Le Sud de France 5.3: Home is Where They Break Your Heart.

Claude Michel is in his seventies, five feet tall and one of the few villagers who wears a jacket and tie when he goes out for a drink at our tiny bar. He is a sharp dressed man. He's also a former mayor of the village and a retired Captain in the French Foreign Legion where he received a Legion of Honor medal for his service in the brutal Algerian war. He came to the village thirty years ago.

He is a man out of another time and another world. When he meets a woman, he bows his head and kisses her hand. I'd never seen this done before and when he kissed my wife’s hand, I was startled. Then I watched him closely as he kissed another woman’s hand, and realized that the way he did made it a lovely gesture.

Today most women don’t expect to have their hands kissed, but Claude Michel’s method is as disarming as it is simple. He takes the woman’s hand, slowly lifts it up, so the woman has a moment to realize what is about to happen, and then he barely touches her hand with his lips. This gesture is an elegant sign of respect rather than of eroticism and most women seem comfortable with it.

Another one of the short men in the village is Liam Gonzales whose family, like half a million others, fled Franco’s Spain in 1939. They were the losers in the Spanish Civil War and they fled across the Pyrenees to seek asylum. Instead of sanctuary, the Vichy government put them in internment camps and then sent to the German ovens. A little over 100,000 avoided that fate by hiding in villages and in the hills. When WWII began many of them fought as part of the Maquis, the Spanish underground. The allies assured the Maquis that after Hitler they’d deal with Franco, but they broke that promise. Liam’s family and thousands of others were left stranded in the South of France. Many settled here in the Herault and I would guess that today about a third of our villagers have Spanish surnames.  

Liam’s first name is also the result of another war--the Napoleonic War of the 1800s-- when the British sent Irish troops to Spain as cannon fodder. Rather than face Bonaparte's cannons many deserted into the Pyrenees with Spanish ladies, the results were Spanish kids with names like Liam, Patrick, and Sean.

 

  The other night when we stopped at the bar for a drink, Claude Michel was there and after kissing my wife’s hand, he came over and shook mine vigorously. He held my hand with his right hand and my elbow with his left, which recognized immediately as the old politician’s hand-lock. 

I bought him a drink and he told me that he played piano and violin and that we should come over to his place for drinks one evening. I told him I played “American guitar” and he replied, “Ah, tu devr’apprendre à jouer de la guitare française, maintainent!” (Ah, you must learn to play French guitar, now.)


I struggle with my understanding of French but I realized that Claude Michel had just used the familiar “tu” for “you” instead of the formal “vous.” Tu is how family people and friends address each other. 

Paul has a guitar like mine

Just then, a big woman who had been talking to Liam, stood up and with a nod to Claude Michel, began to sing. She stood very straight and sang very slowly at first--and very loudly. The song she sang was about a terrible battle that took place near here in 1943 between resistance fighters and the Germans. It recalled the horror of the occupation and that dark night of the soul that the French bear for their collaboration with the Nazis. At this battle, the partisans were defeated, this is a song of loss and sorrow. Nonetheless, it is an uplifting song that urges listeners to carry on, to remember those who died, and to never give up hope. 

At its heart, it is an anti-war war song.  

As the woman sang the passion in the her voice grew and with each chorus, more people stood up and joined in; soon everyone was on their feet. Claude Michel was standing next to me, his back straight and stiff, his right arm waving in front of him. In the dim glow of the bar, I could that see his eyes were damp. Liam linked arms with him and the two rocked back and forth, and then Claude Michel reached out and took my arm and began rocking me in time to the music.

I stood there singing in French or at least trying to sound like I was singing in French, but I had no idea of the words I was singing. The music and the crowd just carried me along and soon enough I was singing at the top of my lungs. 

A strange thought struck me there as I sang. We Americans have no comparable songs of war, songs of remembrance with which to honor Americans who've died in Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam. Without songs of sacrifice and remembrance I thought, we numb ourselves to war's madness and that makes it too easy to go war and to do it without feeling a thing.

