Showing posts with label French history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label French history. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Ancient house for sale

In the region where I live, one of the most interesting places is the charming medieval village of Saint-Antoine l'Abbaye.

In the Middle Ages, a knight returned here with a treasure from Constantinople: the relics of the 4th-century Egyptian hermit Saint Anthony, who is generally considered as the inventor of monasticism. The bones of a major saint, in those days, were immensely valuable, since their presence in a place could attract hordes of pilgrims: a permanent source of prosperity. In the village that now bears the saint's name, a great church was erected to house the relics.

Recently, I was contacted by a female friend of a friend who asked me whether I would be prepared to build a website aimed at selling her ancient house in this village, whose façade is seen here:

I believe that the kind of individuals interested in purchasing such an exceptional place (maybe from outside France) would necessarily be enthusiasts of history and ancient buildings. So, I put a certain accent on that aspect of the situation in the website that I've just completed... which you can visit by clicking on the above image.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Military heritage

I came upon the stupid website mentioned in my previous post while I was searching for explanations concerning an exotic word: poliorcetic. No, in spite of the first five letters, it has nothing to do with the disease of poliomyelitis. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology indicates that the adjective poliorcetic, formed from the Greek terms pólis (city) and orkeîn (besiege), concerns the military art of sieges: both how to resist a siege perpetrated by your enemies, and how to besiege them in turn. This etymological explanation also guides you in the pronunciation of the term: poli-orcetic.

Without necessarily recognizing any of the names on this map, you might guess that these sites are significant from a military viewpoint, because they're all located on the hexagonal perimeter of France.

They are the spots where a 17th-century nobleman, military architect and poliorcetic expert, known as Vauban, encircled the land with a system of complex and finely-built defensive fortresses, most of which still exist today.

Prior to my arrival in France in 1962, I had heard of the failed fortifications designed by the politician André Maginot [1877-1932], but I must admit that I knew nothing of Vauban. In France, I've found that most people seem to have heard of Vauban, and many have actually visited one of his fortresses, or at least seen a TV documentary on this subject.

Yesterday, a dozen fortresses built by Vauban were added to the Unesco World Heritage listing.

Some of the great sieges in world history—such as those of the Crusaders, for example—were drawn out over excruciating periods of time. Three centuries will have elapsed before the universal recognition of the legacy of Vauban. As the computerized idiot mentioned in my last blog might say: That's a big seat!

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Revolutionary euphoria

This pompous painting by Jacques-Louis David [1748-1825] provides us with an absurdly kitsch depiction of Leonidas the Spartan who defeated the huge army of Xerxes the Persian at Thermopylae in Central Greece. In David's time, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the memory of Leonidas was celebrated in France in much the same way that young people now worship, rightly or wrongly, intelligently or mindlessly, the theme of Che Guevara.

I insist upon this comparison, because we often tend to think of the French revolutionaries as crazy impassioned dreamers, many of whom were destined to soon lose literally their heads. During their brief period of glory, they transformed provincial churches into so-called Temples of Reason, and planted Trees of Liberty.

This morning, at the archives in Grenoble, I was amused to find that births in Year 2 (around 1793) were recorded on thick lumpy and crackly paper (a sensual pleasure for my fingers, not to mention the delicious old inky smell) marked District des Thermopyles.

Bloody hell ! as the local ladies used to say in my uncouth Australia... and still say, I fear. Did the little town of Saint-Marcellin really liken itself to the scene of the great battle of Antiquity between the Greeks and the Persians? Did my humble village of Choranche once become an authentic outpost of a latter-day Thermopylae?

A year later, the revolutionary crackpots of Saint-Marcellin had descended from their ridiculous pedestal, and they got back to labeling their district in the ordinary old way.

In colloquial French (a truly colorful language, largely more inventive and sparkling than any variety of English), a lovely expression can be applied to the citizens of a small French town who suddenly see themselves as reincarnated warriors on mythological battlefields of Antiquity. This kind of pretentious behavior is decried (pardon my Latin) as farting higher than your asshole.

Saturday, June 7, 2008

Republican Calendar










Monday, May 19, 2008

Ave Caesar

At the age of 12, at Grafton High School, I started learning Latin under the guidance of a marvelous teacher named Robert Sinclair... who was present at a delightful gathering of friends, at the home of Cathryn Prowse (née Fuller), when I returned to Sydney in August 2006. Like generations of students throughout the world, I encountered that archaic but lovely language through fragments of a literary work written by a celebrated Roman general and statesman: Gaius Julius Caesar [100-44 BC]. The English title of Caesar's book: Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Now, this didn't mean much to me, back in Grafton, for the simple reason that I hadn't fully realized that the adjective "Gallic" designated a real place, known today as France. But Caesar's Latin was lucid, and even a Grafton schoolboy in 1952 could understand that the author was a victorious soldier who must have been some kind of a mixture of Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill.

