Jacqueline Feldman: Precarious Lease review - living on the edge

Taking on some of the contingent, nebulous quality of its subject, Jacqueline Feldman’s Precarious Lease examines the beginning and the end – in 2013 – of the famous Parisian squat, Le Bloc, thinking through the triumphs and consequences of the unique leniency that Paris had shown towards the preservation of such indeterminate spaces.

Le Bloc was one of the last bastions of a loophole that allowed temporary occupancy in exchange for cultural, artistic capital: here iterated in an abandoned, seven-floor ex-governmental building. Its lease was short but chaotic, resulting in the occupants’ eventual eviction; but its death throes bear lasting political and aesthetic echoes in our understanding of human habitation – in all its complex varieties.  

Feldman is an interesting narrator of this story, given that she was not (at least not fully) a resident of this or any other squat. She wasn’t even a resident of Paris, or indeed France, but came to the capital to study. But she was, nevertheless, irresistibly drawn to these environs and exists awkwardly within an anarchic world, an almost-ghostly observer in their limbo-spaces: at times she is even taken for a spy by the inhabitants of Le Bloc. This lends her observation a certain air – possible erroneous – of objectivity, but also a fragile peripherality that underlines the contingent and shambolic nature of Le Bloc itself.

Mixed in with the story of Le Bloc and other such squats is the story of Paris itself, its architectural and social construction. This is observed primarily through the Belleville area, distorted and stripped of its autonomy by the actions of the infamous urban planner, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who massacred Paris’ narrow, tortuous streets, remaking them into wide boulevards specifically engineered so that the barricades that had been used by citizen revolutionaries in the past could no longer be employed. Belleville was the home of Édith Piaf and the source of some of the fiercest supporters of the Paris Commune. Feldman portrays it with the same romanticism that she sees in (or bestows on) the characters that she follows in the book: perhaps predictably, big personalities populate the squat, with names like Caravaggio and Le Général. 

Underneath the book’s romanticism, however, is a sense of unease. Le Bloc, easy to view as an utopic home for society’s misfits, is riven by the all-too-recognisable human conflicts. The perceived democracy of squatters is hijacked by "tontons", de facto governors of the building, who form “a kind of internal court” to deal with disputes. There is something very French, very sans-culottes and reign-of-terror about all of this. Feldman mentions the occasional feeling of insecurity when staying overnight, particularly if you happen to be a woman. She writes: “It is a commonplace to say of intentional communities that within them the society from which they have supposedly withdrawn, the society with its problems, is reproduced in miniature.”

The rigidity of the society of Le Bloc Feldman discusses – alongside other comparable arrangements – feels, in part, due to the contemporaneous legal status of squatters. They were seen as a way to enrich or to highlight the creative freedom of Paris, allowing for their potential artistic contribution to society. But the occupation of empty buildings became something like a job, beset with rules and commandments: specific periods of time before the "precarious lease" of the title could be established; the leave they have in winter to save themselves from eviction; and the means by which the temporary inhabitants can achieve some permanency. The need to sell oneself creatively undermines the sense of what one inhabitant describes as a cultivated difference, seen in contrast to the “will of Bloc artists to make themselves saleable”.

It feels like a system on the verge of collapse – as indeed it is. Feldman describes the last film shot in Le Bloc: “it is like a nature documentary in reverse, waiting for the people, its quarry, to go into hiding. It is a premonition, showing the building not as it is but as it will be, empty of life”. With Le Bloc’s closure, its inhabitants disperse, retaining the temporary, liminal existence of their former home. Feldman sees them spread across the city and carries on seeing them in the years after Le Bloc’s end, but retains her sense of disconnect and distance. At one point, an ex-inhabitant writes a manuscript that has the same subject as Feldman’s book, and when it goes missing she says: “It was as if I wasn’t there. It was as if I was the thief.”