The writing’s on the wall

It’s not clear, at least to me, why there is so much more graffiti in France than there is in the UK. By this, I mean not only the ‘street art’ – murals and other forms of building decoration – that is condoned, and even encouraged, to a much greater extent by the authorities here, but also basic tagging and slogan writing. Poitiers has always had its fair share of this, but in the past month, well, to quote Harold Shand, the Bob Hoskins character in The Long Good Friday, ‘Now there’s been an eruption.’

I came out of our house the other morning to see this on the wall of our neighbour Nicole:

It’s a call for Jean-Michel Blanquer, the current Minister of Education, to resign. M. Blanquer is the target of quite a lot of the current outbreak. I saw Nicole later in the day, and when I commiserated, she just shrugged and smiled. It’s the second time in a couple of months that she’s been done, probably because her patch of white wall is the most inviting ‘canvas’ in the street. With luck it will be gone in a week or so.

The more acceptable form of street art: Voie André Malraux

In Poitiers, more than 2,000 tags were deleted in 2020, and according to Benoît Texereau, responsible for urban cleaning in the city, 600 have already been removed since January, more than half of them in the city centre. The city allocates €100,000 each year to tagging removal, and two men, Yohan Prior and Christophe Giraudon, are employed full-time on the task. They have been working together for fifteen years and have become good friends.

The statistics include only painted tags removed and do not take stickers and fly-posters into account. On average, between five and twenty tags are removed every day. According to Yohan, ‘We erased nearly 245 tags between mid-March and mid-April. It’s a mixture of feminist tags and tags against the government.’ Removing each one ‘can take between 30 seconds and 3 hours, depending on the size of the tag and the fragility of the building’s construction material’. One worrying development is that, during the previous lockdown, the taggers hardly damaged the walls, if at all. ‘Now that doesn’t bother them anymore.’ Yohan and Christophe have recently been equipped with a new machine, a hydrogommeuse, specifically to deal with more fragile surfaces.

M. Texereau says that, while all graffiti will be removed, the ‘prettier’ ones are left till last. The priority is to remove racist tags and other offensive ones that target individuals and communities as quickly as possible. Christophe explains the process: ‘We mask them very quickly with white Meudon [a primer] and then come back to erase them in the following couple of days.’ I’ve seen this in action, and their success rate is quite impressive. However, they appear to have missed the one around the corner from us, which accuses the current Minister of the Interior of being a rapist. It’s been there for over two weeks.

Posting graffiti can incur heavy fines, ranging from €1,500 to €7,500. The way the content of a specific item is worded may also constitute a separate offence in itself. The council provide the police with a regularly updated map of the tags. They occasionally catch the perpetrators in action, but the odds are against them. The current curfew means that, for long periods, the streets are empty of pedestrians, potential witnesses who might act as a deterrent.

Finally, one odd fact. According to Yohan, the feminists tend to tag early in the morning, while other groups do it at night. Suggestions for why this might be are welcome.