What live Roma and Travelers live

How much should these have stolen chickens to afford such cars? ”This Monday in September, in Poitiers, a procession of 150 families of the trip crosses the city, aboard luxurious Mercedes, large BMW and Jeep Cherokee, but also white vans harnessed to large caravans.

"The vans are used to transport the products we sell on the markets," explains Charlot Ziegler, a strong fifties in jeans-chemise.In fact, once opened by the side, the immaculate truck of its nephew gives way to a clock store."You see, we are not all thieves," he smiles.

The Vox Populi continues to accuse the "novelists" of all evils.Banking distributors robbers, country houses, social assistance scams ... Since last July a handful of gyphers has packed the peaceful town of Saint-Aignan, in Loir-et-Cher, everything goes there oralmost.

And the accusations of the Minister of the Interior, Brice Hortefeux, against the Roma community (she would be responsible for one in five flights in Paris!), Assorted from the manu militari dismantling of a good hundred of their wild camps, did nothing to arrange things.Devil !Are the Gypsies and Gypsies all are highway bandits?After a month of investigation of these unloved populations, the table fortunately appears much less black.

First observation: Travelers and Roma do not form a homogeneous population.The first appellation designates the 500,000 French citizens who adopted a nomadic lifestyle (135,000 of them), semi-itinant (145,000) or who recently abandoned it to settle (220,000).For the most part, these real and false travelers come from a mosaic of peoples with roots in northern India, Manouches de France, Sunti d'Italie, Calderacches de Romania, Gypsies from Spain or Yeniches from Germany.

Over the centuries, they have mixed with a whole misery of Norman models, Savoyard sweatshirts and other hawkers thrown on the roads by hunger, to constitute a population living away from the "gadjé", the other French."Today, all claim to be from Gypsy culture and enamel their phrases of expressions in Romanès, an old Indo-European language," sums up Patrick Williams, Director of Research at the CNRS.

Those we got into the habit of calling "the Roma" are much less numerous: hardly more than 15,000 in France.They are neither French nomades.Freshly landed by Romania (for 90% of them) or Bulgaria, they pile up in slum at the gates of major cities.According to the ethnologist Martin Olivera, the only department of Seine-Saint-Denis would house 3,000.

The first arrived after the fall of the wall, then the movement accelerated in 2002, when France relaxed its immigration policy.The membership of Romania and Bulgaria to the European Union, on January 1, 2007, did not open the doors to them: as Brussels allows it, Paris decided to limit the maximum duration of the maximum duration to three monthstheir stay, until 2013.After only they will have the field free in France.

So much for the landscape.And now let's move on to acts.How do travel people manage to afford such beautiful cars and such comfortable caravans?Very simple: most of them have a job.Not in offices, of course!Elagueurs, ferblantiers, remplorers, itinerant merchants, roofers-zinc, circus artists (20,000 Gypsies work under 200 family capitals) ... Their activities are by nature independent, and almost always inherited from tradition."It's stronger than us, we all have that in our skin," smiles Xavier Lapere, who dropped his medicine in the third year to become a ... king of the ride.

De quoi vivent les Roms et les gens du voyage

With his big eight and his "slalom", a 50 -meter -long slide, he is "the royal tour" from April to October (Throne Fair, Loges Day, Tuileries Garden, Bois de Boulogne Festival),by far the most prestigious fairground circuits.Its turnover?Impossible to know him.Like all his companions, this traveler businessman tends to close as soon as we approach money issues.But, obviously, there is no shortage of it, no more than all the owners of large rides.

Depending on the year, a simple buffer car stand using four employees from the same family generates 400,000 euros in official turnover, to which should be added 30 to 40% of black revenue, even admissionof the tax administration.Well enough to live at ease after damaging investments (a large attraction costs 1.2 to 2 million euros) and paid operating costs.

But the vast majority of the 100,000 Gypsy fairgrounds do not drive Carrosse.By running the village festivals with a children's merry -go -round or a waffle hut, they just manage to reach both ends."Some wives are even reduced to making households," says Michel Pierre, of the newspaper "Inter-Foin".

With the crisis, the 150,000 traveler merchants are also going through difficulties."Customers spend less", regrets Steve François.After a summer to sell clothes on the markets near Perpignan, this young Gitan has just left the country to hit the road.Like every year.Direction the Tarn, where he will join a convoy of a hundred families.On the program: slow go up north, stops in Ile-de-France, then head on Alsace before joining Le Bercail, next June, by the Rhône Valley.

At each stage, Steve does the markets within a radius of 50 kilometers, participates in local evangelist meetings, buys ends of textile factories.And, of course, never fail to visit his family."My grandparents had thirteen grandchildren.All are on the markets! ”A hundred vendor processions, including between 100 and 250 families, travels hexagon all year round.

