I shall say this only once! Legs eleven!

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I was living in France when, to the horror of everyone except supporters of the right wing Front National, the PS (so called socialist) candidate Lionel Jospin threw away his party's chances by not campaigning in the first round of the Presidential elections.

I remember the newspaper photographs....a jaunty Jospin in black overcoat and red scarf posing in front of his campaign headquarters, christened 'L'Atelier'...the workshop.
I can remember thinking that it would have been a long time since any of the PS politicians had seen a real workshop.....which might have been one factor accounting for the fact that many voters who were more nearly acquainted with them voted for the FN candidate, Monsieur Le Pen.

In the resulting run off between Chirac (candidate of the not quite so right wing party) and Le Pen, left wing voters felt themselves obliged to vote for the former, indicating their disgust at being so obliged by walking into polling stations holding their noses and, in one case, wearing a deep sea diver's suit and helmet.

Now we are in the build up to the 2012 presidential elections and this year's cantonals (local elections) are receiving a great deal more attention than usual, when they pass with a yawn only slightly smaller than the yawn that greets the elections for the European Parliament.
Why?
Because the Front National are doing rather well, under the leadership of Le Pen II - Marine, daughter of Le Pen I.
Dust off the diving suits, history could be repeating itself.


Not because the PS won't be contesting the first round of the Presidentials.....once the potential candidates have finished mauling and denigrating each other in the process of putting up the last man standing....but because people are just fed up.

All the mainstream parties are tarred with the same brush, their leaders seen as more interested in the spoils than in the welfare of the mass of the French people....

The UMP (ruling right wing party) have not only shot down their leader, Sarkozy, on discovering that he wanted to reform a system that had long reserved the good things of life for the very few to allow a very few more to get their hands on the dibs, but have also managed to shoot themselves in the foot with the same bullet, as having nothing to offer the voters but the discredited system they wish to preserve.
With such talent with a firearm, you feel they must all be dedicated members of la chasse.

One paper...I think Le Point...reports that levels of 'fed upness' are such that people are claiming that they will vote FN because they have been fined for allowing their dog to foul a public footpath!
Given all the wails in blogs about dog turds in Paris I imagine that the Front National stand to win handsomely in every Parisian  arrondissement if that's the case.

So it's not really the moment to alienate a large sector of the rural population....the members of the many and varied associations which adorn the pages of the local rags...the chess clubs, the old car clubs, the photography clubs, the sewing bees, the palets players, the ball trappers, the knitting circles, the local history groups...and  for all I know, pole dancing associations.
Membership of these groups alleviates the tedium of rural life, and 'la vie associative' is always hailed as one of the positive features of French society.....so why would someone want to undermine this institution?

Well, one taxman is trying to do so.
His motives are unknown to me....is he a member of the FN anxious to make the gesture that might just tip the scales in his party's favour or is he just doing his job, obeying orders from Paris to rake in every last euro in order to pay for the the Prime Minister to take a private plane between Paris and his home in the Sarthe to avoid the hurly burly of an hour on the TGV?

What is this taxman doing?

These groups frequently support their activities by organising a bingo...a 'loto'. Some organise these themselves, but in the case currently in court, it is clear that some use the services of a bingo organiser...who has a few rounds for his own profit while he is at it.
The taxman claims that this breaks the law.
But if he wins, it won't only be the organiser that will be coughing up....it will be any organisation holding a bingo session that will be in danger.

This is why.

A bingo..or any game of chance....can only escape tax if it is a session confined to a defined group.... and for social, cultural, educational, scientific or what is described as 'animation social' purposes.
Well, I reckon any rural bingo qualifies under any of those latter headings.
It is the defined circle bit that will cause problems.

A village bingo brings in the group organising it and their families, people who just happen to see the notice outside the mairie and the dedicated bingo addicts who will travel distances to take part.
How can this motley assembly ever be described as a 'defined circle'?

Still, as we all know, there is a great French tradition of resistance to oppression and I am sure that the local groups will be organising to meet the threat.

