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- Sylvain Maillard
Photo : Lionel Barbe (CC BY-SA 4.0) - See the image in its page
Since her election in 2014, Anne Hidalgo and her team have been ravaging Paris. We have devoted countless articles to the state of this city, its heritage, its urban planning and its roads. We have even written a book on the subject La Disparition de Paris.
Having reached the halfway point of her term and with the next municipal elections three years away, what is the outlook? They are bleaker than ever. Emmanuel Macron’s government has never or almost never opposed this policy, which in many places concerns historic monuments, the surroundings of historic monuments, listed remarkable heritage sectors (there are only two in Paris!) or listed sites. This is hardly surprising: Emmanuel Macron is complicit in this policy, which actually suits him very well, so much so that he wants to be a champion of deregulation, and so much so that his indifference to heritage is notorious.
We have had proof of this, in recent months, through information coming from both the Ministry of Culture and the DRAC Île-de-France. We cannot, of course, give our sources, but they are "reliable", as we usually say. And they all point in the same direction: the prefecture of Île-de-France, which actually supervises the DRAC (Direction régionale des affaires culturelles, representative of the Ministry of Culture in the regions, puts real pressure on the Architectes des Bâtiments de France so as not to interfere too much with the projects of the city. And they have to deal with the municipality’s countless destructive projects, because in the event of a conflict they know that they will not be followed in many cases.
As for the successive Ministers of Culture, they have instructions, unwritten of course, but which their senior officials know perfectly well, to avoid any direct battle with the Mayor of Paris.
If there was any doubt about this, proof can be found in the interview Sylvain Maillard has just given to the Parisien. He is a deputy and vice-president of the Renaissance group in the National Assembly and has just been elected head of the departmental office of Renaissance, the presidential majority. He is therefore now well placed to become the official candidate of the presidential party for mayor of Paris, especially since he is in charge of "constructing a project that takes Parisians along" (sic). One can read the following sentence:
"We will not reinvent this city by planting a tree here or another there, but by adapting its architecture to climate change while preserving its beauty. The opinion of the Architectes des Bâtiments de France should be purely advisory to avoid blocking our projects. The decision must be made by politicians".
Yes, you read that correctly. Adopting the rhetoric of the team currently in place at City Hall, he wants to "reinvent Paris". He also wants to "adapt its architecture to climate change", but be careful "to preserve its beauty". A bit like Emmanuel Grégoire wanted to do in his "Manifesto for the beauty of Paris", on which we finally published only one article because we were so sure that it was a hoax. And we were right: none of the commitments made in this document were kept.
But Sylvain Maillard goes even further, and in this we recognise the obsession of certain elected officials to remove the little power that still remains to the Architectes des Bâtiments de France (ABF), after the measures taken in particular by his political party to limit their interventions, for example in the loi Elan. The putative candidate for mayor of Paris does not bother with circumlocutions: for him, the assent of the ABF must be totally abolished. Politicians must have a free hand without these obstacles to vandalism coming to bother them, even if only a little (and in Paris it is really very little). For him, the opinion of the ABF must therefore be purely "advisory". Even Anne Hidalgo never dared to ask for this.
To go further in the disappearance of Paris than the current municipality, this is the project that Sylvain Maillard promises us, thinking that he will "lead the Parisians" and no doubt believing that those who oppose the first one will give him a standing ovation. He is not even officially a candidate yet and we already don’t want him. Paris is definitely a cursed city.