Fragments of an Arbitrary Encyclopaedia Jonathan Meades on France

No strings of onions.

No Dordogne.

No boule.

No piaf.

No, "Ooh, la, la."

No Gallic shrugs.

No street markets.

No checked tablecloths.

Valise.

She told me this without rancour.

It was merely what had happened to her.

She hoped to die French.

She did.

"Every man has two countries, his own and France."

This is habitually misattributed to Thomas Jefferson.

It is in fact a line put into the mouth of Charlemagne

in a late 19th-century play by Henri De Bornier,

who was French, so it's a predictably chauvinistic boast,

and not perhaps to be taken seriously.

Say that in my case it's true, it became true.

I frequently visited France as a child.

Breton beaches, roast horse, cheap hotels,

weird sojourns with my grandfather's elderly business friends

supposedly scholastic exchanges and forgettable provincial towns.

I was for ever hauling a huge suitcase.

Une valise enorme.

'Then came 1962.

'That really was the year of le valise,

'the year France became my second country. I was 15.

'Early in April early one evening between dog and wolf...'

HOWLING

'I got on a ferry at Dover and got off in a war zone.'

EXPLOSION

'It was the shameful thrill of war's omnipresence

'and its fearful randomness that made France my second country.

'On paper, the war was over.

'The Evian Accords had been signed a fortnight previously.

'Algeria had got its independence.

'For the OAS, the war was not over.

'The armed faction of the millions of French citizens

'who, betrayed the Evian Accords,

'continued to plant bombs and attempt assassinations.'

FRENCH-ALGERIAN VOCAL MUSIC

Vallin, Eugene.

'In the earliest years of the 20th century,

'the furniture Eugene Vallin

'made his first tentative steps in architecture.

'Nossi was a celebrated craft centre.

'Glassware, marketry, cabinet-making, ceramics, metalwork.

'Nossi's Art Nouveau was not really that new.

'Much of it was revivalism from of the Rococo and Baroque.

'Art Nouveau mostly occurs in places touched by the Baroque.

'It was covert revivalism.

'These artists heeded Montaigne's council to the plagiarist...'

"Behave like a horse thief.

"Dye the tail and the mane

"and sometimes put out the creature's eyes."

'IE, cover your tracks.'

For all its whimsy, Art Nouveau was political.

The strain that developed in Nancy was in deliberate opposition

to that of Metz and Strasbourg, then German cities

whose recent buildings were in the German Jugenstihl.

Nancy defined itself with its own version of Art Nouveau,

just as many small countries,

aspirantly autonomous regions and city states did -

Riga, Liguria, Catalonia and so on.

Nancy took as its model the English Arts and Crafts movement.

Unlike the Arts and Crafts, it was not opposed to industrial processes,

but it shared the conviction that a well turned door handle

would make the world a better place.

So it was the profusion of its enamel

and the excellence of its stained glass that

prevented the First World War and the blood bath at Verdun.

Needless to say, it was the preferred style of the caviar left.

Sebastien le Prestre Marquis de Vauban

was an expert in porcine husbandry, an economist

and the greatest of military engineers.

He built or rebuilt some 300 fortresses on the country's borders,

the country's ever expanding borders.

The places where they are cited form a litany of belligerence.

They are for ever associable with battles,

sieges, evacuations, trenches, trench foot, shame

victorious commemoration,

mutilation, barracks, disease, humiliation,

mass death.

The hills south of Nancy which Vaudemont is perched on

is holy, or mystical or spiritual,

one of those superstitious things anyway.

Rosmerta, the Gaulish god of fertility, a big girl,

was honoured here in the 4th century BC.

The Romans erected a temple to Mercury.

The first Christian site was of the 5th century.

The Basilica was built in the 1870s.

Its tower has a Mary on top of it.

She's 25 feet tall, another big girl.

If she's capable of virgin birth,

why should she not have an overeager pituitary gland?

When Alsace and northern Lorraine were returned to France

after the First World War,

a folksy ceremony of reunification was held here.

It was presided over by Maurice Barres.

The hill was by then known as "La colline inspiree"

after his novel of that name which is set here

and which treats the tension between Catholicism and the nationalistic stirrings

supposedly prompted by the animism of this place.

The reason that this hill should have supernatural attributes

and imaginary properties dumped on it is clear.

It is the only hill for miles around.

The topographically prodigious is routinely claimed for God

when, in fact, it actually belongs to the marvels of geological happenstance.

Barres was a politician, an eventually repentant anti-Semite,

an unrepentant anti-Dreyfusard, a clubbable bigot.

His life was irremediably coloured

by the German seizure of Alsace and northern Lorraine

when he was eight-years-old.

He was a xenophobe, yet was steeped in German literature.

