French leaders blame ‘smear campaign’ over claims Paris is filthy

FILES-FRANCE-HEALTH-VIRUS-LOCKDOWN
The Arc De Triomphe without any rubbish in sight
AFP via Getty Images
John Dunne @jhdunne6 April 2021

Paris officials have described a string of photos that were posted on social media showing dirty streets and blaming the city’s socialist leadership for the mess a “travesty of reality”.

The hashtag “saccageParis” meaning trashed Paris went viral over Easter, with many of the messages accusing the city’s socialist leadership of ruining the capital.

They complained of uncollected rubbish, damaged pavements and graffiti while posting hundreds of images apparently showing the city to be in a mess.

In tweets and online messaging some Parisians have attacked Mayor Anne Hidalgo with some likening the city to a “shanty town”.

Among the thousands of tweets, Cyrille Capuano said that for years Paris had not lived up to its reputation as the city of light, and he accused Mayor Anne Hidalgo of turning it into a “public dump”.

However, the social media campaign was a “travesty of reality” deputy mayor Emmanuel Grégoire said as he hit back at the stinging attack. The social media campaign has been called a “political smear campaign”.

Paris was densely populated and cleaners were doing all they could, Mr Grégoire told RTL Radio, but he said the French capital was no different from London, whose mayor Sadiq Khan faced exactly the same issues.

“If you take a picture every day of the worst moment of your daily life that isn’t reality. You have to draw a distinction between occasional issues of cleanliness and the slant of political protest,” Mr Grégoire said.

French Far right leader Marine le Pen is among those who have weighed into the row. She shared the hashtag “saccage Paris” and said it “breaks the hearts of lovers of Paris.”

One twitter user posted a picture of a mattress, dozens of cardboard boxes and and plastic backs strewn across a Paris street.

They tweeted: “City that turns into a dump because of the decisions of the town halls but also because a lot of people are big pigs who don’t give a damn about the state of their streets.”

An anonymous twitter user started the hashtag at the weekend after accusing the Mayor of ‘abandonment’ of the city.

They added later: “By launching Saccage Paris, I did not think it would take this magnitude.”

The user challenged the Mayor to come up with solutions to the mess.

Officials said the number of city cleaning staff had been cut by ten per cent because of covid which “may lead to processing delays.”

They added: “Like all cities in France, Paris is faced with incivility and problems of regulating public space.”

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in