Admittedly, war touring isn’t for everyone. After all, that’s far from the Eiffel Tower, isn’t it? (Well, no, you can actually see the Eiffel Tower from an American war cemetery.) And you’d rather be drinking Champagne, right? (Well, the largest U.S. WWI monument in France actually overlooks Champagne vineyards at Château-Thierry.) And you’d rather visit the Gothic cathedrals of France than the war shines of Americans. (You mean like those that you’ll pass along the way?)

OK, I won’t try to convince you. But if you’ll give a look and listen to the presentation below, you’ll see and learn why someone—maybe not you, but you’ve got curious friends and relatives, right?—might want to visit these sights.

Don’t just take my word for it.

Earlier this year I met with John Wessels, Chief Operating Officer of the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC), to ask if the ABMC would be willing to participate in a Zoom talk with me to explain to readers of France Revisited the interest of knowing about and one day visiting the American WWI sights of France. He readily agreed. There was then a question of finding the right person to co-present with me.

I’ve written many articles about touring American war sights in France relative to both the WWI and WWII, I’ve have given lectures in the United States on the subject, and I’ve personally taken numerous travelers to visit these sights. But I’m a generalist regarding travel and touring in France. So I needed a true specialist to join me for the presentation, preferably a military historian who’s visited the sights to be discussed who could speak authoritatively about both major events of the First World War and the creation and evolution of memorials, monuments and cemeteries. Thanks to John Wessels and to the ABMC’s media and communications duo of Hélène Chauvin in Paris and Ashley Byrnes in Arlington, we found the perfect specialist for the program: Ben Brands, the ABMC’s historian and a war veteran himself (Afghanistan).

I now invite you to watch the France Revisited “Conversation with an Expert” below in which Ben Brands and I speak about the American WWI memorials, monuments and cemeteries of France. This presentation—illustrated with numerous maps and photos—was conducted and recorded via Zoom on November 10, 2022, with a live audience of readers of France Revisited. Several segments were rerecorded shortly thereafter so as to resolve technical problems and for coherence.

The timeline below the video indicates the list of topics, events and sights along with the speaker, whether Ben Brands (BB) or myself (GLK). The full presentation lasts 1½ hours. If you wish to watch only portions of the presentation, I recommend that you watch it directly on Youtube and on full screen so that you can click or tap directly on the timeline in the Youtube description section in order to arrive at segments of particular interest to you and better view details of the images. Be sure to watch my introduction and Ben Brand’s conclusion to understand the underlying reasons for organizing this presentation.

Video timeline

0:00:00 Introduction by Gary Lee Kraut
0:05:40 Ben Brands presents the work of the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC)
0:07:12 Who is Ben Brands? What is his role as historian at the ABMC? His tour of duty as a company commander in Afghanistan.
0:12:22 A comparison between a WWII map of the Invasion of Normandy 1944 and WWI maps of northern and northeastern France and Belgium. (GLK)
0:15:24 American entrance into war. Pershing visits Lafayette’s tomb in the Picpus Cemetery in Paris. (BB)
0:18:39 The annual changing of the American flag over Lafayette’s tomb in Paris. (GLK)
0:19:30 Origin and evolution of the ABMC. (BB)
0:23:35 The Lafayette Escadrille Memorial. (BB)
0:27:41 The Suresnes American Cemetery. (GLK, BB)
0:32:00 Mont Valérien, a major French WWII memorial, a 5-minute walk from the Suresnes American Cemetery. (GLK)
0:34:17 The American Naval Monument at Brest. (BB)
0:36:39 Why didn’t the Germans intentionally harm the Allies’ WWI sights during WWII? American involvement in the Somme. The Somme American Cemetery. (BB)
0:40:35 Cantigny. (BB, GLK)
0:42:09 Amiens and the American Red Cross huts at the former Cosserat Textile Factory. (GLK)
0:45:01 Art Deco design and architecture in Saint Quentin and Reims. (GLK)
0:46:33 The American Monument at Château-Thierry, Paul Cret, Belleau Wood, the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery. (BB)
0:57:52 The French-American House if Friendship in Château-Thierry. (GLK)
0:58:34 The Oise-Aisne American Cemetery. (BB)
1:01:04 Quentin Roosevelt, a president’s son killed in aerial combat. (BB)
1:05:08 Anne Morgan and the National Museum of French American Cooperation in the Château de Blérancourt. (GLK)
1:05:56 The Saint Mihiel American Cemetery and the Montsec American Monument. (BB)
1:09:20 Philanthopist Belle Skinner and the village of Hattonchâtel. (GLK)
1:10:18 Verdun and the Douaumont Ossuary. (GLK)
1:11:56 The Montfaucon American Monument. (BB)
1:14:18 African-American soldiers: segregation, heroes, awards and burials. Jewish grave markers. (BB)
1:20:52 The Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery. (BB)
1:23:09 The Romagne German Cemetery, Jean-Paul de Vries’ Romagne 14-18, Sergeant York. (GLK)
1:25:17 The French and American Tombs of the Unknown Soldier. (BB)
1:27:25 Conclusions by Gary and Ben.

Sights discussed in this presentation are located in the Paris region and the departments of Finistère (Brittany), Somme (Upper France), Aisne (Upper France) and Meuse (Eastern France).

Text © 2022, Gary Lee Kraut

The post Where and Why to Visit the American WWI Sights of France appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

Baldwin felt the burden of race and identity in America from the time he was a shy, but precocious child in Harlem. Born out of wedlock to Berdis Jones who bore eight more children when she married Reverend David Baldwin, James was humiliated, physically abused, and told repeatedly that he was ugly by the man he called father. Young James was aware of the boundaries set by white America and, indeed, the boundaries accepted by blacks. He recalls in The Fire Next Time, “the fear I heard in my father’s voice” when he realized that James believed he “could do anything a white boy could do.” Early on, however, teachers recognized his intelligence. One, Orwilla Miller, saw his devotion as a reader and talent as a writer. She convinced his reluctant stepfather, who deeply mistrusted whites, to let her take the 10-year-old to films and plays. Baldwin credits her with encouraging his intellectual development and they remained friends over the years. Orwilla called him Jimmy, as did friends and family all his life.

Baldwin probed race and identity relentlessly as an expat in Paris. In “The New Lost Generation,” an article in the July 11, 1961 Esquire Magazine, Baldwin attributes his decision to leave America to his recognition that attempts to deal with racism and inhumanity through political or social systems was a process that always led to “failure, elimination, and rejection.”

Considering realities such as the plight of blacks in the US, the Holocaust in Europe, and Hiroshima, he concluded that “all political systems . . . seemed morally bankrupt.” Dealing with issues of hate, intolerance, homophobia and alienation on a personal level was equally perilous as exemplified by the suicide of a close friend two years earlier who jumped from The George Washington Bridge in New York because of the relentless fear of living life as a black man in America. Considering the impossibility of ever attaining fulfillment as an ambitious, gay, black intellectual in the United States, Baldwin sought life in Paris to find the long heralded “refuge from American madness” that generations of artists and writers hoped to discover in the City of Light. More importantly, Baldwin wanted to explore and define his identity and “accept his own vision of the world”; this, he felt, was impossible for him in the United States of 1948.

Baldwin did not find utopia in Paris—and he did not expect it. In his 1972 memoir, No Name in the Street, he states that “I had never, thank God—and certainly not once I found myself living there—been even remotely romantic about Paris”; in fact, he had considered going to Israel to live on a Kibbutz. His flight “had not been to Paris, but simply away from America.” He later recalls, however, feeling the lure of Paris when he studied French as a high school student in Harlem with poet Countee Cullen. He credits reading Balzac for his understanding of Parisian institutions and conventions, but upon arrival he came to grips with everyday realities of being poor in Paris directly. He remarks in Esquire that surviving meant “not expecting to be warm in one’s hotel room,” and in Notes of a Native Son that poor expats, Africans and students in the Latin Quarter lived in “ageless, sinister-looking hotels” and were forced to “continually choose between cigarettes and cheese for lunch.” There was nothing resembling an American toilet, and toilet paper was day-old newsprint. He admits to “moments” of longing for familiar American comforts and missing family, but when he thinks of what he so resolutely left behind in America, he chooses to adapt and continue his search for identity.

Baldwin was lonely at first and mourns that he and other poor expats were “surrounded by quite beautiful and sensual people, who did not, however, find us beautiful and sensual.” Parisians generally kept travelers “at an unmistakable arm’s length” even though comporting themselves with “impenetrable politesse.” He recalls that it was a long time before he made a French friend and even longer before he saw the inside of a French home. In the essay, “Encounter on the Seine,” from Notes of a Native Son, he states that “the American Negro in Paris is very nearly the invisible man” ignored not just by the French but by Americans in Paris. In an “undemocratic discrimination,” white Americans did not expect to see blacks in Paris. When they did, they assumed the Negro to be “a needy and deserving martyr or the soul of rhythm.” While meeting a white countryman in Paris did not evoke fear as it would in the US, it did not inspire a bond of community between compatriots abroad.

In Paris, Baldwin became aware of France’s problems with race from its colonial past. He affirms in “Encounter on the Seine” that the African in France has “endured privation, injustice, medieval cruelty” and exploitation in his native land. In addition, he cites the “intangibly precarious” existence the African has in Paris as a colonial desiring freedom for his country. But Baldwin also notes that this “bitter ambition is shared by his fellow colonials, with whom he has a common language.” When the African in Paris meets a fellow-countryman, there is camaraderie, unlike the “lifetime of conditioning” that often keeps the white American traveler at an uneasy distance from the black American. The African has “not yet endured the utter alienation of himself from his people and his past.” A salient difference for Baldwin is that the Africans had the solace of belonging to a culture, the possibility of a homeland and a people to which they could return. The American Black, in contrast, is a “hybrid,” with the “memory of the auction block” and alienation from his own homeland rooted in America’s violent racial past.

In No Name in the Street, Baldwin recounts that after returning from a visit to the US in 1952, he “began to realize that I could not find any of the Algerians I knew.” He discovers that “Algerians were being murdered in the streets, and corralled into prisons, and being dropped into the Seine, like flies,” awakening him to the fight for Algerian independence and the consequences for Algerians in France. He muses on the irony of his coming to France for “the comparative freedom of my life in Paris” as he witnesses the harassment and abuse of Algerians. Still, he recognizes a shared, violent history of colonialism and concludes that he “was still a part of Africa, even though I had been carried out of it nearly four hundred years before.”

