An Unusual Silence

When the firemen arrived, they were struck by an unusual silence. Only a few flames could be seen flickering through the roof of the fortress-like, cinder-block building, and the men assumed that it was a minor fire. But when they pried open an emergency exit at Le Cinq-Sept, a popular dance hall for youths in Saint-Laurent-du-Pont near Grenoble, two of the firemen fainted. Bodies were stacked before them in ghastly contortions of agony. Fists were literally fried against the locked door. Impressions of hands, arms and heads were fused into the cement wall. Almost all of the 145 dead were young--between 17 and 27. It was France's worst single fire since 1938, when 150 people perished in the Nouvelles Galeries department store conflagration in Marseille.

Padlocked Exits. The Cinq-Sept was a pyromaniac's dream. On the balcony overlooking the dance floor, alcoves resembling grottoes were fashioned from papier-mache. Overhanging the room was an explosively inflammable polyurethane ceiling on which a psychedelic light show was played. Illegal one-way turnstiles, with floor-to-ceiling bars surrounded by caging, were the only entrances to the windowless club. Three of the four emergency exits were padlocked to keep out those without tickets who were eager to hear The Storm, a new rock group from Paris. "I admit that the turnstiles ultimately made the club a sort of prison," said Gilbert Bas, 26, a co-owner of the Cinq-Sept, "but we had to keep out the gate-crashers." By locking the doors, the owners created a cinder-block oven.

The oven was apparently ignited when a youth dropped a match on a foam-rubber chair. Flames quickly licked up the grottoes and spread to the ceiling. In a matter of moments, molten sheets of plastic dripped down on the crowd, setting tables, chairs and clothing on fire. Only three men--the club's co-owners --had keys to the emergency exits, and two of them died in the flames. Because there was no telephone, Bas ran to his car to notify the fire department instead of opening the doors. Twenty patrons escaped by leaping over the club's bar and running out the only open exit. One survivor, 17-year-old Jean Luc Bastard, described how some who had escaped punched a hole through one of the locked doors with a beam. "People were screaming inside," he said. "We pulled some out through the hole. We could see people behind the door reaching their arms toward us. After five minutes, everybody inside was dead."

Incredibly, the local fire chief claimed that he had no knowledge of the Cinq-Sept's opening or its fire-law violations, though the club was a great attraction and major tax contributor to Saint-Lau-rent-du-Pont (pop. 3,700). "The mayor's office must certainly have been aware that the dance hall was operating without official authorization," said French Interior Minister Raymond Marcellin. The club had reopened last April in a new building; the old one had burned down on the other side of town, without any casualties, in February 1969.

As a result of the fire, self-proclaimed Maoist French university students rioted in Grenoble, smashing windows, throwing Molotov cocktails and threatening a number of local officials with lynching. As a mass funeral was held for the fire's victims, the French government suspended Saint-Laurent-du-Pont's mayor and the prefecture secretary-general of the Alpine department of Isere where the town is situated. Five mayors from neighboring towns resigned in protest against the suspensions, and a Deputy from Isere, Aime Paquet, rose in the National Assembly and urged: "Let the dead sleep in peace." France-Soir answered him in a frontpage editorial: "We are not trying to disturb the dead," it said. "We want only to wake up the living."

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