🇬🇧 Rue d’Aubagne
On memory, neglect, and living in the shadow of disaster in Marseille.
Seeing in the Dark | 9
I. The Plaque
During my first weeks in Noailles, I walked past the plaque every day without looking at it for more than a fraction of a second. It hung, and still hangs, on the wall along Rue d’Aubagne, not far from the entrance to the flat I rented shortly after arriving in France in 2024, not yet knowing that I would be living in the very spot I had once read about in only a single paragraph of some article on Marseille. At the time, I was absorbed by the things that occupy every newcomer: a social security number, a bank account, figuring out which grocery shops stayed open on Sundays. The plaque was simply part of the scenery, like a streetlamp or a letterbox, one of those things you pass by because you pass by everything you have not yet learned how to read. Rue d’Aubagne smelled back then, as it smells today, of mint and coriander from the greengrocers, of couscous from the small restaurants, and of the dust rising from the perpetually unfinished renovations of neighbouring tenements. Above my head, balconies dried laundry in colours I would not have known how to name in French at the time, and the third step of the communal staircase in my building creaked in exactly the same way whether you were coming in or going out.
I was not in Marseille on the fifth of November 2018. I was living in Warsaw then, with no thought that I would ever settle in a city I knew almost nothing about, other than that it lay on the Mediterranean. This caveat has to be stated right at the outset, because this essay is not an eyewitness account. It is the account of someone who came to live in the shadow of that event six years later, with no direct access to it beyond what can be found in public records, newspaper articles, and conversations with the people who were there, or who have made this neighbourhood their home for a long time.
II. Five Past Nine
On the fifth of November 2018, at five past nine in the morning, two tenements at numbers 63 and 65 Rue d’Aubagne collapsed within seconds. Number 63 was standing empty at the time; it had been acquired in 2016 by the municipal housing agency Marseille Habitat. Number 65 was inhabited, and it was there that most of the disaster’s eight victims lost their lives: only four of the ten households residing in the building survived. In the months that followed, the municipal authorities evacuated anywhere from several thousand to over ten thousand people from buildings deemed at risk of collapse, depending on whether one tallies only the first wave or all the evacuations carried out over the subsequent years. Certain sources speak of just under five thousand people displaced during the opening months; others, looking at the entire span up to the present day, put the figure as high as ten thousand individuals who, in one way or another, lost the roof over their heads due to emergency structural assessments.
Two days after the collapse, on the seventh of November, local residents, evacuated families, and housing rights campaigners founded the Collectif du 5 Novembre, also known as Noailles en colère. In its first month, the collective gathered over three hundred people. It organised a march of white flowers on the tenth of November, a march of anger on the fourteenth of November, and a march for housing on the first of December, alongside demonstrations outside City Hall in the middle and at the end of that same month. Today, as the activists themselves note in interviews given years after the catastrophe, the collective counts about forty permanent members, yet its impact on the city’s housing policy remains, in the view of social historians, disproportionately large in relation to that modest number.
During that very same period, when Marseille was gripped by unrest stemming from two entirely independent causes, the mourning for the collapsed buildings and the nationwide wave of Yellow Vest protests, an event took place that became permanently fused in the memory of the neighbourhood with the grief for the victims of Rue d’Aubagne, even if formally it constitutes a separate case. On the first of December 2018, during the so-called Act III of the Yellow Vest protests, Zineb Redouane, an eighty-year-old resident of Marseille who was closing the shutters of her fourth-floor flat, was gravely wounded by a tear gas canister fired by a riot police officer. She died the following day. The officer responsible for the shot was eventually identified by the General Inspectorate of the National Police, yet the Director General of the police refused to refer him to a disciplinary board, in direct contradiction to his own inspectorate’s recommendation. The judicial investigation was subsequently transferred to Lyon, where in the years that followed the officer was formally placed under investigation for manslaughter. At the time of writing, I do not know the final legal resolution of this case and do not pretend to: according to the latest information available to me, the proceedings were still ongoing.