In the video below, James Baldwin expresses some of this when asked about his relationship with Paris during an appearance before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on December 10, 1986, a year before his death from stomach cancer. Listen to the full three minutes of his answer. (After reading this article, consider returning to watch the entire 55-minute video for a sense of Baldwin’s point of view, the type of questions in the air at the time and their relationship with America and the world today.)

Despite his initial poverty, loneliness, and familiar encounters with prejudice, Baldwin came to love Paris and lived there on and off for the next nine years, returning to the city and its environs after time spent in places including Switzerland, Corsica, Turkey and several visits to the United States. Upon arrival in 1948, he connected with the editors of an avant-garde English language publication, Zero, who took him to the second floor of Les Deux Magots, a regular haunt of artists and intellectuals since the 1890s including James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Picasso among others. Richard Wright, the celebrated American author of Native Son, who had long encouraged Baldwin in his writing, was there to greet him. That night Wright helped him find a room at Hôtel de Rome on Boulevard Saint-Michel. Despite the camaraderie between the two, the next year, Zero published Baldwin’s essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel”—later part of Notes of a Native Son—rebuking literature that attempted to show the brutality of racism without a realistic representation of humanity. Richard Wright’s acclaimed Native Son was among the books chastised for the portrayal of its protagonist, Bigger Thomas, as someone whose “life is defined by his hatred and his fear” rather than in more complex ways. It caused a feud between the two that erupted publicly at Brasserie Lipp. Nevertheless, by 1950 Baldwin was hailed in Commentary Magazine as “the most promising Negro writer since Richard Wright.” They continued their relationship, somewhat tenuously after the outburst over the article, and Baldwin maintained his respect for Wright’s importance as a writer and influence throughout his life.

In James Baldwin, a Biography, Baldwin’s biographer, archivist and friend David Leeming states that once in Paris he eventually met some of his acquaintances from the lively Greenwich Village scene he had left in New York, and that before “long had no shortage of English-speaking friends in Paris.” He and other struggling writers and artists lived at the Hôtel Verneuil on rue de Verneuil in the 7th arrondissement. There he was part of a vibrant but impoverished group of men and women who shared rooms and friendship. He also found compassion in Mme Dumont, the Corsican woman who owned the hotel. Early in 1949, shortly after arriving in Paris, Baldwin fell ill. She exempted him from rent and cared for him for three months, allowing him to feel human kindness amidst the cool indifference of Paris. Leeming also notes that Baldwin “maintained non-Bohemian friendships as well” and eventually frequented the homes of “liberal, white, mostly Jewish middle-class Americans in Paris.” It was at dinner parties at these homes that he “met other American writers such as Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth.”

As he became integrated with life in Paris, Baldwin came to love walking through Les Halles, investigating the clubs and sex shops of Pigalle, and eating at Chez Inez, a jazz club and restaurant on Rue Champollion in the Latin Quarter specializing in fried chicken and emerging talent. Over time and with growing reputation, he met luminaries including Norman Mailer, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and Truman Capote. In 1953, artist Beauford Delaney, cited by biographer Leeming as “the most important influence in his life,” moved to Paris. A close friend and mentor from his Greenwich Village days, Baldwin credits Delaney for being “the exemplar of the black man as functioning, self-supporting artist.” Delaney eventually moved to “an old house surrounded by a garden in Clamart,” outside of Paris, which became a refuge for Baldwin for many years.

Despite his increasing comfort with life in Paris and the jobs he picked up reviewing books or writing articles, Baldwin struggled financially for years and often felt lonely. He took loans from friends and family, but it exacted a toll on his sense of self-worth. Once, Leeming notes, a desperate Baldwin “agreed to take a job as a singer in an Arab night club” until a friend “saved him from that job by employing him as a clerk.”

It was in Paris that James Baldwin finally became comfortable with his homosexuality and found love. According to his biographer, “Lucien Happersberger was a Swiss who had left home in search of excitement and success in Paris.” Baldwin declared that in Lucien he found “the love of my life.” They shared an intimacy for two years that was new to Baldwin. Their complex connection lasted in various iterations of lover and mostly friend for thirty-nine years. Baldwin wanted a permanence that Lucien did not; Lucien married three times and fathered two children. With Lucien, as well as in other relationships, Baldwin had experiences that would surface in Giovanni’s Room, his beautiful and tragic 1956 novel about a gay, white American in Paris who comes to terms with homosexuality, denial and brutality. The bar in the novel, Guillaume’s, is reported to be modeled after Reine Blanche and Fiacre, gay bars frequented by Baldwin in Paris.

A painful experience for Baldwin was his arrest and imprisonment in Paris for eight days over Christmas in 1949. A New York acquaintance, a traveler, spotted Baldwin in a café and decided to move from his hotel near Gare Saint-Lazare to the Grand Hôtel de Bac where Baldwin was living. It was a dismal lodging described in his biography as one of the “enormous, dark, cold, and hideous establishments” typical in those years. The man brought with him a sheet with the name of his previous hotel on it. Since Baldwin was having problems getting the hotel to change linens, it wound up on his bed. Two policemen came looking for the stolen sheet and found it. He and the acquaintance were charged and imprisoned until the 27th of December when the case was dismissed. The experience was frightening for someone new to the language, to handcuffs, to the putrid shed in which men were initially squeezed together with a hole in the center for a toilet, and to the isolation of a cell. One of the interesting observations about the ordeal that Baldwin relates in Notes of a Native Son is that “the Frenchmen in whose hands I found myself were no better or worse than their American counterparts”; under arrest he felt fear and the unknown as he would have in the States. But he also notes that in the “commissariat I was not a despised black man” as he might have been in America. In fact, he observes that in New York he would have been described as “what” he was—a black man. In Paris he was described as “who” he was—an American.

Over time, Baldwin began to concentrate on writing and, in doing so, to explore his vision of himself as a man and as an American. It was in Paris that he began to seriously develop his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, setting up shop, like generations of writers seeking to escape their unheated rooms, on the second floor of Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore. Largely biographical, it recounts one day of a boy’s 14th year in Harlem where he awakens to the reality of racism, brutality within family and injustice on the streets and begins to pursue his own identity. The story had been incubating in Baldwin for years; it confronted his own history within family and in the racial divide of New York. It was published by Knopf in 1952 while he was visiting family in New York for three months. When he returned to Paris, Baldwin arrived with the resources so lacking when he first saw Paris in 1948. Following its publication, he won a Guggenheim fellowship and in 1956 he published Giovanni’s Room which is set in both Paris and the south of France. The novel was written mostly in France but not only in Paris. Baldwin also wrote essays in his early years in Paris that would become part of Notes of a Native Son.

In writing Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin was able to begin unlocking the identity he longed to discover and define when he first left New York. Leeming points to its “theme of the destructive fear and guilt at the base of racism.” This would be explored by Baldwin throughout his life’s work. By writing much of the text in Paris, he was—like so many writers in the past—able to look to look back to America with a new clarity through the lens of an observer. He had the freedom to be a writer and live without the fear and impenetrable barriers he felt in New York. His biography notes that in his “Paris years he never lost sight of his need to confront his ‘inheritance’ as an American black in order to achieve his ‘birthright’ as a man.” In 1955, in his introduction to Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin declares that “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

Baldwin spoke no French when he arrived in 1948, but he did eventually become fluent, as you can hear in this extract from a 1973 interview in French.

Baldwin never idealized Paris or saw it through the “charm of legend” as he referenced the appeal it had for so many Americans; however, he believed that his life “began during that first year in Paris.” Baldwin returned to America for a time during the height of the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s. He traveled the country as a writer as well as an activist. He came to see first-hand the American South where so much violence was taking place. He met with leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., James Meredith and Thurgood Marshall and took part in the March on Washington in August 1963. He also raised support for the march from expats in Paris.

In 1962 he published The Fire Next Time, his seminal compilation of two essays that warn about white America’s need to confront and examine the reality of historic and systemic racism. It brought him international fame. In it he describes the “rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape, death, and humiliation” of “the Negro’s past” in America. He decries that blacks still feel “fear by day and night” and “doubt that [they are] worthy of life.” It is also a text, however, that concludes with the interesting and hopeful metaphor that “relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks” must “like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others.”

Once more, Baldwin left America. He traveled to Africa, Israel, Turkey, England, Switzerland and America again over the years, returning to Paris frequently but declaring himself to be a traveler rather than belonging to any country. (He also referred to himself as a “commuter” between France and the United States.) Leeming reveals that while visiting Paris in 1958, Baldwin “realized that he had changed a great deal in the years since his first arrival in Paris. Paris was no longer home, but it had been an important place in his life.” Later, after more travel and living in Turkey for a few years, Baldwin returned to France in 1970, this time to the south. For the last seventeen years of his life Baldwin spent a large part of every year in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. His home there became a refuge for his thoughts and writing, as well as a magnet for writers, artists, and intellectuals including Marc Chagall, Ella Fitzgerald, Yves Montand, Harry Belafonte, Nina Simone and others.

Baldwin’s need to explore race and identity and to define his life as a writer was pivotal in his decision to leave America in 1948, and he reflects on his decision to come to Paris in the 1961 Esquire article. “I think my exile saved my life, for it inexorably confirmed something which Americans appear to have difficulty accepting. Which is simply, that a man is not a man until he is able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from that of others.” He adds that Paris and Europe gave him “the sanction, if one can accept it, to become oneself. No artist can survive without this acceptance.”

© 2020, Elizabeth Esris
First published on France Revisited, October 2020.

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Meanwhile, here in France, Americans celebrating Thanksgiving typically, even traditionally, enjoy their fresh French turkey with some fine French terroir in their selection of wine—make that wines, plural, since a long meal calls for more than one. So while the information below will especially serve Americans celebrating in France, don’t be afraid to try this back in the homeland or elsewhere abroad on this or any turkey day.

There are a multitude of approaches to turkey, from roasting to smoking to frying, and plenty of stuffing recipes that, when combined, can influence your wine pairing. But on average the range of French pinot noirs, with its great and subtle variety from light to medium to full body, lends itself to roast turkey pairing. Thoughts of pinot noir then leads us primarily to the wines of Burgundy and Champagne (with all due respect to Alsace and to the Loire Valley’s Sancerre and Manetou-Salon).

So I asked the pros promoting the wines of Champagne and Burgundy what they recommended to accompany our traditional American meal.

The Champagne Bureau USA was well-prepared for the question and supplied the following chart:

The Burgundy Wine Bureau (BIVB) put some thought to the question and sent the following suggestions:

As an aperitif, Burgundy’s bubbly, Crémant de Bourgogne, either a blanc de blancs for its lightness and fitness or a blanc de noirs for a more complex opening to your thankful gathering.

