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Posts from the ‘French History’ Category

Nov 12

Only the dead have seen the end of war

Isn’t it funny how you come across things just at the right time.  Or maybe it’s just that one can make things fit when one needs or wants to.  Yesterday was 11th November.  Remembrance Day (or Veterans Day if you are in the USA or Canada and I imagine territories which I am too uneducated to know about).  It can have escaped no-one’s notice that this year marks centenary of the start of World War 1.  La Grande Guerre.  Yesterday, therefore the world stood and still silent to mark with gravity the huge death toll of the following four years.   And much was written and much will be written.  Rightly.

After 11:00 we set off to the village of Anglards de Salers south and a tiny bit east of home by about 45 kilometres.  After a light picnic we toddled off on our walk and passed the little Chateau de Trémolière making a note to return and visit when it is open (outside of the big cities and the heavy hitting sites, many places of interest are closed from Toussaint to Easter in France). It houses a  collection of Aubusson Tapestries, fabric and needlecrafts are passion of mine and besides it has the oddest tower I have ever seen.  We also passed the 12th Century Eglise de Saint Thyrse which features on the list of Monuments Historique de France and made similar mental notes and then an ancient stone fountain which represented the only water in the village until 1904 when the two fountains in the middle of the square were built.  The plaque on the now dried up ‘font’ declares that those Anglardiens who exodussed to Paris would recognise one another by statement that they had been ‘baptised in the stone fountain’.  The connection to Paris is something I will write of another time … the historic links between the Auvergne in general and Cantal in particular to Paris are fascinating and unexpected.

Looking down into the Vallee du Mars
Sturdy trees hastening to winter
Leaves dancing in the brisk November wind
Babbling through the woods the stream merries along
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The green belies the lateness in the year

As we walked the leaves danced in the wind.  It was a classic Autumn day – north of nippy, the air clear as anyone’s bell and the views from the 800 or so metres up above the Vallée du Mars absolutely spectacular.   In good spirits we came across a cross.  A stone cross with the figure of Christ depicted, as is typical in the area, quite tiny with a disporportioned head and massively oversized hands.  What stopped us in our tracks was the panneau next to it.  According to legend (and legend, as my children were always reminded is a story so old that nobody can remember whether its true or not), there was a battle fought on this land between Attila The Hun and the Gallo-Roman forces led by Flavius Aetius (Roman) and Theodoric I (Gaul).  This was in the 5th Century.  Hundreds of years later at the turn of the 18th Century a group of men from the pays came across what they believed to be Attila’s encampment and a dispute broke out when they found a cross there. This stone cross.  Presumably the argument arose as to who could rightfully lay claim to it.  Good old compromise prevailed and agreement was reached that it would be placed between La Mars and L’Auze hence it has stood where we happened upon it for the last 300 years.

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That’s the history or the legend but what stood out to me, was the body count in 451 AD.  120,000 men.  In one battle.  Of course I don’t have accurate figures for what the  populations of France, Italy and Germany were at the time but I am pretty sure that they were a tiny fraction of the populations in the early 20th Century.  Fifteen hundred years, ago all that loss of life.  One hundred years ago all that loss of life.  Present day all this loss of life.  I am but a helpless little voice but maybe if all the helpless little voices gather together – maybe we could try to give to peace a chance and prove Plato, whose words I have annexed for my title, wrong.

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PS:  When we got home and did a little intersleuthing on the net, we realised that this picture is not simply of a rock but of the ruins of a 5th Century fortress which stood on top and around it – you can see some of the stone-work in the foreground.  Sometimes you have to look a little harder to see the fact that war has been all around us for all time.

Nov 3

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At the going down of the sun ….

Saturday was Toussaint in France.  Toussaint translates coloquially as All Saints Day.  It is commonly referred to as La Fête des Morts – the festival of the dead.  All over France people visit cimitieres and leave large chrysanthemum plants for their departed.  The cemetries are alive with colour – I find it very beautiful and appropriate as Autumn marches increasingly sombrely towards Winter and her chill stark blanket.  Not all find it so – a blog I read and always enjoy FranceSays wrote an excellent piece  just before the Fête describing her preference for the ghoulish and outrageous Halloween festivities on the other side of the pond, she being Canadian by birth.  I understand her sentiments – a preference for a joyful approach to celebrating the departed is entirely reasonable.  Another blogger, Tim Lyon, reminisces about Bonfire Night, his best day of the year and captures perfectly what I remember of those festivities each November 5th, I being English by birth.  Actually I am a bit sour about Halloween – not if you are American or Canadian, you understand but it is another example of British cultural traditions being  trampled by the stampede of Stateside stuff … one of the things I love about France is that it remembers that it is France and refuses to have its own identity ripped assunder.  You can have a ‘special relationship’ with whoever you choose without losing yourself to them.