This distinction must be drawn with honesty, because it is all too easy to elide it: Zineb Redouane’s death did not happen during a march commemorating the victims of Rue d’Aubagne, but during separate, countrywide protests that intersected that same week with the raw grief still hanging over Noailles. That convergence of two distinct tragedies in one place and at one moment is part of what makes that chapter so difficult to narrate without flattening it, and some of the accounts circulating within the district do indeed bind the two events into a single thread, despite the fact that in formal and legal terms they remain two separate matters.
III. A Locality Smaller than Chiapas
Rebecca Solnit writes of what she terms global locality: the idea that events taking place in a single, seemingly peripheral place, in Chiapas or Nevada, can trigger networks of solidarity that span the entire globe. That is a locality measured across continents, one that turns global precisely through its symbolic resonance. The locality I am writing about is smaller than a single district. It fits into a hundred-metre stretch of a single street, into a plaque fixed to a stone wall, into an exchange with the local greengrocer who gradually began to recognize me and, one day, without any particular prompting, mentioned that his shop had stood just a few doorways down from what came crashing down.
I did not grasp the weight of those exchanges straight away. It was only after living in Noailles for several months, when the neighbours and shopkeepers with whom I had begun to form something deeper than polite pleasantries at the till started returning more frequently to the fifth of November, that I realised this was not a closed chapter in old newspapers for them. It was an event that continued to structure the way they made sense of their own street: which tenements were safe, whom they could trust and whom they could not, how they interpreted every new scaffolding erected in the vicinity. I came to see that I was living in a place I did not know the way people who had been there on the sixth of November knew it, and that the only honest course was not to pretend I knew more than I did. I recall one such conversation with total clarity: the shopkeeper from whom I bought tomatoes and courgettes every week told me one afternoon, without any preamble, simply that during that week in November he had kept his shop shut for three days because the street was cordoned off for forensic teams and rescue crews, and that to this day, whenever he hears a loud construction noise from nearby, he stops breathing for a second before realizing it is merely a drill or a pneumatic hammer. I did not ask him anything more. That single sentence was enough to see that beneath the surface of the routine transactions I had taken part in for weeks, noticing nothing beyond the price of vegetables, ran another layer of memory, one I had no access to until he chose to open it to me himself.
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IV. Charters and Leases
The Collectif du 5 Novembre did not remain purely a movement of mourning. In the years that followed, its work shifted toward tasks that can hardly be described as stirring, though they represent, to my mind, the most vital part of what survived the disaster: accompanying displaced residents to bureaucratic appointments, reviewing tenancy agreements, offering guidance through eviction appeal procedures, negotiating compensation settlements and temporary rehousing. It is desk work, filled with paperwork, deadlines, and official rubber stamps, stripped entirely of the theatricality of a protest march or the occupation of a public square. Today, according to the activists themselves, it is carried on by a few dozen people who weigh every word with the exactitude of a civil servant parsing a legal clause, because whether a form has been filled out correctly determines whether a family is granted replacement housing or left out on the pavement.
V. Façade and Backstage
A year before the collapse on Rue d’Aubagne, a ten-year cycle during which Marseille had been aggressively reinventing its public image came to an end. In September 2008, the city was designated European Capital of Culture for the year 2013, a selection that sped up the delivery of Euroméditerranée, an ambitious urban regeneration scheme first launched in 1995 as an operation of national significance. That year of festivities drew eleven million visitors and 650 million euros in spending; it reconfigured the Old Port into one of the largest public plazas in Europe and erected new museums in the shadow of Fort Saint-Jean. By 2019, total investment channeled through Euroméditerranée reached nearly seven billion euros, of which more than a billion came from public coffers.
Noailles, the district where the tenements at numbers 63 and 65 stand, or rather stood, had been formally designated as one of the priority zones of that very same urban renewal policy, under what was known as the Noailles-Delacroix block. The very administration that poured billions into the waterfront and cultural institutions simultaneously classified a neighbourhood barely a few hundred metres away as an urgent priority for overhaul due to the severe dereliction of its residential fabric, and that neglect lingered for years without any meaningful intervention, right up until the morning two buildings simply gave way. One could scarcely find a more literal picture of what Solnit, in another context, might describe as the breach between the front stage and the wings: the city’s polished façade, admired by eleven million tourists in 2013, and the back quarters, where people continued living in tenements officially designated as top priority for repairs, yet left untouched for over a decade. Marseille is hardly alone in this: a comparable gulf between a glittering waterfront and a neglected hinterland has been documented in Liverpool, Boston, Newcastle, wherever port cities have sought to salvage their image after decades of post-industrial decline, pouring resources into waterfront development far faster and far more readily than into the buildings that house people with no connection to the new service economy.