For your stuffed turkey with cranberry sauce, something in the order of a Morey-Saint-Denis, a Mercurey, a Savigny-les-Beaune Premier Cru or a Ladoix.

Then, come dessert, to accompany your pumpkin pie or your pecan pie (as long as they aren’t overwhelmingly sweet), a white (chardonnay) Meurault or Marsannay.

So many ways to give thanks.

© 2019, Gary Lee Kraut

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Orléans and New Orleans have been bound by name ever since the latter’s founding as a French colony in 1718, when it was christened in honor of Philippe, Duke of Orleans. But it wasn’t until January 5 this year that the French city on the northern tip of the Loire and the American city on a southern bend of the Mississippi formerly declared themselves related. Sisters, in fact, as Mayor Olivier Carré of Orleans and Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans signed a sister-city pact.

In November last year, Mayor Landrieu et al. had come calling on Mayor Carré in Orléans (photo above), with other stops in Paris and Monaco.The formal signing took place in New Orleans on the return visit when Mayor Carré led a delegation of Orleanais to visit their New Orleanian counterparts.

The occasion for this sister act is the 300th anniversary of the founding of New Orleans within the territory of Louisiana, itself named in honor of King Louis XIV in 1682. Philippe d’Orléans, the king’s nephew, wasn’t just any old duke. After Louis XIV’s death in 1715, Philippe was appointed as regent of France to oversee the kingdom during the youth of the next King Louis, who was 5 years old when he became the XVth. Phil was therefore the man to honor in 1718.

The recent signing was also timed to coincide with New Orleans’ annual celebration on January 6 of Joan of Arc’s birthday, which includes a parade and festivities honoring the city’s French cultural heritage.

While Joan’s birthday is otherwise overshadowed by Mardi Gras as far as festivities go in New Orleans, she receives perpetual honors as a heroine in Orleans. It was, after all, at the gates of Orleans that her reputation took a great leap when she led the charge to help lift the English siege of the city on May 8, 1429. The French victory at Orléans proved to be a major turning point in the Hundred Year’s War against the English. It launched a series of French victories that restored and enhanced the king’s position, helped open the route to Reims for the official coronation of Charles VII, and eventually chased the English from most of the continent. Think of it as the D-Day of the Hundred Year’s War.

An image in relief on the heroine’s statue at the center of Orléans’ oversized central square, Place du Martoi, shows Joan leading the charge during the siege that earned her the moniker of Maid of Orleans (la Pucelle d’Orléans).

That statue, shown at the top of this article, was damaged during the Second World War and restored in 1950 in part thanks to donations from the City of New Orleans.

New Orleans eventually received its own statue of Joan, “A gift from the people of France to the citizens of New Orleans,” as is written on the pedestal. Erected in 1972, that one is a copy of state-sponsored gilt statue by Emmanuel Frémiet first placed on Place des Pyramides in Paris in 1874. Philadelphia and Portland also have copies, as does Melbourne, Australia, and six other cities in France.

Orléans’ Joan of Arc Festival (Fêtes Johannique) in early May, culminating on the 8th, is the highlight of the festival schedule of the city. As part of the the sister-city exchange this year, New Orleans will be the guest of honor at the festival (French President Emmanuel Macron may also attend), whilc also taking part in Orléans’ annual Foirexpo fair, April 6-15 , and Gastronomy Fair, Nov. 23-26. During the summer a pop-up boutique will sell goods from Louisiana. Other sporting and educational exchanges are also planned. In the longer term, the two cities have agreed to express their sisterhood in exchanges and discussions relative to water issues, tourism, culture and heritage, economics, and education and training.

For further tourist information about Orléans see the site of the Orléans Tourist Office. For information about the surrounding countryside see the site of the Loiret Tourist Board.

Elsewhere in the Loire Valley, Tours is sisters with Minneapolis and Trois-Rivières (Quebec), Nantes is sisters with Jacksonville and Seattle, and Saumur is friends with Asheville (NC).

© 2018, Gary Lee Kraut

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An idea comes to me. Why not an afternoon in a park? I live near the Jardin de Luxembourg, in the middle-class 6th district. It is a formal garden in one part, with tennis courts in another. A fountain created at the initiative of Queen Marie de Médicis has been placed to one side. The garden now belongs to the French Senate. There I can enjoy watching ducks swimming in lines in the center pool, or admire 106 statues, but I must stay off the grass. I don’t feel like going to the Luxembourg Garden today. I know it too well. Since it’s vacation time in Paris, I’m in the mood to try something new and a bit less formal.

I consult Google, make a list of a dozen parks I don’t know. The one I choose is the Jardin de la Folie Titon, on the rue de Chanzy in the 11th district of Paris, a racially mixed working class area some distance from my home. I choose it because it sounds small and cozy, a real neighborhood park, but especially because I have never heard of it before.

When I reach the park I learn that it does have some history connected with it. At the entrance, a sign tells me about it. The Folie Titon was a wallpaper factory built here before the French Revolution, and it participated in that event’s history.

A plaque on a wall on the nearby rue de Montreuil says that on April 28, 1789, a few days before the opening of the Estates General, the factory was burned during a people’s riot that was harshly repressed. Another plaque states that the first manned hot air balloon took off from this site October 19, 1783. The factory was rebuilt, but then demolished permanently in 1880. A middle school now stands on the site, built in the architectural style of the small factories which still exist in the neighborhood. It features broad windows across each floor, overlooking the park. The school is named Pilâtre de Rozier, after the 1783 balloonist.

The Folie Titon Garden is designed with a circular path around a big lawn, where today, couples and families are sitting or lying. There are no “keep off the grass” warnings here. An informational sign tells me about a lily pond at the far end of the park, recently installed to encourage “aquatic biodiversity.” There I see water lilies with tall reeds behind them, and a goldfish swimming around. In front of the pond are a variety of flowering and aromatic plants, honeysuckle, nasturtium, fuchsia, sage, and even a few vegetables, cherry tomatoes and squash.

I sit down on one of the numerous benches placed along the path, and watch the people around me. There are other bench sitters, most of them elderly white men. On the lawn there is a mother with a curly headed brown-skinned boy who looks to be about four. He is having a fine time chasing the butterflies flitting around the plants that separate the lawn from the path. He takes time out from his chase to greet me. “Bonjour,” he says. “Bonjour,” I reply. I can see his mother watching him from the lawn, but she does not get up. She must not consider me scary.

What could be scary is the group of teenage boys clustered near one of the park’s exits, not far from the lily pond. They are blacks and Arabs, and they are talking loudly. They stand very close together, and it’s hard to tell just what they are doing. Are they smoking weed? Could they be a gang? I am apprehensive, but relax when I see that the teenagers are ignoring all of the other users of the park, who are also ignoring them. Nobody seems afraid, so I will not be, either.

Two young women, one white, one black, dressed in summer casual clothes, pass my bench. They must live in the neighborhood, I think.

Just beyond me, they stop and look at the middle school. They have a Paris guide, and one reads to the other from it. Once they have finished reading, they take pictures with their phones, then they leave the park. “Why, they’re tourists!” I think to myself with amusement. I thought the only tourist in this little-known, out-of-the-way neighborhood park was me.

I sit for a while longer, enjoying the peaceful atmosphere, then I leave the park, too. I follow the path the rest of the way around the central lawn. There are fewer people on this side, few trees, no benches.

Then I see the Plaque. It is white marble, with lists of names in columns in black letters.

The Plaque reads:

“Arrested by the Vichy Government police, accomplices of the occupying power (Germany), more than 11,000 children were deported from France from 1942 to 1944, and murdered in the Nazi camps because they were born Jews. More than 1200 of these children lived in the 11th district. Among them, 199 babies who had not had time to attend school.

“Passerby, read their names, your memory is their only burial place.”

The children are listed by name and age, one by one, first the babies under four, then the children four to seven.

I feel like I have been hit in the stomach. None of my research on the Jardin de la Folie-Titon made any mention of this memorial to these deported children, the largest and most detailed of its kind that I have seen anywhere in Paris. Few people follow the circular path in that direction, where there are no trees, no benches. From the other side of the lawn, I myself did not notice the Plaque.

In 1942, when the deportation of these children started, I was seven years old, the same age as the oldest of them. In 1945, after the war ended and the concentration camps were opened, I saw a photo in Life Magazine showing heaps of naked corpses. I was ten, an age none of those Plaque children ever reached. I have never forgotten that photo, which became the root of my choice, as a historian, to study the fate of Jews in France under Vichy.

As I walk home through the Jardin du Luxembourg, my mind is still full of my discovery at the Jardin de la Folie Titon. My pretty, formal neighborhood park now seems stiff and stilted compared to what I just saw. I am so happy to live in this city where I can become a tourist and can find something that is more than just pretty, that has a personal meaning for me.

© 2017, Alice Evleth

Alice Evleth is a long-time American expatriate living in the 6th arrondissement of Paris.

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Two films are shown at the Airborne Museum in Sainte Mere Eglise. One of them is among the better introductory films to a visit to the Landing Zone. The other is undoubtedly the worst.

The first, the older one, is a 21-minute documentary that uses a Jaws-like signal of danger as it describes the German occupation, the development of German defenses along the coast, and the civilians’ long wait for liberation. Then the action begins: a fire at midnight destroys the house that stood on the property that is now the museum, people rush from their homes, the fire brightens the night as paratroopers drop from the sky. The beach landing then begins at dawn nearby, battles rage in town, along the country roads and in the hedgerows. They are Americans, to the surprise of many, not English. Lives are lost, freedom is regained, burials take place in what is now the town’s soccer field. The film is short, dramatic and informative, a moving invitation to visit the museum and the sights throughout the Landing Zone.

You may have seen such images and films like this at home; there are plenty on Youtube. But here at Sainte Mère Eglise they take on special significance. In this area where men of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions landed on the night of June 5-6 1944 to secure bridges and roads before the dawn landing of troops on Utah Beach you now stand. A parachute hanging from the steeple of the church across the square lets you know immediately that you’ve arrived at the right place.

After being shown for years in a small screening space in the museum’s second building, behind a Douglas C-47, the type of plane from which the paratroopers were dropped, that 21-minute film was moved in 2016 to a larger space called the Ronald Reagan Franco American Conference Center. The Airborne Museum itself is a non-profit organization. Of the conference center’s €1.2 million construction cost, €350,000 was financed by The Reagan Legacy Foundation.