Back to 1st November.  The Festival of The Dead and no cemetry to visit so what to do to appropriately mark the day?  We have long wanted to visit Oradour-sur-Glane which lies about 100 miles north west of our home, in the Haute Vienne near to Limoges.  On June 10th, 1944 a unit of the 2nd SS Panzer Division (‘Das Reich’) approached the village, encircled it, rounded up all of its inhabitants and massacred them.  642 of them.  Incuding 247 children and infants.  In 1945 Charles de Gaulle decreed that the village must remain untouched, that it should forever bear witness to this and all the other atrocities of the war that ended not quite 70 years ago as I write.  This year is the 100th anniversary of start of the war to end all wars … when will we ever learn.

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The village as it stands today – a permanent memorial to its dead and the thousands upon thousands of other martyrdoms across a world at war …

I am not going to attempt to write the history, nor to comment on it.  I am neither qualified to do so nor foolish enough to pretend that I can.  There is plenty written, some by the scant few survivors (6 men escaped from under the piles of burning bodies, 1 was subsequently shot down as he ran; 1 woman escaped through a blown out window of the burning church where all the women and children were first asphyxiated and then shot and burnt).  If you would like to read more you should start with the excellent Oradour.Info site

‘Here, at this place of torment a group of men was massacred and burnt by the Nazis. Collect your thoughts.’

When you arrive at Oradour the route takes you towards the new town around the perimeter of the ruined original.  Parking up in the leafy car park, we settled The Bean in the car – dogs are not allowed and that is entirely appropriate … the idea of a dog innocently cocking its leg in this place is every shade of wrong.  Le Centre de la Memoire opened in April 1999 and replaced the simple kiosk that had previously served as the point of entry and ticket office.  The French government contribute €150,000 a year to the upkeep of the village and there is a determination that this shall be an everlasting commitment.  Lest we forget.  We bought tickets for the exposition as well as the village and it was money well spent.  In fact I think that visiting the village and not getting the whole experience would be futile. The exhibition takes you from 1933 (with a nod back to the German economy following La Grande Geurre) through the rise of Hitler Youth to the outbreak of war, the war itself, the Nazi occupation and Vichy France leading you relentlessly to the crucial date.  There is quite an emphasis on refugees of many nations and of course Jews.  As you would expect many of the images and accounts are more than distressing and I was thankful that we had decided to forego lunch.  Tears fall freely in such a place.  We watched the film which takes you from the peace and tranquility of this pretty, prosperous and unassuming village, contextualises the role of the Maquis (resistance) in the area and walks you through the events of the day.  It is nauseating, unpaletable.  Blinking and silent we tackled the last of the exhibition … the first thing you are confronted with is a list of other massacres and not just in France – Italy, Czechoslovakia, Poland and most shockingly Belarus – 2,243,000 people wiped out representing a quarter of the total population.  I had no idea.  I am ignorant and I am ashamed.  The exhibition throughout is not partisan and this particularly impressed me … that the most appalling, barbarus act imaginable can take place in a place and that the architects of its monument are able to remember and acknowledge other atrocities was, to me, moving in the extreme.

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Scattered belongings left where they lay after the SS troops had ransacked and pillaged the village

You can then choose to walk around the ruined village – I should note that not content with murdering all its people and returning to ‘clean up’ the evidence the next day, the entire place was torched so what remains is a skeleton.  As we walked up the main street, holding hands all I could think of was what on earth it must have been like on that day when the rumbling lorries and tanks cut off all means of escape, when at gun point the population was rounded up separating man from wife, mother from son and for some time the people believed (as the soldiers told them) that this was a search for arms which they were safe in the knowledge didn’t exist so they expected that frightening as this was, they would be back to normal life in a few hours and chatting about their bit of excitement in the bars and cafes (10 of them) and over supper.  As normal.  But instead never again would lover hold hands with lover, husband with wife, mother with son because they were butchered.  All of them.  Butchered and burnt.  And to this day no-one knows why.  Theories are put out there, of course.  But no-one actually knows why.  I also thought, maybe oddly, of Jamie Bulger – the little tot killed by schoolboys in Liverpool in 1993.  At the time we were told that the boys didn’t understand what they were doing.  I found that difficult to rationalise and I found his little face at the front of my mind as I reminded myself that many of the assailants in this carnage were little more than boys themselves and that they would have grown up against and amongst the fervour of Hitler rallying his youth to cleanse the world of all but the Aryan.  What did they feel … what on earth did they feel as they slaughtered babies?

