Gaîté Lyrique theater

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Gaîté Lyrique theater, in Paris’ third arrondissement, has a long and très glorieux history dating back to 1862, once playing host to operettas by the likes of Jacques Offenbach, but today the establishment seems to prefer staging live-action exercises in the Theater of the Absurd.

Falling into disrepair during the 1980s, in 2002 Paris City Hall decided to reopen the famous building as a new, renovated cultural center devoted to the contemporary arts—the chief such contemporary art being that of hoodwinking the unwilling French taxpayer into funding his own forcible ethnic replacement.

Bad Actors at Play
Today the establishment is self-described as being not simply an ordinary theater, exhibition space, or concert hall, but as nothing less than a “factory of our times”: one remorselessly devoted toward churning out ever more identikit left-wing drones and activists.

On its website, the Lyrique boasts of being a place that “seeks to address pressing cultural, social, democratic and climate issues,” thereby hoping to combine “creation and social engagement to help people put ideas into practice.” Apparently it is “critical to elevate their [i.e., audiences’] civic-minded initiatives and their environmental, social and societal responsibilities,” as opposed to simply putting on a good show to entertain them all, as in the primitive era of Monsieur Offenbach.

It was in this utopian spirit that, on Dec. 10, the establishment organized a free conference titled “Reinventing the Welcome for Refugees in France.” The Lyrique certainly did that, as around 250 homeless African immigrants immediately turned up to the theater’s superbly refurbished and warm 19th-century building to sit enraptured by lectures from eminent French academics and senior officials from the Red Cross. So spellbound were they by such talks’ content, in fact, that once they were over, the immigrants concerned steadfastly refused to leave the building.

Today, their numbers now swelled to around 300, the squatters are still there, saying they will remain in situ until local Parisian authorities agree to give them some free permanent housing to which they claim to somehow be entitled, despite presumably never having paid a single centime in tax into the State’s coffers in their entire lives. Where could these poor, desperate street people have gotten such an erroneous idea from? Quite possibly from some of the bleeding-heart lectures the Gaîté Lyrique had just organized on their behalf back on Dec. 10.

The Children’s Crusade
Rather than being a theater, the Gaîté Lyrique has now essentially become a gigantic doss-house for illegal immigrants, most of whom had arrived in France claiming to be aged under 18, and thus able to be classified as “unaccompanied minors,” which would indeed have qualified them for the legal right to be housed by local authorities.

Yet they were judged by skeptical officials to have in fact been adults merely posing falsely as children in order to trick free homes from the French State, and so ended up sleeping on the street instead. Being failed child actors, it was perhaps only natural for such individuals to then gravitate toward their nearest theater.

As the Lyrique’s halls and display spaces are now full of makeshift beds and soup kitchens, there is little space left for their usual patrons, as photo galleries clearly show. As such, the theater has been forced to cancel or move out-of-house all scheduled events and exhibitions until at least Jan. 24. This is proving to be a very large problem, as its funding model is based upon receiving 30 percent of its running costs from the State, and 70 percent from ticket sales to visiting gullible Left Bank pseuds wearing berets.

Can’t the Lyrique’s board just call in the cops, the lawyers, and the bailiffs to kick the “kiddies” out? Not without looking like massive hypocrites. Evicting “children” during the cold winter festive season is a highly bourgeois, capitalist, right-wing, and Scrooge-like measure to pursue, even though said enfants are not really children at all, but postpubescent impostors. As such, to act in their own rational self-interest here would undermine the publicly paraded left-wing credentials of the theater’s management, so this option is not currently open to them.

Instead, they settled for issuing a statement supporting their building’s unlawful occupiers, saying it would be “unthinkable” to “throw them out on the street…in the middle of winter,” and proudly proclaiming “the legitimacy of the collective’s demand to obtain a roof” over their heads, even if said roof was in fact the Lyrique’s own, and the immigrants’ presence there risked pushing them rapidly into bankruptcy.

The Occupation of Paris
When you examine the kind of exhibitions being staged by the Gaîté Lyrique of late, you could argue the staff were only reaping what they had sown. Consider their vibrant “educational workshop” called “The Migration Fresco,” which promised to begin “Changing the way we look at migration routes.” According to its online blurb:

“Taking the form of a collective and fun workshop…the Migration Fresco offers to discover the stories of Asrallah, Kamal, and Mila to retrace their migratory journeys from their country of origin to their arrival in France. These workshops are educational and invite us to redefine terms that are often used incorrectly in everyday language, and in particular in the media, such as ‘refugee,’ ‘migrant,’ ‘exile’ [what about the word ‘child’?]…. The Migration Fresco encourages us to deconstruct prejudices about the challenges of reception in France and Europe, and encourages sharing and multicultural encounters. The objective? Together, we must change the way we look at migratory paths!”