The Reagan film at the Airborne Museum

The space where the introductory film was previously shown now presents a film glorifying Ronald Reagan. That film is disturbing out of place in this museum.

The older 21-minute film and the newer 7-minute Reagan glorification film (2015) both use 1940s footage to set the stage. Yet whereas the old film shows Eisenhower visiting black-faced Allied troops as they prepare for nighttime assault, the more recent film shows Reagan in make-up and uniform in a Hollywood studio. We are all but told to equate the man playing soldier in Hollywood with the real soldiers in Normandy. An elderly fellow in the film, presented as speaking for all veterans, refers to Reagan as “one of us.”

Without mentioning Franklin Roosevelt, the sitting American president during the Invasion of Normandy, the old film tells about Allies pushing their way to Berlin to defeat a Nazi Germany. The newer film shows Reagan at Pointe du Hoc as though no other president ever honored the veterans and the fallen of the Second World War. It shows Reagan at the Berlin Wall calling on the leader of the Soviet Union “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” as though John Kennedy had never stood there. The old film leads curious visitors to want to discover and contemplate the war sites of Normandy. The new film has Michael Reagan, the president’s son, president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation, giving a sales pitch.

Has the Airborne Museum sold its out on its own mission in order to “memorialize the accomplishments of [Reagan’s] presidency,” to quote a goal of the Reagan Legacy Foundation?

The Reagan Triptych

That 7-minute film is one of a triptych of Reagan images that have been strategically placed at the Airborne Museum so that we shall never forget… Ronald Reagan.
1. His name appears on the conference center. So be it, the foundation led by his son Michael provided a third of the funding.
2. In the exit hall of the building called Operation Neptune, opened in 2014, which shows dioramas presenting various scenes from the airborne landing, one sees portraits of German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and French President Charles de Gaulle, who in 1963 signed the Elysées Treaty in Paris as a firm handshake of reconciliation between the two nations, along with a more prominent and gratuitous image of Reagan 20 years later.
3. And then there’s that film, so intent on placing Reagan, like Forrest Gump (or is it Kim Jong-Un?), at the heat of the action that viewers are led to believe that he would have been a hero on the beaches themselves had he not been… (dramatic pause in the film)… nearsighted.

No, Ronald Reagan was not who my father thought about while in Europe caring for wounded during the war. No, the soldiers did not carry a photograph of Reagan with them into battle. When Eisenhower said to his troops, “The eyes of the world are upon you,” he was not referring to a single man. Normandy is not Reagan’s legacy.

D-Day revisited, again and again

Ronald Reagan was the first American president to commemorate D-Day in France, for it took years for D-Day to be so specifically and particularly commemorated and celebrated. For near 20 years after the war, D-Day and the Invasion of Normandy were largely seen as a step, albeit an important step, in vanquishing Nazi Germany, but requiring no specific commemoration. It took some time for D-Day to gain a singular status in the American consciousness, coalescing our sense of sacrifice for a righteous cause, of honor, strength and the perfect combination of individual and collective effort, and of ultimate victory.

The movie “The Longest Day” was released in 1962. The Airborne Museum opened in 1964, placing it among the first D-Day museums in Normandy, along with the nearby Utah Beach Museum.

As the war receded in time and as many other battles and wars filled newscasts, D-Day—and D-Day above all—became for many the symbol of how we want to see our military might: bringing freedom to the oppressed, supporting and encouraging democracy. D-Day affirms our sense of the United States as the essential nation for forces of good in the world, to the point of diminishing the role of our Allies.

By the late 1960s veterans, then in their 40s, began returning to Normandy to visit the Landing sites, the tombs of their comrades at arm and the new museums. We were sinking into the quagmire of the Vietnam War then. Soldiers who helped turn back the Tet Offensive returned home not to celebration and thanks but to anti-war demonstrations. And June 6, 1944, already gaining prominence over any other date in the war, came further into focus for Americans nostalgic for battles with a clear and righteous cause. The nation that helped bring about D-Day, that was the nation we wanted to be.

More years passed, and in 1984 the 40th anniversary brought together in Normandy, at the invitation of French President Francois Mitterrand, the heads of state of the victorious nations involved in the Invasion of Normandy: Reagan and Pierre Trudeau of Canada, along with Queen Elizabeth II and the monarchs of Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway. At Pointe du Hoc Reagan shined, with large media coverage, as he spoke with simplicity and force about “the men of Normandy,” “the boys of Pointe du Hoc,” and how “[Europe’s] hopes are our hopes and [Europe’s] destiny is our destiny.”

Stirring indeed, but the facts and images associating Ronald Reagan with D-Day and the Invasion of Normandy are out of context at the Airborne Museum. Visitors may hold Ronald Reagan in the Pantheon of American heroes, if they wish. Savor his words at Pointe du Hoc, if you wish. But why single out Reagan here?

Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Syria, etc. Americans are accustomed to hearing about our military expeditions overseas, yet many continue to see D-Day as our ultimate symbol and pride. Where better place and time to save Private Ryan in 1998 than in Normandy in 1944? President Clinton spoke in Normandy on 50th anniversary of D-Day, Bush on the 60th, Obama on the 65th and 70th, but perhaps the administrators at the Airborne Museum were too busy making doe eyes to the Reagan Legacy Foundation and too nostalgic for the Cold War to bother to look that up what those presidents said.

The evolution of museums in the Landing Zone

I have long appreciated the directness and authenticity (or near-authenticity) of the Airborne Museum. The Waco glider with a “stick” of soldier-mannequins, the Douglas C-47, the uniforms and equipment, the possessions packed in paratrooper bags (Chiclets, Lucky Strikes, condoms). That sense of authenticity recently led the museum to replace a Canadian-made Sherman tank built beginning in August 1944 with a Sherman M4 A4 75 of the type used by the Allies as of June 1944.

Of course it’s no longer enough to present tanks, arms, uniforms and planes and expect visitors understand what went on here. Context and explanations are necessary, but even that may not be enough to keep generations born this side of 1990 or 1980 or even 1970 interested and informed.

In 2014, the 70th anniversary of D-Day and the Liberation of France, I organized in Paris on behalf of France’s Heritage Journalist Association a round-table discussion about the evolution of museums and other war-related business and the potential for the “disneyfication” of the Landing Zone, the temptation to falsify in order to make the Invasion of Normandy seem more real, more entertaining. Magali Mallet, director of the Airborne Museum, was one of the participants. She spoke of the necessity to respond to the evolution of the clientele. (Americans represent less than 10% of the number of visitors to the Airborne Museum, about the same number of Dutch visitors.) The majority of visitors are French, including many school groups.) New visitors, Mallet said, have learned little in school about the events of June 1944 and it was therefore the task of the museum to captivate them through emotion rather than artifacts alone in order to then excite their curiosity and their desire to learn more.

I called Director Mallet after re-viewing the Reagan glorification film this month to ask how she saw Reagan’s role at the museum. She said that his place at the museum is not intrusive on the experience of visiting the museum or of its overall approach to informing the public. Veterans, she said, often say how much appreciate the Reagan film and recall his Pointe du Hoc speech. Reagan’s presence on the museum site is neither promotional nor political, she said.

The sons of David Dewhurst, a squadron commander who led a bombing run over Utah Beach minutes before the landing, have gathered over $2 million to help make the Utah Beach Museum the excellent museum it is today, but you don’t see them claiming that their father saved the day. Mention of Dewhurst and his sons is non-promotional and non-political as can be, that despite one of those sons being Republican lieutenant governor of Texas at the time of the donation.

Normandy was never the place to glorify a single man

From Saint Mère Eglise to Pegasus Bridge, from Falaise to Cherbourg via Caen, Bayeux and the five Landing Beaches, this is an extraordinary region to understand not just D-Day, but the entire war in Europe. More than that, it is a region to consider the nature of alliances and the reconciliation of former enemies, to feel and to reflect on national pride, to meet French, British, Canadian, Polish, Dutch, German and others who are heirs to the events of 1944 and the Second World War. It’s a place to consider the civilian victims of war of yesterday and today. But Normandy is not the place to glorify a single man. It is not the place for the singular hero-worship that the Airborne Museum has bestowed upon Ronald Reagan.

Mrs. Mallet, take down that film.

© 2017, Gary Lee Kraut

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Visiting, lecturing and touring have taught me a lot about American involvement in the First and Second World Wars. But my interest is not in war in and of itself, let alone the range of a 75 mm field gun vs. a 155 mm howitzer. What I’m especially curious about is the mindset of the contemporary American traveler. I’m interested in understanding how Americans of different backgrounds relate to their/our own history in France and, more importantly, how that reveals a sense of their individual and our collective place in the world. The First and Second World Wars are significant steps in that history and that place. But I am not a war buff. I am not a history buff. What I am is an American France travel buff. So I would be remiss not to visit American-related and other war sights and to try to understand how and why they came about and what they may signify today.

Yet I recognize that the vast majority of Americans of the 21st century have scarce interest in the First World War—and that despite the spring of 2017 marking the centennial of our entrance into the war and hence of the beginning of the so-called American Century.

Some historical events of 1917: The U.S. declared war on Germany on April 6; General John J. Pershing, commander-in-chief of the expeditionary corps arrived in Boulogne-sur-Mer on June 13; the first major contingent of American forces arrived in France at Saint Nazaire on June 26; American troops marched down the Champs-Elysées in Paris on July 4, and that same day Pershing visited Lafayette’s tomb in Picpus Cemetery.

As I write today, however, one hundred years later, Americans, in their vast majority, whether homebound or travel bound, as well as our elected officials, show little to no interest in the centennial. (We do actually have a national World War One Centennial Commission.) Not that every anniversary needs marking, but there are anniversaries that are uncanny reminders of where we are today and of the decisions and worldviews that we hold. The current centennial is one of them. The causes of WWI, the great debates about international intervention of a century ago and our eventual entrance into the war on the side of France and Great Britain, the development of our military and of our military industry, our role in the conflict’s military outcome and in its final treaty: all of those are echoed in debates and decisions today.

But examining history is not our national strongpoint. For some it may even be anti-American. Furthermore, between the America First attack on science, public education and critical thinking, on the one hand, and by the me-first sense that since Teddy Roosevelt shot game and I want to protect big game and since Woodrow Wilson was a bigot then I’ve got nothing to learn from their points of view, on the other hand, there isn’t much daylight for a national history lesson.

Personally, I prefer having a 13-year-old tell me that history is boring than an adult tell me that it doesn’t matter, because I can then tell a story and show a sight to the 13-year-old to spark interest whereas the adult will dig in to ill-informed convictions like trench warfare.

