Autumn in Paris was drier and milder than usual this year, yet this city is swathed in gloom.

“C’est La Crise”

"La Crise", i.e. the present disastrous economic climate, is on everyone's mind. Unemployment figures are reaching catastrophic levels while food prices continue to climb. Even in usually placid, middle-class neighborhoods the financial distress is apparent, with an ever growing population of homeless, outcasts and beggars.

New Poverty

All over the French capital people are sleeping on doorsteps and park benches and some even cram into phone booths and public toilets to rest. Official shelters are running out of space and makeshift tents donated by charities like "Doctors Without Borders" are mushrooming on sidewalks and in open squares all over town. By the amount of personal belongings some of the homeless carry around in suitcases and plastic bags, it's obvious that many of them landed in the streets recently due to unemployment - and the indecent, sky-rocking rents now practiced in Paris and other major cities. Soup kitchens everywhere serve record numbers of poor.

Envied “Fonctionnaires”

Those who are still employed worry constantly about potential job cuts. And French "fonctionnaires", or state-employees, who - in principle and even at the lowest echelons - are protected from layoffs, do not escape the squeeze from the fast rising cost of living either.

Until not so long ago, it was rare to see non-immigrant garbage workers or street-sweepers in Paris.   But those communal or state employments, which most Frenchmen earlier frowned upon as too lowly, are now eagerly sought after, because they offer job security.