The French Journal

Belatedly, Anzac Day in Villers-Bretonneux

Late last week, in the village of Villers-Bretonneux, hundreds of Australians gathered to commemorate the efforts of their countrymen in World War I on the French front (Sydney Morning-Herald). VB, as it was known, had been captured by the Germans, who viewed it as a gateway for a march on Paris. The Australians fought - and regained - the town, but at an enormous cost: 1,200 lives. Even so, this battle was not the bloodiest for the Aussies in France during the Great War. At Fromelles, in 1916,  there were over 5,000 casualties, including nearly 2,000 deaths.

Villers-Bretonneau planned a week-long celebration of the Australians, in recognition of the 90th anniversary of the battle. Anzac Day, a national holiday in Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere, takes place on April 25 and also honors the soldiers of World War I who fought at Gallipoli.

NYT Day #2: Bordeaux eats, Paris after midnight, lots of opera, Marie-Thérèse

Other items from the NYT:

• The two people who read this blog who have unlimited budgets and who will spend time in Bordeaux in the near future should be sure to read Christine Muhlke's recap of high-end dining in the city. The rest of us without expense accounts may not find the article edifying. Featured are Restaurant Jean-Maire Amat, La Cape, La Grand'Vigne, Cordeillan-Bages, and Hostellerie de Plaisance. (Got to get myself one of these gigs.)
• If I'm reading Elaine Sciolino's article about Paris by Night correctly, after 1:00 AM your best options in the city are some elaborate noshing and a game of pool.
• A more-or-less forgotten survivor of the French Revolution is the subject of Susan Nagel's Marie-Thérèse, Child of Terror, subtitled "The Fate of Marie Antoinette's Daughter." (Apparently, her father Louis XVI is less of a draw and doesn't merit any up-front mention in the subtitle. Ah, the indignities continue!) The NYT review says that "while a biographer's impulse to empathize with her subject is commendable, Nagel's desire to humanize Marie-Thérèse leads her to make some unconvincing assumptions."
• To scope out the future of New York City Opera, music critic Anthony Tommasini has taken himself to Paree to check out productions overseen by Gerald Mortier, who will lead the NYCO next year. Reading between the lines, New Yorkers and opera aficionados should prepare themselves for non-traditional experiences after Mortier hits the town.

A virtual tour of Paris, Mai 1968

A pivotal event of recent French history was the riots of 1968, when an act of disciplining students turned into weeks of upheaval that gradually involved all levels of French society. An excellent virtual tour, almost an online documentary of the era, has been created by Agnès Poirier for The Guardian. As you click on the numbers of a map, Poirier and two commentators tell how the events unfolded, illustrated by a slide show of modern day Paris. It's a formula which both teaches and gives joy those who simply in the mood to revisit the city. And sure enough, for an ironic note about the immutability of some aspects of the French character, while the narrators of the historical tour walk around the sites, they come across a present day demonstration.

Book: Mistress of the Revolution

In New England, it's still too cold for beach reading, but maybe it's not too warm to curl up in front of the fire with a good, long read. A candidate for that activity is a new novel by first-timer Catherine Delors, Mistress of the Revolution. Told against a backdrop of the turbulent French Revolution, it tells of a young woman, first unhappily married and then the mistress of a nobleman. Early reviews indicate that the book is enriched by the wealth of historical detail that Delors, a Frenchwoman writing in English, provides, and there are special guest appearances in the novel by Thomas Jefferson and Robespierre, among other actual famous personages. The book's feature page on its publisher's site has a brief interview with Delors, a excerpt, and a reader's guide.

Parisians, under the Occupation, in color

A new, sometimes controversial, exhibit featuring rare color photographs of Paris during the Occupation has opened at the La Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris. The photographer André Zucca took the shots while on the staff of a magazine, Signal, which was largely an outlet for Nazi propaganda.The Paris portrayed here might almost seem insouciant; the epidemic of queues of people waiting for food rations is not in evidence. If one looks closely, however, at some of the bucolic shots, the color reveals yellow Stars of David in shop windows.

The controversy surrounds Zucca. He was well-paid for his assignments, and he obviously had access to resources such as color stock when it was not ordinarily available. In reviewing the exhibition and an accompanying book on his blog for Le Monde, prominent intellectual Pierre Assouline notes that there is -- at best -- ambiguity about whether Zucca could be considered a collaborator. In response to a line in a preface that "(Zucca) worked for and against the Occupation," Assouline writes, "'For,' one sees well, but 'against,' one still searches for."

