Among the recipients of France’s highest government distinctions – the Légion d’honneur and the Ordre National du Mérite – lined up Wednesday evening in the Élysée Palace’s Salle des Fêtes, Ali Akbar stood out. “Very moved,” Paris’s last newspaper hawker received the insignia of the Ordre National du Mérite – one of the country’s top honors – from President Emmanuel Macron, watched by his wife and children. “That’s it, I’m a knight, I’ve made it,” he said after the ceremony, overjoyed.
For more than 50 years, this elegantly dressed Pakistani man has walked the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, wearing a baseball cap and carrying a stack of Le Monde newspapers under his arm. A local celebrity in this corner of the 6th and 7th arrondissements, few know of his “incredible destiny,” as the president recalled on this occasion.
Born into a very poor family a few kilometers from Islamabad in 1954, he endured forced labor and violence from the age of six. At 18, he joined the merchant navy and traveled the world aboard a cargo ship – a grueling journey of two years that took him through Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Greece and finally to Paris in the early 1970s, at 20. In the French capital, he crossed paths with Georges Bernier, known as “professeur Choron,” who offered him a chance to sell satirical publications Hara-Kiri and Charlie Hebdo on the street.
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