Bikes and Barricades February 19, 2009

I hitched a ride from Munich to visit my friend Clark in Lyon. So I sat for nine hours in the back of a Volkswagen Golf on what must have been one of the hottest days of the year. My driver had been raving about the galleries of Lyon and Dijon, the other passenger, a seventeen-year-old chain-smoking French girl had been nodding in agreement. Not sure what to expect when I got there and not wanting to get booted out of the car, only to be stuck in a service station near Stuttgart, I agreed that I must see the Cathedral and everything else. I didn’t tell them that I wasn’t really going to see any cultural monuments, so to speak. At least not old ones. I stepped out of the smokey sauna at the metro station Clark had told me about.

After one very expensive phone call (thank you Vodafone!) Clark said he would come to meet me. In the meantime, I tried to figure out what it meant to be in France. I had never left the confines of Paris and was not sure what to expect. Lyon certainly felt more cosmopolitan than Paris, it was clear that they hadn’t managed to completely separate and isolate the immigrant population, which is definitely to their credit. Lost in these thoughts, I didn’t hear my name being yelled from across the road. I hadn’t seen Clark since the end of high school and was not sure what to expect and it certainly was not a beard and a dreadlock mullet, although the dirty shirt and cut-off shorts were not a surprise.

With my oversized backpack I jumped on the rickety tandem bike and we set of towards to his home of eight months, the bicycle squat Le Boulon. (This is the French word for nut and bolt.) Having only spoken through myspace messages I wasn’t at all that sure what the hell Clark was doing here or where we were going. Speaking in our loud American accents we rode through the wide boulevards. “So you’re still studying?”, he asked. “Yes, it’s a bit shit, but almost done. How about you? Are you on an exchange?” I replied naively. “No. I decided to fuck college and then ended up moving to France.” Fair enough. 

Soon we arrived at his home. He pressed a bell. There was a sound of metal screeching against concrete on the other side, and the heavy steel battle gates opened. Pushing the bike through the dark entrance tunnel and into the courtyard I was struck by the enormous space. Three buildings around a garden and outdoor kitchen. There were young people everywhere sitting around, equally dirty and somewhat menacing. The atmosphere seemed a bit like the day after Glastonbury finishes, but slightly cleaner.

Shuffling through piles of bikes and beat up furniture towards the workshop Clark turned to me and said, “I forgot to tell you, we are being evicted on Monday. I guess I didn’t really think that one through!” It was Friday, I was supposed to stay for two weeks. Great!

All the rubbish strewn around me hadn’t really registered. It was as though an abundance of steel bars and metal grilles were normal to have lying around anyone’s house. However, with this new information, it became clear that Le Boulon was in the middle of preparing for battle. There were a fair few jobs to be done. Barricade the windows. Barricade the stairs. Barricade the doors. Make ladders. Move everything valuable out. Get drunk. Redaub the Che Guevara mural. It was clear that the Cathedral and galleries that I had been told about would have to wait for another trip. I was there to work. So I chose the least militant job: move stuff.

Squats are labelled by who inhabits them and what they do. In Lyon there were several. There was a squat for people who liked dogs, one for vegans, one for transvestites, ones for anarchists, communists, Romanians, artists, and bike kids. Like rival sports teams they competed with one another and socialized together. It was a race to get the food from the dumpsters before the other squats. For socializing they held shows where everyone turned up to see the same punk bands.

Le Boulon was the bike squat, and had a massive repair and custom workshop which was open for free to the public. (They also stole all the bags of clothes from outside the neighbouring Salvation Army and had a massive free pile, from which I got a very nice Ralph Lauren jumper.) But as the place was being shut down, the whole thing was to be moved to Lyon’s uber-art squat: La Frische. This was a giant disused factory that had been converted into over three hundred workshops for artists, sculptors, musicians, drama groups, musicians, and bike workshops, apparently. All sorts were there, squatters and legitimate citizens with new cars.

The bike shop specialized in building customized bikes. One of the models was a cargo trike. These had huge bays on the front and trailers attached to the back. Hundreds of kilos could be loaded onto them and then easily, or maybe not so easily, pedalled some distance.  And so for the next few days, that is just what I did, joined conveys of cargo trikes going back and forth between the two squats.

By the Sunday evening, the night before the battle was to commence, Clark and I felt more like chatting with a bottle of wine than welding the windows shut. Not much interested in any of the political views being espoused (there is a reason I dropped politics from my degree!) my friend and avoided doing any revolution related work by sitting on the massive roof terrace overlooking the street.  Some of our more zealous comrades had managed to fill it with around fifty shopping carts, a few fridges and some mattresses, as though the police might not have skill to climb over such things, so the only way to get onto the roof was through a tiny window. I could not help but think that this was wonderfully in the spirit of Les Miserable and awaited a torch lit chorus to spring up any moment. Unfortunately our suggestion that a French flag might be draped ironically over the entrance was not met with any enthusiasm.

Despite our attempt to hide, we were spotted. More specifically our bottle of wine was spotted. Like vultures three descended upon us. Over the monoprix barricade appeared the cute French Canadian girl - “Salut” - and then a bunch of words. She figured out I didn’t speak French and proceeded in her broken English, whilst drinking our wine. After a few pleasantries we began to speak about the task at hand. “You haven’t been evicted before?” she asked me, as though my never having been dragged out of a squat at gunpoint by Gendarmes in bullet-proof vests at four in the morning was freakishly unusual. “No”, I replied, “to be honest, I’m not sure why the hell any of you are doing all of this anyway”, I paused. “Surely the police will make it in if they want to?” She didn’t like my answer, it definitely wasn’t the coolest thing I could have said. Probably if I had made anything up about being tear gassed in Greece last spring she would have had me on the roof, right there. But as it was she couldn’t take it. Taking one last gulp, she and her friends disappeared from where they came. Damn! It could have gone so well. It was not meant to be. I didn’t see eye to eye with these anarchist kids, literally, they avoided any eye contact with me. But maybe it was just because after that I didn’t display my wine quite so openly.

That Sunday night was somewhere between the last days of Rome and the night before the bad guys attack in the second Lord of the Rings, where they are in that big mountain. Everyone was drinking and doing manically stupid tasks, like making matching masks out of pink taffeta, and having tactical meetings that involved sitting in a big circle and whispering. Clark and I decided it wasn’t really worth sticking around and got the hell out of there by sleeping at his generous civilian girlfriend’s house.

French police are really smart. They didn’t come on Monday morning when everyone was up for a fight. This kind of ruined the mood. They didn’t come on Tuesday either. Or Wednesday. In fact not until a week after I left. By that time all the barricades had made the entire squat completely uninhabitable, and the majority of the squatters had left.