Nevertheless, despite our national aversion to history, we are very attracted to trends. Knowing and taking part in trends is important to us, even without understanding that they are trends since doing so would involve a minimum of critical thinking. Luckily, then, travel is frequently marked by trends.

We’ll always have Paris, of course, but other destinations that Americans select by broad measure in France shift from time to time. A destination will stand out on the map for the short- or medium-term thanks to some well-placed articles and advertisement, famous visitors, a big book or especially a big movie. Images of Ronald Reagan at Point du Hoc 1984, Bill Clinton in the Normandy American Cemetery 1994 or Saving Private Ryan 1998 may inspire thoughts of visiting Normandy some day.

France Revisited doesn’t have the pretension of influencing trends in tourism any more than we do of following them, but we do pride ourselves on helping to fill in the gaps left by other publications. So while awaiting to the trends set in motion by a blockbuster WWI movie, you can read archived articles about Quentin Roosevelt, “the most famous American killed during WWI,” about Belleau Wood and the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, about Chateau Thierry’s bond with the U.S., and about the American Escadrille Lafayette Memorial near Paris.

More articles about WWI sights, American-related and other, will appear on France Revisited in the coming months, written not by a war buff but by an American France travel buff. In the meantime, my travel research is well underway. Recently, shortly before the first round of the French presidential election, while touring Meuse, Lorraine (northeastern France), I took a snapshot of a desolate corner of the village of Hattonchâtel.

Desolate but very much alive, as the fresh flag and pole and newly pasted and defaced election posters demonstrate. I’m guessing that the posters were slashed by a fan of Philippe Poutou, candidate of the New Anti-Capitalist Party, NPA, whose face remains intact. The slasher may not be difficult to find since Poutou received only 13 votes out of the 967 voters here and in the surrounding 6 villages. Where do their sympathies lie? See here.

Visible behind the posters is one of Hattonchâtel’s scant medieval remnants, an arch that is part of the old entrance gate to the village. Not much to see, but a historical monument nonetheless.

The white monument is a rare example of a WWI memorial that only presents a female figure. The village was heavily damaged in the early weeks of the First World War when the Germans took over the village in September 1914. They were dislodged by American troops four years later.

Hattonchâtel was adopted after the war by Belle Skinner (1866-1928), a philanthropist from Massachusetts, who financed the village’s reconstruction, including the local château, village hall and a school, and the installation of a water system so as to bring drinking water into ever household.

So many stories in one desolate corner.

Far be it from me to suggest that this corner of this village in this part of France is worth the detour. But there you have it in a snapshot, a bit of American history along with much else, past, present and, with the election underway, future.

Most American WWI commemorative events in France will take place in 2018, centennial of our involvement in major fighting in France: Belleau Wood, Saint Mihiel, Meuse-Argonne and others. This summer, though, on private initiative, a transatlantic event called The Bridge 2017 will commemorate the centennial of the landing of the first major American contingent at Saint Nazaire. The ocean liner the Queen Mary 2 has been chartered for the occasion. She will be arriving at Saint-Nazaire, site of her construction, from her home port of Southampton, England, before making the transatlantic journey to New York, while four giant trimarans race against her during the crossing. In 1917 the Americans brought with them not only troops that would change the course of the war but also basketball and jazz, not to mention chewing gum and cigarettes. As part of the festivities, therefore the 3X3 Basketball World Cup will be held in Nantes June 17-21 and jazz will be a main feature of the June 21 summer solstice music festival in the area, as well as on board during the transatlantic crossing. I found a publication interested in my writing for them an article on the subject. It’s British. They liked the Queen Mary 2 angle.

© 2017, Gary Lee Kraut

For general tourist information about touring in three of the departments (French subregions) marked by battles involving Americans during the First World War, see Meuse (Meuse-Argonne Cemetery, St. Mihiel American Cemetery, etc.), Aisne (Aisne-Marne Cemetery, Belleau Wood, Blerancourt) and Ardennes (War and Peace Museum, Sergeant York

“The American Traveler and the First World War Sights in France” will be one of four lecture topics that the author will be proposing to universities, Alliance Française groups, libraires and other groups and organizations during his autumn-winter 2018-2019 guest lecture tour in the United States. If interested in this particular lecture write to Gary at gary [at] francerevisited.com.

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In Normandy, where dozens of museums tell about the D-Day Landing, the 75 days of the Battle of Normandy, the victory for the Allied forces against the German occupant and the Liberation, visitors to the region have, until recently, been offered scant information about the effects of war on civilian populations.

Yet, in addition to the deprivations, deportations and executions caused by the German occupant and in some cases by their French collaborators, Allied air strikes from 1942 to 1944 claimed 50-70,000 civilian victims in France. Of the 20,000 Normans who died as a direct result of the war, the majority were killed by Allied bombardments intended to weaken the Atlantic Wall, destroy enemy forces and prevent the possibility of German reinforcement during the Invasion of Normandy. Furthermore, about 150,000 Normans lost or had to leave their homes during the spring and summer of 1944.

Those numbers, significant as they are, seem small when one thinks—or tries to grasps—that the Second World War caused the death of over 55 million people, of which about 35 million were civilians, including through planned genocide. The First World War brought the military front to the doorsteps of civil life, leading to the death of large numbers of civilians as a direct result of combat. The Second World War then confirmed that civilians were from then on fully a part of war and ideological combat. In the 21st century we are well aware (or should be) that civilians are not only collateral damage but also the targets of military and ideological attacks.

The Civilians in Wartime Memorial (Mémorial des Civils de la Guerre), a museum opened in 2016 in the small town of Falaise, examines of the effect of war on civilian populations. The museum naturally takes wartime Normandy as its prime example while also speaking of civilian victims of other conflicts around the world.

Falaise is a fitting location for this museum since it was in this area that the Battle of Normandy, which began with D-Day, June 6, 1944, ended with the defeat of the German tank division on August 22 in what is known as the Falaise (or Falais-Chambois) Pocket. The town itself, its center heavily damaged, was liberated by Canadian troops on August 17, 1944. It was in Falaise, I’ve been told, that a woman lost her 2-year-old son to bombardments on the day that she gave birth to a daughter.

As Americans, with our own civilians largely out of harm’s way during WWII, we generally focus on the war’s military aspects and on the lives and actions of soldiers and the military hierarchy. As the war recedes in time we further focus the war’s military aspects on the Normandy D-Day Landing and the ensuing several days, sometimes forgetting that a full 11 months of war in Europe was to follow, that harsh battle continued in the Pacific and perhaps even our military presence overseas for much of the past 70 years. Americans now often speak of the Beaches of Normandy as the shining example of our role in securing freedom around the world and hold it up as the best image we have of ourselves in our expeditions overseas.

It takes nothing away from America’s role in the Liberation of Europe to recognize that the effect that WWII and other wars had—and continue to have—on civilian populations, including through our own military actions. As travelers to Normandy remember, commemorate and visit the sites and scenes of D-Day and the early phases of the Invasion of Normandy, those with time to do so (for Falaise is off the beaten path for most itineraries) might also pay a visit to Falaise’s museum for an understanding of how civilian population lived and died during the war.

The Falaise museum is managed by the Memorial de Caen, the region’s major war museum—or museum of peace, as they would have it. In presenting the new museum, Stéphane Grimaldi, director of the Memorial de Caen, has written “The singularity of the Second World War is that it annihilated more civilians than soldiers. It’s estimated that 35 million civilians died – including 15 million Chinese, 8 million Russians, more than 5 million Poles, 3 million Germans. To these terrifying numbers one must add about 100 million wounded and maimed, ‘collateral’ victims of bombardments, exodus, combat and deprivations.”

While devoting major to civilian life and death in Normandy during the war, the vocation of Falaise’s museum is not to tell only a local story but to remind visitors of the difficulties and concerns of civilians during wartime everywhere.

With explanatory panels in French and in English, the visit is designed to begin at the third floor with displays about military occupation by foreign forces. The second floor then speaks of the Liberation. The museum occupies a former court building from the reconstruction period that followed the war. A remnant of the house (of a doctor and former mayor) destroyed during the war on the site is partially uncovered in the basement. While peering into that remnant one hears the sound of bombs dropping. Those bombs room comes at the end of the visit so as to leave the visitor with a reminder of the risk to all civilians in times of military conflict, though it can in fact be visited first, a foreshadow of things to come.

The Route from Caen to Falaise

The route south from Caen to Falaise, 23 miles (37 km), passes two cemeteries related to the Battle of Falaise and the Falaise Pocket. The first, coming from Caen, is the Canadian Military Cemetery at Bretteville-sur-Laize. Falaise, as noted earlier, was liberated from the German occupation by Canadian troops on Aug. 17, 1944. Beyond the Canadian Cemetery is the Polish Military Cemetery at Urville. Most of its 615 tombs there belong to soldiers and officers of the First Polish Tank Division under General Maczek, which was attached to the First Canadian Army. The Mémorial de Montormel, a museum and monument dedicated to the final days of the Battle of Normandy, is a 40-minute drive east of Falaise.

William the Conqueror and Falaise Castle

Falaise itself, much destroyed during the Battle of Normandy, is a handsome example of post-war reconstruction that even on an empty morning has a peaceable air of well-being to it. The tourist office is across the street from the museum. Between the two is Town Hall, an 18th-century survivor of the war. All three of these structures face Place Guillaume le Conquérant, William the Conqueror Square. William was born in Falaise in 1028. He would become Duke of Normandy then also King of England following his conquest of the cross-channel kingdom in 1066. He died in 1087 and is buried in the Abbaye-aux-Hommes in Caen.

William’s Castle, modified by his descendants and then the kings of France, stands several hundred yards away. The Civilians in Wartime Memorial. The royal castle is visible from the museum’s top floor.

The castle ramparts have recently been reconstructed. A previous reconstruction/creation at the entrance to the castle looks so ridiculously out of place that it nearly dissuaded this visitor from wanting to enter. But once inside the remnants of the castle inform visitors about the itinerant court of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries through three parts: that of William’s son, with a residential dungeon (the beginning of the development of dungeon palaces), that of his grandson, then that of the king of France after 1204, when Normandy fell within the crown of France. Tablets enable visitors to see rooms as they might have appeared during those eras.

A brief walk about the center of town may include a visit to Saint Gervais Church.

The restaurant O Saveurs, 38 rue Georges Clemenceau, is a nice option for a well-prepared meal.

