Back home every fall, birds migrate and come home in the spring. They leave because they can’t stand the harsh circumstances of winter and would much rather have better conditions somewhere else. They come back home when they can when the weather is better and life continues. It’s a natural and understandable part of nature, because who really would want to stay in a place that’s not hospitable?
Not to say that humans are birds and that birds are humans but why is it that when a person wants to leave an inhospitable place, other people aren’t as understanding? We stand in different lands but the skin and bones and blood and lineage connect us all. Yet when it comes down to it, the differences are “we”, the ones that are far away from “them”, often choose not to help, talk or even worse, look down upon. Migrating to a new country as a part of the “we” is cool and fun and worthy of a new opportunity but when “they” come, our politicians and public opinion regard it as an annoyance or stealing our social services and taxes. Yes, many people choose to migrate and freely do so but some people don’t have it as a choice. At what point do “they” become “we”. At what point does migration for humans have the same natural view as the migration for birds? Realistically, at what point do the impacts and urbanization of “we” stop using “them” to be better? Realistically at what point do we put a stop to what’s happening to “them” so that one day they can go home and have a better opportunity? Why is not wanting to stay in a harsh environment not understood by humans but it’s understood by birds? The biggest difference is that birds don’t seek refuge when they migrate, but instead get to go back home when their environment is better. Imagine if birds stayed south and never came back north, one land would be full while the other is sparse. Well, “their” environment doesn’t truly ever get better, that’s when “they” become we and we all sit together, one land with all of us and one land with no one left. Look I’m not saying that all migrants should go back to where they came from but I among many as children of migrants and refugees would love to go back to our parents’ home, our ancestral home. Unlike birds, migration doesn’t mean having the ability to go back home once a harsh environment is gone. Sometimes it never goes away. Let’s be honest here, migration is a word that has multiple definitions depending on the circumstance but why is it that depending on where or what you are, we unfairly judge the reasons behind it? This many questions make me want to go home, wherever home may be.
“It has been said by many Christians that Christianity died at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobidor. I fear – God forbid – that my Judaism may be dying at Nablus, Dheisheh, Betein or El Khalil.” -Daniel Boyarin-
Antisemitism is the prejudice against or hatred of Jews. To this definition, the Southern Poverty Law Centre adds that antisemitism seeks to racialize the Jewish people, to ascribe certain characteristics to it as a whole. Zionism is a nationalist political ideology in favour of the creation of a Jewish state, Israel. It is now in support of that state’s continued existence.
An important aspect of Zionism is that the United Nations and many other organisations consider Israel to be engaged in settler colonialism, the practice of “carving out” a new homeland in a previously inhabited land, thereby creating what genocide scholar Patrick Wolfe calls: “a logic of elimination”. What he means by this is the need to develop a moral and practical justification for the removal of the native population, paving the way for “ethnic cleansing, genocide, and other tools of ethnocide.” Criticism of Israel and Zionism in general is thus not antisemitic whatsoever, disavowing the actions of a state does not take aim at an entire religious group, and it would certainly be antisemitic to conflate the two.
The origins of Zionism
The vision of a Jewish state in Palestine predates the 20th and even the 19th century. Indeed, in 1799, during his Egyptian campaign, Napoleon Bonaparte proposed Palestine as an independent Jewish state. While this project never came into fruition as Napoleon was defeated and returned to France, it was the first time Palestine was proposed to be a Jewish homeland. After this, around a century passed before the first Zionist Congress was held. As part of it, the first Zionist organisation was founded, with the objective of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. In 1917, as an Ottoman defeat in World War I seemed inevitable, and the Middle East had been secretly partitioned between France and the United Kingdom, then British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued the now infamous “Balfour Declaration”, promising British support to the Zionist endeavour. Lloyd George, British Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922 was also a strong supporter of the Zionist cause, and a friend to both Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, and Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel. Another fervent Zionist was Winston Churchill, in whose view, Zionism provided Jews “a national idea of a commanding character”.
