He is France’s last newspaper hawker; maybe the last in Europe.<\/b><\/p>\n
Ali Akbar has been pounding the pavement of Paris’s Left Bank for more than 50 years, papers under the arm and on his lips the latest headline.<\/p>\n
And now he is to be officially recognised for his contribution to French culture. President Emmanuel Macron \u2013 who once as a student himself bought newspapers from Mr Akbar \u2013 is to decorate him next month with the Order of Merit, one of France’s highest honours.<\/p>\n
“When I began here in 1973 there were 35 or 40 of us hawkers in Paris,” he says. “Now I am alone.<\/p>\n
“It became too discouraging. Everything is digital now. People just want to consult their telephones.”<\/p>\n
These days, on his rounds via the caf\u00e9s of fashionable Saint-Germain, Mr Akbar can hope to sell around 30 copies of Le Monde. He keeps half the sale price, but gets no refund for returns.<\/p>\n
Back before the Internet, he would sell 80 copies within the first hour of the newspaper’s afternoon publication.<\/p>\n
“In the old days people would crowd around me looking for the paper. Now I have to chase down clients to try to sell one,” he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He is France’s last newspaper hawker; maybe the last in Europe. Ali Akbar has been pounding the pavement…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":334868,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5309],"tags":[2000,299,36],"class_list":{"0":"post-334867","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-france"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115008295565160099","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334867\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/334868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}