For opening times and other information see the following websites:

Mémorial des Civils de la Guerre (Civilians in Wartime Memorial), 12 Place Guillaume le Conquérant, 14700 Falaise.
Falaise Tourist Office, 5 Place Guillaume le Conquérant, 14700 Falaise.
Falaise Castle, Château Guillaume le Conquérant.
Mémorial de Montormel (Montormel Memorial), Les Hayettes, 61160 Montormel.
Calvados Tourist Board. Calvados is the name of the department (sub-region) in Normandy which includes Falaise, Caen, four of the five Landing Beaches, Caen, Deauville, Honfleur, etc. The fifth Landing Beach, Utah, is located in Manche.
Normandy Tourist Board. Information about the broader region.

© 2017, Gary Lee Kraut

See other articles about Normandy on France Revisited.

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It was the synagogue’s cleaning woman, a Muslim of Moroccan origin, who called the rabbi in a panic to tell him that eight soldiers, heavily armed and carrying duffel bags, had arrived with orders to protect the synagogue. And they were hungry, having been shipped out from their base southwest France without provisions.

The previous day, in response to the terror attacks of January 7 and 9, Prime Minister Manuel Valls had made a stirring speech to the National Assembly in which he reaffirmed an earlier declaration that “without the Jews of France, France would no longer be France.”

Kehilat Gesher, a small bilingual (French-English) synagogue of 160 families, was now one of the sites where a total of more than 10,000 soldiers would be affected to “ensure the permanent protection of sensitive points and of public spaces, with priority given to Jewish schools, synagogues and mosques,” as the prime minister declared the night before.

Cohen, the founding rabbi of Kehilat Gesher, quickly left his home in the Marais to meet the men.

Meanwhile, Rabbi Pauline Bebe, Cohen’s wife, who is French, discovered that a squad had also been sent to protect the Centre Mayaan, the community center and synagogue of the Communauté Juive Libérale d’Ile de France located in the 11th arrondissement.

Rabbis Cohen and Bebe form a unique couple in Judaism in France and worldwide. They are both ordained in the Jewish movement called “Libérale” in French which corresponds to the Reform movement in the UK and the US, though for some Americans its approach might appear to be midway between Reform and Conservative. The Reform movement upholds the equality of men and women in religious practice and leadership. Reform Jews represent about 5% of the France’s Jewish population, which is estimated at 500-600,000. Most Jews in France are not affiliated with any synagogue, while the majority of those who are belong to Orthodox synagogues. The third major current of Judaism in France is the Conservative or Massorti movement.

The synagogue and the soldiers

For three months after they first arrived, squads of eight lived at Kehilat Gescher 24/7, in rotation, as at other sensitive sites. “Everyone, even a little hole in the wall synagogue like ours, had eight,” said Cohen.

After a time their presence became the new normal, but the initial weeks provided a learning experience for the rabbi, the members of the synagogue and the soldiers. The first three weeks Kahilat Gesher hosted and was guarded by a platoon from the Montauban-Toulouse area. That’s the area from which three soldiers were killed in the terrorist attacks of March 2012 that also included the murder of a teacher and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse.

“This group knew that the first people that Muslim extremists were killing [in France] were soldiers,” said Cohen, “so they knew they were in the line of fire. And they were trying to figure out ‘What’s the connection between Jews and soldiers?’”

What is the connection?

“The soldiers and the government represent the authority… and the Jews… are the easiest way to get a lot of bang for your buck. That’s the short answer, while there are a lot of ands, ifs and buts that I could add to that.”

(The initial interview with Rabbi Cohen for this article was conducted one week prior to the attacks of November 13, 2015 that killed 130 people in Paris.)

Though Cohen wasn’t aware of any soldiers assigned to Kehilat Gesher being of Jewish faith, the soldiers sometimes did take special part in the Saturday morning service.

“I did things during that time that I, as a foreigner, could get away with but that other rabbis, including my wife, would not even think of or do because they grew up in this culture… Every Saturday morning we have at the end of the Torah reading of our service a prayer for France, as synagogues everywhere around the world have a prayer for the government. So Saturday mornings I would ask the soldiers [who were off duty inside] if one of them wouldn’t mind reading the prayer for France. Having a guy come here in full metal jacket reading [this prayer], for the community, especially at that time period when everyone was shaken, was very moving, and extremely moving for the soldiers as well.… They would sometimes tremble when reading it.”

Some, he adds, would also sit in on one of the various classes given in French at Kehilat Gesher, discussions about the Torah, the Talmud or questions of Jewish life and ethics.

That, he said, is “at least one thing that can be pulled out of the dark days of January. Generally those who join the army tend to be more patriotic, nationalistic than most other citizens. Therefore politically the more nationalistic parties reach out to them and they’re more attracted to those parties. So to have almost 10% of the French army living in close quarters, mainly with the Jewish community, for three months… I hope that somewhere along the line those seeds will bear fruit… Everyone, in all of the communities, treated them like their own kids…”

Every Saturday afternoon 20 sushi meals were anonymously ordered for the soldiers at Kahilat Gesher. Congregants were ordering pizzas for them. A woman from the neighborhood who wasn’t a member of the synagogue knocked on the door one day and offered them a large pot of couscous, saying it was kosher.

After three month the rhythm changed and the army stood guard only whenever activities taking place. Cohen assumed that that, too, would slow down or stop as the year went on, but the rhythm continued.

“The government is in for the long-haul,” he said, “which is a good thing, I guess… That’s one thing I always point out to [those] who say ‘This is 1933 [in France], the brown shirts and Kristalnacht are around the corner.’ There are two major differences: one of them is that there is [the existence of] Israel, the other is that it’s the government that’s been taking the lead to try to protect us.”

Making Aliyah: Moving to Israel

The Jewish Agency for Israel, an Israeli organization operating internationally to assist those interested in moving to Israel and “to rescue Jews from countries where they are at risk,” reported for 2014 “a dramatic increase in Aliyah [the Hebrew term for immigration to Israel] from France. That year saw the arrival in Israel of 7,000 new immigrants from France, more than double the 3,400 who arrived in 2013 and triple the 1,900 who came in 2012.” That made 2014 the first year in which more immigrants came from France than from any other country. France has the largest Jewish population in Europe and the third-largest in the world after Israel and the United States.

Within days of the January attacks Natan Sharansky, head of the Jewish Agency, estimated that 15,000 French Jews could immigrate to Israel in 2015. In fact, about 7800 French Jews made Aliyah that year, according to the Jewish Agency. [Post-note: In Jan. 2017 the Jewish Agency announced that under 5000 French Jews immigrated to Israel in 2016.]

In early 2015, in the wake of anti-Semitic acts in Paris and then in Copenhagen, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Natanyahu’s call on Jews to leave France and Europe overall was widely condemned in Europe as unhelpful, even insulting. Asked a year later (May 2016) to describe Israel’s policy toward immigration from France, Israeli Ambassador Aliza Bin-Noun said that the official Israeli position was that immigration to Israel was a personal matter and that Israel would do all that it could to help those who want to establish themselves in Israel to do so. The ambassador qualified that by quoting her father: “When he heard that there was an anti-Semitic event anywhere in the world he always told me, ‘I think they deserve it because now we have a Jewish country… so if something happens to Jews in the world it’s their responsibility… Now we have a Jewish country, a country that can protect all of the Jews in the world.’”

Said Cohen: “Somebody who wants to move to Israel because they have a project and for a fuller Jewish life, I think, especially as a rabbi, that’s great, I want to help you out. Someone who’s running away because 10% of the population of France is Muslim and you’re scared is something else… It [fear] is one those things that doesn’t become the primary reason but it’s an additional reason for someone to leave.”

[Estimates of the number of people of Muslim faith or heritage in France vary from about 6 to 10% of an overall population of 66 million.]

Cohen cautions that what the numbers of those moving to Israel do not indicate is the return rate, particularly for those who leave over the age of 40, when “integration is much more difficult than when you go right after your studies.”

Furthermore, he said, “It’s very hard to discern how many people are actually leaving because of their fear of anti-Semitism [and] how many of them—especially if you’re younger and you have a degree and you haven’t been able to get a job for a long time in France…—are leaving for economic reasons. Those who have some connection to go to the United States—that’s the golden ring. But for French who do not have the American connection, if you’re Jewish, Israel is the easy place to go. Otherwise the other ambitious entrepreneurs of that age who are not Jewish and are not going to think of going to Israel tend to go to London, which is now the seventh largest ‘French’ city.”

“Economic Aliyah [from France] is very important, much more important, I think, than the anti-Semitic Aliyah,” he said. “And on top of it there’s the third element which is financial Aliyah. In the past several years… there is a huge financial drain going on in France. The highly wealthy [have moved to] London, Brussels, Luxembourg. They take the train in to work here, but they’ve established tax residencies in other countries. You have a large group of Jews doing that as well. [There are] many [Jewish] French businessmen who moved their families to Israel but come to France to work during the week. They’ve established their tax residence there but they live out their financial life here.”

In his own synagogue, he said, “I have a handful leave each year and they tend to be all in their mid to late 20s. The families that I’m aware of leaving had left over the past year or two [before the January attacks] for financial reasons.” He said that he hasn’t had any Anglo-Saxon families leave France to return home out of fear, but rather because the time of their mission in Paris was up.

Could it be that Reform Jews feel less threatened than Orthodox Jews, among which the men wear skullcaps and the children may attend Jewish schools?

“You can’t deny that there’s anti-Semitism that’s within certain aspects of society here.”

Have you seen any change in that in the more than 20 years that you’ve been in Paris?

“What has changed for me is that starting around 2000, 2001, for the first time the people in polite society who would not have said something [anti-Semitic], though they may have always thought it, they no longer felt the societal pressure to be quiet. So there’s then a loosening of tongues which then creates an atmosphere that permits things. They’ve given themselves permission to say things that they wouldn’t have said beforehand. But I don’t think the actual number of anti-Semites has necessarily changed, certainly within what are called the French ‘de souche’ [old stock French]… In a way you can say that the French are far less anti-Semitic than they’ve ever been. But within a subgroup, specifically with an Islamic subgroup of radical Islam, it’s off the charts.”

According to the American Jewish Committee, a global Jewish advocacy group that occasionally reports on public opinion surveys with regards to anti-Semitism, “Three distinct groups in France are noticeably more anti-Jewish than the overall population… The groups are supporters of the National Front party (extreme right), to a lesser extent supporters of the Left Front coalition (extreme left), and members of the Muslim community.” Surveys conducted by the New York-based Anti-Defamation League regarding anti-Semitism in Europe found “a dramatic decrease” in anti-Semitic attitudes in France between the fall of 2014 and the spring of 2015, with 77 of those polled agreeing that “violence against Jews in this country affects everyone and is an attack on our way of life.” It concluded that “concern about violence against Jews increased by 20 percent in France, 31 percent in Belgium, and 33 percent in Germany.” While the ADL’s “anti-Semitism” index revealed scores that were “extremely high for Muslims,” the lowest level was recorded in France, at 49% compared to 17% percent in the population overall. The United Kingdom, for example, Muslims scored at 54% on the index compared to 17% in the overall British population.

