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On the corner of the Boulevard St Germain and the Rue St Benoit, in the heart of Paris' Left Bank and just a few metres from where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir sipped their cafe cremes, a 56-year-old newspaper seller is preparing to go down fighting.
"I
am just about hanging on by my fingernails," said Jackie Hubert, who has sold Le Monde, Le Figaro and Liberation from his street-corner stand for more than 20 years.
"I am one of the few who are still resisting. I don't intend giving up yet."
The struggle is to keep the Left Bank, once the cultural powerhouse of the French capital where Juliette Greco sang, Miles Davis played and Michel Foucault philosophised, from becoming an enclave of designer boutiques and clothes shops.
Now Hubert and La Resistance de la Rive Gauche, as they have been dubbed, have a new ally: the town hall, which has just launched a £20 million ($53.4 million) plan to save the area's booksellers, arthouse cinemas and independent galleries by buying up properties to stop them being converted into yet more fashion stores.
The plan has been attacked by critics as against the laws of the free market, and defended as the only way of reining in the demands of voracious capitalism, mass tourism and, perhaps the greatest Gallic bogeyman of all, globalisation.
Deputy mayor Lyne Cohen-Solal decided to act after a famous bookshop just outside the Sorbonne university was replaced by a cheap clothes shop.
"All the cities all over Europe are starting to look the same. London, Berlin, they're going to have the same streets with the same shops," Cohen-Solal said.
"If we don't intervene ... we are going to have only textile shops and fast food. We don't want this kind of future for our city."
The Left Bank scheme is specifically focused on bookshops and the small independent art galleries that the town hall believes give the area its specific charm.
By owning properties or leases on shops, the town hall can decide their future use.
At the Visions bookshop - 45m and nine clothes boutiques away from Jackie Hubert's newspaper stand and the famous Cafe Flore - the measure was welcomed last week. "It is getting harder and harder,' said Pauline Perrier, the daughter of the owner, as she watched tourists pass the shop's displays of high-quality art books without stopping.
"The clientele has changed a lot. There's still some of the old culture left, but the rents have gone through the roof, so only the big designer brands can afford them."
Local representatives and community associations were recently defeated in a similar battle to keep major international retailers away from Paris' Champs Elysees.
The "most beautiful avenue in the world" is now dominated by luxury goods brands or universally known chain stores. One survey in a French newspaper last week showed that "luxury shopping" topped culture as an attraction in the city.
Yet in much of Paris the resistance continues. In the eastern 11th arrondissement, the local town hall has declared war on the encroaching Chinese clothing wholesalers.
More than 500 such dealers have bought groundfloor shops over the past decade, so locals now have trouble finding a local baker, butcher or cafe - "the essentials of life", according to one official, who blamed "property speculation, the new tendency to shop in supermarkets and ... globalisation".
The conflict has a strong ideological element. Paris' city hall and much of the east and north of the city are run by Socialist politicians who loathe the neo-liberal economic rhetoric of President Nicolas Sarkozy.
The new Government recently moved to block the repurchase schemes, with one official telling reporters it was time Paris "welcomed in the spirit of the 21st century".
"If the bookshops are closing down, it's because they have fewer customers," said Michel Lalande, at the prefecture of Paris. Others question exactly who benefits from the expensive schemes.
"I don't actually see why small expensive art galleries need to be protected for the good of the city's population," said Alain Lartigue, a waiter who works in St Germain des Pres.
Whatever the measures taken by the town hall, they are unlikely to satisfy Hubert.
Indicating the Louis Vuitton store to the left, Dior in front and Giorgio Armani to the right, he shook his head.
"I can't say I am optimistic," he said. "There's too much cash at stake. The end is inevitable."
Observer
