The police arrived before daybreak, striding through the darkness down the embankment of the Seine clad in riot gear.
The migrants in a makeshift camp along the quayside were mostly asleep when the officers took up position, although they soon woke up, emerging from tents, with alarm on their faces.
Few had a clear idea of what was going to happen to them next. All, however, understood that the presence of several dozen riot police officers signalled the clearance of the camp that has been home to 300 migrants for months.
“I don’t know where I’m going,” said Yussef, 21, a Sudanese man who had arrived in France last week after travelling across Libya, Tunisia, the Mediterranean, Italy and Switzerland. “I only hope they give me a bed somewhere. It’s very cold here.”
The evacuation of the camp is part of a programme described by President Macron’s government as a humanitarian response to the migration crisis that has left thousands of Africans, Afghans, Albanians, eastern Europeans and others sleeping rough in Paris.
Charities are sceptical. They say Macron’s goal is to remove unsightly camps from the capital before the start of the Paris Olympics next summer, just as favelas were bulldozed in Brazil before the Rio Games and the poor were displaced by Chinese officials ahead of those in Beijing.
Although the clearance of migrant camps in Paris is nothing new – there have been about 400 such operations since 2015 – the rate has accelerated in recent months in the run-up to the Olympics, charities argue.
There has also been a shift in the policy. Whereas homeless migrants used to be directed to shelters in and around the capital, more than 2,800 have been sent to the provinces since March.
They are taken to temporary shelters in towns such as Bordeaux, Strasbourg or Lyon, where they stay for three weeks whilst permanent lodgings are found – at least in theory.
In practice, there is often no housing available, with the result that they return to sleeping rough in provincial towns and cities whose councils complain that they are overrun.
“The aim is to take the migrants far away from Paris,” said Eve Derriennic, general co-ordinator in Paris for Médecins du Monde, the French charity. “The trouble is that many end up on the streets in towns in the provinces where they have less support than in Paris.”
Harmonie Lecerf-Meunier, the deputy mayor of Bordeaux, told France Info, the state radio station: “We are saturated, over-saturated. We’ve got families in the streets, shanty towns and squats. We cannot take any more people.”
Her plea seems to have fallen on deaf ears in the capital, however. Of the five coaches laid on for the migrants evacuated from the camp by the Seine, the first was heading to Bordeaux.
“I don’t know where Bordeaux is,” Yussef said as he was ushered towards the coach. “I just want to work and to earn money and have a place to live.”
The government’s supporters say ministers are doing their best in the face of acute difficulties, with France receiving 131,254 asylum claims last year, compared with 81,130 in the UK.
With fewer than 50,000 beds in centres for asylum seekers, tens of thousands are in “emergency housing”, generally hotel bedrooms booked by the state.
But in the Paris region, many low-cost hotels used by the government have been refusing to take homeless migrants this year. They are undergoing an upgrade ahead of the Olympics in the knowledge that they can make more money by offering rooms to sports fans during the Games.
The loss of several thousand hotel rooms has added to the number of migrants on the streets, charities say.
A housing ministry spokesman insisted that the camp clearances in Paris had “nothing to do with the Olympics. The aim is to enable people to build a life for themselves in Bordeaux or Marseilles or wherever”.
Sammy, 25, an Ethiopian asylum seeker who has been sleeping rough under the French Institute of Fashion by the Seine for more than a year, said he had no desire to build a life for himself the provinces.
“My life is in Paris,” he said. “This is where I’ve claimed asylum.”
He had little hope of being given refugee status in France, having already been refused it in Germany.
“I want to live in France,” he said. “But if I don’t get asylum here, I might try to go to England.”