Undercover bingo.

Let us listen in on the secret planning group of the ball trappers.....probably by using the listening devices the gendarmerie have illegally placed on the premises under the pretence that the ball trappers are potential terrorists, on the lines of the Tarnac Nine.

Jules, have you organised the bingo cards?

Yes, no problem...I've printed them off on my son's computer....

And the notices?

Yes, those too....with instructions to bring a torch, a folding chair and a tray to write on.

Right, Didier....have you organised the distribution?

Yes....the postmen are taking them out with the letters the day before. They know which houses to avoid...
I'm meeting them round behind the church so the postmaster doesn't see anything.

What about the venue? Isn't it going to be a bit noticeable, all these people collecting? Suppose we are denounced?

That's exactly why we chose the field behind where the travelling still used to stand before they made it stay in one place.....there are all those lanes through the vines and at least three roads for access to the area...and we'll have sentries with mobile 'phones.

Yes, but getting all these people away safely will be a problem all the same if the gendarmerie make a raid...look at the job we have in the salle de fetes as it is....

Alfred's organising the parking in the fields behind the vines....and at least we won't have anyone trapped in the lavatory...I keep asking for that door to be fixed but they do nothing....They can find money to replace the secretary's typing chair but when it comes to something vital like a lavatory door.....

O.K. Clement....calm down....

Yes, you're right. Have to keep a clear head...
Look, Jean-Pierre, even if the worst comes to the worst and they catch some of us there won't be a problem.

What do you mean, 'won't be a problem'?

Well, I'll just tell them that we're having a rave party for the notaire's son.....and I should know, I'm his clerk.
You watch them slink away......

He nothing common did, or mean...

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A great man died this week. Not well known outside his own area, but a man of his place and a man of his time.

Known to the children and young people of the schools he visited as 'the grandad in the cardigan' he was a quiet man with a story to tell who put to shame the professional 'storytellers' who infest the public sector of education and the arts......the exploitative children of the middle class who suck in the milk of public subsidy supplied by the people they insult with their puerilities.

He was a young man, helping his father with their own farm and the business they had lately undertaken, when the French government surrendered to the Germans in 1940.
While the government and 'le tout Paris' fled to the south to escape the fate of those they left behind, with little thanks and no recompense for the troops who died to secure their safe retreat, he was working in his father's vines.

The Germans arrived, their vehicles circulating as they wished on the roads under the high hill upon which he worked.
An intrusion he could not accept, despite all the appeals of Marshal Petain...the man who played on his reputation for killing less men than other French  generals in the First World war to bring France to its' knees in the face of the German Blitzkrieg which ran over the French defences like a knife through butter.

Marshal Petain, allied with the Catholic bourgeoisie who thought that the soul of France had been massacred when workers achieved not only the right to holidays, but holidays with  pay!

Our great man could not accept that 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' had been replaced by 'Family, Work, Fatherland', the slogan of the Petain regime.
He had grown up in a household which held firmly to Republican values...no Church schools, no interference by the Church in State affairs..no class subjection.
He and his family were easy meat for those who envied them their improved position in society and the rise to power of the Petainists, the collaborators, gave the opportunity.

He and his father had sought contact with the local, vestigial, Resistance, and were given the responsibility of running the drops made by a Lysander aircraft from England...delivering radios and arms to help the local groups.
They and a few friends organised well, lighting the landing field they had chosen at the last minute, always conscious that the Germans manning the posts on the hills around could descend on the landing ground in less than twenty minutes...by which time the gallant pilot had taken off again, leaving our great man and his friends to dispose of the bounty....often bicycles were their only means, riding through the dark lanes with radios strapped to their carriers.

But, of course, the they were betrayed.
Denounced.
By neighbours jealous of their farm and their business.
By neighbours who could justify what they had done because the people they denounced were people they had been taught to think of as contemptible, beyond the pale of the Church and not acceptable in respectable circles.
And those who had taught them this were now the people in power.