An apparent paradox, both Arthur Balfour and Churchill were staunch antisemites. In 1905 when he was Prime Minister, Balfour called for the rejection of Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in the Russian Empire, claiming Jewish immigration to bring “undoubted evils”. Churchill’s antisemitism was even more pronounced, as he claimed Jews to engage in a “worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation” in 1920. Furthermore, it was Churchill, not the Nazis who started the antisemitic conspiracy theory of “Judeo-Bolshevism”, claiming communism to be a global Jewish plot to take over the world. Lloyd George was not so explicitly antisemitic, nevertheless he was the first of many who saw Jews as an instrument to be used to further Western interests, more on this later.
This apparent contradiction begs the question of why these fundamentally antisemitic politicians would support a Jewish state in Palestine. For Balfour, the Zionist project was a convenient answer to the “Jewish Question”, the debate in the ostensibly liberal countries of Europe dealing with the status of Jews as a minority within society. Youssef Munayyer phrases it nicely: “instead of insisting that societies accept all citizens as equals, regardless of racial or religious background, the Zionist movement offered a different answer: separation.” For Churchill, the “international Jew” was plotting to overthrow the West in line with his “Judeo-Bolshevist” conspiracy theory, and Israel would, as beforementioned, provide a national idea, which would in his opinion stop him from trying to overthrow civilisation. Lloyd George took a more pragmatic approach, avoiding the blatant antisemitism of Balfour and Churchill. In his 1939 memoir, he talks about the “war value of the Jews of the dispersal”, referring to the German mobilisation of Jews in Poland against the Russian empire during World War I. George goes on to explain that it was this “war value of the Jews” which led him to develop an interest in Weizmann. His statement is reminiscent of Joe Biden, who proclaimed in 1986 that “were there not an Israel, the USA would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region”.
We thus observe three of the most instrumental people to the Zionist effort to be motivated not by a noble effort to provide a safe haven for Jews, but by a will to rid England of Jewish people, by a strange vision of the Jew as harbinger of destruction and chaos (and a consequent need to get rid of him), and by an impetus to use Jewish people, in this case as a colonial outpost in the Middle East. In its initial phase, Zionism was opposed by both liberal and orthodox Jewish organisations in Europe, who feared that “Jewish nationalism might endanger integration into non-Jewish society and give new momentum to anti-Semitism”. Karl Kraus, a renowned Austrian Jewish journalist and writer, said in 1898: “The militant Zionists in particular succeeded in convincing Christians who had previously had no taste for anti-semitism of the sanctity of the idea of separation”.
Israel, land of the (white) Jews
According to the Israeli Basic Law passed in 2018, “The State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious, and historical right to self-determination”. The United Nations say that self-determination must involve “the rights of all peoples to pursue freely their economic, social and cultural development without outside interference”. These statements are hard to reconcile with the current status quo in Israel. There exists not only apartheid between Arabs and non-Arabs, but also a de facto racial hierarchy within the non-Arab, Jewish population of Israel.
The most flagrant example of this are the “Beta Israel”, Ethiopian Jews who were airlifted to Israel from Ethiopia after the massive operations “Moses” and “Solomon”. Around 160’000 of them live in Israel, the biggest population in the world. Hanan Chehata writes about the hatred they face in their daily lives: they are massively discriminated against in nearly all aspects of life, such as housing, employment, education, the army, and even in the practice of their religion. According to a study, 53 percent of employers preferred not to employ “Falashas” (a derogatory term for Ethiopian Jews), and 70 percent of them tended not to promote them. Out of 4’500 Ethiopians who graduate with degrees, only around 15 percent find work in their field of study. Additionally, some areas have policies of not selling housing to non-white Jewish people. “Anyone can come, but not Ethiopians”, says the owner of a building in Ashkelon. There have also been multiple instances of the country’s chief Rabbis calling black people the N-word and monkeys (imagine the pope screaming the N-word from his Vatican balcony), Benjamin Netanyahu also referred to black African immigrants as “much worse” than “severe attacks by Sinai terrorists”. White Israelis have murdered black refugees and even babies, without facing imprisonment. Finally, in a fashion typical for colonialism all over the world (Puerto Rico, Greenland, etc.), Israel forcibly sterilised Ethiopian Jewish women, a policy generally aimed at keeping specific communities from growing.