Much later, I discovered the splendid city of Arles, birthplace of Christine's maternal grandfather, Paul Marteau [1896-1976]. I even got around to taking my children there to watch to watch bull fighting in the Roman arena. And I finally realized that this charming city on the banks of the Rhône was closely associated with the ancient Roman named Caesar who came here to fight his famous Gallic Wars.

A few days ago, archaeologists announced that they had found a splendid life-size bust of Caesar in the Rhône at Arles. The marble sculpture was probably created during Caesar's lifetime, around 49-46 BC, when he was founding the Roman colony of Arles. After 56-year-old Caesar was assassinated in Rome by Brutus on the Ides of March, folk in Arles probably decided that it would be wise to dump his effigy in the Rhône... not far from the right-bank neighborhood of Trinquetaille, where Paul Marteau had grown up without ever knowing that Caesar's marble head was lying alongside in the mud. Meanwhile, a string of Catholic popes had reigned at Avignon, and hordes of folk had danced beneath [not upon] the famous bridge. Countless bulls were slaughtered, too, over the centuries, in Caesar's colonial arena. Later, I started learning Latin. Not long after, Christine and I were married, then Emmanuelle and François came into existence. To my mind, it was high time that Caesar's head resurfaced at Arles!

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Half a century ago: gestation of a new republic

Exactly fifty years ago, on 13 May 1958, Algiers was agitated. Crowds had gathered to honor the memory of three French soldiers executed by the Algerian FLN party [National Liberation Front], and to express their disapproval of the formation of a government in Paris led by Pierre Pflimlin. Banners in the midst of the crowd declared that Algeria must remain French, while others cried out for the return to power of Charles de Gaulle.

The army joined in the protests, which looked at times as if they might degenerate into a riot. Inspired by a concept of the French Revolution, the general Jacques Massu set up a comité de salut public [committee of public welfare], and called upon the French president René Coty to form a government in a similar spirit of salut public.

This crisis that flared up in Algeria created a context in which Charles de Gaulle finally decided to preside over the destiny of France.

The events of 13 May 1958 are considered as the starting point of the creation of the Fifth Republic.

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Victory in Europe Day

Paris had been liberated from her Nazi oppressors during the second half of August 1944. Eight months later, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in Berlin. Then, on 8 May 1945, the official act of Germany's unconditional surrender meant that Europe could at last celebrate victory. In London and the USA (where Franklin D Roosevelt had died a month earlier), these victory celebrations were massive.

Recently, when my daughter Emmanuelle purchased a flat near the Place de la République in Paris, she obtained a couple of old photo albums that belonged to the lady (deceased) who had lived there. Among these amateur snapshots, there are three interesting images of Paris on May 8, 1945, which are no doubt published here for the first time. [Clicking a blog photo displays an enlargement.]

Five huge flags are suspended from the Arc de Triomphe. [Paris historians might be able to tell us whether the habit of flags under the arch dates from that epoch.] The army truck on the Place de l'Etoile has a white five-pointed star on the door. Is the Jeep a US or a French vehicle? There's a French policeman on a bicycle, surrounded by a couple of civilian cyclists and a midget automobile. On this 8 May 1945 at the hub of France, the ambiance is calm.

On the Place de la Concorde, the atmosphere is subdued. I have the impression that the couple in the foreground were the proprietors of Emmanuelle's flat. The man is wearing some kind of decoration in his lapel, whereas the woman seems to have purchased a poster. They appear to me as Gaullist patriots, happy to realize that Paris is once again their familiar City of Light. Everything in this photo indicates calm and sunny relief.

This photo was taken from the balcony of my daughter's flat in the Rue Oberkampf. The lady is probably the same person seen in the photo on the Place de la Concorde. The building is bedecked with five flags, including those of France, the USA, Great Britain and Russia.

The overall impression gleaned from these images is that Victory Day in Europe, for Parisians, was a solemn and subdued affair.

Friday, February 1, 2008

Saying sorry to indigenous Australians

The antipodean continent chosen by the British authorities as an excellent abode for social outcasts had been inhabited for many millennia by a vast community of Aborigines whose tribal culture and pantheistic religion were exclusively oral.

These innocent and relatively peaceful natives were no match for the European invaders—convicts and settlers—who simply snatched the plains, rivers and mountains away from the indigenous Australians, using violence, if need be. Later, the colonial authorities stole, not only the natives' land, but their children too, in view of an absurd eugenic principle according to which the only survival strategy for this people would consist of educating them in a European context and inter-breeding them with white individuals.

