Firemen's Balls- A Celebration

You may not be aware of this most odd annual Paris event, so I shall tell you about it. Come July I was quite excited about the Bastille Day celebrations due to hit France, and Paris, on the 14th of the month.  Living in the 12th arrondissement, I'm pretty close to Bastille, (from 'the storming of the-' fame), so I knew there'd be something special planned.

I had in mind some photographs I'd seen in a Robert Doisneau exhibition at the Fondation Cartier earlier in the year.  Couples were dancing in streets lined with bunting and others displayed generic scenes of collective merriment of the sort not experienced on any other day of the year.

I had in mind a feeling of unification against the ruling classes, or at least some 'stick it to the man' type burning effigies of Sarko's melting face.  If not, at least a feeling of booze-fuelled false hope about the future of mankind.

Alas, come the morning, the incessant raindrops fell obese from the dark sky, and all joys seemed far away. The TV channels showed lifeless military parades which were only improved slightly by the absence of a queen.

A Bastille day military parade.  Whoopy shit.

Toward nightfall, the skies cleared and some friends suggested one of the Firemen's balls. I thought, well, the 'pompiers' are the first port of call for all things ranging from fires (their speciality), to destroying wasps nests, to car crashes, to -I'm sure if they were asked- getting cats down from trees. Why the hell not go to them for a dance; they seem to be good all-rounders.

I wasn't expecting however that on every Bastille Day in France, loads* of fire stations shut for the night in order that a disturbing number of people squeeze into them with the intention of having fun in the background to bad pop music. Perhaps some people enjoy being trapped in a space populated by 16 others per square metre, listening to some of the worst music ever composed. The wine is cheap, but is that reason enough to suspend one of the basic emergency services?

The Pompiers Bal; it was even worse than it looks.

We went to the ball in the Marais, apparently one of the most popular in Paris, but I imagine the intended atmosphere was similar across the city.  Despite someone throwing in some tear gas at one point, it wasn't a nice environment to be in.  More crucially though, the fact that these things take place in fire stations begs response to the question, 'what if there's a fire tonight nearby, and people die because all the local firemen are off their boobs on Beaujolais?'

You couldn't phone the police; they're too busy getting stoned out of their minds and giving eachother blowbacks.

*unofficial figure