The Tour de France Goes On. Also Elections.

National Elections in France

Final Vote Sunday, July 7

Post-election crowds at Place de la République, Paris, July 7.
 

First the political news from Paris: the election result on Sunday, July 7, was unexpected. The left-wing coalition won the most votes, while the near-fascist party obtained the fewest votes. A very dangerous result was thus avoided, though many unknowns remain as to how the winners will govern.

Continuing post-election celebration at Place de la République.

Cycling

Riders in Sunday’s stage of the Tour de France, 2024.
I used to watch this major French sport, but I haven’t been interested in recent years. 
However, I’m participating in the blog event “Paris in July” and thought someone should mention the Tour!
Obviously, I’m not there but I found the photos online.

Jonas Vingegaard downs some water after winning Tuesday’s stage 16 time trial (Getty)
Increasingly hot summers are challenging the cyclists more each year.

Souvenir water bottles. Drinking enough water is obviously a necessity.

Thirsty Riders 2015-2023

All cycling photos are shamelessly copied from news articles on the web. The two Place de la République photos are from CNN. This blog post is shared with Paris in July and with the weekly celebration of drinks at Elizabeth’s blog. 

Antisemitism in France Then and Now

French Election, Summer 2024 

News of France this week is primarily the news of the election. If you have been following French current events, you will probably know what I’m about to say, but here is my summary of the situation. France has a multi-party political system, representing a spectrum of views from extreme right to extreme left. For several years, the centrist party of President Macron has dominated the government; however, his party was severely defeated in the election of representatives to the European Parliament last month, and he declared elections for a new French government. 

Sunday, June 30, the first round of voting was a major blow to Macron’s centrist coalition, which came in third behind the far right and the far left. In particular the far right National Rally party (the RN, formerly called the National Front) obtained the most votes, and has a good chance to win a majority in next Sunday’s second and final round of voting. As the Guardian says:

“A high turnout in Sunday’s first round saw RN comfortably win first place with 33.1% of the vote, almost two points up compared with three weeks ago. For context, this is the first time that the party founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen has broken through the 20% barrier in a legislative election.” (source)

This is concerning for many reasons; in this short summary I’m going to concentrate on the issues of antisemitism expressed by members of this party.

From French newspaper Libération: “Twelve million of our fellow citizens have voted for a far right party that is clearly racist and anti-Republican.” (source)

Despite pretense to the contrary, the “rebranded” party founded by self-proclaimed antisemite Jean-Marie LePen and currently run by his daughter Marine is a frightening specter in the French elections this week. A strong possibility of their winning a majority and thus taking over the government is very chilling.

After the first vote on June 30, the extreme right party in France is far ahead of the others.
This is the party of LePen, a dedicated antisemite, though they have stepped back the antisemite rhetoric.

During the electoral campaign in May, there were antisemitic statements from both far right and far left candidates, for example—

“Racist and antisemitic rhetoric and conspiracy theories spread by National Rally candidates came under scrutiny during the campaign sprint — and amplified questions about whether the party’s rebranding was merely window dressing. Almost 1 in 5 of National Rally’s candidates for parliament have made “racist, antisemitic and homophobic remarks,” French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said in a televised debate Thursday.” (source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/06/30/france-elections-macron-le-pen-bardella/)

Further, antisemitic public actions in France (as in other European countries and in the US) has been ongoing since the Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing war last October:

“There were more than 360 antisemitic episodes in France in the first three months of this year, or an average of four a day, an increase of 300 percent over the same period last year, the government said. In the most recent one that shocked the country, the three boys are said to have dragged the girl [age 12]  into an abandoned building where she was repeatedly raped and insulted.” (New York Times, June 20)

Here are few additional examples of antisemitism by National Rally candidates:

“Sophie Dumont, a National Rally candidate in northeastern France, was spotlighted by Libération for a post implying that Jewish financing was behind Reconquest, a rival far-right party led by Eric Zemmour, who is Jewish. Zemmour’s adviser had said that the ritual slaughter of animals to make kosher and halal meat should not be banned in France. “The small gesture that betrays the origin of the funds that fuel Reconquest,” Dumont wrote in a now deleted comment. 

