October 11, 2023 at 7:15 a.m. EDT
Some evidence suggests that the uproar is more about mania than menace — bedbug cognoscenti suspect that widespread reports of a surge are exaggerated. In the Paris Metro, about 50 bedbug sightings have been received; none was verified. Pest control services say many of their house calls to exterminate bedbugs turn out to involve other vermin or preventive treatment.
No matter. Paris’s psychosis over bedbugs — tiny, vampiric and tricky to eradicate — has crossed the channel to Britain, an island nation of astonishing diversity but apparently finite tolerance. Some there worry that the Eurostar, which connects Paris to London with about 15 speedy trains daily, is an all-too-perfect conveyance for insects hitching a ride in luggage or upholstery.
A dispatch the other day in the Guardian, a British newspaper, noted that Google searches for bedbugs had spiked in the U.K., and that social media postings pointed to an incipient meltdown.
“My friend is on a train from Birmingham to Leicester and she’s just seen a bedbug,” tweeted a Londoner using the handle @tiandemi last week. “The whole carriage is screaming. It’s game over lads. We’re f—–.”
As a native New Yorker who grew up cohabitating with cockroaches — my parents’ kitchen afforded them a spacious nocturnal speedway — I’ve seen plenty of pests in the city. The Big Apple is only now emerging from the grip of a summer invader that began swarming the town in 2020: the spotted lanternfly, a thick-shelled planthopper that residents are urged to squash on sight.
In Venice, pigeons are so aggressive that fancy hotels employ falconers to patrol their terraces to protect guests from the winged gray scourge. While patrons were enjoying their drinks last week at the legendary Hotel Danieli’s rooftop terrazza, overlooking Venice’s lagoon, they were introduced to the impressively taloned predator on duty. His name was Axel.
In Paris itself, rats are everywhere and always have been. When I’m out walking with my friend Sabine and one scurries across our path, she pays it as little heed as she would a cat. Earlier this year, the mayor of Paris declared a truce in the city’s war on rats. Henceforth, officials announced, the policy would amount to: Can’t we all just get along?
But getting along with bedbugs does not look like part of the Parisian program. Overkill seems to be the plan, insofar as there is one. The French authorities are hellbent on Bugxit.
Charged up by a media-fed frenzy, and nervous that the coverage will drive visitors away from next summer’s Olympics in France, the government convened a crisis meeting last Friday. The authorities, clearly worried, are considering setting up a national surveillance center. Several schools that reported infestations were closed. Lawmakers delivered dire speeches.
In the Palais Bourbon, august home to the French Parliament’s lower house, one deputy, Mathilde Panot, held aloft a glass vial she said contained les punaises de lit, as bedbugs are known here. She called on the government to mobilize and establish a national disinfection service, declaring that bedbugs “have turned the lives of millions of our infested citizens into a nightmare.”
Bedbugs have been around a long time, and Paris isn’t the first place to go bananas over them. New York succumbed to a similar craze in 2010, when an infestation swept Google’s headquarters in the city and forced the brief closure of Niketown’s megastore in Midtown.
Just as with that panic, now a fading memory, the current anxiety in France might ultimately turn out to be about little of consequence — aside from short-lived rashes, largely propelled by breathless media coverage.
At Hygiene Premium, a family-owned pest control service with six stores around Paris, Sacha Krief, the founder’s son, told me that business is booming — even if signs are modest of a much greater infestation. He said Paris’s recently concluded Fashion Week, along with the Rugby World Cup (in Paris until late October), might have brought more bedbugs to town. About 70 percent of his clients want information or treatment for the pests, up from roughly half until a month or two ago.
Krief thinks traditional and social media are also among the chief culprits, along with, perhaps, tourism and the popularity of secondhand clothing. But he’s not complaining. “It’s making up for two or three years during covid, when business was very slow,” he said. “So that’s fine. All the better.”