He was a Lorraine supremacist

who subscribed to a doctrine akin to "Blut und Boden".

He believed that his native forests spoke to him.

Much that he wrote was absolute tosh,

but he wrote it captivatingly

and he influenced not just the gullible but an entire generation.

Vaudemont Sion was proclaimed the Sacred Hill of the nation,

and Barres somehow persuaded France that Lorraine,

despite being on its margins, was the country's heartland,

its spiritual heartland - whatever that meant.

The celebrity witch, Joan of Arc, also came from Lorraine.

The month after she was canonised,

the chamber of deputies voted in favour of Barres' plan

that a national day should be devoted to her.

Charles de Gaulle, whose idea of nationhood owed much to Barres,

chose to live at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises

in Haute-Marne, on the edge of Lorraine.

He had no connection with the area.

Strategically it was between Paris and the garrison towns on the German border,

but in that part of the brain where psychology and topography meet,

it was more than that.

De Gaulle wrote of the vast, raw, forlorn horizons.

Melancholy emptiness where nothing changes,

not the spirit not the place.

De Gaulle, like Barres, was a solitary

who immersed himself in the depths of woods,

took succour from the signals he discerned in nature.

Like Barres, he believed that he was communing with a higher reality.

Destiny then is a delusion prompted by...

..and a multitude of furry mammals scurrying nowhere in particular.

In July 1940, the opium-smoking jobseeking Admiral Emile Muselier

sucked up to de Gaulle by proposing that the cross of Lorraine

should be adopted as the emblem of the free French.

The two-barred cross is of Byzantine origin.

The top bar was added in sacred iconography

so that it could be inscribed INRI -

"Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews".

The device is to be found in the coats-of-arms of Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.

It reached Lorraine by a heraldic genealogical route

that involved the Dukes of Anjou.

Such a cross would be a potent symbol for the free French,

because it graphically defied the hooked cross, the swastika.

De Gaulle's predictable acceptance of Muselier's proposal

further augmented Lorraine's religious nationalist mystique.

Lorraine stood for France.

Henri Vaugeois founded L'Action Francaise in 1899.

It was both a movement and a newspaper which propagated that movement.

It was anti-Dreyfusard, anti-Semitic,

anti-corporatist, anti-republican, anti-democratic,

anti-Protestant, anti-Masonic.

It goes without saying that it was xenophobic.

Maurice Barres was soon involved

and so too was the demagogue, Charles Maurras.

It was Catholic and monarchist.

It supported Mussolini and Franco.

However, its enthusiasm for Hitler was tempered,

not because it disapproved of his doctrine,

but because it still hadn't got over the defeat by Germany

at Sedan more than 60 years before.

And its subsequent pro-Vichy stance

derived from the odd conviction that by collaborating

France would retain its identity.

Identity is a perennial concern of the Far Right.

Its enemies are rootlessness and cosmopolitanism.

Identity in this sense is a form of communitarianism,

which defines people by their race and inherited culture,

rather than by their individuality, their aspirations and their talents.

It's a kind of prison.

In the years after the war, the Second World War,

one of Action Francais's street hawkers was

the young Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Later he would serve in the army in Indo-China and Algeria

and enter Parliament as its youngest member in 1956

under the banner of Poujadism

which took its name from the stationer and rabble-rouser

Pierre Poujade, the deafening voice of the silent majority.

There is then a direct link from the nationalism

and revanchism fomented by the defeat in 1870

to the chippy paranoiac nationalism of the present-day.

There's a direct line

from Barres and Maurras to Jean-Marie

and thence to his daughter and successor, Marine Le Pen.

"La Marseillaise" the French National Anthem

This fringe is always with us.

It is also always impotent.

It's erectile dysfunction is due to its being a perpetual dupe.

More opportunistic populists portray it as a bogey, a no-hoper,

whilst at the same time filching its ideas and sanitising them.

Every other strain of French politics changes by the month,

even by the week.

The absurd right's inflexibility is a national,

not to say nationalistic, marvel.

It stays put. It stays pure. It stays white...mostly.

It stays wounded.

Like Philoctetes, its sores will never heal.

'Sur de vous, et sur d'elle...

'Beaulieu, Chambord,

'Tradition, Grand Tourisme.

'Eprouvez-les chez votre concessionaire.

'Simca Vedette.'

The mortally wounded OAS's endgame was played out

against the glossy backdrop of les trente glorieuses,

which were not yet so-called.

Les trente glorieuses...

Today, it's an everyday phrase that derives from the title of a book

of the late '70s by the economist Jean Fourastie.

It signifies the roughly 30 years from the liberation of France

until the first oil crisis in 1973,

a period of exponential industrial growth

and the rush towards modernisation, both public and private.

The standard of living rose three-fold during this period.

