Months after hundreds of migrants effectively took over the Théâtre de la Gaîté Lyrique in Paris, police finally forcibly evicted them in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
At around 6 am Paris time, anti-riot CRS police broke through a line of far-left protesters to clear around 450 migrants from the historic Théâtre de la Gaîté, which had been occupied for over three months by migrants demanding the French government provide them accommodation.
According to police, 46 people were arrested as clashes broke out between officers. Paris Police Prefect Laurent Nuñez accused “elected officials [and] ultra-left activists” of having “come to prevent this operation,” broadcaster BFMTV reports.
Nuñez ordered that the 19th-century theatre be evacuated of the hundreds of mostly sub-Saharan African migrants on Monday, calling the occupation of the building a threat to “public order”.
The police said that since the start of the occupation of the building in December, there had been several knife fights within the theatre and that complaints had been made against some of the migrants. They also argued that the building was not suited to house so many people and that it represented a fire risk.
The left-wing Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, said: “At this stage this is what had to be done because the situation was very complicated, very tense and very dangerous for these migrants.”
The incident began when the theatre hosted a conference on refugees in December, which saw hundreds of migrants from Africa let into the event for free.
However, once the conference concluded, the migrants refused to leave, demanding that the government provide them free housing, claiming that they had arrived in the country as unaccompanied minors and, therefore, were entitled to shelter. It is often the case that illegals will pretend to be minors in order to better their chances of gaining refugee status.
The occupation resulted in the theatre losing hundreds of thousands of euros as it was forced to cancel events as they refused to kick the migrants out.
Among the cancelled events were a collective workshop dubbed “The Migration Fresco”, “And now what do we do? A survey on masculinities”, and an exhibition entitled “Trans*galactic”. The leftist organisers of the theatre said that because of the occupation, the venue faced the potential of filing for bankruptcy.
Upon being forced out of the theatre by the police on Tuesday, one migrant is reported to have said: “France is shit, there is no work… France colonized us, we come to colonize it and we will stay. Fuck France!”
Leftist demonstrators were said to have chanted Antifa slogans and “We are all the children of migrants” as the police approached the building.
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