Marianne
My Fickle French Mistress
1968 - 2007
Robert Sendrey
Copyright © 2013 Robert Sendrey
All rights reserved.
ISBN- 10: 1481819429
ISBN-13: 978-1481819428
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments i
1 My first encounters with Marianne 1
2 Rouen, September 1968 10
3 A French upbringing, winter 1968 18
4 Christmas 1967, a flashback 22
5 Wedding Bells are going to chime 29
6 University in the 60s and 70s 37
7 Tenure with National Education (1975) 62
8 Bicentenary of the French Revolution 81
9 Pandemonium at the Micmac Institute 86
10 Ecole polytechnique 93
11 How I googled mother 98
12 Douce France 113
13 Waterloo station and the Bonaparte café 120
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Joan and her countrymen
1 My first encounters with Marianne
Bonjour Marianne
I have been flirting with Marianne for more than forty years. That is a long time for the type of love-hate relationship we have built up over the years. Mine is a tale of three cities, and three countries. I was born in England, came to France for the first time when I was nineteen, and discovered my family’s original homeland when I was fifty-six. This is a faithful account of my personal experience of French daily life and French history, the places I have been to, the people whom I have been involved with, most of whom have played their role, be it great or small, in the development of the French Republic. I shall dwell on French beliefs and myths as they appeared to me over the years. Before I deal with my own personal family and identity, I must stress the importance of the families I have been associated, some of whom have been through the throngs and ordeals of recent French history, battles fought and lost, prisoner of war camps, torture and luckily survival.
Like Standhal’s hero Fabrice del Dongo[1] , at Waterloo, in the midst of history, accidentally accompanying Marshal Ney, the bravest of the brave, amid the fallen redcoats, and the white puffs of smoke of cannon fire, I have my own personal vision of France in the making, although far less mock-heroic. Waterloo! Waterloo! Dismal plain! The name sums up in a nutshell the mythology shared by both England and France. Remember, if you can, the Bonaparte café at Waterloo station, not the best place for Eurostar, I suppose. No wonder they have moved to Saint Pancras!
I have many names and identities to choose from. European history has its role to play in my predicament. I shall begin with introductions, and as you can imagine, the first name I chose, is of my own imagination.
May 1968
Let me introduce myself. I was born in England in 1948 and was given the name (approximately like the following one) Richard Wishton. The family name makes me think of wishful thinking, or if wishes were horses, beggars would ride[2]. I learnt much later that it was not my real birth name, much later. I was brought up in Paisley, a little industrial town near Glasgow, famous throughout the world for its textile mills and Paisley pattern. Those dark satanic mills, Blake refers to in Jerusalem. I studied maths and physics at Paisley Technical College (now a university) and dropped out, preferring history and literature. However, I ended up teaching maths and physics again forty years later in Paris. Fate’s little ironies!
When I was nineteen, I left home on my first but not last intercultural voyage of discovery and, after travelling over night from Glasgow, via Lockerbie where we stopped to have tea, and then on to London on a coach (the cheapest way) arriving at Victoria bus station, then on to the Channel ferries by train, to New Heaven, crossing the choppy tongue of sea to Dieppe, thence to Rouen.
Marie-Anne was waiting for me at the SNCF station. We had planned to live together. We had met the previous summer in a night club. I had invited her to a coca. I remember meeting a guy dressed in an 18th century frock coat a week before we meet. He had long fuzzy hair, was completely sprawled out against a wall like a patient etherized upon a table. Someone said to me, “Meet Jimmy Hendrix of the Jimmy Hendrix Experience.” He died of an overdose three years later.
Marie-Anne and I were young and inexperienced at the time. And what a time! I had arrived in France at the height of a major social and political crisis, a period of revolt and upheaval. I had been following events on television, watching cars burn in the streets of Paris (a common site even today!), barricades go up, police brutality (a common feature here), and mass demonstrations aimed at ousting out the Old General. As one student pamphlet put it, “Un vieillard nous gouverne!” And France indeed was ruled by a disgruntled authoritarian old man, who would be forced, very shortly afterwards, to step down after being the engineer and founding father of the Fifth Republic.
At that time, I was certainly not a Gaullist. I was to understand and appreciate his contribution to French society much later in life. As the saying goes, if you are not a revolutionary at twenty, there is something wrong with your heart. If you are still a revolutionary at forty, there is something wrong with your head. So my heart was fine and I suppose me head needed some improving that only experience could bring. The French have another way of analyzing politics and the political divide between the Right and the Left. Le Cœur est à gauche, le porte-monnaie à droite[3] . At that time, I had only thirty-seven 1968 pounds in my wallet, some clothes, books, records (Beatles, Stones, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan). My bank account and real estate holdings have greatly improved despite Marianne`s terrifying tax extravaganzas.