There were quite a few visitors – many English in actual fact.  We walked past the sign at the entrance to the village which says simply ‘Souviens-Toi’ … ‘Remember’.  We walked past another sign which said ‘Silence’.  I have to say that most ignored that polite request.  Many were taking pictures – I found this hard.  Particularly when a young man prepared to pose leaning on the doctors car. This is probably the best known symbol of the village …  Doctor Desorteaux arrived back from tending a patient somewhere in the Commune  and joined his father, the Mayor where he and the villagers had been rounded up on the Champs de Foires (village green) and waited his fate.  I wonder who he had been treating – a woman in the early stages of child-birth perhaps … maybe he said he would return later and see how she was progressing, or an elderly patient bedridden who he saw several times a week.  I wonder how long they waited for him to return before the news reached them that he and the whole of the village were no more.  (remember a Commune in France is like a Parish in the UK … it is not simply the village at its head but generally will have some or many outlying hamlets and farms within it). I wonder if they cursed him for being late with the medicine he said he would return with.  I wonder.  Because all I can do is wonder.  I can’t feel – how can I begin to?  Me, in my cosy little world desensitised by images played out on our TV screens of warzones the world over because we never ever learn.  Go to Oradour – hear the voices echoing on the village green, the rhythm of ordinary life and think.  Think what it actually means to go to war.  Then vow that you never will.  That you will do all that you can to stop the politicians from allowing us to be subjected to such vile, futile and self-serving actions.  Tell them that they are no better than Hitler – if you dare.

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The Doctor’s Car

I should note that the photographs that illustrate this piece are not mine – they have all been harvested from the internet.  Although we had a camera with us, we felt it entirely wrong and rather mawkish to take pictures in this place which is a killing field – the place where so many where slaughtered and who can have no grave because their assailants saw fit to destroy the corpses to render it impossible to identify them.  These God-fearing Catholics, many slain in their Church have no place to lie in peace.  We also chose not to walk through the village cemetary to the memorial, it being Toussaint and there being families leaving chrysanthemums for their departed.  However sombre, La Fête des Morts is a fitting festival and the French have it right in continuing to celebrate within their own culture.  In my opinion.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Laurence Binyon – ‘For the Fallen’

PS:  I said that I feel that it would be futile to visit the village without experiencing the exhibition.  The village is beautifully kept – it is a memorial in the most poignant way and though things have been left as they were it is clean and tidy – there is no blood, there are no remains of the day beyond the buildings and some things that lie where they fell that day and, as though to underline that the assasins were God fearing men, Christ still hangs on his Cross outside the hull of the Church.  To me this is entirely appropriate – any more and it would be an invitation to the most morbid sort of voyeurism.  But the result is cleaned and to understand the brutality of the day, you need to read the seering words and see the ghastly images laid out in the museum.

 

Sep 4

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Dance me to the end of love

As previously noted, we drive a lot, little dog and I a motley pair and better still a trio completed by the husband with two brains.  One day not so long ago we set off for Grenoble at around 5 a.m.  We go to Grenoble reasonably frequently since HB2 has associations with IRAM (Institut de Radioastronomie Milliemetrique) and indeed worked there for 9 years throughout the 1980s.  He had a house in the Belledonne mountains until recently and still has a bank account at Caisse D’Epargne in the village of Uriage les Bains.  That we had to go TO the bank to reset his PIN will tell you that this particular bank is a teeny bit perochial  – this is a 5-6 hour drive and we can’t use the nearer branches in Cantal because Caisse d’Epargne is entirely localised.  Hey ho.

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Chateau d’Uriage in Uriage les Bains

We made it in time for His Brainship to get whatever it was sorted and for The Bean and I to have a stagger up to the chateau (now in flats which I rather covert the idea of living in) and back down again.

Back to the University campus for lunch and a quick meeting with the glorious and waspishly effete Philippe (him) and a speedy spin around Castorama in search of another garden chair (The Bean and me).  In case you are concerned, they didn’t have the right chair in the right colour … silly me – its almost time for Christmas, why would a shop have garden furniture in Summer!

