A Fever in the Streets of Paris

PARIS — Friday, 10 p.m., Place d’Italie. Francis Thomas, a.k.a. “Fanta Boy,” is here with his wheels on, ready to roll.

All week, the lanky, unmarried immigrant from Cameroon has waited for this moment. It’s what he daydreams about while working as a security guard: the wind in his face, the pavement under his feet, the thrill of streaking downhill at 30 mph.

“Once you’ve tasted the Friday night ride, you become impatient for Friday to roll around again,” says Thomas, 25. “You can’t live without it.”

After nightfall on the last day of the workweek, something strange and unique happens on the avenues and boulevards of Paris. By the thousands, tipped off by the Internet, cellular telephones and word of mouth, people like Thomas don their in-line skates and assemble for a 15-mile mass trek through the French capital.

During the warmest days of summer last year, this unusual parade, known as the “Friday Night Fever,” was drawing 25,000 people--the population of a good-size town. This year, Boris Belohlavek, 29, a computer engineer who plots the skaters’ weekly route, expects 35,000, maybe more.

For skaters throughout the world, this has become the equivalent of the Boston Marathon or the yearly conclave of Harley-Davidson enthusiasts in Sturgis, S.D. It is the sum of their sport/passion/lifestyle. Already, it’s an urban legend.

“We’re thinking of bringing a group over,” David Miles, 44, president of the California Outdoor Rollerskating Assn., said by telephone from San Francisco. “I’ve got some people coming up here from L.A. tomorrow. They keep asking me, ‘When are we going to Paris?’ ”

How exceptional is the Fever? According to Miles, San Francisco boasts the biggest “night skate” in the United States every Friday. Typical attendance there is 350--or 1% of what is anticipated in the French capital once the weather turns balmy.

The ritual is so unusual that some social scientists have perfected their own skating skills and now trail along each week, wondering if they are witnessing the future of their country. Heard that the French are clannish, tradition-bound couch potatoes? Not between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. at the Fever, anyway.

Here, Parisians mix with banlieusards, or residents of the economically depressed suburbs. French of European stock mingle with immigrants and offspring of immigrants.

“You meet a lot of people. There’s great ambience,” says Andre Baron, 37, an electrician from the suburb of Courbevoie. “I come to make friends--male and female.” He has been skating since May 1999, when colleagues at work needled him about not getting enough exercise.

“At the skate, you get whites, blacks, beurs [young people of Arab origin],” says sociologist Anne-Marie Waser, 39, who has been on in-line skates for a year herself, following skaters with her questions and whirring tape recorder. “What intrigues me as a sociologist is that we can have so many people together with so few rules.”

Set in motion by three whistle blasts, the horde sets off at 10 p.m. from Place d’Italie in a working-class neighborhood of southeastern Paris. Following a different route each week, the wheeled cortege climbs up and down Montmartre and the other hills of the city.

Stretched out over as much as three miles, les rollers zip by monuments such as the Louvre, Arc de Triomphe and Eiffel Tower, which are bathed in nighttime floodlights.

To provide an escort to the weekly event, two years ago Paris authorities created the world’s first police brigade on roller skates. “There are often accidents, people wounded,” says Pascal Furbini, chief of the 18-officer detachment.

What’s more, irate Parisian motorists, blocked at red lights for 20 minutes or more as the skaters flow by, often try to force their way through the human traffic.

“When motorists see our uniforms,” Furbini says, “they rapidly change behavior.”

In its beginnings, the Fever is very French. It began in apparent illegality in 1993 but got a tremendous boost two years later during that most Gallic of happenings, a general strike. For nearly a month, the Metro and other forms of mass transit in Paris were paralyzed. To get to work, thousands of people dug their roller skates out of the closet, or bought a new pair. After the strike was over, many Parisians kept skating.

Now the Fever is accepted as legal--but with a peculiar French twist. Every Wednesday at 6 p.m., Belohlavek has an appointment at the Paris Prefecture of Police to request an official blessing for the route he has mapped for the coming Friday. The map is posted on the Fever’s Web site at https://www.pari-roller.com.

The quirk is that Belohlavek must apply for a demonstration permit, as if he and the other skaters were holding a political protest or a labor rally. French law, it turns out, doesn’t have any provision for thousands of people descending into the street for the sole purpose of having a good time.

The fact that such a collective urge is behind the Fever may portend a different future for a nation where social activity often has been highly politicized.

“The skaters love being part of a mass movement where belonging doesn’t imply being in revolt or having some kind of grievance,” says sociologist Waser, who studies new forms of sport at the government’s National Center for Scientific Research here. “They are not even against motorists who try to ram their way through the crowd.”