Fourastie was no doubt an ironist,

the word "glorious" was a provocation.

In his estimation, glory derives from the spread of affluence,

the triumph of consumerism, medical advances,

improved education, improved working conditions,

improved public services and so on.

I own therefore I am. I am happy, I am healthier.

Now that I drive a Simca Vedette and possess plenty of plenty,

the state is no longer solely an ideal

to which I bear quasi-religious fealty and adolescent resentment.

It is also a supplier with which I enjoy

a near commercial relationship in exchange for my taxes...

my heavy taxes.

For Fourastie then, glory had little to do

with the nation state's mystical allegiance to soil,

with self-regarding pomp,

with fawning exaltations to patriotism.

Which is just as well,

for these were otherwise startlingly inglorious years for France,

marked by political ignominy, political chaos,

political assassinations, attempted putsches,

a bloodless coup d'etat,

presidential mendacity, social catastrophe,

near revolution and war upon grinding war,

Europe, Indo-China, Algeria.

For a mostly preening nation, France's war record

in the 20th century was dismal.

Played four, lost four.

Throwing the sponge becomes habit-forming.

# Pour celui qui en revient

# Verdun c'etait bien

# Pour celui qui en est mort

# Verdun c'est un port

# Mais pour ceux qui N'etaient pas nes

# Qu'etaient pas la pour apprecier

# C'est du passe

# Depasse

# Un champ perdu dans le nord-est

# Entre Epinal et Bucarest

# C'est une statue Sur la Grande Place

# Finalement Verdun

# Ce n'est qu'un vieux qui passe. #

Verdun...

the ten-month battle in 1916 claimed 300,000 lives.

The name is France's greatest trigger to remembrance.

It is to France what the Somme is to Britain.

One difference, of course, is that Verdun is on home soil.

A second is that beside Lutyen's monument to the Somme's victims at Thiepval,

the Douaumont ossuary seems architecturally inappropriate.

It's not exactly frivolous, but it lacks solemnity, it lacks gravity.

It recalls the architecture of pleasure, monstrously distended.

It's inimical to meditative remembrance.

Its architects lacked the nerve

to address the awful purpose of the monument.

They shamefully made light of it,

they created a 140-metre long betrayal of the dead.

One might also add that they were victims of the Modernist century's

incapacity to devise a commemorative mode.

No century ever needed one more.

# Bien sur que je n'etais pas ne

# Je n'etais pas la pour apprecier

# Mais j'avais un vieux a Verdun

# Et comme je n'oublie jamais rien

# Je reviens

# Je reviens

# Je reviens. #

This is Paul Verlaine's Ode to Metz.

"Fate made Metz my cradle.

"It was raped.

"Yet it remains demure, more virginal than ever.

"Childhood was bliss in this place

"whose fortress was no fortress

"for its commandant's weapon was the white flag.

"This was the proud mother I loved."

The commandant in question was Francois Achille Bazaine.

In 1870, he threw the sponge

after Metz had been besieged for two months.

The animals had been eaten and typhus had become rampant.

Hardly a cheese-eating surrender monkey

as the Boche

and Donald Rumsfeld would have had it.

When France's porous border admits

the invading armies of its bad neighbour,

it admits too German buildings.

The station at Metz is wholly German.

The round-arch neo-Romanesque idiom

forms no part of France's architectural lexicon.

Barres described it as "an immense, squat, meat pie",

a characterisation that is more xenophobic than aesthetic.

The station and the palaces nearby

were built after the annexation of northern Lorraine in 1870

at the end of the Franco-Prussian war.

They're didactic buildings,

intended as instruments of subjugation.

They're architectural manifestations of Imperial Prussia's might.

The restorations of existing buildings

were designed to rewrite history and render them Teutonic.

1962, the night I arrived at Dunkirk,

Roger Degueldre, the OAS fighter was arrested in distant Algiers.

He was tried by a kangaroo court.

Edgard de Larminat, the general who was to have presided over that court,

killed himself rather than sit in pre-judgment.

On July 5, 1962, Algeria became independent.

The next day, Roger Degueldre was clumsily executed by firing squad,

most of whose members tried to miss the target.

This judicial murder eventually took half-an-hour.

The sentence was devised to appease bien pensant piety,

to sate liberal blood lust.

After his death, he was the object of black propaganda.

He had been a Belgian,

a collaborator,

a member of the Waffen SS Wallonien brigade.

He had in fact been a resistant,

as have many other members of the OAS.

This of course did not and does not accord

with the canonisation of the OAS as fascist.

On the contrary.

As Winston Churchill had observed 20 years before,

the quasi-fascist was Charles de Gaulle

who had conducted his resistance from Carlton Gardens in St James's.