With only thirty-seven pounds to live on, one quickly comes to the conclusion that work is unavoidable. As it was, despite the upheaval, I had been hired for two months as a moniteur in a Colonie de Vacances, a children`s holiday camp in the Massif Central in a place called Gelles, far from the madding crowd of urban revolt and civil disobedience. The country people were definitely not in the scene and had remained faithful to the Grand Charles as they called him.
My job consisted in looking after a bunch of urchins (gamins, gosses), who taught me the worse, yet most frequently spoken, variety of French. The kids had come from the DDASS, which is la Direction Départementale des Affaires Sanitaires et Sociales. This administration looks after children who have been abused by their parents or abandoned by their mothers, usually at birth. The French have an expression, born under X, meaning that the mother has handed the child into the custody of the State, and in no way, will her identity be revealed henceforth.
If the child is not adopted, he or she will be brought up in an institution run by the DDASS. The children that I was in charge of were about ten years old. Thanks to them, I became familiar with the terminology that would serve me for the next forty years, if I needed to insult someone or understand that I was being insulted. Here are some expressions for your enlightenment. If you intend to settle in France, rebuilding what I would call the Neo-Plantagenet Empire, these words might come in handy. Let’s look at con, conard, gros con, fils de pute, salaud, salopard, merdeux, and last but not least, pédé, these terms of endearment are for men. What about women? Well, there’s pute, putain, conne, pauvre conne, connasse, pétasse (my favorite), pouffe, and pouffiasse, not to mention the classical and often used saloppe. The latter can be positive when it refers to the sexual feats of the female concerned as in “O la saloppe!”, but negative if she has done you some kind of nasty thing, a vacherie for example, such as sneaking in before you to take your long-sought after parking slot, and giving you the famous bras d’honneur translatable as stuff you, or the index raised to the heavens translatable as up yours! In that case, one says “quelle saloppe!” Armed with these linguistic tools, one can confront every day French life, drive a car around Paris and understand what people think of you. If you want some one to shut up, then ta gueule is the word you need.
Gelles is in the Massif Central, not far from the volcano, the Puy de Dôme. Here, I became acquainted with such cheeses as cantal and bleu d’Auvergne, and the local folk music. Auvergne was logistically cut off from the rest of France at that time. The motorways that connect the main town, Clermont Ferrand, had not been built yet. The noise and excitement of the Latin Quarter of Paris (near where I now live) were far away. The local people were hostile to the student movement and extremely conservative. This was the fief of the very arrogant Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the future accordion-playing minister of finance, and in 1971 president of the Republic. He would later preside over the drafting of the EU constitution, which was to be rejected both by the French and the Dutch in 2005.
Giscard was a very supercilious, pretentious, high-handed character with a nec plus ultra snobbish accent. He was a former student of the Ecole polytechnique and the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, l’ENA (for which I now work), the two most important seedbeds of the French political and economic élite. In order to appear nearer the common man, he would have himself invited to dinner by the ordinary people. He did manage to write a spicy novel about a hitchhiker and another about a love affair with a fictive Princess Diana persona, (would you believe it? he entered the Académie Française in 2005. Bravo Giscard! His advanced liberalism was not a great success; consequently, he was defeated at the 1981 election by the crafty, Machiavellian François Mitterrand, a right-wing politician who had managed to woo the Left to achieve his careerist objectives. In the thirties, he had been close to extreme right movements such as les Croix de fer (Iron Cross) and la Cagule (sort of balaclava). In 1940, he is supposed to have declared:
" Je fais don de ma personne au maréchal Pétain comme il a fait don de la sienne à la France. Je m'engage à servir ses disciplines et à rester fidèle à sa personne et à son œuvre ." (1943)
The second month, August, of the French Summer Holidays, was spent in Gstaad, in Switzerland. Recently, in 2006, the French pappy-boomers’ pop idol, Johnny Hallyday migrated there, fleeing the French IRS with its battery of taxes including the very popular ISF, Impôt de Solidarité sur la Fortune, or wealth tax, very popular with the poor (social justice oblige) but extremely unpopular with the upper middle classes who have to pay it. The French political left pay lip service to social justice while making sure that their own personal wealth is not affected, by finding loopholes in the system or undervaluing their property. If you are a collector of paintings, Picasso’s, Monet’s, you do not pay the wealth tax on their value: les copains d’abord! The richer members of the Socialist Party are known as the Gauche Caviar. I must confess I stood for election in 1977 as a member of that party before it came to power and things went terribly wrong thereafter. Illusions Perdues in the words of Balzac. One very rich member, and possible French presidential candidate, was caught with his trousers down in a New York hotel. His wife possessed a very expensive collection of paintings, tax exempt. Michel Rocard was the instigator of this very unfair tax when he was P.M.
