Rue d'Aubagne: the appeal opens, and substandard housing is on trial too

Según franceinfo, the appeal trial over the collapses on the rue d'Aubagne in Marseille opens this Monday, 2 November. A first trial on the tragedy was held at the end of 2024; the collapse killed eight people six years earlier. Also according to franceinfo, the hearings are billed as "hors normes" (exceptional in scale), new summonses are planned, and the problem of unfit housing in Marseille is to be examined again. The details of the defendants, the sentences at stake and the timetable are not in the dispatch we have; we will not invent them.

Let us first think of the eight people who died, and of their loved ones, who will have to relive all of this in a courtroom. An appeal trial is no formality for families in mourning: it is a second crossing.

What follows is our reading, not a fact established by the courts. A house that collapses is never only a matter of stone. A home is the first place where people rebuild themselves: you sleep there to go back to work, you cook there, raise children there, look after the elderly. Economists call this social reproduction, the labour that makes people rather than commodities. When the roof is rotten, that labour becomes harder and more exhausting, and it falls on households, very often on women, who do the washing in the damp and watch the cracks on top of everything else.

The other side is rent. In a system where housing is first and foremost an asset that yields income, the interests of the person who lives in a flat and those of the person who collects the money do not always coincide. Marx was already describing, in Das Kapital, landlords who judge "any pigsty" good enough for their worker while haggling over the rent to the last penny (our translation). The setting changes; the logic dies hard: a modest tenant with nowhere else to go is poorly placed to demand repairs. Marx also noted that laws meant to end such nuisances remained a dead letter when their enforcement depended on the landlords themselves. In Marseille, it is precisely this chain of inspections and responsibilities that the trial must dissect.

We can expect the justice system to establish who failed, and that is its role. But the court will not, on its own, judge a housing market that leaves poor families in dangerous buildings for want of an alternative. That question remains political: how many safe and affordable homes, how many inspectors, what real constraint on those who rent out hovels?

To be continued, then, hearing after hearing. If the appeal manages to name responsibilities, so much the better. But the rue d'Aubagne will not be settled by a verdict: it will be settled when no one else risks their life for a roof that costs little.