Marseille is in a state of flux – a place that encapsulates France’s volatile political landscape unlike anywhere else. At the heart of this tension are the Ultras: football fans ferociously dedicated to their city’s team, who have constructed a movement built on the foundations of radical politics, passion and pride.
Text: Frank L’Opez ✪ Photography: Harrison Thane
CHAPTER 2
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.↪ ↪ 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 present day, a collection of young sans papiers (‘undocumented migrants’) lean against it – many of whom arrived in the midst of a pandemic. They greet each other warmly, but treat passersby with suspicion. “No fucking photos,” they say. “It is not a fucking zoo here.”
While this is happening, football fans in fluorescent bibs – the Ultras – hand out food. They are supporters of Olympique de Marseille (OM): the only top-level club in the city. The badge is scrawled on walls, worn on chests and visible in shop windows everywhere. The Ultras present have mobilised to work with food banks – they are here in order to care for those most in need.
I’m with them today, handing out cakes and mangoes to migrants and the homeless. The mood is that of tension, punctured by occasional joviality. “This is my dinner,” says a teen as he waves a joint at me. In truth, I might be treated differently if I wasn’t wearing an Ultras bib. It has earned me the trust of a volatile crowd.
This is, after all, a city that wears its colour in smoke: where protest and carnival