In 1968, with the student revolt, money had gone over the border into the Helvetic Republic. The franc[4] was devalued, and I can remember how we ran to the Railway Station to change our pocket money into Swiss francs before the devaluation came into effect. Gstaad is a beautiful village surrounded by beautiful postcard like mountains on the slopes of which many rich celebrities had their winter sport chalets, among whom B.B. (Brigitte Bardot, the then sex kitten and later animal lover and protector, God bless her for that!) and Frédéric Dart, the very successful creator of the San Antonio novels, which, I must admit, I have never actually read. And of course, Roman Polanski, who was forced to stay in his chalet there, pending a possible extradition to the USA in 2009.
Marie-Anne took me, on our day off, to a chic salon de thé. I ordered a lager and she had tea. Sitting beside us, was a group of three well-dressed French ladies, accompanied by a local Roman Catholic priest, who reminded me of the legendary Friar Tuck. He really looked well fed but this was Switzerland. In France priests are generally very lean and extremely poor. They are not paid by the tax-payer but by the generosity of the faithful, a diminishing species today. I shall always remember what one of the ladies said, as it is so characteristic of the French bourgeoisie, in its profound and shrewd logic: “C’est un joli pays la Suisse, car l’argent est sûr[5] !”
Looking into this pithy truism, we can see that every time France is threatened with that recurrent abomination, socialism, with its egalitarian lip-service to equal rights, equal opportunities, and social justice, which generally ends up increasing the gap between rich and poor, money flows out. Yes, every time the Left seems to be on the threshold of political power, money pours into Switzerland. Of course, I was a leftist at that time and the previous sentences are the result of after thought or hind sight.
Walking over the mountains with my group of pré-ados as they were called, I admired for the first time the beauty of the Alps, reached my first summit, and walked by the magnificent properties of the rich and famous. One day, we hitch-hiked to Berne, the federal capital. All I can remember was seeing a statue of a bear, and then we were off looking for a ride back to the camp. The building, where we were staying, housed a finishing school during the academic year, but was rented to our association during the holidays. Finishing schools were popular among the rich because that type of institution allowed them to send their daughters to Switzerland to polish off their French, culinary talents, and social education. Later the girls could be married off to the sons of businessmen, stockbrokers, financiers. Thus, wealth and privilege could be perpetuated among the same old families. At least, that was what I thought at the time without having read Pierre Bourdieu yet, the author of Les Héritiers[6].
2 ROUEN, SEPTEMBER 1968
Rouen, la ville aux cent clochers, the town with a hundred steeples. These words were the first I heard about the town where Joan of Arc was burnt at the stake. I was to live there for eighteen years.
Joan of Arc
« Ô Jeanne sans sépulcre et sans portrait, toi qui savais que le tombeau des héros est le cœur des vivants, peu importent tes vingt mille statues, sans compter celles des églises : à tout ce pour quoi la France fut aimée tu as donné ton visage inconnu[7]... »
André Malreaux
At the end of August, we returned to Rouen, a mediaeval city in Normandy, famous for the trial and burning at the stake of Saint Joan, on May 30th, 1431. The original stake has recently been discovered while an underground car park was being built, and put beside the exact spot where the Pucelle d’Orléans was martyred.
The picture above was taken in the Place du Vieux Marché in ROUEN
After swift military victories, Joan had the French pretender to the throne, Charles VII, crowned in the cathedral of Reims. French kings are traditionally crowned there and buried in the Basilique de Saint Denis, to the north of Paris. Captured during a skirmish near Compiègne in the north east of France, Joan was put on trial for heresy. Bishop Cauchon was the chief judge.
Joan showed remarkable shrewdness during the trial. When she was asked if she knew she was in God's grace, she answered: “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.” The question was dangerous as, according to Church doctrine, no one could be certain of being in God's grace. If she had answered yes, then she would have convicted herself of heresy.
The inquisitor, Jean LeMaître and other members of the court, were under compulsion, and had even been threatened with death, to make sure Joan was punished. Although the maid should have been kept in an ecclesiastical prison, she was in fact held and guarded by English soldiers. Her clothes had been taken from her and some may have even tried to rape her.
Bishop Cauchon[8], who owed his position to the regent, John of Lancaster, duke of Bedford, did not allow Joan to make her appeal to the Pope. Joan was tricked into signing an abjuration document, which sealed her fate.
