This text, published in 1968 in the Revue Igloos/Le Quart Monde, was written in the context of the often violent levelling of shanty towns in the Paris area and elsewhere.
(Original: French)
“Only people crushed under the weight of the violence of their fellow human beings are totally destitute. They are mercilessly targeted by contempt or indifference against which they cannot protect themselves.
They can only withdraw, leaving the usual paths. Then they have to blot themselves out and become forgotten in emergency housing settlements, slums, and shanty towns. They are outcasts.
The violence of contempt and indifference causes extreme poverty, since it inevitably leads to exclusion, to the rejection of one human being by others. It ensnares people who live in poverty in mechanisms that crush them and destroy them. It turns them into a disenfranchised people.
The constant deprivation of communion with others – which fills life with light and security – condemns their minds to darkness, imprisons their hearts in turmoil, anguish, and mistrust, and breaks their spirits”.
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