Other surprising innovations she has noted: The Fever has no self-aggrandizing leaders trying to exploit the operation for their own purposes, and its only headquarters is virtual--an Internet address. Many people come, skate and leave, content just to have been in the company of other human beings.

For a few hours every Friday, some normal rites of French behavior don’t seem to apply. “I’ve been skating for a year, and no man has ever asked me to have a drink,” Waser marvels. The skaters also help one another. “If somebody is drunk or gets aggressive, 40 people will be on his case immediately,” Belohlavek says.

With a wicked smile, the route-maker admits that “to the despair of everybody,” he intentionally charts each course to include at least one bone-jarring passage down cobbled streets. There will be fast-paced downhill stretches, such as from Porte de Versailles along Boulevard Victor, where speeds can reach 30 mph. Some uphill legs, including the Buttes-Chaumont hills of the Right Bank, are so grueling that some skaters don’t eat beforehand for fear the physical strain might make them vomit.

“You can’t be afraid to suffer. I think you’ve got to be crazy to make this Friday trip,” says Thomas, who got his nickname because of his fondness for orange soda.

Some members of the Friday night crowd wear “quads,” the old four-wheel type of roller skates, while most are equipped with the sleek and modern in-line variety. Real speed demons wear five-wheel models, known as “skeelers.”

Like many Fever regulars, Thomas doesn’t wear a helmet and has no elbow, hand, knee or leg padding under his baggy blue nylon jacket and jeans. He loves the thrill of fear he experiences when he rockets downhill, knowing that nothing will cushion the pain if he goes down on pavement or cobbles. He wears a Walkman, and skates to reggae or the zouk music of the French Antilles. He can get so wrapped up in the experience that the day before one recent Fever, while skating to his job, he slammed into an automobile. It was a police car.

“I never saw it,” Thomas admits.

Such carefree abandon is atypical, but accidents are common enough that two ambulances now follow every edition of the Fever. On average, five skaters are so badly hurt each week that they need to be hospitalized with broken bones, head injuries or other wounds. One night in October, there was a fatality.

Pierre Derud, a member of the Fever’s yellow-shirted volunteer patrol, hit a raised fluorescent marker dividing two lanes of a Left Bank boulevard. He was moving downhill at the time, speedster’s skeelers on his feet and his hands clasped behind his back. The bump was enough to send him sprawling, and he hit his head on the pavement. Derud, in his 30s, fell into a coma and died.

Derud wasn’t wearing a helmet. In the name of freedom and individual choice, the Fever doesn’t require it. Night skates in the U.S. usually do--”You have to have a helmet, or we don’t want to hear about you,” says Mac McCarthy, 45, chairman of the San Diego Skate Club.

As the Fever has spread, new threats to its loose and near anarchic character have cropped up. To advertise herself as youthful and dynamic, a right-wing candidate for the Paris mayor’s office recently had herself photographed while roller-skating, a development warily watched by longtime Fever-goers.

Another new danger, organizers say, is commercialization. The average Fever fan is 25 to 35 years old, and many of them are academics, civil servants, doctors, business executives and graduates of the French equivalent of the Ivy League. Attracted by such demographics, companies ranging from yogurt makers to organizers of roller marathons have been flocking to Place d’Italie on Fridays to hawk their wares or give out samples before the Fever sets out.

According to Belohlavek, some corporations have even tried to buy their way in. Coca-Cola Co., he says, was willing to sponsor the skate but wanted monitors to wear red T-shirts emblazoned with the Coke trademark and insisted that no other soft drinks be allowed access.

“That I refused to do,” Belohlavek says. “I told Coke they could come and hand out free drinks but that if Pepsi wanted to come next week and do the same thing, that they could.”

The computer engineer says the whole thing may be getting so big and cumbersome that it will collapse under its own weight. Already, there are rival skating activities in Paris, including a less challenging circuit on Sunday afternoons that draws thousands, including entire families.

From authorities, there may come a demand for more regulation, including the obligatory use of helmets. Clearly, the Fever has expanded too fast for lawmakers to keep up.

Ordinarily, under French traffic regulations, roller-skaters are considered pedestrians and are supposed to stay on the sidewalk. On Friday nights, however, they are explicitly banned from anywhere but the street pavement. A governmental commission is drawing up a white paper on whether, in legal terms, a skater moving at 30 mph is really a pedestrian. Changes in the traffic code may be in the offing.

When the first Friday night sorties onto the streets of Paris began in 1993, the 20 or so pioneers were afraid they might be arrested. Now the Fever gets an official escort from motorcycle police officers, who clear the streets of cars and people so the skaters can pass.

“To go down the Champs-Elysees with motards opening the way, there is only President Jacques Chirac who can do it,” Belohlavek says, “and us.”