This certainly is not the only instance of Israel harming Jewish people of colour. In the 1950s, up to 5,000 Yemenite Jewish babies disappeared from their hospital beds, their mothers were told they had died, or were not informed at all, according to the lowest estimates, one in eight Yemeni Jewish babies in Israel disappeared. Soon after it was alleged that the babies were kidnapped by the Israeli state and put up for adoption or just sold to childless European Jews. Israel always denied any involvement in this matter, until 2016, when cabinet minister Tzachi Hanegbi, the senior official in charge of reviewing archival material on the matter, admitted that Yemenite babies were indeed taken from their families. In 2021, a report from the Israeli health ministry detailed its involvement in the disappearance, admitting it had helped put the babies up for adoption. Since then, the ministry has tried to prevent the public release of its report. A Knesset Committee has also admitted that medical experiments have been performed on Yemenite children, some of whom died of their consequences. In some cases, their hearts were harvested and given to American doctors who were doing research on heart disease in Yemen.
Another example of many, is the way Iraqi Jews came to Israel. Around 110,000 Jews moved from Iraq to Israel shortly after its creation, motivated by antisemitic attacks in their home countries and a promise of a better life in the new Jewish state. According to prominent Israeli-British historian Avi Shlaim, Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, carried out several attacks against Jews in Iraq, involving bombings among other things. Thus, Israel played a major part in destroying the millennia-old Jewish communities of middle eastern countries such as Iraq.
So, we can certainly say that Israel is not a country for all Jews, rather it is a place for white, European Jews. Who better to exemplify this than one of the most influent white European Jewish intellectuals of the last century, Hannah Arendt. A Jerusalem Post article details Arendt’s visit to Israel: “Describing Israel, Arendt noted that the country had at its top German judges of whom she approved as the “best of German Jewry.” Below them were prosecuting attorneys, one of whom, a Galician Jew, was “still European,” she noted. “Everything is organized by the Israeli police force which gives me the creeps. It speaks only Hebrew and looks Arabic. Some downright brutes among them. They obey any order. Outside the courthouse doors the oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country.” Israel as a colonial entity cannot and does not want to rid itself of white supremacy, people of colour will never be safe there, even if they are Jewish.
They may be antisemitic, but at least they are with us…
A third and equally relevant part of Zionist antisemitism is the movement’s alliance and cooperation with far right and antisemitic organisations ever since the movement’s inception. Even before Israel gained independence, it worked together with none other than Nazi Germany. The Haavara Agreement was a treaty between the Zionist movement in Palestine and the NSDAP, facilitating the migration of German Jews from Germany to Palestine. This was financed by the sale of the property of German Jews, the proceeds of which paid for essential (German-produced) goods. At this time, Nazi Germany was being boycotted by Jewish organisations, businesses, and other groups all over the world, posing a potential threat to the still fragile fascist state, yet the Zionists ignored this boycott and cooperated with it regardless, boosting the German economy.
In the present day, Israeli Zionists have again found strange bedfellows. Their partners and allies include leaders such as Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán, and Mateusz Morawiecki. Former Italian interior minister Salvini is very straightforward about his affinity for CasaPound, a neo-fascist political organisation, whose members he has openly worked with. Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, has publicly called Miklós Horthy, the country’s World War II leader, a “great statesman”. The Horthy government was a member of the Axis Powers and enacted antisemitic legislature leading to the deportation of around 440,000 Jews.
Morawiecki, the Polish Prime Minister actively tried to illegalise the claim that Polish people and officials collaborated in the Holocaust, a form of Holocaust revisionism: “Those who say that Poland may be responsible for the crimes of World War II deserve jail terms”. These are only a few examples of the dubious relations Israel maintains with antisemites around the world, there are too many instances to list here. This reaching out has not come without consequences. The American far-right has picked up on the amicable tone set forth by Israel and capitalises on it. Prominent American neo-Nazi and self-proclaimed “White Nationalist” Richard Spencer has called himself a “White Zionist” and has given Israel as an example of an “ethnostate” he would like to see implemented in the USA. Stephen Bannon, the former White House chief strategist under Donald Trump, who ran the far-right media-outlet Breitbart News, known for its white supremacist and conspiratorial positions and who complained about Jews in his daughter’s school, and Sebastian Gorka, a media host on the far right network Newsmax and a former Trump White House official, who is a proud supporter of the Vitézi Rend, a fascist Hungarian organisation, both consider themselves proud Zionists.
