PARIS — The mound of torn black garbage bags spilling rubbish was stacked waist high under an elegant 16th-century carved turret.
All up and down the Rue Hautefeuille, a medieval street in the heart of the Left Bank in Paris where poet Charles Baudelaire was born at No. 13, uncollected trash poked up from the hefty municipal garbage bins lining the narrow paved sidewalk.
In the city’s mean season of terrorist attacks, floods, unending demonstrations and work stoppages, a days-old garbage strike was the latest insult just as the weather warmed and noisy soccer fans poured into France for the European Championship soccer tournament. No end is in sight.
The unions said they would not back down, as did the government. Many of Air France’s pilots announced that they, too, would join the strikes. The crews of express, suburban, regional and intercity trains are all on strike, and they voted Friday to carry on with the work stoppage.
Mostly the workers are protesting much-contested changes to France’s rigid labor code that somewhat loosen employment regulations. A huge demonstration against the changes, already weakened by government concessions, is planned for Tuesday.
France appeared to be falling apart again.
“We’ve seen everything,’’ said Julien Collard, who helps his father run the old-fashioned restaurant underneath the turret, Café de la Tourelle. “First the attacks. Then the floods. And now this.’’ He looked out with disgust at the disorderly mound of trash abutting his wood-paneled establishment.
Lamenting the business the restaurant has lost, Collard said: “It’s disgusting. It stinks, and it brings rats. People see this, and they walk away.’’
The basements of residences and businesses closer to the river flooded after the recent downpours, which temporarily closed the city’s museums.
Tourism is way down this year in Paris, among the world’s most-visited cities: It fell 15.5 percent in the first two months, with the greatest drop among Japanese visitors. The threat of terrorism is the principal reason, after the two attacks of 2015.
A gathering spot for soccer fans near the Eiffel Tower, known as the Fan Zone, is heavily policed, with stringent searches. The director of France’s domestic intelligence agency, Patrick Calvar, recently told a parliamentary commission that France remained the No. 1 target of the Islamic State group.
“This, all this, it’s not good for the tourists,’’ said Omar Anraoui, who was looking at the overflowing garbage cans from a bar down the street from Collard’s cafe. “We’ve got a lovely country here. But this is how we welcome people?’’
Not all of Paris is covered in uncollected garbage. Half of the city’s 20 arrondissements, or districts, are served by private companies that continue to collect the trash, and many streets are unaffected. Paris’s City Hall on Friday announced the deployment of additional garbage collection trucks, promising that the city would soon be cleaned up.
Still, the largest garbage treatment center, just outside Paris, remains picketed by workers. On Friday, the General Confederation of Labor, known as CGT, not the biggest but the most militant union and the Socialist government’s principal adversary, called on garbage workers to continue striking until the government gives in.
Things could get worse before they get better. Philippe Martinez, the mustachioed former Communist Party member who is the leader of CGT and is orchestrating the strikes, appears often in French media to express his disdain for the government’s proposed changes to the labor law.
“We started with demonstrations, we did one, two, three, four,’’ he said on Saturday. “They didn’t listen to us. At a certain point the workers got mad and went on strike.’’
On Saturday, Martinez told reporters in southern France that Tuesday’s demonstration would be “enormous.’’
