‘Spiderman,’ a Migrant in Paris, Scales Building to Save a Young Child

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President Emmanuel Macron of France meeting with Mamadou Gassama at the Élysée Palace in Paris on Monday. Mr. Gassama scaled four stories of a building in the French capital to save a young child hanging from a balcony.CreditPool photo by Thibault Camus

By Alan Cowell and Aurelien Breeden

May 28, 2018

The child seemed to be suspended from a balcony. An adult standing nearby seemed powerless to help. Disaster seemed the only possible outcome.

Then, to the nimble rescue on the streets of Paris on Saturday evening, came a young man whom some French people have started to call the Spiderman of the 18th, referring to the area of Paris where the episode unfolded.

With a combination of grit, agility and muscle, the man hauled himself hand over hand from one balcony to another, springing from one parapet to grasp the next one up. A crowd that had gathered before he began his daring exploit urged him ever upward, according to onlookers’ video that was shared widely on social media.

Finally, the man reached the child and pulled him to safety. And suddenly, an act of individual courage and resourcefulness began to play into Europe’s fraught and polarized debate about outsiders, immigrants and refugees.

The man, identified as Mamadou Gassama, is a migrant from Mali, a troubled former French colony in northwest Africa. Mr. Gassama had yearned to secure the requisite documentation to live legally in France, and his dream came true on Monday after a meeting with President Emmanuel Macron.

“I told him that in gratitude for this heroic act he would be given legal status as soon as possible,” Mr. Macron said in a statement on Facebook after meeting with Mr. Gassama at the Élysée Palace in Paris.

Mr. Macron added that the Paris firefighters were “ready to welcome” Mr. Gassama into their ranks, and he said that he had “invited” Mr. Gassama to apply for French citizenship.

Mr. Gassama will be one of a lucky few. In 2017, only five people were granted residency papers for “exceptional talent” or “services rendered to the community,” according to statistics from France’s Interior Ministry. In 2016, there were six.

The meeting with Mr. Macron came after the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, also called to thank him for his “act of bravery.”

“He explained to me that he had arrived from Mali a few months ago, dreaming of building his life here,” the mayor said on Twitter. “I told him that his heroic act is an example to all citizens and that the city of Paris will obviously be very keen to support him in his efforts to settle in France.”

Even the anti-immigrant National Front party offered to support Mr. Gassama’s bid for residency — but only in return for the expulsion of all the other migrants living in France without official consent.

As for Mr. Gassama, he told French reporters that his act of courage had left him shaken. “I saw all these people shouting, and cars sounding their horns,” he said. “I climbed up like that and, thank God, I saved the child.”

“I felt afraid when I saved the child,” he said, according to French news reports. “I started to shake, I could hardly stand up. I had to sit down.”

Follow Alan Cowell and Aurelien Breeden on Twitter: @cowellcnd and @aurelienbrd.

Elian Peltier contributed reporting.

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