On returning from the pilgrimage to Chartres on Whit Monday last week, a young pilgrim was fined for ‘disturbing the peace’ because he was singing with his friends in the corridors of a Paris train station. A few days after the chaos caused by supporters of the Paris Saint-Germain football team, the sentence seems somewhat disproportionate. The reason is simple: when imposing fines, the transport authorities deliberately target passengers who are convenient for them—who are obviously not the real troublemakers.
On the evening of Whit Monday, several thousand people were returning to the capital by train from the town of Chartres, where one of Europe’s largest pilgrimages was coming to an end. It is a tradition among pilgrims that before parting, they sing a song of thanksgiving, the Jubilate Deo, on the platform of Montparnasse station, which serves western Paris. This impromptu concert clearly did not please the railway inspectors who witnessed the scene. An 18-year-old boy named Augustin was asked for his papers and fined €60 for causing a disturbance at the station.
The young people who witnessed the scene were stunned. Le Figaro gathered their testimonies: “We told the officers that we didn’t understand, because there were thousands of us singing, and there is often music and singing in stations, especially since the SNCF installed free-access pianos!” explained one of them. The officers explained that the young man had been fined because he had “looked” at the SNCF officers while singing. That was his crime.
A few days earlier, Parisian train stations and metro stations were stormed by hordes of fans after Paris Saint-Germain’s victory in the Champions League final. While they were certainly not singing in Latin, they were anything but discreet, but apparently none of them were fined for “disturbing the peace.” However, the noise level was certainly greater than that of the pilgrims returning from Chartres. Leniency in one case, questionable zeal in the other.
It is common knowledge that rail (SNCF) and metro (RATP) transport workers are all staunch left-wing trade unionists, which explains their spontaneous complicity with the average immigrant fan and their mistrust of pilgrims who are a little too white. But there’s more: an investigation by Le Journal du Dimanche reveals that they are in fact instructed to prioritise “good payers,” i.e., those who respect authority and are likely to pay their fines promptly and in full. In short, you are more likely to be fined if you are Augustin, a pilgrim from Chartres, than Youssouf, a PSG supporter.
While the Left regularly cries out against ‘profiling’ and accuses the police, security guards, and transport officials of ‘targeting’ immigrants, it turns out that the opposite is true. Honest passengers, most of whom are travelling with valid tickets, are harassed for obscure reasons: ‘blurred’ ID photos, carrying an object that is too bulky, as experienced by a young woman who was fined €150 for carrying a green plant. Inspectors are paid on a performance basis, and their career prospects also depend on their ability to issue fines en masse. They therefore have a field day, primarily targeting passengers who are able to pay their fines immediately. Regular fare dodgers—on bus and metro lines well known to the authorities, as they serve neighbourhoods with large immigrant populations—are left alone because they are unable to pay. Real fare evasion, i.e., not paying for a ticket, costs €700 million a year, but it is not the target of the most vigorous crackdown.
The Institute for Justice has taken up this issue and referred it to the Ombudsman for Human Rights, requesting an investigation: “RATP officers should not abandon the fight against fare evasion, which is their core business, to focus on minor or even imaginary offences on the pretext that people are solvent,” explains the institute’s president. This is just one example of the inability of a flawed system to tackle the real issues while targeting innocent citizens.