Choices, choices – 3 p.m on a sunny Tuesday what should we do next.  We could walk in the mountains … appealing.  We could go shopping … I can always talk myself out of that one.  Or we can go to Vienne.  The Brains have been before and I have wanted to go here ever since I drove through it the very first time I came down to Grenoble on my own and decided, with no time constraints to go entirely non peage.  That Leonard Cohen played in the Roman theatre in 2009 is a further lure.  I love him.  I wasn’t there but I wish I had been.  He used to be accused of writing music to slit your wrists by when I was at school and proud of the fact that my dad looked like him according to the very beautiful Sarah Chant.  I was not very beautiful so having a father who resembled an icon was a way of attaining that popular girl status we all craved if only to protect ourselves from the less lovely bullies who would make your life miserable at the drop of your school beret.  I still bathe in his exquisite lyrics and though he has never really been able to sing and I am told his voice such as it was is fading, I would still have loved to sit and listen and marvel at the agility of the true poet.

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L’ancien Theatre in Vienne

Of course Vienne won.  You know that.  And we arrived in the late afternoon of a particularly warm day, parked and strolled.  This place is lovely.  The second largest city in Isere (the largest is Grenoble) which in turn sits in Rhone Alpes.  The Rhone strolls leisurely through it.  Large and languid it needs make no extraneous effort to impress.  It just is.  The town was first settled by the Romans and wears those remains well.  Here the semi circular Ancien Theatre, there the Temple d’Auguste et de Livie, the ruins of the medieval castle on the hill that was built on Roman footings, the pyramid (otherwise known as le Plan de l’Aiguille) which rests on a four arched portico this is a place that knows what it is.

Cathedral de St Maurice
Le Temple de’Augustus et de Livia
Mediaval tower with extensions
L’Hotel de Ville
Spanning the river Rhone
L’Eglise St Pierre

It shimmys you through its history easily and the town moves around its monuments fluidly – al fresco bars and cafes abound and clearly it is thriving.  A huge new tourist office is being built looking over the river on which you can take a boat the size of a small principality to cruise and dine.  We made a note that we will.  It is a place we will return to and explore over and over again.  We whistle-stopped around it seeing the stunning cathedral of St Maurice, the elegant city hall and all the above except the needle.  I noted the casual layabout roman carved blocks by the Temple with some glee … one of the things I love about Rome is the way the ancient has just been squished in with the modern over the centuries and the bits that drop off just stay where they lay.  It has the beauty of an overstuffed boudoir whose owner can’t bear to part with a single thing, even if its broken.

I should note at this point that I have an overwhelming and admittedly, to the casual observer, quite possibly strange obsession with the departements and regions of France.  When we first drove the long drive from Oxfordshire to Cantal late last summer, we bought a book in one of the Aires on the way called ‘Les 101 departements de France’.  It is aimed at children …. probably quite young children if I’m honest but I love it.  Slowly, slowly I am making sense of the geography of this huge country and slowly, slowly I am learning all the departments, their numbers (they are numbered alphabetically) and I can idly note where the cars that punctuate my drives long and short come from.  And its not entirely pointless to know where they are from – for instance, there are lots and lots of Paris plates in Cantal and I know why …. if you want to learn you will have to stick with me because I am being discursive enough in this post already.  But I will, I promise, write about what I have learned the historic connection between the two is, before very long at all.  My pledge is that if you hold you breath, you won’t turn blue … I don’t want asphyxiated readers on my conscience so that will be spur enough to write it.  Back on piste …. I live in Auvergne (in Cantal – number 15 to be precise) and to the west of me is Limousin and number 87 is Haute Vienne.  Which means there must be a Vienne.  And indeed there is (number 86 naturally) – I’ve been there … it’s in Poitou-Charente and its capital is the lovely Poitiers which I will always think of as Sidney.  If you are as old as I you will know what I mean.  But Vienne is not in Vienne.  It’s in Isere.  And that it was historically called Vienna makes it even more confusing.  But one thing I was sure of  that Viennoisserie, the wonder of French patisserie must certainly come from Vienne.  I pressed my nose against several pastry shop windows … I am often to be found in this postion lured by the sweet wonderlands they always are.  And I went home secure in the knowledge that I had been in the home of the croissant.  Only to find that they come from Vienna.  But then again … maybe it was this Vienna.  Before it was Vienne.  Surely.  Surely the French can’t be eating Austrian pastries … can they?

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I’d buy it ….

On the long drive home I told my husband a story of a trip a little while ago … stay with me now, settle and I will share it with you.