VI. The Trial
On the seventh of July 2025, nearly seven years after the disaster, the criminal court in Marseille handed down its verdict regarding sixteen defendants and corporate entities. Xavier Cachard, an attorney and the property manager of the co-ownership association for number 65, as well as the owner of one of its flats, was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, two of which to be served under electronic surveillance. Gilbert Ardilly, the owner of a first-floor flat occupied by a Comorian family with an eight-year-old child, received an identical sentence. His son, Sébastien Ardilly, was sentenced to three years, with one year under electronic monitoring, while the son’s wife, Martine Ardilly, received a three-year suspended sentence. Julien Ruas, a former deputy mayor, was given a two-year suspended sentence. The charges encompassed manslaughter through gross negligence of a safety obligation and subjecting vulnerable persons, including at least one minor, to undignified housing conditions. One hundred and two individuals were recognized as civil parties to the proceedings, and the damages awarded exceeded 1.4 million euros.
This verdict, like most rulings in matters of this kind, possessed none of the dramatic weight one might expect after seven years of waiting. It was a litany of names, years, suspended months, terms of monitoring, and monetary sums. Yet it is precisely this dry, bureaucratic form of justice that provides, I believe, the most telling answer to the question of what hope can look like when confronted with an irreversible disaster. It brings neither relief nor closure to grief. It is simply a long, painstaking process of establishing accountability, one that terminates in an inventory of names and figures, and one that the families of the victims will likely never experience as adequate, no matter how many years of imprisonment a court might hand down.
VII. Forty Thousand
The catastrophe on Rue d’Aubagne was not an isolated incident in a city where, according to reports by the High Committee for the Housing of Disadvantaged Persons and the 2015 Nicol report cited by Marseille’s municipal authorities, more than forty thousand dwellings, roughly thirteen percent of the city’s entire housing stock, are deemed potentially unfit for human habitation, posing a direct threat to the health or safety of as many as one hundred thousand residents. That is not an anomaly at the edge of the statistics. It represents nearly one-seventh of the city I live in, living in buildings that might at any given moment replicate the fate of numbers 63 and 65.
This reality shifts the meaning of the plaque I walked past so heedlessly during my early weeks. It is not the commemoration of an isolated misfortune, an act of God like a sudden natural catastrophe. It stands as an indictment of systemic neglect that happened to surface in Noailles in the most violent way, but which, statistically speaking, could just as easily have surfaced in any other neighbourhood of the city sharing a similar architectural legacy and a comparable history of landlord abandonment.
VIII. Pointe Rouge
A year after settling in Noailles, Lou and I moved to Pointe Rouge, a district right along the water, with marinas, a beach, and a completely different architectural language, completely devoid of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tenements that have been deteriorating in the city centre for decades. That move had nothing to do with what I had learned in Noailles. We were not running away from the memory of the disaster or from anything connected to it. It was prompted by ordinary things: different work, a different pace of daily life, the simple need to look out over the water rather than at the stone wall of an adjoining building.
I do not know whether I ought to justify that choice. A part of me would like this relocation to carry symbolic significance, to stand as some kind of gesture toward what I had come to understand about the city during my year living a few doors down from the collapse. Yet simple honesty forces me to admit that this was not so. We moved because it suited us, and that plain, unembellished explanation is probably what comes closest to the reality of living in a city that holds both a disaster and a marina within its borders, separated by only a few kilometres, without any grand narrative capable of reconciling them.
And yet, whenever I find myself in the centre and Rue d’Aubagne lies on my route, I still take the turn to walk along it, not because I am required to, but because the plaque I once passed without looking now forces me to slow my step, and I can no longer undo that. That is perhaps the only enduring lesson I carry from the year spent a few doorways from the site of the collapse: I cannot distill it into a single sentence, and I do not think anyone who was truly living there on the fifth of November 2018 would expect someone like me to do so on their behalf.