Today, it would appear that the prime minister of Australia is at last about to apologize officially to the so-called "stolen generations" of indigenous Australians, victims of cruel acts perpetrated in the past by white Australians. It's far from easy, of course, to decide upon the most effective and morally just way of making such a formal apology... and this explains, no doubt, why it has taken such a long time for this event to become a reality. We current Australians tend to say, or at least think, that our ancestors, not us, were responsible for these crimes against the Aborigines. So, why should we say we're sorry for acts that we didn't actually commit, personally?

Although the respective situations and tragedies are profoundly different, Australia's forthcoming apology to the Aborigines reminds me of the French government's complex relationship with Jewish citizens and residents of France during the terrible Nazi period. Justifications of a similar kind were advanced for decades to postpone the fateful act that would consist of saying explicitly: The nation, today, is sorry for all that happened!

Whatever we might say concerning the errors and foibles of former president Jacques Chirac, we must give him credit for being largely responsible for this official act of contrition, on 16 July 1995, at the former location of the notorious sporting stadium (the so-called winter cycling track of Paris) where Jews arrested by French police were assembled before being deported to concentration camps. In a fortnight, in the Antipodes, Kevin Rudd will be performing a solemn act of the same order.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

We don't need another hero

The war-time story that I am about to tell has given rise to a controversy in France, which culminated yesterday when schoolteachers were expected—at the request of the president Nicolas Sarkozy—to read out in front of their students the final poignant letter to his parents penned by a young martyr named Guy Môquet.

His father, Prosper Môquet, a French railway-worker and trade-unionist, was the Communist member of parliament for a precinct of Paris. In 1939, since the PCF [Parti Communiste Français] supported the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, it was disbanded by the government, and Môquet senior was arrested. A few months later, he was deported by the French authorities to a prison camp in Algeria. Meanwhile, his son Guy, a student at the Lycée Carnot, had become a militant in the PCF youth movements.

Môquet junior distributed Communist leaflets denouncing the treason of French industrial leaders, and advocating the liberation of jailed Communists such as his father. Insofar as a French law of 1939 prohibited Communist propaganda, three French policemen arrested 15-year-old Guy Môquet at the Gare de l'Est métro station in Paris on 15 October 1940, and he ended up at a prison camp in Châteaubriant near Nantes. A year later, he was still imprisoned at that same place when a German commandant was assassinated at Nantes. In the reprisals, Guy Môquet was the youngest of 27 hostages at Châteaubriant who were executed by a Nazi firing squad on 22 October 1941.

Sarkozy's decision—announced on the day of his presidential investiture—instructing teachers to read out Guy Moquet's final letter, on the anniversary of his death, was unexpected and somewhat foolhardy. The French president should have known that, in imposing his conception of the celebration of a hero, he would irritate countless citizens. On the one hand, Communists don't wish to see one of their emblematic figures recuperated, as it were, by a right-wing politician such as Sarkozy. Besides, it's not clear whether the young Communist militant and martyr Guy Môquet should be placed in the category of authentic Résistance fighters... like the five heroic revolver-toting students from another Parisian lycée, Buffon [Jean Arthus, Jacques Baudry, Pierre Benoît, Pierre Grelot and Julien Legros], executed in February 1943 : the subject of an excellent TV film aired, by chance, last night. Finally, many teachers, professional historians and other observers consider that the State has no right to impose its points of view, or promulgate decisions of any kind whatsoever, in the domain of history.

The most profound opposition of all came from intellectuals who pointed out that Sarkozy is confusing two related but fundamentally different concepts: on the one hand, the scholarly pursuit of history, and on the other, the emotional phenomenon referred to, in French, as memory, concerning events that are so recent that their recollection still causes pain. Schoolteachers are expected to handle—as objectively as possible—the first of these concepts: history. Sarkozy's directive, however, lies clearly in the domain of memory: that's to say, relatively recent dramatic events that still hurt... which have no place in history classrooms.

I was shocked when I first heard of Sarkozy's decision, and I was utterly flabbergasted—like countless French people—when it was revealed that Sarkozy's buddy Bernard Laporte, trainer of the national rugby team, was so ridiculously zealous that he mimicked the president's sensitivity by reading out Guy Môquet's letter to the team just before their opening match... which they lost to Argentina. On the other hand, I'm reassured to find that so many French teachers refused intelligently to tolerate Sarkozy's silly brainchild.

Saturday, July 21, 2007








Saturday, July 14, 2007

Once upon a time in Paris














Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Traces of D-day

