To enjoy the more recent version of this site go to www.francerevisited.com.

See you there!

http://francerevisited.com/2011/01/florida-forgives-jim-morrison-for-dying-in-paris/

First, political entertainer Glenn Beck entertained his faithful by slamming a Holocaust survivor for not being Republican by referring to liberal philanthropist George Soros as “a Jewish boy sending Jews to the death camps.”

Then, looking to obtain contracts for train projects in the United States, France’s train company SNCF acknowledged with “profound pain” in Florida something that the company had yet to do directly in France: the state-run company’s active wartime compliance and contracts with Germans from 1942 to 1944 that resulted in the company transporting about 75,000 Jews toward concentration camps during the German Occupation of France. The company’s previous unwillingness to acknowledge its wartime role had all but blacklisted it from the competition for major rail contracts in Florida and California. SNCF’s American mea culpa business campaign can be read here. Now, France’s ambassador for human rights, while encouraging SNCF to be upfront about its wartime history, has accused American politicians of exploiting the issue for protectionist purposes.

This was followed up over the weekend by The New York Times’ revelation of a 600-page Justice Department report detailing how, in the years following WWII, the U.S. government and its intelligence services assisted the entry of Nazis into the United States and provided them with safe haven.

So Glenn Beck’s listeners may have gotten a good chuckle, SNCF is back in the running for the Tampa-Orlando high-speed line, and it turns out that that old neighbor of yours you thought might have been a Nazi might actually have been one.

Now that we’re clear on the moral issues, any chance the dollar’s going to rise soon?

- GLK

Don’t you love the way the headline writer threw in the hype word “stranded,” calling to mind people trapped by rising waters, abandoned in a war zone, stuck without anyplace to turn. Who would want to read “Strikes at Eiffel Tower Give Tourists More Time to Appreciate the Beauty of Paris” or “Orsay Closed by Parks Open” or “Eiffel Tower Visible from Far and Wide Despite Strikes” or “Strike over Retirement Age Leaves Tourists in Paris Well-Fed Anyway”?

To those who do find themselves “stranded” in Paris, well, lucky you!

- GLK

For more information visit http://www.fristcenter.org/.

“Gingrich, who ditched two wives (the first when she was battling cancer; the second after an affair with the third — a House staffer — while he was impeaching Bill Clinton), now professes to be a good Catholic. Evidently the first two wives don’t count because he hadn’t converted to Catholicism.”

That Gingrich’s personal bio contains more than a few references under the heading “hypocrite and cad” isn’t news, but it was so central to Dowd’s argument that it got me thinking what would happen if a journalist for a major newspaper in Paris wrote that about a politician in France.

The answer: she and the paper would be sued big time for invasion of privacy or at least widely accused unethical journalism for attempting to make his marriages and religion a part of his CV.

The other day I posted on France Revisited’s Guest Blog an open letter from an association of a certain standing calling for the preservation of 100-year-old industrial site on the edge of Paris. I got to wondering what would happen if a major preservationist society in New York took the fight to saving a similar site.

The answer: the developer would pay big money to place a full-page ad in their defense in The New York Times—and promise riches for all.

Two cultures, two approaches to the common good—rather, four approaches if you count both sides of each example.

The partnership called “France-Atlanta: Together Towards Innovation” builds on a relationship that already exists between Atlanta and the Lorraine region and Atlanta and the City of Toulouse. Georgia Tech has had a campus in the city of Metz, capital of Lorraine, for the past 20 years, while Atlanta and Toulouse have been sister cities since 1974. Large delegations from Lorraine and from Toulouse are expected to attend.

For more on the “France-Atlanta” partnership and the events of Nov. 29-Dec. 12 see http://www.france-atlanta.org/.

For more information about the relationship between Toulouse and Atlanta click here or here.

For information about Georgia Tech – Lorraine see www.georgiatech-metz.fr/.

The American version is to appeal to a higher cause, the classic “I failed to live up to the standards of the Church thereby letting down all those whom I’ve helped throughout my years of selfless service” apology.

