Rue Claude Tillier, XII arrondissement, Paris. A building from the 1970s, put up by an association of former French ambassadors to Africa to welcome migrants into the capital. Three hundred beds at the start. When I arrived, six lustres later, thirteen hundred. Four floors, each with its own rooms and collective kitchens. A Dantean underworld beneath. A courtyard at the centre, the village square.

Two populations, half the building each: Malian immigrants on one side, Algerians on the other. Eighty percent belonged to the first group. If the building had been a ship, it would have capsized.

It was madness by any measure. Every year the prefecture issued a waiver, because it had nowhere to put the migrants and could not afford to close the building. There were others like it across Paris — substantially similar, substantially full. When I left the city, years later, the season of fires began. That had been my greatest fear, ahead of the sanitary one so fashionable today. But I belong to the generation that blew on a sweet dropped on the ground and called it disinfected.

Every electrical socket carried such a multitude of multi-plugs — hotplates, heaters, warmers, kettles — that it became tangible proof that guardian angels exist. The full-time electrician spent his days chasing cables fused into the walls and switches short-circuited by a paste of decomposed cockroaches.

The Algerians, older men, were not in surplus. If they were not harkis — the "fighters for France" in the bloody Algerian war of liberation — they had certainly lived through it. They were old now, the way Europeans are old; or European, the way the old are.

On the other side, the sub-Saharan co-religionists: irrepressible vitality, irreverent, apparently out of control. It was a staggering observatory. Hierarchies and scales of value crossed, opposed, sometimes turned against each other like the gears of a mad clock.

The invisible structure

There was the imam, the religious hierarchy, and the inevitable call to prayer filling the courtyard and the adjoining streets. I remember Boubou, a likeable layabout who often loitered near my office. One day, mid-sentence, the muezzin sang and Boubou sprinted to the staff lavatory — separate, as is the custom in France, from the bathroom — to perform the required ablutions. Purity expresses itself in many forms.

There were the delegates, the centre's representatives I dealt with as director. They were clan heads, one per family name: the Diallos, the Tourés, the Traorés. And this dynamic could be surprising. Diarra, who led my team of orderlies, commanded respect even though he was not a delegate. Diarra belonged to a higher-ranking family. When a representative of the Malian government came to my office to announce that the executive had bought a satellite channel and decided to install a giant dish on the roof of Tillier, the guarantor — acting as the government's ambassador to the centre — was Diarra, not the delegates.

There were the elders, sometimes in Mali, sometimes at Tillier, who decided who would leave or occupy a bed in my centre. It was a genuine hidden power, and a constant arm-wrestle for the manager — for me — who had to mediate with the demands of the outside world: French authorities, social services, and so on.

Then there was a hierarchy based on order of arrival in France. The African binman employed full-time by the city of Paris stood at the top. The boy just off the boat at the bottom. The latter was the one to fleece, because everything was service, market. You need a residence permit and don't know where the offices are? I'll tell you — for a price. The closed-source model applied to daily life.

The permanent whirlpool

The centre was a kind of permanent whirlpool, where the concept of property grew very thin. There was a market for freshly stolen mobile phones. The buyer got an unpredictable window for calling relatives back in Africa: the duration depended on how fast the victim got the SIM blocked by their operator.

There was a butcher, a giant with a machete who hacked pieces of lamb on wooden blocks and laid them out for sale on a table — in summer, naturally. Seen in this light, the antiseptic hand gels and the amuchina in the salad that people now use so liberally seem more like superstitious rites of an odd religion. I don't have the numbers, but I doubt the mortality rate in Rue Tillier strayed far from the European average.

I remember, one day, having to scold the giant with the machete. My finger raised, "don't you dare, not ever again" — and he nodded. Sometimes you push your luck.

Communication mattered. The same notice printed on red paper made far more impression than a few sentences on a white sheet. Blood was very present in the collective imagination.

There were the cooks, preparing industrial quantities of mafé, the West African national dish of chicken and spices. On the floor or at the tables, strictly with the right hand — the left serves other purposes — residents and centre staff, RATP transport workers, Aéroports de Paris employees, all of us ate together in this swarm of uniforms and clothing of every kind.

There were, in the underworld below, the tailors sewing endless lengths of fabric that swept the floor. Even when the sewers overflowed. It was fine.

And there were the goldsmiths. Yes, goldsmiths. They worked gold with skill, producing geometric forms that have nothing to do with the often hideous abstraction of the twentieth century. These were methectic forms in the Platonic sense: they captured the idea, the geometric form used by the demiurge in the Timaeus, by Leonardo in his drawings.

The twelve Mamadou Traoré

Every so often the gendarmes would arrive.

"We need to speak with Mr. Traoré."

"Which one? I have seventy-four."

"Mamadou Traoré."

"In that case, twelve."

"Mamadou Traoré, born in Bandiougoula, 1982."

"Which of the four?"

In many documents of the time, to be fair, only the year of birth appeared — no month, no day. But the point was something else. Here you touched with your hands the fact that individual identity — the idea that each person is unique and unrepeatable — is a Western invention. In the sub-Saharan wing of the Claude Tillier Centre, identity began with the surname. The individual is the torchbearer of the lineage, like the nobility among us.