 

“Agnès Pageard, a National Rally candidate in Paris, has advocated for abolishing a law that makes it illegal to question the Holocaust and another that bans ‘incitement to hatred’ against religious or racial groups. She responded to a social media post that alleged ‘collusion’ among prominent Jewish people in France by recommending ‘reread Coston and Ratier’ — two authors known for their antisemitic conspiracy theories.” (source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/06/28/france-far-right-antisemitism-racism-le-pen/)

On the left, there are also a number of candidates who have made antisemitic statements, such as this example about a candidate of the party “La France Insoumise” —

“At least one member of La France Insoumise has made intolerable remarks. Reda Belkadi, a candidate in the Loir-et-Cher department south of Paris, published anti-Semitic messages in 2018 on social media. He had used the anti-Semitic slur ‘youpin.’” (Le Monde, June 29, 2024)

Looking Back: Paris Under the Nazi Regime

Les Parisiennes by Anna Sebba (published 2016)

As I read this book about life in Paris under the Nazis, I constantly thought about the current French election and its all-too-painful reminders of this part of the past. I read this observation about the current party, the National Rally:

“There was a reason a political barrier was long erected against the National Rally, with its quasi fascist history (now disavowed) and its enduring belief that immigrants dilute the essence of the French nation. The party provokes extreme reactions and troubled memories of the collaborationist wartime Vichy government.” (source) 

 

In Les Parisiennes, Anna Sebba depicts the lives of many women who lived through the Nazi occupation of Paris. Most of the author’s subjects had little or no contact with the Jewish residents of Paris, and little or no responsibility for the persecution and deportation of Jews to the Concentration Camps — but there are many stories of the fate of Jewish women, including, for example, the famous writer Irene Nemirovsky. I’m not going to review this book, but only use it to remind us of the past history that haunts many Parisians (and of course others) even today as antisemitism seems to return, along with attacks on many modern immigrant communities and naturalized French citiens.

For the Jews of Paris in 1942, the main event was the arrest of almost the entire Jewish population, which was done by French, not German, authorities. Here is Anna Sebba’s summary (in case you are not familiar with the history:

“On 16 and 17 July, the Vichy government, aiming to satisfy German demands to reduce the Jewish population, arrested some 13,152 Jews, including more than 4,000 children, mostly from Paris, in an operation which they were calling ‘Spring Wind’. René Bousquet, Secretary General of the French National Police, knew that using French police in the round-ups would be ‘embarrassing’ but hoped that this would be mitigated if those arrested were only so-called foreign Jews. However, as the historian Serge Klarsfeld has revealed (making use of telegrams René Bousquet sent to the prefects of departments in the occupied zone), the police were ordered to deport not only foreign Jewish adults but children, whose deportation had not even been requested, nor planned for, by the Nazis. Pierre Laval maintained that including children in the round-ups was a ‘humanitarian’ measure to keep families together, a clearly fallacious argument since many of the parents had already been deported.’ (p. 159)

Before they could be deported on trains to the East, these victims were held at a sports stadium:

“Everyone was taken on French buses to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a bicycle stadium in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, where most of the victims were temporarily confined for five days in extremely crowded conditions, almost without water as there was only one available tap, with little food and with inadequate sanitary facilities. They were then moved to Drancy, Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, internment camps managed by Vichy in collaboration with the Germans, before being sent on by train to Auschwitz for extermination. The round-up has been a source of enormous grief in France. It was not until 1995 that French President Jacques Chirac admitted French complicity as French policemen and civil servants had been used for the raid. He urged that 16 July be commemorated annually as a national day of remembrance. It was a ground-breaking moment in French history.” (p. 161) 

Sculpture commemorating the Jews of Paris deported in 1942 (Source: French Dept. of the Army)

The sculpture above shows the “Square de la Place-des-Martyrs-Juifs-du-Vélodrome-d’Hiver, where a sculpture by Walter Spitzer and Mario Azagury entitled ‘N’oublions jamais’ (Let us never forget) remembers the victims of the roundup of Jews on 16 and 17 July 1942, at 8, Boulevard de Grenelle, 15th arrondissement of Paris. © Département AERI”

Paris in July

Along with many bloggers, I’m participating in “Paris in July,” a blog event hosted by Emma at the blog Words and Peace (link). My contribution today connects current events in Paris to the historic events of another July — July, 1942. 

