixed, economically integrated, as once, though no one remembers, almost all the city was.
Most Parisians do not know the Rue Serpollet, a little street ending in a dead-end on the city line, a quiet little street, felt more like being in a provincial town than the capital of France. You can walk around, smell the fresh baked bread early in the morning, stop in a café and stand at the bar for an espresse and a shot of brandy, think about how swell it is here, this quiet neighborhood in this swell city.
You know it because you play tennis on the public courts nearby, they are not bad courts, trees and foliage around them. You prefer the ones down the street at the Stade Leo Lagrange, named for a Socialist leader of the last century who encouraged sports, physical education, colonies de vacances, subsidized vacation camps for kids from such neighborhoods. Natalia, my little friend from Lodz, used to meet here, we paid a few euros, hit for a few hours. There are few places more peaceful than the east side of the city, guarded by the old fort at Vincennes, Foreign Legion headquarters, in whose park there are, what else, more tennis courts and everything else, including one of the nicest children’s playgrounds.
Charlie-Hebdo’s offices, in a plain fairly newfangled building on the Rue Serpollet, were bombed two or three years ago, something about making fun of Islam or its prophet. The paper moved to offices nearby, toward the Place de la République. Nearby may be stretch if you do not like to walk. If you do not mind, it is near enough, you stay on the long Rue du Chemin Vert and find Boulevard Richard-Lenoir and work your way through little streets until you find the Rue Nicolas-Appert, which is hardly more than a block, and this seems to matter now because the killers were, we learned, not sure where they were. But they found it. The guess would be that someone else had cased the place, because they went to the wrong office first. The editors were next door. These were the men they were looking for, who had insulted their prophet and thereby merited death. The killers, the police think, are French, French-born anyway. The Republic accepted them. They did not accept the Republic. They are Muslims.
Most Parisians do not know the Rue Serpollet, a little street ending in a dead-end on the city line, a quiet little street, felt more like being in a provincial town than the capital of France. You can walk around, smell the fresh baked bread early in the morning, stop in a café and stand at the bar for an espresse and a shot of brandy, think about how swell it is here, this quiet neighborhood in this swell city.
You know it because you play tennis on the public courts nearby, they are not bad courts, trees and foliage around them. You prefer the ones down the street at the Stade Leo Lagrange, named for a Socialist leader of the last century who encouraged sports, physical education, colonies de vacances, subsidized vacation camps for kids from such neighborhoods. Natalia, my little friend from Lodz, used to meet here, we paid a few euros, hit for a few hours. There are few places more peaceful than the east side of the city, guarded by the old fort at Vincennes, Foreign Legion headquarters, in whose park there are, what else, more tennis courts and everything else, including one of the nicest children’s playgrounds.
Charlie-Hebdo’s offices, in a plain fairly newfangled building on the Rue Serpollet, were bombed two or three years ago, something about making fun of Islam or its prophet. The paper moved to offices nearby, toward the Place de la République. Nearby may be stretch if you do not like to walk. If you do not mind, it is near enough, you stay on the long Rue du Chemin Vert and find Boulevard Richard-Lenoir and work your way through little streets until you find the Rue Nicolas-Appert, which is hardly more than a block, and this seems to matter now because the killers were, we learned, not sure where they were. But they found it. The guess would be that someone else had cased the place, because they went to the wrong office first. The editors were next door. These were the men they were looking for, who had insulted their prophet and thereby merited death. The killers, the police think, are French, French-born anyway. The Republic accepted them. They did not accept the Republic. They are Muslims.
Rest here.