The maid, now a relapsed heretic, was burned at the stake on May 30th and her remains were incinerated, lest people might collect relics, and her ashes were thrown into the Seine, which runs through Rouen. Geoffroy Therage, her executioner, is reported to have said that he greatly feared he might be damned for having burned such a holy woman. Joan was re-tried and declared innocent on July 7th, 1456. It is extremely difficult to talk about Rouen without mentioning Joan. I recently bought a painting of Joan in captivity[9]. The English soldiery had stripped her naked and she sat in her cell, displaying a beautiful yellow back and shapely buttocks, recognizable only by the black prison bars and her short-cut hair. The artist who sold me it had his gallery in the rue du Vieux Palais, beside the Place du Vieux Marché. The original stake was found beside the modern church.
It now commemorates her martyrdom. Written on a portique are the words of André Malreaux, de Gaulle’s culture minister. I can still here his voice resounding in dull melancholy tones, a voice from beyond the tomb, the voice of a man suffering from Parkinson’s disease.
In the French collective memory, Joan is the symbol of resistance to Messieurs les Anglois. The extreme right-wing party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, an organization which is often accused of anti-Semitism and xenophobia, celebrates Saint Joan’s day, on May 30, and organizes a procession to the golden equestrian statue of Joan, on the rue de Rivoli, beside la place Vandôme in Paris.
Rouen is a town of many churches, spirals, and one university, in Mont Saint Aignan, on the hill overlooking the old town. In order to remain in France and be given une carte de séjour, I was advised to enrol at the newly built Faculté des Lettres, where I was to study English literature (so as to find a job), French literature (to help me learn French and adapt to a new country), and Latin (for fun, simply because I liked that language and did not have a second foreign language yet). Until now, I had been brought up on mathematics and science, and was quite poor in foreign languages, dreadful at French, and I had only a few smatterings of German.
The university campus looked much like the housing schemes of the French Banlieue, (meaning a place where people were originally banished), built to accommodate the poorer workers in high rise HLM towers, and later the immigrants from North Africa. The University of Rouen, which had once been part of that of Caen (founded by the English in 1432 during the reign of Henry VI), was architecturally the anti-Oxbridge. The oldest elements were redbrick, the most recent concrete. It was a dismal place to study. There was one nice restaurant, set in the nearby forest. However it belonged to a Faf organization. Faf (facho, fascist) was the word used to describe the extreme right-wing students. One night it was burnt to the ground.
We mostly went to a dismal café-brasserie in the town centre, the only café in fact, named after Louis XIV’s finance minister, Colbert. There we played yam. French cafés are not renowned for their comfort or interior design.
When I began my studies in Rouen, France was lagging far behind England in many respects. Few people had telephones and one had to go to the post office, buy a token, and wait in a queue for a telephone booth. Motorways were just being built and only a small section had been completed between the capital and Rouen. At University, the atmosphere was very tense. Violence broke out frequently between the gauchistes and the fachos (extreme right students). The Ligue Communiste of Alain Krivine was actively engaged in condemning the Stalinists of the French Communist Party. Journals appeared such as Rouge or the Maoist Cause du Peuple. Not to mention Arlette Laguillère’s Lutte Ouvrière: Arlette who ran for the Elysée six times including the 2007 election, and was a member of the European Parliament for several years.
I must admit, I read Rouge regularly and was even on the front page in 1969 during a demonstration. I had a beard at that time, as it made me look and feel revolutionary. Il faut que Jeunesse se passe, as the French would indulgently say.
It is interesting to see how youth does indeed pass in politics, and what has happened to some of those flamboyant revolutionaries of May 68. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, known as Danny le Rouge, is a MEP and a member of the Green Party. Serge July founded the newspaper Libération in 1973. Alain Geismar, former leader of the Gauche Prolétarienne, is now an adviser to the mayor of Paris. He was put in prison in 1970, became an Inspecteur général of French National Education, and in 1990, worked in the ministerial cabinets of both Michel Rocard and Lionel Jospin as a deputy director. Today he lectures at Sciences-Po. Like the writer Crébillon[10] , it is possible in France to be imprisoned in the château de Vincennes one day, and become a minister the next! All those people have since watered down their red wine.
I attended many meetings throughout 1969 and learned to sing the International in French, holding up my left clenched fist in defiance of bourgeois authority. There was much talk of marxism-leninism, and I actually tried to read The State and the Revolution, written by Lenin in 1917, and found it so boring that I gave up after a dozen pages.