His father was taken.
He was taken three days later.
He was taken from a wife he had married only three months before by French policemen, and dumped in a French prison.

Thence he was sent to Buchenwald and, eventually to DORA the site where the V2s...the precursors of the moonrockets... were fabricated.

Theses V2s were aimed at Great Britain..and when they struck, the devastation was terrible.

The men forced to work on these monsters knew their devastative power and attempted to sabotage them....so, one morning coming to work, our great man saw seven men hanging from a gantry, slowly strangled to death.
It is not only story of the officer's revolt against Hitler that needs to be told...but also the revolt by the hopeless, those slaves who had only once choice...slow death by overwork, or the bright spark of revolt..with the inevitable bitter ending.

He was lucky. He survived. He came home.

Home, where his wife had struggled against all the odds to keep their vignoble working.
Where he had to live alongside the people who had denounced him.
Where he could have pointed the finger.

He did nothing of the sort.
Knowing who he was, and where he had been  he did not approve of the backlash of the liberation, the settling of scores, the shaving the heads of those girls who had had German boyfriends...
He knew the loneliness  of being away from home, family and friends...
He knew the drear misery of life for girls in rural France..those without a penny of money to spend on themselves.
He did not condemn those girls.

What he did condemn was the fate of the children born of their relationships...plonked into orphanages by family pressure and brought up as third class persons.

What he did condemn  were the people who had collaborated actively and, at the last minute, had turned their coats to maintain their power.....and he condemned the political impulsion which supported these people.

Once home again, his  sole idea was to make his vines productive again.
But the locals had other ideas.
They wanted him to become maire of the commune.

There were a lot of communes where a new maire took over after the war, part of the effort to sweep under the carpet the Occupation years, and his commune was one of them.
A new council, too, to make a clean sweep.

As maire, he was returned time after time, but, as the years wore on, the old families who used to control the commune started to be elected as councillors again....but any dubious proposals would be crushed as he raised his head and stared steadily at the man concerned. There was a lot of history in that stare.

He was not a vengeful man, but he wanted to make sure that what had happened to him, and to France, should not happen again.

In a period when France was inventing the legend of 'every Frenchman was in the Resistance' he started visiting schools and talking to the children, from primary age up to the lycee pupils.

He warned of what happens when a nation becomes divided into interest groups who place their own welfare before that of the country as a whole.

He warned of the brutality that people permit themselves once they can stop regarding people as people. When they can replace the idea of  'a human being like myself' with a label.....'Jew', 'Gypsy', 'Handicapped', 'Agitator', which entitles them to treat those so labelled as they please.

Aware of the ease with which France pushes aside unpalatable facts, he started to collect the reminiscences of all those genuinely engaged in resistance, and with the help of others like himself, started a small museum which showed what had happened in the area from the German invasion in 1940 to their retreat in 1944.
Consultation of the archives was open to everyone...and most revealing.

For over sixty years he bore witness to what happens when a society forgets its' values.....and generations of children in his area have been able to ask direct questions of a man who had suffered the worst that life can offer and be helped to understand that ignoring something does not make it any less real while doing nothing allows evil to triumph.

'The grandad in the cardigan' has gone and with him the soul and conscience of the area.