The business version of that hit the big-time news today with the resignation as chairman and chief executive of Hewlett-Packard of Mark V. Hurd following an internal sexual harassment inquiry that found him in violation of the company’s code of business conduct through his filing of illegitimate expense reports.

In a prepared statement accepting martyrdom, Mr. Hurd said, “As the investigation progressed, I realized there were instances in which I did not live up to the standards and principles of trust, respect and integrity that I have espoused at H.P. and which have guided me throughout my career.”

Interpretation: “Sorry for trying to be perfect.”

I stopped into a gas station just over the North Carolina border in Fayetteville, the first American town named after the Marquis de Lafayette, and couldn’t take a oui without reading on a comdom distributor that “abstinence before marriage and a monogamous relationship during marriage” served as better protection than a tube of latex, nevertheless “available here for your privacy and convenience.”

In France, you’re actually more likely to get laid, not to mention elected, by practicing abstinence from God and a monogamous relationship with the local wine.

Nevertheless, south of D.C. and before you hit Florida you travel through states with identities comparable to certain regional identities in France—Burgundy or Champagne or Brittany, for example—meaning that whatever pleasures and opportunities they may provide for the visitor you’d feel quite the outsider if tried to settle down there.

I wasn’t looking to settle down though but simply to spend two days in and around Cary, North Carolina, visiting an old friend from high school and enlisting him on a tour of French bakeries or restaurants in the Raleigh-Cary-Durham area.

We had a lot of catching up to do, which I won’t bore you with here, so I’ll cut to the chase.

First we went to the old North Carolina Statehouse in Raleigh, where sculptures on the outside mourn for the Confederacy (below left) and a sculpture of George Washington on the inside (below right) serves as a cautionary tale for those who would have their democratically elected leaders sculpted by Italians.

We went hunting for French pastries and found what I have come to consider the best croissant between Newark, NJ, and Naples, FL.

It was in the town of Cary, between Raleigh and Durham, at La Farm Bakery, a busy brick, wood, and tile bakery-café with an open kitchen where even on a busy morning the service was friendly as all get-out. If it takes a bit if fear of God to get good service then maybe the French should start going to church more often.

The croissant was deliciously fresh and buttery, and it had a close rival in the flaky pain au chocolat. The breads looked look picture-perfect.

Of course one can’t judge bread simply by its appearance so I asked the woman in line behind me which one’s she’d tried and if they were good. Turns out she was Sandra A. Gutierrez, a local food writer, and she had tried them all. Her knowledgeable enthusiasm for La Farm’s bread convinced me that this picture was worth a thousand bites.

Too good to be homegrown (no offense to residents of the Raleigh-Cary-Durham area), there had to be some serious baking education behind La Farm Bakery. Indeed there is; I learned from the bakery’s website, that the man behind the quality (and success) of the place is Lionel Vatinet.

His know-how doesn’t come from the Frenchness of his name, though I suspect that helps, but from the fact that he learned and developed his skills by touring for seven years with the guild of craftsmen and artisans called Les Compagnons du Devoir, at the end of which he earn the prestigious title Master Baker.

An outsider might never feel at home in North Carolina, but he’ll always have find comfort at La Farm.

La Farm Bakery, 4248 Cary Parkway, Cary, NC. 919-657-0657.

Ugolino and His Sons / Ugolin et ses fils
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-1875)
Marble of 1865-1867 based on plaster model of 1860-1861

The story for this sculpture is derived from Dante’s Divine Comedy, specifically a story from Inferno in which Dante encounters in his travels through hell the soul of Ugolino della Gherardesca.

Ugolino’s soul has arrived in the betrayal circle of hell following his decades of involvement in the many bloody political struggles within and among the city states of 13th-century Italy. After Ugolino’s power in Pisa has definitively been overthrown and captured, Ruggieri, Archibishop of Pisa, accuses Ugolino of treachery and orders him, his sons, his grandsons thrown into prison, where they are abandoned, the key thrown into the river.

