What The Hell America!

With just over 800,000 inhabitants, Marseille is France’s second-largest city. Its location at the gateway to the Mediterranean has fostered a long history of immigration, from Italy in the late nineteenth century and from North Africa during and after decolonization. This city also has little in common with Paris. If in the capital’s elegant, imposing Haussmann-style buildings renting a room costs at least €800 a month, Marseille’s city center remains popular and multiethnic.

According to a 2020 study by Elisabeth Dorier and Julien Dario, the city’s first arrondissement (district) has a very high poverty rate, affecting over half population in some areas. One of its neighborhoods is Noailles, crossed diagonally for almost half a kilometer by Rue d’Aubagne. This street, with its historic buildings of three, four, or five stories, many of which already existed at the time of the French Revolution, leads down from Notre-Dame du Mont, an area of bars and nightclubs, and then joins the Canebière, the city’s main artery. On each floor of each building there are three windows, with laundry hung out or else wooden shutters. The repetition conveys a sense of regularity and order to those who walk through Marseille’s far-from-orderly center with their noses upturned.

Abruptly, this regularity in Rue d’Aubagne is interrupted by a gaping void between nos. 61 and 69. A void that was not always there. A gap that has only recently appeared — and which reminds the Marseillais and passersby of a date etched in the city’s memory, even giving its name to a small square in the street: November 5, 2018.

That morning, at 9:07 a.m., buildings 63 and 65 on Rue d’Aubagne collapsed within minutes — perhaps even seconds — and became a pile of rubble. At first, some thought it was an explosion, a bomb. However, this hypothesis was quickly discarded. The two buildings had collapsed, pulling each other down, raising huge clouds of dust and taking with them eight people’s lives. They were five men and three women, aged between twenty-six and fifty-eight, of various nationalities — from North Africa to Italy, from France to Senegal and the Comoros. All of them were tenants of the flats at no. 65. These people, artists, students, and others with precarious jobs and insecure living conditions, reflect the diverse population of Noailles.

No. 63, owned by Marseille Habitat, a mixed-economy company of the city of Marseille, was unoccupied and abandoned. No. 67, also uninhabited and in poor condition, was demolished on the afternoon of November 5 to prevent further collapse. For days, people dug through the rubble to recover the bodies, and for years the investigation continued to pin down responsibility and understand how it was possible for two buildings in the center of France’s second-largest city to suddenly collapse “by themselves” in 2018.

The investigation lasted six years, during which thousands of Marseille residents were forced to leave their homes overnight because they had been categorized as dangerous. On the day of the collapse, around a hundred residents were evacuated from the neighborhood, a number rising to four hundred over the following six days, representing 10 percent of the population of Noailles. In its report on the causes and consequences of the collapse, the independent newspaper Marsactu describes this series of evacuations as a wave caused by the collapse.

In the meantime, the Collectif du 5 Novembre, a collective founded two days after the disaster, has never stopped building solidarity networks and, together with many other local organizations in Marseille, keeping the housing issue in the spotlight. Since then, the collective has been particularly active in the days leading up to each November 5, organizing events and commemorations. It was even more active last November, as the trial to determine responsibility for the collapse opened two days after the anniversary.

The trial, which took place in open court, lasted six weeks and ended on December 18, 2024. People were keen to find out what was being said: on some days, the courtroom, which holds four hundred people, was overcrowded. The final verdict will be announced this coming July 7. A total of sixteen defendants, both individuals and legal entities, stood trial. Among them were the owners of the flats at 65 Rue d’Aubagne, including former regional councilor Xavier Cachard, who was also the lawyer for the Liautard firm, the managing agent of no. 65. The defendants included Jean-François Valentin, the head of Liautard; Christian Gil, the director of Marseille Habitat; Julien Ruas, the only politician charged, who, at the time of the collapse, was in charge of urban risk prevention and management and served as a city councilor; and the architect Richard Carta.

Just two and a half weeks before the collapse, on October 18, 2018, Carta had inspected building no. 65 on behalf of the City of Marseille after being informed by one of the tenants about the poor condition of the buildings. However, his visit was brief — and he did not inspect the basement, where the most serious structural problems were concentrated. After recommending the reinforcement of one of the walls at risk of collapse, he allowed the residents to return to their apartments.

This report, which prompted the city to send an expert to assess the condition of the building, was not the first warning. As early as 2014, concerns had been raised with city authorities about the deteriorating condition of the building, which was riddled with growing cracks and heavy water ingress. Several more warnings followed over the years. The last warning came at 2 a.m. on November 5, a few hours before the collapse: Marie-Emmanuelle, one of the tenants trapped under the rubble, had called the fire brigade in vain, fearing that the building could collapse at any moment.

The deteriorating condition of the building was well known to both the apartment owners of no. 65 and the city administration. The former, more concerned with collecting rent and avoiding expenses than ensuring the safety of their tenants, had repeatedly refused to renovate the building, as evidenced by the minutes of the condominium owners’ meeting, which were analyzed during the trial.

As for the city council, its action — or rather, its inaction — was decisive. As the public prosecutor pointed out in his closing argument, lives could have been saved if the authorities had intervened to carry out emergency repairs to building no. 65, whose owners had failed to act, and building no. 63, which was owned by the city and had fallen into disrepair. Instead, the two buildings collapsed one after the other, triggering a domino effect with fatal consequences.

The emptiness on Rue d’Aubagne is a clear symbol of the political vacuum characteristic of the Gaudin administration, which ruled Marseille for a quarter-century from 1995 to 2020. The housing crisis was and remains particularly serious, as already shown a decade ago in the Nicol report. This document warned that 40,000 housing units jeopardized the health or safety of their 100,000 residents — an eighth of the city’s population. In the Noailles neighborhood, 48 percent of the buildings — namely 1,600 homes — were classified as dilapidated or run-down by the public urban planning authority Soleam.

The city of Marseille allocated €2 million in 2014 to tackle substandard housing, but over the four-year period before the deadly collapse, only 15 percent of these funds were spent, according to Radio France‘s investigative unit. So, as the public prosecutor emphasized in his closing argument, Marseille had the financial means to tackle the housing crisis, but lacked the political will to act.

This was also evident in the way the city administration was structured. With just over a dozen officials responsible for managing urban risks across the city, there were clearly too few staff to tackle such a widespread and urgent problem. As France Info reports, Christophe Suanez, director of the Risk Prevention and Management Service, wrote in a letter just months before the tragedy that a “serious lack of staff ” made it “impossible to take civil security and protection measures.”

The inaction and negligence of the Marseille administration is well described by Bruno Le Dantec in his book La ville sans nom, which makes clear the disdain of the ruling classes for the historic center and the desire to “cleanse” it of the poorer sections of the population. By treating the city as a place unworthy of care, of having an identity, of bearing its name, the administration had thus created the conditions for the drama on Rue d’Aubagne to unfold. Even though the mayor at the time, Jean-Claude Gaudin, claimed that the collapse was caused by the autumn rains, the void created on Rue d’Aubagne was predictable and avoidable.