To Market, To Market

By 11 o'clock every night in Paris, the trucks are jammed into every narrow street from the Opera to the Louvre. Horns squawk, cops shout, taxi drivers curse and take long detours, but nothing helps until 9 o'clock the next morning when the trucks roar away. The noisy, redolent center of this nightly hubbub, and its cause, is Les Halles Centrales, Paris' central food market.

Through Les Halles' twelve iron-and-glass pavilions move every fish, vegetable and piece of meat that Paris consumes. "The belly of Paris," Emile Zola called it. Under the glaring light of bare electric bulbs, husky men in blue overalls and leather aprons unload crates of cabbages from Burgundy, baskets of fish from Brittany, beef carcasses from Normandy.

The pavilions overflow, and the surplus spills into the streets. Sides of mutton hang along the northern wall of the church of Saint Eustache; mountains of crated cabbages and oranges block the sidewalks for half a mile. Buyers for hotels, restaurants, retail groceries and butcher shops swarm and haggle, crunch over the crushed ice of the fish pavilion to finger white octopuses or boxes of shiny mackerel, delicately press ripe Camemberts and sniff critically at Bries. As dawn breaks, late partygoers pick their way gingerly across the littered gutters to one of the small, famed bistros like The

Dog Who Smokes, for Les Halles' famed onion soup.

Wasteful Ways. Today the belly of Paris is badly upset. And the symptoms it suffers from are those that afflict all France--the paralysis of outworn tradition, the plague of overorganized centralization, the jealous persistence in selfish ways. The tradition began in 1134, when King Louis the Fat picked out a quiet meadow on Paris' outskirts for the food marketeers. The meadow has long since been surrounded by the center of burgeoning Paris, but no one has been able to dislodge Les Halles, though it is two miles from the main railroad stations and set in a tortuous network of ancient streets barely passable by trucks. In the resulting jam, it takes a truck up to three hours to make the two miles from the Gare de Bercy, and the trucking charges for those two miles from station to market are higher than the shipping charge from the farthest corner of France to the railroad station.

Paris consumes only about half the food that pours into Les Halles. The rest is promptly reshipped to the provinces. The villain, as Herber Luethy pointed out trenchantly in France Against Herself (TIME, July 4), is centralization, which in France makes the smallest village council unable to pave a road or fix a school-house roof without the approval of a ministry in Paris, which makes all French roads pivot on Paris like spokes of a wheel, which has discouraged provincial markets and forces produce into Paris to find a buyer. Nearly a third of all France's food funnels into Les Halles. Thus, peaches grown in Southern France are shipped 500 miles to Paris, loaded onto trucks, brought to Les Halles, unloaded into barrows, sold, then sent out again, perhaps leaving Paris on the same train on which they arrived, finally to be eaten in a restaurant a few miles from where they were grown. The waste is enormous. An estimated quarter of all fruit and vegetables is spoiled in handling.

The cost is also enormous. Every trans-shipper and middleman adds his commission, every valuer or forwarding agent gets his fee. One Paris housewife bought a head of cauliflower for 120 francs at her greengrocer's. She found a note from the farmer tucked under one leaf: "I sold it for 12 francs. How much did you pay for it?"

Tradition v. Enterprise. Les Halles bristles at any suggestion of change. For Les Halles is not so much a commercial enterprise as a bewildering labyrinth of concessions and customs controlled by 1,500 concessionaires. Privileges granted by some forgotten bureaucrat with the passage of time have become "rights," and made them rich. Every table, every booth, every square yard of sidewalk, every handling process or valuing fee is claimed by someone as such a right, handed down from father to son, sanctified by feudal tradition or half-forgotten law.

Recently, there was an attempt to move Les Halles to one of the main freight-railroad stations, where produce could be sold directly from railroad cars and costs cut in half. It got nowhere. Two years ago the government, taking reluctant notice of angry complaints, set up an official "High Council of Les Halles" to look into the situation. Last week it met for the first time, agreed torpidly to consider what it might possibly discuss, and then adjourned without setting a date for its next meeting. Nobody was in any hurry for improvements, particularly the concessionaires.

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