Instead of using their considerable power to act against threats on Jewish lives all over the world, Israel actively endangers them, by working with and promoting, far-right, fascist, and ethnonationalist forces. It would seem that promoting nationalism and short-term political gain is more important to Israel than to protect Jewish lives around the world.
Conclusion
The notion that Israel is a safe haven for all Jews can safely be discarded after considering all the above. While it would be absurd to claim Israel to be antisemitic in the way Nazi Germany was antisemitic, it nevertheless cannot be denied that Zionism has deeply antisemitic roots, and only ever gained the indispensable support of European powers because they saw Zionism as a way to eject their Jewish populations. Furthermore, there is no doubt that systems exist within the country that exclude and discriminate against a large number of Jews, and the Israeli state openly and proudly works together with antisemites (who are not so unlike Nazi Germany) internationally. A more logical and historically consistent perspective would be that Israel is a settler colony following a long European tradition. As such it is necessarily obsessed with creating a settler in-group, most often a racial one. In Israel’s case that is not white people, as was the case in Canada, Australia, etc., but the Jewish people. Not all Jewish people though, as we have seen. Just as South Africa had the Population Registration Act, Israel has the Law of Return. In both cases, “racial experts” decided who got to be part of the in-group, i.e. who got to be White, or Jewish. In Israel it is the orthodox Rabbis (yes, the notoriously racist ones), who decide singlehandedly who gets to be Jewish and who does not. Thus, Jewishness is cynically used to police Israeli society, the aforementioned Ethiopian Jews for example are sometimes outright refused to be Jewish.
This issue is now more relevant as ever, as dissent to Israel’s genocide in Gaza is growing in the Jewish Diaspora all around the world, and Israeli media is calling for their exclusion from the Jewish community at large. A state committing the worst crimes possible cannot possibly claim to represent a large and heterogenous group of people without generalising them, ascribing certain characteristics to them as a whole and therefore racializing them. This, next to the obvious hatred brought against non-white Jews, is what makes Israel and Zionism antisemitic.
SciencesPo. For many the dream school. The goal that got them through all the stress of high school. For others an unforgettable opportunity to come to France, to actually get to live in the country of baguettes, croissants and fine wine. For all of us a symbol of academic prestige and (hopefully) a future riddled with the relative job security of a degree from an institution like ours promises. However surface impressions aside, what has Le Havre really come to mean for its students? Is the university experience all it was promised to be?
This proved a difficult question to answer and no one homogeneous answer could be derived from the results of surveys conducted with 11 SciencesPo Le Havre students from both 1a and 2a. Though one general notion can be stated, no one regretted their decision to study here. And that seems like quite a solid foundation to start from.
Baguettes and prestige aside, the leading motivation behind the interviewed students’ choice to apply to SciencesPo was the academic layout of the degree. The variety of courses mixed with the opportunity to choose a major the second year topped off with the third year abroad seems to be without a doubt the biggest asset students identified with the school when applying. And in terms of academia that notion seems to remain in present day too, in some ways it’s as if the stellar layout of the bachelors degree manages to make up for other less stellar aspects of the school. Because even if the “doing an exchange year the last year” expectation is met (notwithstanding the unfortunate souls who completed their degree during the covid years of course), other expectations haven’t quite been met to the same degree.
One student mentioned that she was expecting a substantially higher level of infrastructure, namely a school with functioning wifi (please note that even if the wifi does work now, the memory of it not working still remains and validates this point) and more space and resources in general. Another student expressed disgruntlement over our limited library selection, especially for non-francophone speakers. A third student was disappointed over the unequal distribution of events, both academic and social, between Le Havre and Paris. Along the same line a last student mentioned that it’s a shame how limited all assos activities in Le Havre are compared to Paris. Especially in terms of cooperating with the local community.