Books: Madame de Staël

My thirst for reading some French history led me to Maria Fairweather's recent (2005) biography of Madame de Staël. What a woman! What a life! Alive during the time of the French Revolution and Napoleon's reign, de Staël was like the Susan Sontag of her time, composing intellectually challenging treatises, novels, and plays, but she was also more than that. The daughter of Jacques Necker, perhaps the most important governmental finance expert of the times, de Staël had access to wealth, a fascination with politics, and an expansive personality that drew the most important people in Europe to her salons. She wasn't a beautiful woman, and her arranged marriage was loveless, but she carried on a series of passionate affairs, sometimes several at once; her conquests included Benjamin Constant and a devoted boy-toy lover near the end of her life. Her influence was so consequential that Napoleon, who hated powerful women, banned her from Paris, an injunction that she nonetheless repeatedly appealed and challenged; she was not one to take "no" for an answer, even if it came from the emperor. It is no small praise to say that Fairweather's book does justice to de Staël's life.

France looks again at "La Résistance"

The question of France's role in World War II has been re-opened for discussion with the television broadcast in the country of "La Résistance," (The Guardian, U.K.). Consisting of two docu-dramas and four documentaries, the series aims to swing the pendulum back from an era when Collaborationist guilt impacted the view of France's history to a measured evaluation which also considers the heroism that many demonstrated during the war. The two dramatizations depict, in one episode, acts of defiance that characterized daily life, and, in the other, attempts to help Jews avoid persecution. The four documentaries elaborate on those themes, with segments on passive and armed resistance; stories about French Jews who fought against deportment; and an examination of the numbers of French Jews who survived the era, and why.

If you speak French, the site of France 2, one of the channels showing the films, has videos and background materials about the programs. (Nothing I can embed, alas.)

Books: The Wreck of the Medusa

Some incidents are out there, hanging in my subconscious, without my actually understanding what they really are about. (Don't you love it when I get thoughtful?) One of those events is The Wreck of the Medusa, which a new book by Jonathan Miles proclaims to be one of the most dramatic sea disasters in history, comparable, in its day, to the Titanic.

In 1816, a French ship ran aground in Africa. Some of the survivors -- the more well-to-do -- set off in life boats; others remained with the ship; and 150 more boarded a makeshift raft. What occurred on the under-supplied, unstable raft -- including murder, cannibalism, and suicide -- became a scandal that rocked the French government of the time. The dramatic tale inspired a famous painting by Théodore Géricault which contributed to the notoriety.

Miles's book follows not only the story of the shipwreck, but the resulting political controversy and the composition of the painting as well. A review in The New York Times called it "enthralling," even if the language is occasionally "overwrought."

Bon anniversaire, Comte de Buffon!

My war against germs continues, and I'm losing. Perhaps a discussion of viruses and other natural phenomena is appropriate for my next offering, which is a celebration of the 300th birthday of Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte du Buffon. The man in question, explains the NY Times, is largely forgotten, but his legacy is considerable. He wrote, all by his lonesome, a 44-volume encyclopedia about the natural world which was a standard text for over 200 hundred years; he was a contemporary and rival of a Swedish botanist, Carolus Linnaeus, who is still revered. A more familiar part of Buffon's heritage, however, is Paris's Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, which he founded, and the Jardin des Plantes, the acreage of which he was instrumental in expanding. Besides those two landmarks, the Times also takes us to Buffon's country home in Montbard, a small Burgundy town which "is not otherwise particularly picturesque," and then a walk to nearby Buffon, a village which gave the Comte his name and which still maintains a forge that he built. Should you retrace these steps -- and I can't imagine too many people doing that, but whatever -- be prepared not to find much mention of the Comte, so you'll celebrate him alone. For the rest of us, a slideshow may suffice.

And now I have a date with a bowl of chicken soup.

Women of the Resistance

The BBC has a touching report on women from France who left the country during World War II for England in order to support DeGaulle's relocated government. This feature is not a comprehensive history. It concentrates instead on the reminiscences of Tereska Torres as she tours the areas of London where she used to work. (After the war, Torres wrote a book, Women's Barracks, which caused a scandal.) And through her story, we are reminded that in those days heroism took many forms.

In talking to the BBC reporter about the Gallic Women's Barracks, "(Torres) told tales of camaraderie, of women from all walks of life thrown together in an alien country, tales of lonely Christmases singing French carols and desperately trying not to think of home." Her husband was killed during the war; she was five months pregnant. Almost seventy years later, the atmosphere is autumnal during Torres's return to London. Joined by a companion from the war years, Torres said, "I remember a girl called Claire and I remember a girl called Tereska, but they were two girls from a long time ago. They're no longer us."