Although a budding revolutionary, I did accept invitations to official functions and in 1969, I witnessed the lavishness of my beloved Marianne, not the one I was living with, but the revolutionary maid clad in the tricolor cockade and Phrygian cap, the Marianne portrayed by Delacroix as Liberty leading the people, her right hand holding the French flag, and her right breast defiantly challenging the despot; Marianne the epitome of FREEDOM and FRATERNITY (with capital letters), the symbol of the French republic, the Goddess Athena, the Roman Minerva; Marianne who sprang to life in September 1792, by decree of the National Convention, and whose statue can be seen in every town hall, whose face is on every postage stamp, be she Brigitte Bardot (1970), Mireille Mathieu (1978), Catherine Deneuve (1985), Inès de la Fressange (1990), Laetitia Casta (2000), who lost the prestige of being Marianne because she expatriated to London (high treason!), and recently Evelyne Thomas (since 2003). Maybe Carla Bruni could fulfil the role in the not too distant future!
For those of you who do not understand the mysterious workings of the French administration, I shall say a few words about the Préfet and the Recteur. The prefect from the latin praefectus, is the chief of the administration in a department (thanks to Napoleon who replaced the intendant, Louis XIV’s creation) and the rector is the head of education in an académie (administrative zone) and chancellor of the University. He is always a University professor, chosen by the government for his political sympathies and, we hope, his integrity and professionalism. Both are lodged at the expense of the Republic in lavish manor houses.
Decentralization had not yet given parallel powers to the Conseil Régional, which has taken over some of the attributes of the prefect.
As a foreign student, I was invited to a party at the Rectorat, where, with a group of English students, whom I had met on the campus, I was treated to plates and plates of canapés and delicious petits fours, both savoury and sweet, with an endless flow of champagne. If this was my first encounter with the generous and abundant mamelles (or udders) of Marianne, it certainly was not the last. When the Republic wants to entertain, it does so in the most plenteous sophisticated manner. The French National Assembly also lavishes on its guests an abundant supply of vintage champagne and fine food, but I shall keep that for later.
The rector, Monsieur Ch……, was a very pleasant congenial fellow, who did not lack a keen sense of humour. How many times had I been standing chanting slogans outside his Rectorat, and now, here I was in conversation with the man we students considered our enemy. Some years later, when I was teaching in the lycée Corneille, formerly the Collège royal de Rouen before the Revolution, I heard the rector evoke the long tradition of student strikes and uprisings in the school with a slight tinge of nostalgia. French high school pupils are easily manipulated and talked into striking, an easy prey to the extreme left demagogues or even to the Gauche Caviar, the bourgeois leaders of the socialist party: rich and sometimes very corrupt!
3 A FRENCH UPBRINGING, WINTER 1968
My Marie-Anne introduced me to her uncles and aunts, cousins, and parents, and I was readily invited to family dinners. Here was where I learned French table manners and customs. At that time, my culinary skills were limited to spagetti à la bolognaise and frying eggs without burning them.
I had very little experience of gourmet food before I came to France. In Scotland, we ate fish and chips, sausages (with preservatives), steak and kidney pie, pork pies and a few other typical British dishes. In Scotland, Marie-Anne had found a notice in a butcher’s shop amusing. “Our sausages have preservatives”. This was amusing as in French, a preservative is a condom and a sausage can be what you might imagine it is.
Gallic table manners and etiquette were very different to what I had been accustomed to. The first rule was to eat everything your host offered. Oysters, snails, sea food, very red roast beef. Once I was given a slice of very rarely cooked leg of lamb, and I spent the next three days with a fever. My body did not have the anti-bodies necessary to protect me from the crise de foie, the French national illness at that time. An illness that occurred when one had eaten and drunk too much. The doctor did cure me and I suppose I developed the right immunity as I can now eat meat more or less raw or red or rare. Tartar steak with French fries is one of my favourite dishes!
Much later, when I was living in Paris, I was invited to accompany a group of British conservatives, a MEP selection group, to the French senate. We lunched in the Salle Napoléon, a red and gold dining room with a portrait of the Emperor (the Senate’s founder) looking disdainfully down upon us. The cook certainly had a sense of humour, if not of revenge, as he had prepared a roast of beef for the rostbeefs[11] , a roast of the reddest and bloodiest possible variety. And how those English ladies looked at one another in despair! If the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, it was avenged that day in the dining room of the Senate, symbolically, and probably indigestibly, at least.
At table, one must keep one’s hands visible, and certainly not put one’s elbows on it except maybe when the coffee and brandies are served, after two or three hours eating. In the Normandy countryside, a Sunday meal can last from one o’clock to six in the evening. The trou normand, in the middle of the meal, a glass of Calvados, clears the way for what is yet to come. Needless to say, a bowl of milk with biscottes in it suffices in the evening.
