“PURIFYING” PARIS

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 April 1928, Page 9

“PURIFYING” PARIS

A NIGHTLY ROUND UP. Every night in Paris there is what is called a police “rafle,” a rounding-up on the .boulevards or in cafes or elsewhere of everyone without distinction writes the Paris correspondent of the Manchester Guardian). “Papers” are roughly demanded, and those that cannot produce them are likely to be hauled off to the police station and kept there for hours under conditions that are far from pleasant. On each occasion thousands are accosted, scores hauled off, and perhaps, when the sifting has been completed, a few rogues and vagabonds retained. Last night in a minor raid in an outlying quarter over a thousand were held up and a handful arrested. The process is called the “purifying” of Paris, and it must be admitted, in justification of the Prefect of Police, that need for it was becoming urgent. Already it is having its effect. Montparnasse by night has become almost respectable, cerainly dull in the exilreme to those who come to Paris in search of the “gay life.” But the process is a rough one that would not be tolerable in a country where the police have not almost unlimited powers. Now that the tourist season is about to open visitors to Paris should be earnestly warned never to leave their hotel without their passport. Innocent English visitors, as a recent case showed, have no remedy; nor need they count on diplomatic support if they should suffer the humiliation and misery of being detained all night. There is another danger, that known jocularly as the “Passage a Tabac” — in plain English, the brutal beating by the police of people taken to the police station. This is only too common a practice, and it is one of the wonders of French life to the foreigner not only that the thing is allowed but that it is treated only too often by the press as a joke.

The Paris “Midi” relates a case in its daily frivolous column, illustrating it. with a comic pen-drawing of two officers beating and kicking an unresisting man of middle atge. The victim is a well-known Dutch painter. Van Ilervaenen. He was, though quite innocent of anything, arrested in a raid in Montparnasse the other day and taken to the station.

“My name is Van Hervaenen,” he. declared haughtily, thinkng that, to givo his name would bring his release with apologies. Instead of that he was there and then subjected to the “Passage a Tabac,” and with such vigour that he is menaced with the loss of an eye. He has gone back to his own country, shaking the last, of France from his shoes at the frontier.