Between my delayed train arrival in Perpignan last weekend and my even more protracted bus departure next day (Diary July 9th), I spent a night in the “Dali Hotel”.
The great surrealist painter lived most of his life just across the border in Spanish Catalonia, but Perpignan was his regional capital. It was also, if the man himself can be believed, the centre of the universe.
His 1965 painting La Gare de Perpignan depicts a “cosmogonic ecstasy” he claimed to have experienced at the railway station two years earlier.
The vision revealed to him nothing less than “the constitution of the universe”, including the “weight of God”, with both of which the station was inextricably linked.
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Lingering on arrival in the unremarkable building, I searched in vain for signs of what inspired Dali. But somehow, the doors of perception failed to open for me. So did the doors of the waiting room and ticket office, both of which were closed for repair.
My stay in the hotel, although pleasant, also fell well short of cosmogonic ecstasy. If not of the universe, however, it gave me a small insight into French politics, and what is now a laboratory for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally Party, formerly the National Front.
In 2020, Perpignan became the first French city of 100,000 people to elect an NRP candidate – Le Pen’s former partner Louis Aliot – as mayor.
Since then, Aliot has concentrated on two high-visibility issues: security and cleanliness. I didn’t notice a single police officer in the 24 hours I was there but was assured there are far more of them than before.
The clean streets policy, meanwhile, was unmistakable. From the manicured park in front of the hotel, via the lawn-lined banks of a canal, to the city centre streets around O’Flaherty’s pub, the place gleamed.
This is in keeping with one of the symbolic changes Aliot has introduced. The city’s slogan used to play up its ethnic identity, as “Perpignan le Catalan”. Now, on all municipal signs, it’s the religious-sounding “Perpignan la Rayonnante”, which implies the place is a shining light.
Another symbolic move, more heavy-handed, was the renaming of a public square after Pierre Sargent (1926 – 1992), a former captain in the French Foreign Legion who later led a right-wing terrorist group in Algeria, opposing decolonisation, before becoming a National Front deputy.
On the train to Perpignan, I had read of the signs being taken down after left-wing protests. But just across the street from my hotel, the “Esplanade Pierre Sergent” was still clearly marked, alongside another “Perpignan la Rayonnante” sign advertising a dispenser for dog poop bags.
The area behind the hotel was interesting too, for different reasons. Before checking out on Saturday, I noticed a stately flight of steps across the plaza there and, climbing them, found I had left the litter-free tourist areas and entered the ghetto of Saint-Jacques.
This is the impoverished home to 5,000 people, mostly of gypsy or Arab background, living in a cluster of narrow streets and alleys on a hill. Perpignan la Rayonnante didn’t seem to extend here. There was litter everywhere, adding to a general air of desolation.
Of police, however, the area seems to have no shortage. Although again I didn’t see any, their heavy-handed treatment of local crime has been the subject of recent news stories.
This is ironic, because the gypsies of Saint-Jacques voted heavily for Aliot, who had courted them. In the face of harsh policing and plans to demolish some of the quartier’s old buildings and rehouse residents, the mutual infatuation seems to have worn off.
How Dali would have felt about Perpignan’s new far-right regime is a debating point. His support of General Franco earned him expulsion from the official Surrealist school in 1939, although apologists argued that his art was subversive enough to excuse him from charges of collaboration.
As seen by the writer André Breton, lead theorist of surrealism, his main interest was in money. Breton once rearranged the letters of Salvador Dali, with satirical intent. His new version read “Avida Dollars” (the first word means “hungry for”).
But much as he cultivated the cult of his own personality, Dali’s mystical visions seem to have been deeply felt at least. The last and most mysterious resulted from a series of hallucinations after the death of his long-term partner and muse, Gala, in 1982.
In those, he foresaw an imminent geo-mystical catastrophe, subsequently depicted in a painting called “The Topological Abduction of Europe”. A minimalist work by his standards, it comprises only an undulating grey background, with two cracks or fault-lines running down it and a mathematical formula at the bottom.
Naturally, Europe’s predicted disappearance was to happen in or near Perpignan - it has been noted that the fault lines on his painting resemble the route of two motorways near the city. Perhaps that was a factor in the transport delays I suffered last week. Either way, I can report that, whatever else it has achieved so far, Perpignon’s far-right government has yet to make the trains (or buses) run on time.