Marie-Anne’s parents had built a country house, la Blanchardière, in the village of Saint-Saëns, about twenty miles from Neutchâtel. It stood on a plot of land, parallel to a little river, in a charming valley surrounded by green hills and woods. Marie-Anne’s cousin, Gilberte, lived in a little wooden farmhouse nearby. During the debacle of 1940, when people learned that the Bosch were coming, and screeching stukas were whirling down on the civilian population, she had taken to the road and had gone as far as Neutchâtel, before coming back home once the armistice had been signed.
Gilberte was a professional cook, who officiated at many a country weddings, christenings, birthday parties, golden anniversaries, holy communion parties, and a wonderful cook she was too! She herself never married. She would have made a husband very happy with her delicious riz de veau and bouchées à la reine but she had refused all proposals, and had preferred to remain single, living on her little farm with two cows grazing behind her white wooden cottage.
We would spend our weekends there in spring and summer. Every year a man came with a cider press, and the apples in the orchard were gathered and squeezed into a liquid we called boisson, bottled and left for a few months. When one opened a bottle, half the content erupted in a fountain of white foam. What was left was drunk (as indeed were the drinkers).
Every year, August Klébert, Marie-Anne’s father, would have a pig slaughtered. The carcass of the animal was transformed by an itinerant butcher into whatever one can make from a pig, namely boudin noir (black pudding), pork chops, roasts, filet mignon, liver pâté, and many other things to boot. Dans le cochon, tout est bon!
A lamb was also slaughtered in spring. We would grill both lamb and pork chops on the barbeque, drink cider and wine, and spend the rest of the afternoon lying in the orchard, under the trees, sleeping it off.
I often went for postprandial walks across the hills and back along the valley road, past the notary’s manor, where a peacock shrieked “léon”. After the Sunday lunch, we would go to the farm nearby and bring back a churn of freshly drawn milk for the supper, still warm and unpasteurized.
Progress in the shape of a motorway put an end to that bucolic idyll. The house, which now overlooks the dual carriageways, was sold for half its value. Thank you Marianne for that nice little salopperie!
Those first few years in France had one important consequence for me: I put on weight, a few pounds. Over the years, I have gone from 78 kilos to 114, an increase of about 25%. I put it down to growing old and maybe over-indulgence. As Oscar Wilde put it, I can resist everything except temptation.
4 CHRISTMAS 1967, A FLASHBACK
Before I came to France to live, I had, at the age of 16, flown over Paris on my way to Cattolica in Italy. The pilot had announced to the passengers that we could see the Eiffel Tower on our right. It was my first glimpse of a city I was to spend a large part of my life in, either visiting it, or working in it. After the summer I had spent with Marie-Anne, I was duly invited for Christmas to meet her parents, sister, and family.
That was a meal that the Bosh[12] won’t get!
At this point in my story, I must mention that first visit to France in 1967. I arrived for Christmas. I remember the very cold weather, the icy roads, the dark blue grey sky over Bois Guillaume, the Peugeot 404 (the same one Colombo has in the popular TV series), also the abundance of smoked salmon, foies gras, oysters, Champagne, Gevultzstraminer, Reisling, Château Latour, and many other fine wines and brandies. Marie-Anne’s grandparents were still alive. This was to be their last Christmas. Her grandfather, Klébert, had been sent to the Dardanelles during the First World War. He could reminisce on how he had to walk back from Thessalonica, in Greece, after the armistice had been signed. I can imagine him singing a popular song of the French soldiery:
Un kilomètre à pied, ça use, ça use
Un kilomètre à pied, ça use, ça use les souliers (etc.)[13]
From Thessalonica to Rouen, the poilu (French WWI soldier) must have walked about 2000 km, and ruined a few pairs of boots!
Both wars had left their imprint on the French psyche. One expression caught my attention. After a meal, Marie-Anne’s father would say: En voila un que les Russes n’auront pas[14] ! The Russians were the current potential national enemy. Previously, the Bosh had been given that honour. And in the 1870s, the Prussians. Maybe, the English were the first successful candidates, unless it was the Romans. Although I think the saying began after the Franco-Prussian fiasco of 1870-1871, when the French, for the sake of honour, declared war on the Prussians, although they had no battle plan except the presumptuous desire to visit Berlin, no adequate maps of Alsace and Lorraine, and no general worthy of the name. The Bavarians quickly occupied Alsace before the French Army got there. What followed, we are all aware of: defeat at Sedan, the Emperor captured, two world wars and millions of deaths on all sides.
