Sarkozy Out

originally posted by MarkS:
they were countries before and countries again they'll be.
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I'm not sure what you mean by 'country'. Go back just a couple hundred years and witness all the different political arrangements in each of those geographic locations.
 
originally posted by SteveTimko:
France is pretty fucked up.

Who knew Gertrude Stein was a Nazi collaborator? That's a history of fucked up.
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I have a colleague who is a Gertrude Stein specialist, who contests this history. In any case, Stein was American, which argues that Americans are pretty fucked up, not a discovery. We hardly need her to buttress the shameful history of France in WWII. But then, the core of the French Resistance were the communists, so I guess you could argue that, by electing Hollande, they are moving, admittedly in a flanbyish way, in the right direction. If you have a taste for such melodramatic historical narratives, that is.
 
Steve, nice site.

There is an article there on how badly France is doing.

As to Vichy... I'd be interested to hear from a Third Reich scholar what were Germany's plans for a never-say-die France.
 
Shit...
Do you think I should move to Texas and grow some Cab?
It's not for me it's for my kids. We can't even find any more transgenic cereals to go with their raw milk for breakfast... Socialim...
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by SteveTimko:
France is pretty fucked up.

Who knew Gertrude Stein was a Nazi collaborator? That's a history of fucked up.
Click to expand...

I have a colleague who is a Gertrude Stein specialist, who contests this history. In any case, Stein was American, which argues that Americans are pretty fucked up, not a discovery. We hardly need her to buttress the shameful history of France in WWII. But then, the core of the French Resistance were the communists, so I guess you could argue that, by electing Hollande, they are moving, admittedly in a flanbyish way, in the right direction. If you have a taste for such melodramatic historical narratives, that is.
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I take nothing on its face from Alan Dershowitz, the author that Steve links to. But a recent article in the New York Review of Books favorably praises the Will book and points to earlier works by Janet Maslin that discussed the same "issue." The fact is, if you were a Jew in France (whether Vichy France or the part incorporated into Germany), and especially a prominent one like Stein, the reason you survived and lived as "normally" as anyone else had to have been because of collaboration (or perhaps a very highly-placed relative, which was not Stein's situation). Unlike her brothers (at least one of whom, Leo, had ceased talking with her), she saw no reason to leave France -- which is highly suggestive. Don't forget, also, that she managed to do this even though she was a champion of what Hitler called Entartete Kunst (degenerate art).
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:

As to Vichy... I'd be interested to hear from a Third Reich scholar what were Germany's plans for a never-say-die France.
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The classics on German policy towards France are Eberhard Jäckel, Frankreich in Hitlers Europa (1966) and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France, Old Guard and New Order (1972).

The idea that people in an occupied country sought favors from the occupier can hardly come as a surprise. Given the general interest in the Loire here, I recommend Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation (2002), which does a particularly good job on ordinary people's efforts to navigate the war years in and around Chinon.

Hollande is a much more direct heir of Mitterand, whose relationship to the Resistance, like much else, was, shall we say, opportunistic, than to the PCF or any early Resistance leaders. But the constant references to Vichy and the Resistance are really besides the point by now.

I think Texas needs all the socialism it can get. Cab would be good, too.
 
originally posted by Cliff:
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:

As to Vichy... I'd be interested to hear from a Third Reich scholar what were Germany's plans for a never-say-die France.
Click to expand...

The classics on German policy towards France are Eberhard Jäckel, Frankreich in Hitlers Europa (1966) and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France, Old Guard and New Order (1972).

The idea that people in an occupied country sought favors from the occupier can hardly come as a surprise. Given the general interest in the Loire here, I recommend Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation (2002), which does a particularly good job on ordinary people's efforts to navigate the war years in and around Chinon.

Hollande is a much more direct heir of Mitterand, whose relationship to the Resistance, like much else, was, shall we say, opportunistic, than to the PCF or any early Resistance leaders. But the constant references to Vichy and the Resistance are really besides the point by now.

I think Texas needs all the socialism it can get. Cab would be good, too.
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Since I called the narrative by which I got from Resistance leaders to Hollande both flanbyish and melodramatic, I should have thought no one would have taken it more seriously than the one I was poking fun at. I agree that almost any simple history drawn from either collaboration or resistance now almost 70 years in the past is bound to be constructed to prove a point. The reference to it on a thread about a European election is really a subset instance of Godwin's law.
 
Yes, I got the irony -- I was reacting mostly to the idea that the Communists were the "core of the Resistance," a narrative they very much constructed to prove a point after the war. They were important, to be sure, but hardly the only influential current.
 
originally posted by Cliff:
Yes, I got the irony -- I was reacting mostly to the idea that the Communists were the "core of the Resistance," a narrative they very much constructed to prove a point after the war. They were important, to be sure, but hardly the only influential current.
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I thought everyone in France was in the Resistance. ;)

As for the PCF, I still remember vividly the two brothers in The Sorrow and the Pity who said that the reason they joined the Resistance is because the Party told them to. No doubt, had Hitler not invaded the USSR, the Party wouldn't have given those orders and it never would have crossed their minds to have joined. Vaches héroïques.
 
originally posted by Claude Kolm:
I thought everyone in France was in the Resistance.
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I'll never forget my orientation month on my junior year abroad in the '90s. A twee, adorable little family in a four-story one-room-wide house in Tours. They were all shorter than me and the other American girl, including the father. (And I'm five foot six, barely.)

One night, the parents go out, and the 24-year-old son, François, comes back from military service. He is so handsome I briefly imagine marrying him and spending my life knitting his socks. But anyway, I digress. The younger son and daughter and other American girl and I sit down to play cards and drink something (can't even remember if it was wine or cognac or something else).

Then François gets up and says, "Sharon, come see this. Shh... don't tell anyone."

Takes me to the display case, one of those things everyone has that have kind of nice sauce boats, glasses and plates, some standing up, behind glass. Only on one shelf are some medals.

He points: "That's the one Marshal Pétain gave to my grandfather."

He laughs and puts his finger to his lips.

I think they were pretty Catho; they also had a picture of an adolescent François in a crowd reaching out to touch the Pope's hand.

Still, thinking back on it from a less naïve place, I'm amazed they had it on display.
 
A long time ago, yes.

Céline (at least early Céline) is confoundingly brilliant. Maybe my favorite novelist of the 20th century in France, with Proust (in a completely different vein, of course).
 
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