The first few Sabbaths after the attacks of January an imam friend of the Rabbi Cohen came to every service to show his support. “He asked me if he could come and I said ‘Of course.’ I do a lot of interfaith dialogue. However, one of the things that I as well as other leaders who are involved in any sort of outreach, we’re very wary of creating problems for our interlocutor” due to a backlash in their own religious communities. In order to support the more moderate voices among Muslim leaders, he said, the Catholic Church has been helpful because “it’s less of a sin to have a dialogue with Catholics.” Catholics can then initiate interfaith dialogues with imams and “once that starts happening you can bring in the back door and start bringing in some rabbis.”

Paris’s bilingual synagogue

Tom Cohen and Pauline Bebe met when they were students in Israel in the late 1980s. Originally from Oak Grove, Oregon, near Portland, Cohen attended the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, the West Coast affiliate of the Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative) in New York. He then completed his seminary studies in New York while Bebe complete hers at Leo Baeck College in London. In 1990 Bebe became the first woman from continental Europe to be ordained as a rabbi since Regina Jonas was ordained in Germany in 1938. (Jonas was later assassinated at Auschwitz.) Women were ordained in the United Kingdom as early as 1975 at Leo Baeck College. Today she is the doyenne of the three female rabbis of France.

For several years Cohen and Bebe racked up high cross-Atlantic telephone bills, the both moved to Paris, to marry and to work.

In the fall of 1992 Rabbi Cohen was appointed at the synagogue on Rue Copernic (Union Libérale Israélite de France, 16th arrondissement of Paris), Paris’s oldest Reform synagogue, to second Rabbi Michael Williams, a Brit. (That synagogue was already officiated by Williams in 1980 when it was the site of a terrorist attack, the first such attack against Jews in France since WWII.)

In 1993 Cohen was approached by “four or five” bilingual (English-French) Jewish families in the western suburbs of Paris to assist them in teaching and understanding Jewish life. He described the families as comprised of Jewish women from New York married Frenchmen—“half Sephardic Jewish guys who threw the tefillin off of the boat as they entered Marseille to be more French than the French and the other half fallen Catholics.” In particular the women wanted to know how and what to transmit to their children in terms of a Jewish education. “They came up with the idea of starting a light Friday-night service in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and their friends then heard about it in Paris and also wanted to join.”

As the number of participants grew Cohen developed the structure of a formal synagogue by founding Kehilat Gesher. For a while services were held alternately in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Paris, but Rabbi Cohen soon realized that all of the growth was in Paris.

Kehilat Gesher holds services in French and English along with Hebrew prayer. Cohen himself is bilingual, as are many of the congregants. For Torah study, parents can have their children educated in either English or French.

Warm, voluble and good-humored, Cohen has developed Kehilat Gesher into a religious center that is a reflection of his own personality and of the diverse backgrounds of its members. Sixty percent of the families at Kehilat Gesher are French, while 40% are mixed French-English-speaking natives or fully English-speaking native families. The congregation brings together Ashkenazic and Sephardic cultures. Most of the native English-speakers are American, while “a handful” are British and there are also other foreign nations (Dutch, Swedish, etc.). Of the English-speakers, “the Brits tend to be the more involved,” said Rabbi Cohen. “All of them have them have taken on some kind of responsibility to make the community function, not just in a user mode but also in a provider mode.” The synagogue currently has 160 member families, a “family” meaning an individual, a couple or a family with children for membership purposes.

For the past decade Kehilat Gesher has been renting space in the 17th arrondissement, near the Courcelles metro station, and has recently been looking to expand to a more permanent setting. “We’re looking to have a place of about 500m2 [5400 sq. ft] and we want to stay in the 17th because this is our historic home.”

They now have 125m2 [1350 sq. ft.] for a variety of activities, including a 40m2 multipurpose rooms where religious services are held. To accommodate services for a “lifecyle event” such as a bar- or bat-mitzvah, Kehilat Gesher must to rent an alternate space.

“We’ve reached saturation point,” said Cohen. “A lot of the French families who come to see the place love the community but can’t join because it seems like a fly-by-night operation in a storefront. I was never a brick person, I was person oriented, but I realize that bricks have their place.”

Rabbi Cohen is hoping to find a place soon and then to begin fundraising. The synagogue survives by membership and donations. Kehilat Gesher USA is a U.S.-based non-profit organization through which Americans can give to the synagogue. Kehilat Gesher also participates with Rabbi Bebe’s synagogue in the Fondation Maayan, which enables tax deductions for donations.

Centre Maayan

While Rabbi Cohen was developing Kehilat Gesher in the mid-90s, Rabbi Bebe was created her own synagogue, the Communauté juive libérale (CJL) Ile de France, which she founded in 1995. Formerly housed in a space near Place de Cliché similar to Kehilat Gesher’s today, the CJL now occupies a large space in the 11th arrondissement that Bebe dubbed the Centre Maayan (Maayan means source of water in Hebrew). With the move membership quickly grew from 170 families to 400 families, an evolution that Cohen hopes to emulate when Kehilat Gesher moves to a large space. Bebe is fluent is English, as Cohen is in French, and while some native English-speakers and bilingual families do attend CJL—and visitors are welcome—the services and instruction are in French, with French and Hebrew prayer.

Bebe’s synagogue is a luminous space with light beige wood seating in a semi-circle around the bema, as the raised podium on which the rabbi stands is called. A tree bearing colorful leaves decorates the ark, the ornamental closet where the torahs are kept. A playful chandelier of dancing metal and colored glass lightens the area around it. Bebe stands at a podium on which a fabric is embroidered with curving stems in flower.

On the Friday after the November 13, 2015 terrorist attacks that killed 130 people and wounded many others, about an equal number of congregants were in attendance, filling about half the room. About one quarter of the women and girls wear skullcaps; nearly all of the men do.

A piano by the podium, played by an elderly congregant, accompanies the chanting during the service. There is warmth to the service but not exuberance. The banter between the congregants appears to be more restrained than that at Rabbi Cohen’s synagogue across the city, the reflection of both cultural differences and the approaches of each rabbi.

The Centre Maayan is located near the offices of Charlie Hebdo that were attacked on January 7 and near the Bataclan concert hall attacked on Nov. 13. During the Charlie Hebdo attack a Muslim policeman named Ahmed Merabet was murdered on the sidewalk at the corner near the synagogue. In her sermon after the November attack, Bebe recalled Merabet’s smile, familiar to her since would pass him frequently on her way to and from the synagogue. She reminded the congregation that one can no longer say that the targets are others. In their hatred of those who don’t resemble them, the assassins see numbers, not people, she said. She called these acts attacks on humanity and concludes that in the simple act of having coffee on the café terrace, the cup itself could now be seen as a sign of humanity that the terrorists would deny.

Together, Cohen and Bebe, parents of four children ages 12 to 20, created a Jewish summer camp in 2014. In 2015 they very quickly attained their limit of 70 children, ages 8 to 16. In 2016 they expanded to allow in 102 children with a staff of about 30. Several dozen children had to be refused for lack of space.

While that increase undoubtedly reflects the quality of the offer, Cohen said that it is also shows that terrorism in France and anti-Semitic attacks in general have not dampened the desire for French Jews to live as Jews in France.

Given the immediate success of the summer camp, why didn’t they bring their two fledgling communities together 20 years ago as they were both getting started?

There is some joining of forces between of the couples’ synagogues with special events, concerts, teaching, but Cohen cites three reasons for never wanting to create a common synagogue: First, they didn’t want the community to get in the way of their couple. Second, it’s important that anyone who joins his wife’s community has to know that their rabbi is a woman; otherwise, he said, there’s the risk that some would see the male rabbi as a kind of superior by virtue of being male. Third, “my wife wouldn’t like my services and I wouldn’t like her services. We have different styles, but that’s okay, we joke about it.”

Madame Le Rabbin and Monsieur La Rabbine

In French un rabbin is rabbi and une rabbine is a rabbi’s wife. So while Pauline Bebe is une rabbine by virtue of being Rabbi Cohen’s wife, she also un rabbin in her own right. As France’s first female rabbi she felt it her prerogative to decide how she should be addressed as a rabbi. Wishing to be addressed by the title rather than the person, she therefore elected to be called Madame le Rabbin.

Meanwhile, Tom Cohen, as the first husband of a female rabbi in France, felt it his prerogative (“me, who bastardizes the French language all the time”) to decide what the term in French for that would be. “I decided on the same logic, so while in my synagogue I’m Monsieur le Rabbin, when I’m in her synagogue just as her husband I’m Monsieur la Rabbine. It’s my little contribution to France.”

Not so sure the Académie Française would agree.

* * *

Both Kehilat Gescher and Centre Maayan welcome visitors wishing to attend services. For security reasons, it’s advisable to call or write first to let them know that you’d like to attend on a given day.

Kehilat Gesher
Rabbi Tom Cohen
7 Rue Léon Cogniet, 75017 Paris
Telephone: 09 53 18 90 86

Communauté juive libérale Ile de France at the Centre Maayan
Rabbi Pauline Bebe
10 Rue Moufle, 75011 Paris
Telephone: 01 55 28 83 84

© 2016, Gary Lee Kraut

An earlier, shorter version of this article appeared in The Connexion in January 2016.

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The post A Couple of Rabbis in Paris appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

By Herbert H. Hoffman

In our younger years, long before we met, we had both been to Paris. We had seen the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Champs Elysées, the Arc de Triomphe and other sights, most of them on the right bank of the Seine. We were now a couple, American tourists revisiting a city we had separately loved the first time. Friends had suggested that we might like the left bank this time.

We took their advice. We rented an apartment on rue du Bac, a street we didn’t know. “Our” house was at no. 40. The third floor leaned a little and the floor boards creaked at every step, making us walk as if we were at sea. It was the romantic milieu we had sought.

Rue de Bac is an old street, a former cattle-driving path leading to the ferry (le bac) across the Seine to what is now the western end of the Louvre. There is a bridge now, the Pont Royale, completed in 1689.