Raising the ghosts

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We were assembled at Madeleine's hospitable table, friends and family, French and British, for Sunday lunch and the aperitifs had been going the rounds...Suze, pineau, whisky and white port...while the clock ticked towards one o'clock. I had been asking about something that had been puzzling me...I was permitted use of the woods of the chateau up the road, and often used to walk there. A week back, I had seen something new - a very weathered stone cross erected in the main clearing. I hadn't seen the chateau owner to ask what it was about, and then a couple of days later, it had fallen down. Artisan francais again, I had thought. I was going to ask if anyone round the table had any idea what it was all about when the dog pricked up his ears as he heard his master's running feet on the pavement outside, and then barked as his master hurled himself through the portals in order to be at the table on time. Master had been winning at cards, but knew where his duty lay...lunch was serious business.
Someone commented on how good the dog was, especially as he could have been hoping to receive his master's portion if the one o'clock curfew had been breached and then a British friend said that his dog had rendered him good service during the week and proceeded to tell us his tale.
He was renovating a beautiful 'maison de maitre', a large, once elegant house which had been regarded as the best house in the commune, but which had fallen on hard times before he took it in hand. His companion was a little black dog who he had found on the road on Christmas Day who followed him everywhere around the house and garden. In the early hours of the morning, the little fellow had woken him, barking frantically, standing up on the bed defending his master. He heard sounds of heavy footsteps outside his bedroom door and got up to see what was going on,accompanied by the dog. Once out on the landing, he could still hear the footsteps, but this time up in the attic. Once there, they sounded from below again, and then from the ground floor as he ran up and down the stairs trying to pin point where they were coming from. Then the noise seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, whirling around him as he stood on the stairs before it suddenly stopped. The dog trotted back to bed and he was following when another noise started up. The door was open and he could see that there was nothing there, but the house was full of the noise of buckets of water being thrown against the walls of the bathroom, smashing and sluicing for what seemed a long time before it too, stopped and there was silence. He went to bed, reassured by the dog's lack of interest in proceedings, nothing further happened, and that was the end of the story.
Or it would have been, except that the next day he was talking to the old chap up the road, Gaston, a man who was cordially detested by all his neighbours as he could and would defend his rights with the force of law, custom or a shotgun as he felt the occasion demanded. However, as a new arrival and a foreigner, our friend was accepted by Gaston, who was always ready to help out with advice and assistance. He recounted his tale, expecting derision, but Gaston just took him into the house for a drink and began to explain the history of the house he had bought.

It had belonged to one of the families of local bigwigs in the inter war period, and the man in possession just before the 1939 - 1945 war had been a big spender. He bought himself an aeroplane which he would land on the lawns in front of the house from the proceeds of a thriving wine business, had a lot of agricultural property and had married a woman with money. His uncle was maire of the commune, and he was regarded as a pillar of the community. What the community didn't know was that this pillar was a different chap once he was out of their sight in Paris on 'business' trips. Then it was wine, women and song and money no object.
As an aside, it strikes me life must have been pretty stultifying in rural France, for anyone with any money seemed to be off up to Paris as often as they could to get away from it all. A friend told me that her uncle had managed to lose the family chateau after too many visits to Paris during which, mysteriously, he had been offering Mistinguette - a music hall star - vast amounts of money 'to sit in his car'.
The war was a godsend to our big spender, who was beginning to get through his fortune. He supplied eau de vie in quantity to the German occupiers and, as all my informants agreed, the Germans might have requisitioned, but they also always paid. The money was rolling in, smart cars were being bought and life was good. He was in good odour with the occupiers. The fancy took him to make a drive from the main road to the house, the old fashioned courtyard entrance not being to his liking, and, I suppose, the 'plane having been grounded for the duration. In the depths of winter, he obtained forced labour and dynamite to blast the frozen ground and level the new approach. It had all disappeared by our friend's time, but he could still see the trace of it where the ground dried out faster than its' surroundings in the heat of summer.
He wasn't the only one making money. A crony who owned the brickworks was making a pile, his neighbour was also in on the eau de vie supplies and there was always the black market. As Gaston explained, a lot of farmers before the war were tenants, subject to crushing leases, but such were their profits from the black market that after the war they could afford to buy out their leases and become independent. Bigger fish could make even more money, while the poor devils of women whose husbands were POWs, or who had been young enough to have been taken up for forced labour in Germany, were trying to keep the farms going singlehandedly or were going under.

