Precarious Lease

On 31 December 2012, Le Bloc opened its doors. Situated at a far edge of Paris, near where the banlieue began, the legendary squat was eight stories tall and four basements deep. It took in artists and activists as well as immigrants to France from various corners of Europe, Africa and the Americas, all of whom lived and worked within Le Bloc's labyrinthine structure, continually threatened with eviction and existential as well as financial precarity. Jacqueline Feldman, a reporter from the US, spent a number of years with the residents of the squat, witnessing firsthand the creativity and grief inherent to everyday life there and the gradual dismantling of Paris's counterculture. With Precarious Lease – the title itself referring to a French legal device by which squatters could receive a temporary reprieve from eviction but were reduced in status to property guardians – Feldman tells Le Bloc's story. In the tradition of Walter Benjamin and with the journalistic attunement of Joan Didion, Feldman draws on Paris's revolutionary and bohemian history as she raises questions of the most contemporary urgency about hospitality and refuge, idealism and utopia, creativity and precarity, ecology and the possibilities left for writing and inhabiting a capital city.