Blog post © 2024 mae sander.

 

"French Rhapsody" by Antoine Laurain

French people care about politics -- French politics! They know a great deal about the lives and histories of recent candidates for president of France. They care about literature, mostly French literature, though they are aware of writers from elsewhere: Shakespeare, for example. They care about a variety of genres of popular music. They have their own stars in music, literature, art, film... as well as sharing the love of many stars from England and the US.

Paris is the center of French life for politics, literature, music, education, and most other cultural activities. To live and work outside Paris can result in others viewing you as a failure or at least can result is others seeing you as giving up your ambitions.

All these basic facts are in play in the novel French Rhapsody by Antoine Laurain (published 2016). Several fifty-something men and one women in roughly the present moment (maybe 2015) reconnect many years after their one shared moment from their past. For a brief time, they had tried to form an innovative popular band -- "The Holograms, that was my group, my rock group. Well, it wasn’t rock, it was new wave; cold wave to be exact," the central character explains. (Kindle Locations 127-128).

A strange coincidence brings the members of the long-dissolved group back into contact through a rather wacky and revealing set of events. The man who engineers the reconnection has become a rather dull doctor who has followed his father's footsteps treating very ordinary people's ordinary illnesses. Two of the other men who shared the brief dream are now powerful political leaders in opposing political parties. One politician was "To the Right of the Right" (Kindle Location 1119) and the other was a very rich businessman whose political position would only be understandable if you were French.

Another man from the group had become a kind of conceptual artist, moderately successful. He desperately craved recognition and adoration for his works. The last man in the band had been a very eccentric antique dealer, but had committed suicide in a rather bizarre way around a year earlier. The only woman, the group's highly talented singer, had lived in Paris only briefly, and long since returned to the provinces to run her family's hotel.

Each one who had shared in the band's brief existence also had a few significant close relationships with a spouse, a girlfriend, or children. The author provides a vivid look at the facts of their current existence and their current frustrations. At the same time, the author is surprisingly terse, portraying each character with just a few details, and telling the story of their reconnection in a suspenseful way so that the end is actually a surprise (but no spoilers). He refers to many French cultural icons such as the book Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier (Kindle Location 1449), the restaurant in the Gare de Lyon called Le Train Bleu, or "an arthouse cinema on Boulevard Saint-Michel." (Kindle Location 1382).

Could this group really be a kind of "everyman" and "everywoman" who reveal a key cross-section of French life? And at the same time, satirize life in France in quite a funny way? That was how it seemed to me. Each character occupied a different social position in a typical neighborhood of Paris (or in the case of the woman, outside Paris). Each man had his own frustrations with his life and his own regrets about his past (maybe the woman didn't have as many regrets). As the story unfolds, each one is forced to think about how much life has changed since they were young, which could be pretty ordinary, but this is no ordinary tale.

Here's just one example. A publicist is attempting to create a new image for JBM, the not-right-wing very rich businessman character with political ambitions. So she makes him cook (how French is that?) --

"For half an hour, JBM had been stirring a now-overcooked pot-au-feu under the spotlights set up in the kitchen, to the constant flash of the camera. The domestic staff – the cook who had actually made the pot-au-feu, the butler and the housekeeper – had withdrawn discreetly to the doorway, where they stood watching Monsieur pretend to be an enthusiastic weekend cook, while doing their best not to smirk or nudge each other. Monsieur, who couldn’t boil an egg and was barely capable of pouring himself a Nespresso from the machine.  

"‘Who do you think I am, Alain Ducasse?’ JBM said with irritation in his voice." (Kindle Locations 1221-1225). 

In an article about the book, author Antoine Laurain wrote: "I called the book Rhapsody because nothing is certain in a rhapsody. It’s a very particular musical form, free, full of movements, and most of all, as unpredictable as the times we live in." ("Antoine Laurain: My country is the same as yours. Politicians have never been so unpopular" The Guardian, November, 2016)

My friend the blogger Jeanie at the Marmelade Gypsy recommended this author, for which I thank her enormously! She wrote about his other book, The Red Notebook, and said "It's all so simple. Yet so wonderful." Yes.