All was going swimmingly, until the Allies had the lack of tact not to be thrown back into the sea in the summer of 1944. There had always been a Resistance in France, not numerous, mostly independent groups or Communist trade unionists, but in existence, and they began to make their presence felt. Not comfortable for those with big contracts with the Germans...and not comfortable for de Gaulle, by now recognised as leader of the Free French. The last thing he wanted was to have France liberated by foreign armies with the assistance of a Communist underground! The right thinking were encouraged to form groups and received arms in order to make a political counterweight to the Communists' very real claims to have been the only organised Resistance in France during the dark years of the Vichy regime.
Well, the big spender was right thinking, and, with his cronies and followers, swiftly became a 'Resistant', as the Germans began to pull back out of the area. However, as Gaston explained, there was a problem. While the big spender could proclaim his house a Resistance centre, and could proclaim himself the local Resistance leader, his history was well known and he decided that he must shut the mouths of the dissidents.
In a farm on the other side of the commune lived a youngish man, classed too weak for the forced labour drafts, who had acted as a courrier for the Resistance unit based in the railway works in the next large town. As the Germans retreated, his role became acknowledged...drinks in the bar, etc...and the big spender decided that this was going to be his example. He had the man lured to the house and locked into the outhouses. Whether things got out of control, whether drink had a part to play, whether it was all premeditated, Gaston did not know, but the man was tortured, his ear cut off and sent to his home and he was murdered, his body being buried in the woods in the next commune.

Well, the big spender survived untouched....but he never prospered. His cronies did, going on to bigger and better things in postwar France, but he could not change his ways and a lot of people were reluctant to deal with him given the rumours circulating. His business went downhill, he sold off his property, he sold his wife's property, and ended up in a small house down the road from the scenes of his glory, known to the commune as 'the man who ate three houses'. His wife was a recluse, his two sons were unemployable, except by the maire, daughter of a crony, who gave one a job as a roadsweeper, but being, as Guy remarked, 'allergic to dust', even influence could not keep him the job.

Retribution, then, down over the years?

That was the end of our friend's story, but Madeleine's cousin took over. A quiet man, who collected moths for the national scientific body, he had been a Resistant..as he said, a bit by accident. As a youth, he had been caught by the French police putting up rude posters about the Germans and had been handed over for a bit of rough treatment. So rough, in fact, that one ear was almost completely missing and he was partly deaf. Released, he was adopted by the group run by the doctors at the local hospital, and did his part. Not, that he always said, that that was much. He did what he could, usually passing messages. He never mentioned the risks he had run...as I say, a quiet man.
He and a group of old Resistants had been gathering together the accounts of everyone who had taken part in the movement locally, and he, as the archivist, knew something which linked the two stories.
Yes, the murdered man had been buried...in the chateau woods. In the clearing where I had seen the cross. In rural France, everything is seen, it is just not generally commented upon. The man's cousin had taken the man's dogs and they had found the body of their master which was dug up and given proper burial - complete with the ear.
In another account, details were suitably airbrushed. The group to which the young man had belonged were incensed.....to lose a colleague after the Germans had left, and then in such a fashion! They had ambushed the big spender's bailiff, the man who had lured the young man to his doom, taken him to the clearing and shot him. His family were told where to collect the body.

'Why didn't they shoot the big spender, or his cronies? Why go for the bailiff?'

The cousin explained that if the big spender had been shot, the repercussions would have been enormous...the gendarmerie would have been at full stretch to catch someone who attacked an important man...whereas, for the bailiff......
Oh, and as for my idea that the cross had been incompetently put up...nothing of the sort. He was well abreast of local gossip and the grapevine had been agog when, with a new owner at the chateau, the bailiff's family had wanted to put up a memorial and the owner had agreed. Local opinion disagreed. It was thrown down the next day and if it were to be put up again, the same fate would await it.


The U.K. was never occupied by the Germans and it is presumptuous of anyone who did not live through an enemy occupation to say how people could or should have acted, but if there had been something like the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the war instead of the propaganda trumpeting how every Frenchman was in the Resistance, and vindictively shaving the heads of women denounced as 'fraternising' with the Germans, perhaps the anger nurtured for more than fifty years would have been dissipated earlier.