There in prison Ugolino would watch his descendants die one by one of starvation, and, starving himself, and at his sons’ urgings to put an end to their suffering, he would eat their flesh before dying himself of starvation. As the soul of Ugolino tells it, “I threw myself, screaming and crawling, over their lifeless bodies, calling them two days after they died, and calling them again, until hunger extinguished in me what pain had left.”

The soul of Ugolino tells Dante this story as he continues to suffer his subsequent punishment in a special circle in hell reserved for betrayers of various kinds. There, two souls, Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri, are for eternity cramped together in a frozen hold from which only their necks and heads emerge and where Ugolino constantly gnaws away at Ruggieri at the place “where the brain meets the nape.”

A bronze version of this, cast in 1863 and originally placed in the Tuileries Garden, is now found in the Orsay Museum.

Carpeaux is also the sculptor of the joyful and seductive grouping of figures called “Dance” on the Garnier Opera in Paris (photo right).

The Burghers of Calais / Les Bourgeois de Calais
August Rodin (1840-1917)
Bronze of 1920s based on plaster cast completed in 1889

Rodin a successor to Carpeaux in the French sculptor hall of fame, also made his own version of Ugolino, which can be see in its monumental version in the ornamental pool at the back of the garden of Paris’s Rodin Museum and in a muddled miniature version on the Gates of Hell, a work inspired by Rodin’s passion, even obsession, for Dante’s Inferno.

Rodin’s greatest public sculpture, however, is The Burghers of Calais. The scene here is a historical event during the Hundred Years’ War between England and France.

For 11 months from 1346 to 1347 the English army of Edward III laid siege to the port town of Calais (the closest point between England and France, where the Chunnel now arrives). Aware that the town would starve to death if the siege continued, the commander of the garrison at Calais attempted to negotiate with the English, offering to surrender the town to the English if the Edward III were to agree to spare the population.

But Edward III wanted some form of vengeance of the trouble of laying siege for so long. He therefore offers to spare the town on the condition that six town leaders, or burghers, stripped of hats and shoes and any symbols of power and wealth, are brought to him bearing the keys of the city and with the rope with which they will be hung wrapped around their necks.

Rodin depicts the six men isolated in thought and movements, with each expressing a different mindset and stance with respect to despair, yet collectively they present a sense of ultimate patriotic sacrifice. And there’s amazing hand raised in a question that draws the viewer around to the back of work

Though the men are depicted as they are headed toward their individual and collective deaths, they were in fact spared. It’s said that Edward III’s queen Philippa stepped in at the last minute and begged the king to spare the lives of such heroic men willing to sacrifice themselves for the survival of their fellow citizens.

This intensely expressive and moving work was created to be placed in front of Calais’s City Hall, where the original was inaugurated in 1895. A number of copies were made after Rodin’s death, including this one at the Met and another at the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia. Another copy stands in the Rodin Museum in Paris, which occupies the mansion and garden where Rodin worked and lived when in Paris beginning in 1908.
Hercules the Archer / Héraklès archer
Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929)
Bronze of 1920s based on original plaster model of 1909

Antoine Bourdelle studied with Rodin and began making a name for himself in the early 1900s as he began to purify and simplify his forms. He has created in this, his most celebrated work, a remarkably balanced tension in which the viewer anticipates the unleashing of Hercules’s arrow.

The story here is that of Hercules’s sixth labor.

Driven mad the goddess Hera, Hercules killed his children in a fit of madness, a.k.a. temporary insanity. As penance, he was told by the oracle to serve King Eurystheus and perform for him ten labors, two of which where eventually considered invalid and so finally amounting to twelve.

His sixth labor was to eradicate the flock man-eating birds that had the lake near the city of Stymphalus. Hercules used god-made castanet-like noisemakers to scare the Stymphalian birds into flight then shot them down with his bow and arrow.

There are a number of bronze versions of this around the world. The one in France’s national collection is in the Orsay Museum. A plaster version is in the Bourdelle Musem which occupies the studios and home where Bourdelle worked and lived in Paris’s Montparnasse Quarter from 1885 on.

- Photos and text by GLK