In our small village bar, the sorrow and the passion of that awful moment in 1943 was alive again. I stood next to Claude Michel and I was sobbing too, not for the partisan’s losses, but I think for my own.

But this was not what I came to France for, I came here to take pretty pictures, eat cheese, and write funny blogs- not to dredge up old memories and open old wounds. Certainly, I didn’t come here to have my heart turned inside out by a bunch of semi-sloshed town folk in some hole-in-the-wall bar in the middle of nowhere.

Later as we left the bar, Liam patted me on the shoulder and tapped his heart with the palm of his hand. 

Above us, a bright crescent moon floated in a star-filled sky, lighting our way.

"Yeah,” I thought as we walked off, “home is where they break your heart.”  

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Sud de France 3.3: The Forgetting Machine

I was in Villeneuvette again to photograph the ruins of the town’s once prosperous textile factory. (See Sud de France 2.2 for my first visit here.) For over four hundred years Villeneuvette fabrics were known throughout the world and the town was a Royal Manufacturer for the King. 

It was a prosperous hard working place so much so that the words “Honor through Work” are etched over the entrance to the town. But the town died because of wars and cheaper products made in other countries. The mills and factories are now empty shells and the town is struggling to rebuild itself on the strength as a crafts and art center.

Wandering around the ruins reminded me of a conversation I had a few days ago with some British friends over dinner. We were talking about the recent protests against raising the retirement age and one of them, Liam, said the cause of the problems were, 

“There’s a real difference between Northern and Southern Europeans is that the south is just lazy. Just look at where all the economic trouble is Greece, France, Italy, Spain.”

I was surprised to hear this because Liam seemed to be selectively forgetting that just a week ago his own British government announced Draconian reforms to cut its deficit. More severe reforms than the French passed. Ones so severe that had they been passed in France it would have really blown the country apart. 

What was going on I think is what I call the “The Forgetting Machine.” That wonderful mechanism in our brains that selectively edits reality to fit our personal world views. Liam was stereotyping the people he lives amongst in such a smooth and natural way he doesn’t even realize that he’s doing it, he simply holds his “truths” to be self-evident.

The “laziness” of the Southerners discounts the fact that just a few years ago the Spanish, Italian and Greek economies were rapidly growing and the envy of the Northern nations. Then came the economic recession and it turned the world upside down. But was the recession caused by Greek laziness or by Wall Street shenanigans? By the French retirement system or by banks reselling risky mortgages? Wasn’t the economic recession caused by the North and not the South?

The funny thing is that Liam is forgetting that what he is really talking about is the division between Europe's Protestant North and Catholic South. A divide that's hundreds of years old. He’s now in the laid back Catholic South and it's a bit uncomfortable for him. 

“The French are just not entrepreneurial" Liam says. " They prefer to spend time at home with their families than to work a little longer to make more.”

I was surprised to hear that putting family before work was a bad thing. 

In response I pointed out t him that we were sitting in a new restaurant in the heart of Clermont run by a couple of young French guys. (The food here is wonderful, a modern reworking of traditional French dishes done with the lightest of touches. For example, for dessert I had a crème brûlée with just the hint of fresh ginger and a small side dish of granulated coffee sorbert.)
So weren't these two young Fenchmen entrepreneurial?  

I'd say that what the French may lack is not an entrepreneurial spirit but the ruthless competitiveness of the North (and of the US.)

But Liam is right when he says that the French put their personal lives ahead of their work lives.  I have yet to meet a French person who works two jobs. They do work long hours but when they are not working, they are NOT working. 

If enjoying life is a crime then I think that the Southern Europeans are guilty as charged.

There's also an irony here. Liam within a few kilometers of Villeneuvette and its stone buildings. These  stand as a silent reminder that even in the sunny, soft, Sud de France an awful lot of people have worked very, very hard to earn their daily baguette. 

Photos and text © 2010 Steve Meltzer