In April we travelled to Russia.  For Russia you need a visa.  The two venerable institutions (that which he works for and that which he was visiting) communicated, many people filled in many forms for him and we travelled to Lyon to drop our passports, pay a fee and settle back for their return in a week or so.  Two Brains went back to the US a few days later (that our daughters are convinced that he is one of The Men in Black may go a way to explain how the passport was in Paris via Lyon and he still managed to board a flight from Europe and enter the US without a murmour) and I woke the following day to an ominous email telling me that something was wrong in the process and I needed to contact him urgently.  Actually, my paperwork (which I had filled out myself) was perfect but unfortunately the enormous combined brains of the two venerable institutions had made a mistake with his.  Frantic calls to Paris, more paperwork and eventually, after nearly two weeks,  a call to tell me that the passports were ready for collection in Lyon.  That I was due to travel to London on the Monday left me with no alternative but to drive down before the Consulate closed at midday on the Saturday.  Which I did.  And a lovely drive it was – sunrise over the volcanos of the Puy de Dome can never fail to captivate.  The Bean, unimpressed by the display  slept and we made Lyon by 11.  I ran in and out bearing the treasured passports complete with visas and skipped back to the car to take tiny dog for a walk and grab a coffee before the journey home.  The consulate is in a pretty area of what is a lovely city and one that I fully intend to explore but enough of buildings and rivers and city ambience, the point of this story is a person.

Pretty it is, but mostly closed on a Saturday morning, in this area that is mainly devoted to businesses.  Vainly looking about for a likely pit-stop I nearly fell over a tiny little lady pulling a shopping trolley prettily adorned with macaroons.  She was trying to catch the attention of The Bean so I stopped in politeness and truthfully complimented her cake-garnished pull-along.  In my opinion there can never be too many macaroons in a life, preferably to devour but if that isn’t an option then images adorning pretty much anything are an acceptable reminder of their delight.  The lady was truly like a sparrow – tiny, black eyed and spry.  She coaxed and cajoled The Bean who dutifully danced on her hind legs and the lady rewarded me with the tinkling laughter of so many fairies ringing tiny bells in the tree lined square.  She told me she had a dog indoors who is so old that he can only make it to the bottom of the steps twice a day to perform his necessary functions and that aged and slow as she is the dog can’t keep up at all.  She asked if I was from Lyon and I told her no, English but living in Cantal.  She was interested.  Did my husband work there … no – America.  She hoovered up every morcel of information I could give her and pointed in turn to the only cafe open on a Saturday morning in this district.  She wanted to know if I had children.  I told her about the girls and about the son I gained with marriage.  She laughed at my eye-rolling descriptions of them and asked if they visit often.  I told her they would in summer I hoped.  We chatted away and she asked if I had grandchildren.  Not yet I said.  And then all of a sudden her face creased in the wrong way.  The sad way.  Her dark beaded eyes clouded and tears pricked them.  I touched her arm and asked stoutly (I am English in a crisis) if I could help.  She composed herself and told me that she had lost a grand-daughter.   To start with I thought this must have just happened but in fact it was over 20 years ago. Aged barely 19, killed in a road accident.  A fool drove his car into hers.  He survived, she died.  She said not a day passes that she doesn’t think of the girl, a promising ballerina so full of life then brutally stamped out.  The girl was her youngest grand-daughter.  She said the dancing stopped with her passing.  I couldn’t leave her in her sadness so I suggested we take coffee together.  We walked the square and sat in front of the cafe for maybe a half hour.  I would estimate that this little bird was at least 85 and probably ten or even more years older than that.  Her clothes, immaculate, her tiny frame that would fit in her own shopping trolley, her lovely lilty slightly growly voice, her directness affected me then and I will always think of her.  Not as often as she thinks of her dancing grand-daughter but nonetheless I will think of her often.  The grief still so raw after decades and the root of it the fact that she still walks and her grand-child is motionless.  Dance me to the end of love ….

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Plateau d’Artense in the Belledonne above Grenoble …. to me this is where my father walked when his spirit left his body. I can see the lively young spirit of a dancer on the path with him

PS:  Familiarity breeds contempt – unfortunately 2 weeks later I got a rather official letter rather officially telling me that somewhere between Brioude and le Puy en Velay I had been doing a whopping 97 in a 90 zone – 1 penalty point, 45 euros and a note to self that nearly a year here has made me rather too blasé.  To note:  Here there is no 10% cushion … in fact at 90 kmh the allowable excess is 2 kmh – that’s less than 1 mile per hour at nearly 60.

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