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871
Let’s take a look at the events which brought in their wake those two world wars. While Bismarck was preparing for a war, with an army of 800,000 well-trained soldiers, and excellent artillery freshly manufactured by Krupp, France was engaged in the colonizing of North Africa, and in a fiasco in Mexico. A quarrel broke out over the Prussian claim to the Spanish crown. France was opposed to it, and prevailed. However, the French wanted to make sure there would never ever again be such a claim. France had once been surrounded by the Hapsburgs, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire under Charles V. They did not want the same situation with the Hohenzollerns! On July 13th, 1870, the Prussian king’s response to the French request was telegraphed to Bismarck in Berlin. By blue-pencilling some of the terms of the Elms Dispatch, he made the letter extremely insulting[15]. The message Bismarck concocted ran as follows:
“The French ambassador has asked his Majesty to allow him to cable Paris that his Majesty commits himself never to take up the candidacy again. His Majesty has refused to receive the ambassador and has had an adjudant[16] inform him that he has nothing to say to him.”
Napoleon III, against his better judgment, declared war on Prussia on July 19th. The German states rallied to the Prussian cause, which was the aim of Bismarck’s strategy, and sent troops to invade Lorraine. General Bazaine was quickly encircled in Metz; the French army surrounded at Sedan: 20,000 French soldiers were killed and 83,000 taken prisoner. France was occupied, Paris surrounded, Germany united during a coronation held in the Galerie des Glaces, a symbol of the power and magnificence of Louis XIV, in the palace of Versailles, on January 18th, 1871. Louis, by the way, was the king during whose reign France acquired Alsace, in 1648, while his mother, Anne d’Autriche, was still the regent.
The German Reich was born for better or for worse. Millions of Frenchmen, Germans, Englishmen, and Russians to mention but the subjects and citizens of a few nations would give up their lives as a consequence of this war. Revenge! Revenge! Revenge!
(Anne-Marie, whom we shall meet further on, lost her grandfather as a consequence of the Great War. Didier Ambroise, a liaison officer, died of lung disease after having been gassed in the trenches. He was only 31.)
The literature of Maupassant and Zola (la Débâcle) relate diverse episodes of the Prussian Occupation. The loss of Alsace and Lorraine was the main causes of the First World War. Revenge! I remember learning a popular song inspired by the event and sung before the Second World War: Vous n’aurez pas l’Alsace et la Lorraine[17] ! Well the Boshes got both back for five years after the French defeat in 1940! Some families changed nationality three times! The word Bosh may originate from an old French word signifying head, of the pig-headed type. The English of course were called roast-beef, because of their red uniforms.
War Clouds over France, 1937
Before the outbreak of World War Two, Auguste Kléber, Marie-Anne’s father, was a séminariste destined for the priesthood. This was one of the opportunities open to intelligent young men of peasant stock to receive an education beyond the certificate d’études. He had entered the Petit Séminaire (Roman Catholic Boys School) and had won the first prize for Greek prose translation. However his hormones incited him to climb over the wall at night and go out with the girls. One young lady in particular, a certain Rosy, four years older than he was, allegedly became pregnant. In those days, the honourable thing to do was to marry the wench. Auguste Kléber, being only sixteen, needed a dispensation, which he got from the French president of the day, Albert Le Brun. The happy couple wedded. It turned out that the girl was not pregnant: the ways of the Lord (and the ladies) are mysterious. During the war (1939-1945), Rosy died. There are several hypotheses concerning her demise.
1. She was killed during the bombing. (frequent)
2. She was in the resistance, caught, tortured, and shot. (possible but unlikely)
3. She was Jewish and deported. (maybe)
4. She died of disease brought on by malnutrition. (very common)
5. She committed suicide. (unlikely)
6. Any other natural cause or accidental one. (plausible)
No one in the family knew about Rosy until one of the daughters discovered the livret de famille . Auguste Kléber married a second time during the war, after he had presumably engendered Marie-Anne (born during the May 1944 bombing of Rouen). When the war was over, he divorced, and married Marie-Anne’s mother when his daughter was seven and her sister was on the way.
In 1943, Auguste Kléber and many of his friends had been sent off to work in Germany. Had they really volunteered or were they driven by famine? Pierre Laval had gained Hitler’s endorsement provided that he sent thousands of workers to Germany. The STO (Service de Travail Obligatoire) was set up for that purpose. The only alternative was to join the Maquis, (the Resistence) which some young people did. All in all 700,000 French workers went to Germany; 60,000 died there.