On our first evening in Paris we had dinner near the bridge at Le Terminus at no. 5 rue du Bac. The name of the restaurant refers to the nearby railroad station that was eventually transformed into the Orsay Museum. About 400 years ago, Charles d’Artagnan, the dashing captain of the King’s Mousquetaires, once rented rooms at no. 1 rue du Bac. The fusion of dates in a single location let us know that that certain parts of Paris run on a time table that differs from what we are used to at home in Southern California. It was just the beginning of our realization that Parisians store the memories of their notables on streets throughout the city, including a good many on rue du Bac.

The following day we discovered that at no. 44 we had another illustrious neighbor, so to speak, a ghost of more modern times, André Malraux whom people of our age group remember as DeGaulle’s minister of cultural affairs. Some of us know him for his novel La Condition Humaine, Prix Goncourt, 1933. He finished that book in a room just one door south from where we were billeted. He was a difficult neighbor, it seems, and some wit once said that he was one third genius, one third hard to follow and one third totally incomprehensible. He died in 1976 and is buried in the crypt of the Pantheon.

Another of De Gaulle’s ministers also once resided at no. 44. He was Maurice Couve de Murville. His portrait appeared on the cover of Time for February 1964 because he had important dealings with the United States. As France’s foreign minister, he had the unpleasant task of informing President Lyndon Johnson that the French government, convinced that America’s policies would lead to failure, could not lend support to the Vietnam enterprise. Unfortunately he was right, and we now had a glimpse of the ghost of Vietnam to add to our list. The poet Charles Baudelaire had set the scene for us when he wrote about the cité pleine de rêves, où le spectre, en plein jour, raccroche le passant, where ghosts by daylight tug the passer’s sleeves.

Our sleeves were tugged again a day later. Branching off rue du Bac across the street from our building is the short rue Montalembert, named for a writer and publicist of the 1830s who, incidentally, also once resided at our own address, no. 40 rue du Bac. As we followed this little street we came to rue Jacob where we stopped at no. 56, in front of a most important monument for a visitor with an interest in American history. It was here that Benjamin Franklin, John Jay and John Adams negotiated and, in 1783, signed the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War and officially recognized the United States of America as an independent country. The building itself is not the original one but the site—am I too sentimental to say this?—remains the birthplace of the USA.

No Frenchman has been more celebrated in America than the Marquis de Lafayette, friend and trusted ally of General George Washington. There are at least twelve cities in the United States called Fayetteville. There are also three Lafayette townships, two Lafayette counties and one Lafayette parish. One of the Marquis’ homes was at no. 183 rue de Bourbon, several blocks around the corner from rue Jacob. It is a lieu de memoires that invited us to speculate what might have become of the American Colonies had France not been on our side. The French-American admiration goes both ways. We were happy to learn, for example, that the Marquis named his eldest son George Washington de Lafayette.

Americans have many friends whose spirits still hover over or near rue du Bac. We promptly located another: the writer Romain Gary, who resided at no. 108. He won the Prix Goncourt, a prestigious literary prize, twice, for The Roots of Heaven and The Life Before Us, respectively. Apart from being an essayist, soldier, politician, diplomat, pilot and secretary of the French delegation to the United Nations, he was also a friend, almost an American himself, working as a screenwriter in Hollywood and later as consul of France in Los Angeles. He died in 1980. His ashes float in the Mediterranean.

The American artist James Whistler lived at no. 110 from 1892 to 1901. He died in London in 1903 and is buried across the channel, but his mother—at least her stern portrait officially titled “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1” (1871)—remains in Paris and is now a stone’s throw from rue du Bac, in the Orsay Museum.

The writer François René de Chateaubriand was still a very young man in Franklin’s day. He was astute enough, however, to have observed that in the days before the French Revolution turned ugly the ordinary people of Paris were enthusiastic about the Americans’ struggle for independence (from the King of England, that is). In the street, if not in the royal palace, “le suprême bon ton était d’être américain“, the coolest thing was to be American, Chateaubriand wrote in his memoires. He traveled to America and met General Washington. He describes this visit in great detail, finishing his account by calling Washington “le soldat citoyen, libérateur d’un monde,” citizen soldier and liberator of a world. He confessed in his memoires how happy he was that the General received him and that he has felt a certain excitement about the encounter all his life: “je m’en suis senti échauffé le reste de ma vie“. Chateaubriand remained a lifelong friend of America and years later remarked with satisfaction that “la république de Washington subsiste; l’empire de Bonaparte est détruit,” Washington’s republic lives; Napoleon’s empire is dead. We were truly surprised to find such a good friend at no. 120 rue du Bac. Across the street in a little park there’s a sculpture, a bust really, of this remarkable man. His remains are not in the Pantheon. They are in St. Malo where this stubborn writer and diplomat from Brittany had wished to be buried.

As an aside it’s worth noting that Chateaubriand’s longtime friend Madame Récamier was with him when he died. That was in 1848. She died a year later. She is known to many of us because Jacques-Louis David portrayed her in a thin white something reclining on a two-headed couch. We now call that sort of sofa a Récamier. The picture hangs in the Louvre.

One of the cross streets of rue du Bac is rue de Varenne. There, at no. 50, stands the Hôtel Galliffet, where, in 1797, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand was installed as foreign minister during the Directoire period of the new French Republic. (It is now the Italian Cultural Institute.) It is no exaggeration to say that Talleyrand was the most ingenious politician and statesman of the French revolutionary period and beyond. It is said that First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte was a guest here at one of his parties. By 1803 Talleyrand was Napoleon’s adviser, an appointment that had incalculable consequences for the new United States. Napoleon had plans to expand French possessions in the Americas. President Jefferson was aware of these plans and feared that the United States, then a small country, might lose docking privileges in the formerly Spanish, now French harbor of New Orleans. He sent envoys to negotiate lease terms. Napoleon’s plans had changed, however, and Talleyrand, his negotiator, suggested that the President just buy New Orleans outright, and the rest of Louisiana as well. All American school children know about the Louisiana Purchase which doubled the territory of the United States. It was news to us that we have to thank Monsieur de Talleyrand for that.

Another important person was at that party in 1797, Madame de Staël. She was a champion of liberty, freedom of speech and democracy, a prolific writer, critic and mover of ideas. She met or corresponded with everybody who was anybody, anywhere, from Auguste Comte, Lafayette and Lord Byron to Emerson, Goethe and Pushkin. Politically she was opposed to Napoleon I, Emperor of the French. He exiled her because the dislike was mutual. By 1815 Napoleon was out, however, but Madame was not. She had good judgement and saw the world clearly. Some wit suggested that with Napoleon now gone there were only three powers left to save Europe: England, Russia and Mme de Staël. Such was the woman who had her salon at no. 94 rue du Bac, an influential woman who had nothing but good to say about America. “You are the advanced guard of the human race,” she is reported to have said. “You have the fortune of the world.”

At the Seine end of rue du Bac the river road was once called quai des Théatines, now quai Voltaire. There, at no. 27, another illustrious man of letters, Jean Arouet, dit Voltaire, died in the home of his friend, the Marquis de Villette. He did not live to witness the signing of the Treaty of Paris, but he knew Franklin and apparently liked him enough because it is said that he referred to the struggling colonies as “Franklin’s New World.” Voltaire, incidentally, once suggested that it was the duty of all men to examine their hearts and ask if religion should not be charitable rather than barbaric. The question is still open.

Before the great renovation projects of Baron Haussmann in the 1850s and 1860s, rue du Bac was connected to rue St. Dominique. Alexis de Tocqueville was born in 1805 at no. 77 rue St. Dominique, above what is now an Irish pub. In 1831 the United States was still somewhat of a mystery. The French government was eager to learn how things were done in this new republic. They sent a young de Tocqueville to find out. His two-volume report became a classic, known to us as “Democracy in America.”

The spirit of Charles Louis, Baron de Montesquieu caught up with us on rue St. Dominique, mainly because my book discussion group had recently studied his De l’esprit des lois. He is another important Frenchman for Americans because his ideas were widely read in the second half of the 18th century and were in part responsible for the way the Constitution of the United States was conceived. He did not live to see what he had helped create. He died in 1755 on a visit to Paris, probably at a friend’s house at no. 16 rue St. Dominique.

Antoine-Nicholas de Condorcet lived at no. 6 rue St. Dominique. He had much to say about the American Revolution. Shortly before his death in 1794 he wrote a treatise outlining how its development could ultimately benefit the world. His particular concern was an extensive bill of rights that would go farther than the Constitution did at that time. He foresaw the need to abolish slavery, for example. Our forefathers should have listened to him. Without his encouragement it took us another seventy years to accomplish that. Tragically, he did not survive the French Revolution.

America has still another friend whose memory lives on in Paris, the poet Charles Baudelaire. While it is difficult to say where in Paris Baudelaire lived—he lived in many different places—it appears certain that he once lived at no. 21 rue du Bac, in a house that is still there, a house with a huge stone portico spanning an extra wide wooden portal. “J’ai longtemps habité sous de vastes portiques...” he wrote in La Vie Anterieure, which increases the probability that it was this house.

A decade or so after de Tocqueville’s voyage, an American poet burst upon the Parisian scene, Edgar Allan Poe. Some say that there is a melancholic string in the French soul and that Poe’s somber moods made that string vibrate. Baudelaire and Poe never met but they were kindred spirits. Here is a stanza from Baudelaire’s poem Spleen, translated by Kenneth O. Hanson:

When the low heavy sky weighs like a lid
Upon the spirit aching for the light
And all the wide horizon’s hid
By a black day sadder than any night…

“…un jour noir plus triste que les nuits” – a black day sadder than any night? Well then, how about “Once upon a midnight dreary”?

If the French understood Baudelaire, how could they not love Poe? It is not hard to see why Baudelaire felt compelled to translate The Raven, and everything else Poe wrote, into French. To this day, it is said, Poe is better known in France than in America. How comforting to know that we have cultural as well as political ties across the ocean. And the story does not end here. Messrs. Harper Brothers, Poe’s publishers, commissioned the well-known French painter Gustave Doré to illustrate The Raven, the original English language edition, with twenty-five engravings. Over the years these illustrations have become almost as important and as gripping as Poe’s words. And the work has endured. Doré, it turned out, is another spirit floating over the neighborhood. The house where he lived with his mother was no. 73 rue St.Dominique, across the street from the Tocquevilles’.

Who would have thought that America has so many friends among the ghosts of this old neighborhood?

© 2016

Herb Hoffman and Joan Preston visit France from their home in Southern California as often as possible. They enjoy walking the streets and stumbling upon places that hint at a story which Herb then puts into words.

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