Charlot Ziegler would not abandon this life for nothing in the world.He sells carpets by door-to-door in the beautiful neighborhoods."I get up very early and I finish late to meet customers outside their working hours".If it works ?"We are clever," he admits.All his fortune is there, on the road, to testify to it.No villa and even less life insurance, but two superb caravans (one for him and his wife, one for his children), a Mercedes van in which he states his stock of Kilims, and an Audi A6 anthracite gleaming, bought20,000 euros used six years ago.

"We work hard, but we still do well ...".Less addicted to large spaces than merchants, craftsmen, who trace the road in the same convoys, sometimes end up separating themselves around their local customers.Arrived in Montreuil in the 1960s, hundreds of Serbian Roma working in the building now live in pavilions.

This does not prevent banks from being suspicious with travelers: in general, they refuse to lend them money, fault, they consider, sufficient guarantees.To finance their cars and their trailers, the nomads are therefore reduced to go into debt to consumer credit institutions (Cetelem, Cofinoga, etc.) at rates up to 20%."It's a bit of an injustice, but they have no choice," observes Christophe Robert, an official of the Abbé Pierre Foundation who knows these populations well.

Of course, the caravan world also has its proletariat: a hundred thousands of seasonal workers little or not qualified, who, between two works, remain thanks to family allowances and RSA.The Michelets are one of them.A few years ago, they put their caravans on a bit of agricultural land that they bought near Romorantin, in the Cher Valley.

In the spring, they pick the asparagus and strawberries, in summer, they pick up the pickles.Odd jobs rarely declared, of course.And, three months a year, they will seek their pittance elsewhere: "We do the harvest in Champagne, the prunes in Agen, the cherries in the Luberon, that brings back well," admits Raymond.How many ?The minimum wage ... family members also make a little scrap, distribute prospectus and work in the building, black or under a status of self -employed.Not folichon.

But still well compared to the Roma.They struggle in black misery.As they are not entitled to any social assistance, they dress in Secours Populaire, line up in front of the restaurants of the heart and recover, in the evening, spoiled vegetables and expired trash cans in hypermarkets.What are they doing ?Not much, in truth.The rare somewhat qualified sell their work force at the exit of DIY stores.

Loading and unloading of materials, helping hand for painting ... If all goes well, they will receive around thirty euros for a working day.Always better than the comrades who make music in the metro (they collect 25 euros), wash the windshield with red lights or sell jaws picked up in squares (20 euros of daily gain).As for those who, like Lyuba, are content to indulge in the begging eight hours in a row, they can hardly hope for more than 15 euros.Derisory, perhaps, but not in the eyes of this 20 year old Romanian.Because, taking a quarter every morning in front of a bakery in Montmartre with her baby in her arms, she wins three times the equivalent of the minimum wage of her country, that, moreover, she would have no chance of touching inHis native fear.

Almost cynically, market laws have mixed with perverting this subsistence economy.A family who finds a vacant lot immediately beats the recall of his companions, after having herself took up residence as head of camp.To be able to install their barracks there, the other groups will have to pay him rent."This tithe varies from 30 to 150 euros per month in the 40 camps in Seine-Saint-Denis", estimates the sociologist Olivier Peyroux, of the Montreuilloise association outside the street.

Other clans improvise bankers: they lend money at usurious rates or advance the price of the trip to immigration candidates.This high price debt is called "kamata".To reimburse it, some Roma sometimes sink into real delinquency: theft of metals, looting of car rims and mirrors and other money.When they are not forced to put their children at the service of their creditors.This is how 10-year-old kids are forced to engage in all kinds of trafficking, as in Dickens, their young age guaranteeing them a certain impunity (read the box below).And sometimes even prostitution.

On the other hand, the community of travel people is not known to specialists to be particularly criminogenic.Of course, some of its members sometimes let go, say, some slippages.The seasonal workers Solognots, for example, engage in poaching with so much delight that they are nicknamed the "two-legged foxes", the roofers-zinc and the pruners go from time to time a little strong on the invoices with the peopleelderly and, without stolen works of art, some chip merchants would be hard to garnish their shopping.

As for the gypsy which controls the metal recovery sector, they sometimes distance themselves from good business practices: the Parisian police are currently investigating a large traffic of metals in an organized gang ...

But these tilting so often pointed out by opinion should not be an illusion: the many police officers that we interviewed all confirmed it, it is very rare that the arrival of a camp in a city be marked byA flambé of flights or delinquency acts.In general, nothing is happening."The Gitan district is the quietest of the agglomeration," said Pierre Parrat, deputy mayor of Perpignan.In short, we are not more dishonest in caravan than in an individual house.