How to smile your way through the Parisian transit strike: Citymapper

Executive summary: there’s an app called Citymapper available on the iPhone and Android that does an excellent job of staying on top of metro, train, and bus line operating hours.  Want to know about (1) linguistic trivia associated with strikes in French, and (2) public attitudes about the current action sociale?  Read on.

One of the things that I find very striking about Paris is that although the building located at any particular spot might change, the function carried out there can remain constant over centuries.  Millennia, even.  For example: the spot where Notre Dame de Paris is located has been a place of worship since the Druids were there.  The Palais de justice was the residence of the Roman administrator, and then the palace of the early French kings, before becoming the center of the French court system.  And, most relevant to today’s ravings: the location of the Parisian City Hall has been where the city was run out of for as long as Paris has been run by its bourgeois.

City Hall–in French, L’Hôtel de ville–is located on the Right Bank of Paris.  Although the Right Bank is very much the seat of Parisian power today, it started as mostly swampland.  (That fact figures into how the city was taken by the Romans–a story for another time.)  The expansion of Paris from the Left Bank to the Right in the early Middle Ages started with the area where the Hôtel de Ville is located today.  It was an early area of business, and the riverbank–la grève–in front of its current location was a gathering spot for laborers looking for work.  As the story goes (and I’m sorry that I can’t give you a citation for this, but I think that I ran across it in Metronome), over time the word for the place where laborers gathered became associated with strikes by laborers.

There’s some documentary evidence for this association.  Let’s work our way backward.  The Internet has given us Trump, revenge porn, and catfishing; in recompense, it has also given us free on-line versions of a number of historical French dictionaries.  Les-voilà.  Starting with the 8th edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, published 1932-1935, we have the following.  The first sentence is A level, flat surface covered with gravel or sand, going along the edge of a sea or a large river:

Continuing back in time to the 18th century, we have this from Jean-François Féraud’s Dictionnaire critique de la langue française, published 1787-1788.  It contains the definition level and sandy beach:

Finally, going back to Jean Nicot’s Thresor de la langue française, published in 1606, we have the following, which includes words that I believe to mean “gravel, sand” (gravier and arena):

If you haven’t been reading the news from France lately: public transport workers in and around Paris have been on strike for the past six weeks.  A public transport strike in these parts does not mean a complete cessation, but rather a diminution, of service.  A given metro line might be operating at half capacity, or maybe only 1 out of 3 trains on the line are running; those services might be only available during the morning and evening rush hours (en heures de pointe), or just in the evening.  Trains are packed to bursting, electric scooter rentals are maxed out; Uber is running, but the automotive traffic is so heavy that a 30-minute ride can easily take an hour.  As I write this in mid-January of 2020, the exceptionally convenient low-cost mobility that is such a delight of normal life in the City of Light is only a fond memory.

Are Parisians frustrated by the disruptions caused by the strike?  Of course.  Are they complaining about it a lot?  Not really.  Here are typical comments from my friends about the motivation for the strikes–a proposed reorganization of the admittedly convoluted French retirement system:

1. The reforms won’t hurt me, personally–but, I’m worried for my child.
2. The transportation workers are striking for all of us.
3. The strike has to screw up Paris, or it won’t have any effect.

The comments reflect some underlying widespread French attitudes about their famous work stoppages: (1) Everybody has to earn a living, and (2) Your strike may be screwing up my life today, but my strike will be screwing up yours tomorrow.  So: in general, people are pretty tolerant of this kind of thing.

…and with that, I’m off to check Citymapper to find the best way to get to the Musée de la paléontology et de l’anatomie comparée—one of the three best museums in the world, in my humble but reasonably informed opinion.

The picture of an écartèlement (“drawing and quartering” in English) at the top of this page is of a bas relief from northeastern Spain. I found it at https://fr.vikidia.org/wiki/%C3%89cart%C3%A8lement.

Conflict of interest statement: I don’t have any.  Citymapper does not pay me, nor do they offer me free services.