France had to pay an enormous tribute to Germany in food, labour, and pillaged works of art for Reich-Marshall Göring. More than a million and a half men were kept in POW camps. Most of the country’s production was packed off to feed the Third Reich and provide material for the German war effort. Young Frenchmen were rounded up and dispatched to the Messerschmitt factories, including one particular Georges Marcher, the 1970s communist party leader, famous for the sentence “Communism is generally speaking positive” months before the Berlin Wall came down. Those, who were influenced by the pro-Nazi propaganda of Jacques Doriot, who founded the French Popular Party in 1936, and Robert Brasillach, the editor of the anti-Semite journal Je suis partout, joined the Charlemagne division of the Waffen SS, and very quickly found themselves “freezing their balls off” on the Russian front. Among the collaborators worth mentioning was Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, an intellectual and novelist, who committed suicide in 1945. Robert Brasillach was executed on February 6th 1945, after a trial lasting thirty minutes. Before he died, he shouted “Vivre la France quand même !”
Christmas 1967
While reading a satirical newspaper, I came across the following sentence. Debré, allez faire cuire un oeuf! Telling some one to go and boil an egg (testicule) is a way of showing extreme hostility and disapprobation. Michel Debré had been Prime Minister (1958-1962) and one of the founders of the Fifth Republic. In 1967, he was the Finance Minister, and after May 68, the French Foreign Minister. In 1967, things in France were heating up, and not just eggs! When the country is doing well, the French get that revolutionary itch, which starts tickling them, irritating them, driving them mad, until they blow the whole thing up. After the Christmas break, I went back to Scotland and resumed my studies. My mind was made up, I would return to France in summer.
Marie-Anne’s grand-parents were to die a few months later, but I can still remember the old man, his back bent after years of working in road construction as a terrassier, a navvy, his Gallic moustache not unlike Georges Brassens’ or Asterix’s. I have a vague recollection of her grand-mother, small, skinny, and all dried up.
5 Wedding Bells are going to chime
December 1968: Tournedos Rossini
As for myself, I was married for the first time in the town hall of Rouen in December 1968. It was the first encounter with the Civil Code but not the last.
As I record these mémoires, inspired by Chateaubriand[18], I can look out at one of Marianne`s Republican Temples across the road from where I live on one of the nicest avenues of Paris. Indeed the French Town Hall is a place where most administrative tasks are carried out. It also replaces the functions of the Church, especially for recording and officiating over weddings. One must marry in front of Monsieur le Maire or his substitute before going on to any religious ceremony. The business takes only a quarter of an hour at most. The Mayor reads an excerpt from the Civil Code[19], the French Republic`s Holy Book, and after acceptance by the couple of their new legal status and the exchange of rings, the official papers are signed, witnessed, and a copy of the livret de famille[20] is handed over to the blushing bride. Vive la Republique! The civil wedding is the only legal one (since September 20, 1792). Let’s listen to the mayor:
"Conformément à la loi, je vais vous donner lecture des articles 212, 213, 214 et 215 du Code civil :"
Article 212 ~ Les époux se doivent mutuellement fidélité, secours et assistance. Les époux assurent la direction morale et matérielle de la famille.
The spouses owe each other fidelity, help and assistance. Spouses provide the moral and material direction of the family.
Article 213 ~ Ils pourvoient à l'éducation des enfants et préparent leur avenir.
They provide for the education of children and prepare their future.
Article 214 ~ Si les conventions matrimoniales ne règlent pas la contribution des époux aux charges du mariage, ils y contribuent à proportion de leurs facultés respectives.
If the marriage covenants do not address the contribution of spouses to marital expenses, they contribute in proportion to their respective faculties.
Article 215 ~ Les époux s'obligent mutuellement à une communauté de vie.
The spouses mutually undertake to live under the same roof.
So much for French law. Napoleon’s original articles were more male-dominant. Equality seems to have prevailed, today, in theory at least. The code was promulgated by Napoleon, the then first consul on March 21, 1804. The preparatory work was carried out by Jean-Jacques Cambacérès, the second consul, and Pierre-Joseph Cambon, within a commission. The project went through 100 sessions of the State Council and was originally composed of 2281 articles divided into 36 sections.
On my desk, there is a silver coin, a remembrance of another time, with the effigy of Louis XVI (1774-1793), the last king of France and Navarre of the Ancient Régime, who was executed in 1793. His brother Charles X was in fact the last king of both France and Navarre in the history of France, ousted out by the 1830 July revolution. A similar coin brought about Louis’ recognition at Varenne, and subsequent return to Paris; his trial; and demise because he had endeavoured to escape and join the anti-revolutionary forces to the east of France. The end of the monarchy reduced the power of the Roman Catholic Church in France, the Elder Sister of the Church, as she is sometimes called by clerics.
On January 20, 1793, Louis was condemned to death. The next day he was escorted by a guard of 1200 horsemen on a two hour ride through the city to la place de