Now all these points can absolutely be attributed to the size of the Le Havre campus, it’s only natural that resources here will be more limited than in Paris. And many students did mention that they had been prepared for and expecting the various consequences that a small campus and city entailed. Such as a limited social life and limited amount of extracurricular activities available. And for some the size of the Le Havre campus was even seen as a positive that provided a security amongst the chaos and instability that moving on your own to a new city or even country entails. The small campus means that you’ll be seen and valued in a way that might be harder to get at a big campus with a crowd of students so big everyone just becomes another face. And along those same lines several students did mention that their expectations were positively exceeded in regards to the social aspect of it with most respondents mentioning the social life on campus as being a vibrant and welcoming thing. Certain dismay regarding the clicky nature of our social scene, especially in regards to students sticking within their own national or ethnic groups were voiced by some respondents. Yet the overall opinion on the matter was that the school as a whole is a tight knit community, kind of with our own little bubble.
However the negative consequence of that bubble is that it is just that, a bubble. SciencesPo Le Havre is in many ways very isolated from the rest of the city and if praise for the third year abroad format can be seen as the one generality amongst students positive answers regarding the school, then our isolation to the rest of the city marks the consensus amongst students negative responses regarding the school. However how much fault behind that can be attributed to the school and it’s services vs to each individual student is debatable, regardless of this though the general feeling is that more integration with the local community would be nice.
Another mentioned point of what would be nice to have is more “reality preparing” activities. Several students said they were expecting an environment more focused on actually preparing the students for a life in politics or business or at least a life outside of academia, with focus on networking as well as fostering political discussions. Or at the very least with information sessions regarding future job opportunities after university, something that once again seems to be a resource reserved for Paris. That said, it’s not as if these things are non-existent on campus, and although they’re mentioned as possible points of improvement both for the school administration and the student body, they’re mentioned within an otherwise positively toned response.
In the end the respondents’ answers were surprisingly diverse and nuanced, yet if one was to derive one thing from it all it’s, once again, the fact that no one regretted their decision. A fact that shone through in the responses through the notion that although Paris gets too much attention, the academic workload sometimes feels soul-crushingly high and the quality of Le Havre as a student city seems questionable at times… The people are good, and most expectations of uni life are met at our little school, especially when it’s only two years. Finally, a quote from one of the respondents would be the best way to conclude this article: “I’m looking forward to the next year and a half but thank god it’s only one year and half” – SciencesPo Paris campus Le Havre, student, class of 2026
“A city isn’t so unlike a person. They both have the marks to show they have many stories to tell. They see many faces. They tear things down and make new again.” -Rasmenia Massoud-
This being the first article of what will hopefully be a monthly column, I want to start by explaining why I am writing and what I want to achieve by doing so. Being new in Le Havre is the one common experience shared by all students here but one. That being so, I thought it would be interesting to gain a better understanding of the city. However drab its sky may be, however crumbled its houses’ facades are, there still are little treasures to be discovered and cherished. I believe that by understanding our surroundings more, we are able to look at them in a new light and perhaps even recognise some beauty in the ordinary.
The goal of this introductory article is not to provide an in-depth presentation of everything shaping Le Havre’s identity as that would require several books. Its objective, rather, is to “paint” a superficial portrait of the city, hopefully providing interesting insight into the life of its communities and the conditions in which they live. As it goes on, this column will explore much more specific aspects of life in Le Havre by interviewing people, studying particular places in the city, such as neighbourhoods, landmarks, local institutions, and their significance to the city and its inhabitants, and more. You can think of this column as a figurative treasure hunt, with me looking for the city’s gems. Before we embark on this journey, I believe it to be necessary to take a step back and look at the city as a whole, its history and how it is faring today.
