Under the elevated tracks of Paris Métro Line 2, between Stalingrad, Jaurès and La Chapelle in the city's northeast, tents appear, are cleared, and appear again. In October 2026 the cycle turned twice in a single week. On October 8, a joint operation by City Hall and the state cleared a camp beneath the line and placed about 140 people in shelters. On October 14, a larger sweep under the same viaduct moved 333 people into reception centers, according to the mayor's office and the prefectures.
Officials call these operations mises à l'abri, "sheltering." Aid groups call them something else.
Who Sleeps Under the Viaduct
The people living along Line 2 are overwhelmingly asylum seekers and migrants without stable housing. Many are young men from Sudan, Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal and other African countries, alongside Afghans and others fleeing war and repression. Some have pending asylum claims; others have been refused and have nowhere to go. Most arrived in Paris after crossing the Mediterranean and moving north through Italy.
For Black Africans in particular, the camps are the sharpest edge of a broader story we have followed this autumn: who France counts as belonging, and who it keeps at the margins.
"Sheltering" or "Social Cleansing"?
Paris mayor Emmanuel Grégoire defended the October 14 operation. "We owe it to the people living on the street as much as to the residents," he said, adding that the city could no longer accept people "sleeping on the street, in undignified conditions, without offering them a solution."
The aid group Utopia 56, which works daily with people in the camps, called the sweeps "social cleansing." Advocates say the pattern is familiar: a dawn operation, buses to temporary shelters, often outside Paris, and stays that end within weeks. Those who are refused or who leave the shelters drift back to the city, and a new camp forms a few hundred yards away. The October 14 operation, 20 Minutes reported, was itself a continuation of the clearance at Jaurès the week before.
A Cycle Measured in Years
None of this is new. Paris has cleared camps at La Chapelle, Porte de la Villette, Saint-Denis and along the canals for nearly a decade, often dozens of times a year. Each sweep removes tents from public view. None has solved the shortage of asylum housing that produces them. In August 2026 the city said it moved 253 people into shelters after clearing a camp that had held as many as 450.
The repetition reveals the policy's real goal. Clearing a camp is visible and fast; housing people, processing claims fairly and giving them the right to work are slow and politically costly, especially with the far right leading polls ahead of the 2027 election.
Why It Matters
The same week Paris cleared the viaduct, a gunman in Trappes opened fire in what prosecutors are investigating as a racially motivated terror attack. The two stories are different, but they share a climate in which Black and immigrant lives are treated as a problem to be managed rather than as people to be protected. That is the question at the center of Whose France?: whether the republic's promise of equality reaches the people sleeping beneath its trains.
Related Reading on HistorianSpeaks
Ask the Historian
Have a question about this story, or an idea for a future post? Send it here.