The method

Living at the centre meant riding the crest of the wave, with the goal of defusing the permanent fuse — to paraphrase Trotsky — of civil, penal, and sanitary emergencies. It was constant negotiation, mediation, finding the right word. My predecessor had given me good counsel on this: when someone raised their voice — it happened often, with populations inclined to theatricality — he would speak ever more softly, forcing the other to lower theirs. Though this stratagem would not have worked had his interlocutor not recognised a certain power in him, his being the director. Without that, the louder voice would simply have drowned out the quieter phrasing. Dialogue always presupposes recognition of the other.

For my part, I used a different approach, especially in the most heated moments. I remember meetings with furious delegates and howling crowds behind them. I remember their ceremonious way of going back to Adam and Eve to explain the roots of a contingent problem they wanted me to address. There was a great deal of theatricality, and in their own way they were performing — they had to show their people they meant business.

The imperative, then, was not to interrupt. Never, for any reason. It would have been too strong a trigger, and rightly so: cutting someone off is a failure of respect — even if, at times, not from emotion but sheer exhaustion, you are sorely tempted.

Do not interrupt. Make it understood that you are listening, and listen in earnest, while noting the logical steps of the speaker's argument in the margin. How useful my university note-taking habit proved in those moments. You feel like Socrates in the Apology, but you keep writing. If you recognise the right to speak, your own right will be recognised in due time. Then it is your turn, and from your notes you draw a coherent discourse in which nothing is forgotten — you synthesise, connect the dots, and answer everyone, thereby saying: I heard you. You propose solutions, open a dialogue. A game of mutual recognition against a backdrop of concrete problems. The hemlock is not for today.

It was profoundly philosophical work. The dialectic of ideas played out before my eyes, and it was fascinating. That anthropological step aside created a theatre in which the figures of thought could play outside the usual frames that allow debate only when it does not impact the real. The censorship of posts that fail to conform to our social media's Community Standards is no different from that of the Ancien Régime, where — as Tocqueville noted — one could discuss anything provided one did not discuss power. Tillier, like the later experience of the Roma camp, offered precisely this: playing in earnest, not for show. Philosophy became a sextant for navigating real life, not a drawing-room ornament.

On the strength of this, I proposed to several university rectors that philosophy be introduced into the training of social workers. Sociology and psychology can provide extremely useful keys, I explained, but the educator — confronted by trade with thought patterns sometimes unknown to him — can find himself in situations he cannot interpret, and make the wrong choices as a result. From that simple observation came the philosophy courses I taught during the Tillier years at various French training institutes for social workers. As well as the cafés-philo — philosophical discussions in Parisian bars — that I ran with psychologists and third-sector workers, with abundant carafes of wine, as Socrates teaches.

The wrong metaphor

But the most dangerous thing is not open confrontation, even theatrical as I have described. Disaster lies in wait when the interest and emotion of the other distorts your words. When the reported version is enough — fits the expectations — and makes it normal to judge without hearing the other side.

In 2002 came the terrible sinking of the Senegalese ferry Joola, off the coast of Gambia. The ship, overloaded beyond belief with passengers, had capsized under the excess weight. The images looped on every network and made the danger plastic, visible.

At the time I was fighting every day to reduce the risks of overcrowding. The dangers were enormous — not only sanitary. The centre had just been the epicentre of "the largest tuberculosis epidemic since the war," to quote the doctors who had managed it. But fire was worse. The trafficking was incessant and the delegates profited from it, making it ever harder to talk without colliding with vested interests. We were heading straight for the wall. I was afraid for them — genuinely afraid — and I was afraid for myself. I felt the breath of criminal liability on my neck, whatever might happen in that building where nothing met code — the perfect scapegoat, if anything did.

Exasperated, in a private conversation with the chief delegate, I used the wrong image — that of the Joola — to make him understand where the unchecked growth of numbers was leading us. And with that image I lost the centre.

I touched an exposed nerve. Many residents had acquaintances on that ferry. I touched interests. The phrase was seized upon, twisted, repeated throughout the centre with intentions attributed to it that were the opposite of those that had produced it. It was a wrong phrase, and it failed to respect the grief of others. By its nature, then, it lent itself to a distortion that was anything but disinterested.

Then I lost my grip. It became wall against wall.

We tend to think the most treacherous situations are the theatrical ones — the furious crowds — when in fact a private, unprovable, one-to-one conversation can have far worse consequences. We know how dangerous crowds are. The Gospels tell us, the Apology tells us, the books of Gustave Le Bon and René Girard tell us. But the point is not, in truth, the container — it is the intention, the soul, of the interlocutor, whether singular or multiple.

At Tillier I learned that video meliora sed deteriora sequor is a borderline act: sometimes at the edge of the unconscious, in that grey zone where one knows and does not know. And frankly, I do not know what moved the delegates in their hearts. In the distortion, everything fit, and maybe that suited them.

The sophist, on the other hand, knows fully what he does and what he wants. But that figure I would only encounter later.

The fires

I returned to Italy for family reasons. In Paris, the season of fires began. Several structures like mine — all from the same period, all with the same problems — caught fire, as was inevitable. Funds were unlocked to renovate them. But the dead did not return, and perhaps neither did the managers.

Written in dialogue with an AI assistant. The life, the memories, and the voice are the author's. Disclosure is the point.