Of all the crossing points between France and Italy, the Saint-Louis bridge is undoubtedly the most picturesque. Imagine a road suspended on a rock face between Menton, a town in the south-east of France, and Grimaldi, in Italy: on one side, the steep, cave-carved mountains; on the other, a landscape of terraced farmland running down to the coast. Far below, the Mediterranean glowed mauve on this early autumn morning, when the sun was not yet shining.

But this sublime place was filled with a sense of despair. For every day, this stretch of road, framed by the police stations of both countries, plays host to a tragic ballet of migrants who come and go, a long procession of unfortunate people expelled from France. Handed over to the Italian police, they will try their luck first once, 10 times, 20 times, until they manage to cross this border on which France has re-established controls since 2015. "In the end, most of them make it," said Loïc Le Dall, a member of the local branch of the Association Nationale d'Assistance aux Frontières pour les Etrangers (ANAFE). Some even take the most dangerous routes, such as on the roofs of trains or the vertiginous path known here as the "pas de la mort." But in the meantime, they are caught up in a strange game of political-police ping-pong, which has become both a legal and humanitarian headache.

What could this woman standing on the parapet between the two border posts have been thinking? With her face pressed against the fence, she looked out over the sea and beyond to the lights of Menton. Near her, two very young children were shivering in their cotton clothes. Further on, her husband climbed the slope pulling a small suitcase. They were Kurds, fleeing Turkey for political reasons, they said.

Large cubic boxes

In their group, formed by chance contact with a people smuggler, was another family with children and a teenager accompanied by his mother. Poyraz was 17 years old, wearing his headphones on his neck, and he wanted to make something clear by quickly making a sign of the cross, with his back turned so that his companions couldn't see him: "We're Orthodox," he said quietly. "It's very difficult for us in Turkey."

Three steps away, two Nigerians looked up at a blue sign on the side of the road: "Menton, the pearl of France, is happy to welcome you." With empty hands, they looked distraught, lost. They had nothing, no suitcase, no telephone, no headphones and not a single bag, even a paper one – even in extreme misery, there are hierarchies. Above all, like many migrants, they had very few words in English or French to explain their situation. The oldest managed to formulate a question, putting together a few scraps of English: "Why don't they let us in?"

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