Le Havre was officially founded on the 8th of October 1517 by King François I. It was established as a military port, as a place for adventurers to depart from. One notable example of an explorer would be Giovanni da Verrazano, who left from the port in 1524 to go on to be the first European to land in New York. In the 18th century, the city shifted from being a military port to a significant commercial hub, trading colonial goods and participating in the triangular trade, with over 100,000 slaves being shipped through Le Havre. Interestingly, this detail is very much downplayed in the city’s official account of its history, only mentioning the triangular trade once and calling its role “marginal”, completely omitting slavery. During the Industrial Revolution, Le Havre experienced an economic Golden Age, fuelled by the trade in colonial goods such as cotton, coffee, and chocolate. At this time the city’s stock exchange was the second biggest in world, rivalled only by that of New York. The Second World War brought ruin, as allied bombings destroyed large parts of the city with around 20,000 houses razed to the ground. Le Havre was rebuilt after the war but failed to attain its former industrial glory. From 1956 to 1995 the city was under left-wing (Parti Communiste Français) administration, since then it has shifted to the right, with Édouard Phillipe (Horizons) being its current mayor. This shift from a social democrat to a neoliberal political regime has had striking consequences, as I will elaborate further below.
To get an idea of the wellbeing of the city, or rather that of its people, we can look at Le Havre from a statistical perspective, using data from the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE). The most striking information revealed in its “dossier complet” of the commune is an unemployment rate of 20.8% in 2020, versus only 8.6% in all of metropolitan France at the same time. Some tentative explanations for this extraordinarily high rate are offered by Anita Menendez, head of CGT Le Havre (France’s biggest labour union), and Emilie Roland-Parzysz, director of the O2 agency (elderly care). According to them, this high unemployment is to be blamed on a lack of professional training accompanied by the city’s industrial specialisation, on refining and petrochemicals for example. This combination leads to limited professional opportunities and increased economic precarity.
Le Havre is a city in transit. Inspired by Bilbao and Liverpool, a neoliberal reimagination of the Havrais cityscape took place in the 1990s and is currently still being implemented. According to Antonin Girondin, PhD at Caen-Normandy University, there is no more blatant example of this than what used to be called the “Quartier de l’Eure”, now known as “St. Nicolas”. This area in the south of Le Havre, right next to the SciencesPo campus used to be an archetypical working-class neighbourhood, housing the dockers and other port-affiliated workers. In the mid to late 2000s, this area got caught in the crosshairs of the combined interests of real estate investors and the city’s now neoliberal administration. Here Le Havre’s shift in political orientation becomes relevant, as the city is opened up for private investment and speculation, reflecting the paradoxical relationship between the neoliberal condemnation of the state and its simultaneous reliance on the state’s monopoly of violence. What I mean by that, is the private sector’s rejection of public regulation (profits, pollution, etc.) on the one hand, and a reliance on public policy, finance, and force, if necessary, to lay the foundation for investment. In very typical fashion, public funds were used to renovate and transform the “Docks Vauban” into a shopping mall. The way was thus paved for private investors to start building residential housing in the former workers’ neighbourhood. This connection between the public and the private sphere is very explicit, as is shown by extracts of an interview with a key member of the city hall: “We therefore conducted a discussion with the developers on the feasibility of good quality housing programs. The latter wished for (in addition to the repair of the streets already started several years ago) the construction of a new footbridge above the Paul Vatine basin as an extension of rue Bellot and the creation of quality public spaces as well as the fact to provide a view of the pools for the new apartments.” (translated from French). These programs did not take long to show results, the buildings constructed between 2007 and 2010 were between 1.5 and 2 times more expensive than the average real estate in Le Havre. This increase in the price of housing immediately reflected itself on the social fabric of the neighbourhood. Between 2010 and 2016 the proportion of workers dropped from 44% to just 27%, while the proportion of people with white collar jobs nearly tripled.
Girondin makes it clear that this is a clear instance of “new build gentrification”. This concept developed by Mark Davidson and Loretta Lees in 2005 describes a kind of gentrification characterised by the erasure of working-class social markers and the “quasi-systematic” destruction of industrial and working-class architecture to make place for higher-end residential buildings. The old architecture’s remnants are destined for commercial use, with the example of the Caillard shipyards, a 70s and 80s landmark of worker’s struggle, being transformed into a supermarket. There is an underlying violence to this process, an entire class witnesses the destruction of its symbols and its living space while speculators are already drawing the plans for what they are to be replaced by.
