The relocation of migrants from Paris has outraged mayors from rural France, especially from small towns and agricultural areas, who believe that this migration is linked to presenting a shiny and migration-free capital for the Games. Clean-ups in the run-up to a major event are and have been a reality, as they were before the World Cup or the Winter Olympics.

Rio 2016 was paradigmatic in its supposed clean-up, as not only was there a truce between drug trafficking leaders and the governing authorities to show a different face of the Carioca capital, but the streets and squares were unusually clean and free of homeless people, something that "returned to normal" only days after the Games.

The same happened in China's capital for the 2008 Games, when homeless beggars and street vendors were removed. For the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, there were neighbourhoods near the centre of Doha that were literally covered in painted plasterboard, so that most tourists could not see beyond the main avenues.

In these Paris Games, the idea is the same: to show a face that does not correspond to everyday reality. Preventing the world from seeing the enormous problems of migration, insecurity or the daily problems of one of the world's great capitals, and making it all seem like a fairy tale, seems to be the goal, rather than solving real problems.

In these Paris Games, the idea is the same: to show a face that does not correspond to everyday reality. Preventing the world from seeing the enormous problems of migration, insecurity or the daily problems of one of the world's great capitals, and making it all seem like a fairy tale, seems to be the goal, rather than solving real problems.

In this sense, the supposed cleaning (which is often nothing more than moving them from a visible place to a less visible one, in order to maintain or present a more appropriate image) ends up being a transfer of problems from the capital to the cities of the interior. 

Serge Grouard, the right-wing mayor of Orleans in central France, complained on Monday that up to 500 homeless migrants had arrived in his city of 100,000 without his knowledge.

"It has been proven that every three weeks a bus from Paris arrives in Orleans with between 35 and 50 people on board," he told reporters. There were also rumours that they were there to "clean up" the capital before the Olympic Games in July and August.

Each arriving migrant is given three weeks in a hotel at the state's expense, but then they are left to fend for themselves, Grouard explained, denouncing a lack of sustainable planning. Paris has long been a magnet for asylum seekers and migrants, mostly from former colonies in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East, with demand for short-term emergency accommodation.

As a result, informal camps are regularly set up under bridges or in open spaces around the capital, and are periodically dismantled by the police. The occupants are offered the opportunity to apply for asylum, and the government's policy is to move many of them out of Paris and into facilities elsewhere in the country. 

The arrivals at Orleans 'are not linked to the organisation of the Paris Olympics', the state's regional security office said in a statement on Tuesday, adding that Orleans was one of 10 'regional temporary reception centres'.

"We were not consulted, neither about its creation nor about the people who will go there," Floriane Varieras, deputy mayor of Strasbourg, told AFP when asked about a regional facility near her city in eastern France. "I agree with the mayor of Orleans, the more opaque side of what is happening," she added.

In January, the mayor of Lavaur, a small town near Toulouse in south-west France, issued a public letter denouncing the policy of moving migrants around the country as "irresponsible" and "dangerous". 

Bernard Carayon, a right-wing member of the Republican Party, wrote that the policy was "designed to make Paris more 'presentable' and manageable, six months before the Olympic Games, and this is unacceptable".

In a speech in September 2022, French President Emmanuel Macron supported the idea of dispersing asylum seekers and refugees across the country. He also argued that refugees could help achieve a 'demographic transition' in rural and small-town France (which is suffering from a constant decline in population and resources).

Many politicians have accused Macron of introducing poverty, crime and Islamism into traditional communities that are often suspicious of outsiders. In February, an umbrella group of 80 French charities called 'Revers de la medaille' (The Other Side of the Medal) denounced a 'social cleansing' of Paris ahead of the Olympics, with efforts to remove migrants, the homeless and sex workers.