ULTRA OM

EMMANUEL MACRON KNOWS the French people are losing their minds as he tells them to be home by 6pm. It is March 2021 and a daily curfew is enforced by military-like police. They patrol the public squares. The bars remain closed.

France’s strange president has never recovered from making a speech in which he declared that he was the descendant of Louis the Sun King. He did this from a gold-plated room. “Vive la France,” he said, as unmaintained buildings full of people collapsed in Marseille, a city where you can find homeless families sat on a mattress in the street; where refugees hang under a resplendent arch – The Porte d’Aix – that once greeted the traveller into this historic port city. It looks just like Paris’ Arc de Triomphe, yet in Marseille it’s where displaced people mill around in a space reclaimed. A victorious monument to commemorate an absurd notion of victory, now an arena of the marginalised.

“If you don’t sing we kick you out… … If you’re a real Ultra, you sweat as much as those on the pitch.”

Here, under the arch, as the streets empty out, there are people genuinely struggling, having made unfathomable journeys that most people would find impossible to comprehend. The arch itself was inspired by the Romans. In the (‘undocumented migrants’) lean against it – many of whom arrived in the midst of a pandemic. They greet each other warmly, but treat passers-by with suspicion. “No fucking photos,” they say. “It is not a fucking zoo here.”