Objective successfully achieved! Ironically, this was one of the very pro-immigrant exhibitions that, due to the excess presence of immigrants in the building, has since had to be rehoused elsewhere, just like the immigrants themselves now demand to be.

Pictures at an Exhibition
Other exhibitions may have been resettled in other areas purely for their own safety. Most of the Lyrique’s immigrants are black or Muslim, hailing from culturally conservative lands in France’s former African empire, like Mali. As such, one can only imagine their likely reaction to the Lyrique’s “Trans*Galactique” photography exhibition, originally due to have run until Feb. 9, billed as being “An artistic plunge into trans identities” and “A visual exploration celebrating trans and queer identities and questioning notions of gender, identity and resistance in a rapidly changing world.”

The stated aim of the photo show was to display large images of various black and brown men dressed unconvincingly as women in order to begin “paving the way for more inclusive and supportive alliances,” placed “Against a global backdrop of rising intolerance” against transgenderists worldwide. Would that be a “global backdrop of rising intolerance” against them in foreign Muslim lands like Mali, where many of the immigrants currently occupying the Gaîté Lyrique were born, perchance?

A now-relocated special female-led workshop of erotic emancipation aimed at helping attendees “Put some poetry in your sexts,” meanwhile, may also have drawn ire from some of the more oversensitive infants on site who hail from lands where women are expected to wear burkas and yashmaks all day long, not send unsolicited images of their naked genitalia to strangers via Snapchat.

By deliberately encouraging individuals from such cultures to pour into their country unimpeded, do the left-wingers who run the Lyrique really not see how they will only end up undermining their own liberal values about things like gender and sexuality, which they profess so very loudly to love?

Collectif Insanity
It is not even as if the occupiers demonstrate any noticeable gratitude toward the Lyrique’s board for deliberately ruining themselves by playing their hosts. Every day, the immigrants gather outside on the steps of the theater, loudly banging drums and shouting demands and slogans, further putting the public off from approaching anywhere near the place.

Legal immigrants and their descendants in the area are also having their lives and livelihoods destroyed by the selfish squatters. U.K. broadsheet The Times sent their Paris correspondent out to interview the manageress of the Bistrot de la Gaîté, a restaurant that sits (now generally emptily) next to the theater.

Despite being the child of legal Algerian immigrants, the manageress told The Times that the new illegal immigrants “are ruining my business. They hang around outside my terrace, smoking joints and fighting among themselves. Not only do we no longer get theatergoers because the theater is shut but we don’t get passers-by either. They’re being frightened away by all these young men.”

According to the native French left-wing activists ultimately responsible for organizing the whole migrant occupation in the first place, the Collectif des Jeunes du Parc de Belleville, the Lyrique had become a center for their sacred “anti-racist and anti-colonial struggle.” I wonder if the seemingly successfully integrated and financially self-supporting Bistro owner from the former French colony of Algeria would welcome their wholly unasked-for “anti-racist” and “anti-colonial” efforts on her own alleged behalf?

Reading From the Same Script
Non-French media, getting hold of this story, have treated it very much as a lone one-off, but this is not so. During 2023 and 2024, several municipal public buildings in Paris became occupied by immigrants at the behest of the Collectif des Jeunes du Parc de Belleville, often cultural centers run by white-guilt-ridden, leftism-sympathizing useful idiots like those at the Gaîté Lyrique, who prove easily susceptible to such crude moral blackmail backed up by mob rule.

One such location was the Maison des Métallos show space, which was similarly flooded with around 230 strangely tall and well-developed foreign “minors” for three months until eventually Parisian authorities gave in and agreed to transfer the immigrant invaders to more suitable accommodations elsewhere in the city.

A better alternative might have been to forcibly transfer members of the Collectif des Jeunes du Parc de Belleville to semipermanent accommodation within a French State prison, as in the good old days of the Bastille. Capitulating to such morally self-entitled individuals only gives them the green light to go away and do precisely the same thing over and over again, as can currently be seen with the grand débâcle at the Gaîté Lyrique today. As ever, just like Rudyard Kipling once warned, if you pay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane—or the Malian either, apparently.

This entire self-defeating attitude is summed up perfectly in a comedy sketch from the 1994 spoof BBC news sketch show The Day Today, in which the program’s host, Chris Morris, tells viewers about the sad plight of one young foreign war orphan he has just encountered using the following highly emotive words (look around 22:37 minutes into this video): “I have a child about his age myself. When I phoned him ten minutes ago, I told him to move out of the house to make room for his new brother.” Back in 1994, that was still considered just a joke. Now it appears to be official French artsworld policy.

Are events currently playing out at the Gaîté Lyrique more truly a comedy or a tragedy? Either way, someone really should write a play about the whole thing.