While the workers are being driven away from their neighbourhoods, the city has another problem: it is shrinking. Since 1975 Le Havre has lost seven percent of its population. The concept of the “shrinking city” is not a new one and is often used to describe what happened to post-Soviet cities in eastern Europe after what economists fittingly call economic shock therapy. Indeed, we can draw a parallel between Le Havre, also known as Stalingrad-sur-Mer, and post-Soviet cities such as Budapest, Bucharest, or Tallinn. Both the late Eastern Bloc and Le Havre in the 80s were in economically precarious situations, albeit for different reasons. In each case the incumbent left-wing administration was replaced by a right-wing one. In both cases, the new administration made it their raison d’être to dismantle what their predecessors had built, concretely this meant using public authority to privatise public infrastructure, an unconditional opening of the public realm to capital. After this forced opening, conditions in the post-Soviet states and in Le Havre deteriorated massively, with millions of excess deaths in Russia and a constantly worsening urban exodus in Le Havre.
What we see in Le Havre then, is a city under attack. We see the consequences of deindustrialisation and its effects on the people it formerly benefitted. Most importantly, we witness a transformation of the city’s soul, from a working-class bastion into a shadow of its former self, ravaged by the liberalisation of the real estate market and demographic decline. What makes this city special are, in my opinion, its people. Be it the student community in SciencesPo or the Havrais people in general, they make the life here worthwhile. Its diverse communities create a unique and enriching environment, its cafés, boulangeries, and restaurants are places for discussion and diversion, and its cinemas provide a so often needed refuge from our daily routines. We have much to look forward to here, even during the rainy days, which will probably be most of them.
“But cities aren’t like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.” -John Updike-
At the beginning of this month we were all still showing up to school in shorts and tank tops, living in some sort of surreal prolonged summer that felt both like a blessing and a concerningly stark reminder of the ever present and ominous climate crisis. Then suddenly that autumn we’d all been dreading (or longing for) came sweeping in with what felt like an ocean’s worth of rain and a small hurricane. If any of you experienced it as a sudden shift, that’s probably because it was. The temperature dropped ten degrees in two days, now I’m about as uneducated as you can get regarding weather phenomena but ten degrees sounds rather significant. Which raises the question, how are the students of SciencesPo Le Havre coping? Was this influx of autumn weather a welcome shift of pace amongst midterm stress or was having to suddenly figure out how your heating works the precise thing you didn’t need right now?
I have to admit that I was expecting most of you to be of the latter opinion, that autumn crashing down over Le Havre, albeit not necessarily unexpectedly but definitely suddenly, offered nothing but inconveniences. However after having surveyed 40 SciencesPo Le Havre students, that didn’t quite seem to be the case. Only 15 of you answered that you wanted summer to keep going, whilst 25 said that autumn came either right on time or even should have started a few weeks ago. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m in complete agreement with the majority here. I’m a winter lover through and through and I truly believe that the best part about October and November is that they’re all stormy and cozy. So it was about time October stopped pretending to be august.
That said, I was slightly surprised, especially since the survey was sent out after a certain sailing competition had forced many of us to lengthen our commute to school, prolonging the time we had to spend fighting the elements every day. And there were definitely those of you who voiced certain disgruntlement with the weather. Especially in regards to wind and its terrifying strength. However even with the difficulties of the wind threatening to blow half of us into the ocean on the way to school, you guys seem generally positive. Some even mentioning that the wind makes it sort of an accomplishment when you actually get places. So where is this positivity coming from? Or is it not positivity at all but rather a sign of climate anxiousness, where any further prolongment to summer would serve no other function than being further evidence of the (climate wise) dire future to come?
Because I mean, heat waves in October in the northern hemisphere? It’s an anomaly. One that most scientists conclude to be an effect of human-induced climate change. Now there’s no doubt that the prolonged summer of 2023 is a mild example of climate change consequences compared to the fierce storms, floods and droughts that the world’s being hit with. But perhaps your responses can prove that mild or not, the weather’s helping us all stay reminded about the sometimes far-too-easy-to-forget global warming. Or maybe I’m reading far too much into this and all your responses really indicate that you’re as excited as I am about sweater weather, hot cups of tea and cuddling up under a blanket to watch a movie on a rainy day.
Le Dragon Déchaîné 