Degueldre's grave in the Gonards Cemetery at Versailles

is the site of an annual ceremony,

attended by his fellow outcasts who survived,

men and women turned into pariahs by De Gaulle's treachery.

It routinely prompts protests.

Algeria is always with us.

The conjunctions of Belgium and France,

Germany and France, Switzerland and France,

Italy and France have produced

no significant architectural mongrelism.

Lille is all Parisian boulevards and Flemish backstreets.

Strasbourg is either over-Deutsch

or hyper-Francais.

There's no fusion,

no metissage.

Architectural apartheid was the rule until the coming of Modernism.

The European Court of Human Rights derives ultimately

from the 1789 declaration of the rights of mankind and citizens.

It is of course misnamed.

It's the European Court of Special Pleading.

We're showered at birth

with the promise of potential entitlements

and should those entitlements not be fulfilled,

we can come here and complain and so line the pockets

of the pious shysters of the human rights industry.

No matter.

The architecture of this dodgy institution on the French-German border

is indistinguishable from that of buildings on the Polish-Lithuanian border.

Homogenisation has its benefits.

Modernism has no nationalist etiquette attached to it.

It's the pan-European idiom.

It does not express disparities.

The constant injunction to celebrate vibrant diversity is moronic.

It is shared qualities which should be appreciated.

To emphasise differences merely consigns people to their background,

where they've come from, to their tribe, their caste, their religion.

It creates ghettos.

France's regionalism, France's fragmentation

is exacerbated by its borderland absorption of Belgium, Germany,

Switzerland, Italy, Spain.

What is notable is the absence of reciprocity.

France borrows from its neighbours.

Approximate linguistic expressions apart,

its neighbours are less prone to borrow from it.

Universalism doesn't travel.

What do you call good German cooking?

You call it Alsatian cooking,

boastful but probably correct.

Alsace enjoys the reputation of being the most gastronomic region

of the most gastronomic country on Earth.

Yet there's an obvious paradox here

for its cooking is only French by appropriation.

The characteristic dishes are German.

Presskopf, Baeckeoffe,

Flammkuchen.

Many dishes arrived from further east with the Ashkenazi Diaspora.

The bias against Dreyfus was more than anti-Semitic.

He was a Jew whose family had lived, until its annexation,

in Alsace, a place of ambiguous loyalties

which excited a suspicion in deepest unequivocal French-most France.

ARCHIVE RECORDING: 'Notice the Nazi salute of the Vichy Frenchman.

'This is the man whose word we should have to trust in negotiations

'with conquered France,

'Laval, whose habit of eating frogs makes him technically a cannibal.'

The actively collaborationist and the actively resistant

represented a tiny fragment of France's population.

The precise figures will never be known.

Private fear, public shame.

Both extreme factions attracted turncoats who moved between them,

the invariable behaviour of the politically opportunistic.

The myth of resistance and its counter myth

have contaminated France for well over half a century.

For every shaven-headed woman, for every Laval justly executed,

for every scapegoat like Brasillach condemned by a show trial,

there were numberless subsequently amnesiac officials

who simply swapped one regime for another.

Well-connected war criminals rose through the peace-time ranks

to powerful positions under the patronage

of all the presidents of the Fifth Republic,

from De Gaulle to the laughably compromised Francois Mitterrand.

Just as their forebears were unquestioningly obedient

in their submission to Hitler

and to the dictates of the racial state,

subsequent generations of Germans have been unquestioningly obedient

in their expressions of shame and ancestral culpability.

France has suffered no such collective expiation.

The occupation was another episode in France's interminable civil war.

Right against left, monarchism against republicanism,

Catholic against the evil alliance

of Masons, Protestants and secularists.

The OAS included former collaborators and former resistance.

Men who'd been deported to Dachau, men who had deported them.

The black propaganda continues 50 years on.

Denunciation, forged documents, satanic rumour mills.

The proof is never simple.

The Minister for the colonies and the first Vichy administration was Henry Lemery.

He was black.

The baguette is not French.

According to its creation myth,

it was introduced to Paris from Vienna, in 1830, by August Zang.

In France, Zang was a baker. In Vienna, he was a press tycoon.

This is a not-uncommon combination of pursuits.

One thinks of Rupert Murdoch.

France withdrew from Indo-China after the debacle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

It might have been yesterday.

Georges Boudarel was a French teacher in Saigon who, in 1950,

had defected to the Vietminh.

He set about re-educating French prisoners.

When they proved ineducable, he starved and tortured them.

He was responsible for the death of almost 300 of his compatriots.

He was sentenced to death in absentia.

Years later, one of his victims who had survived

recognised him in Paris.

He was put on trial for Crimes Against Humanity.

He had embarked on a university career, teaching history, of course.

Scores of academics - useful idiots - came out in his support,

muttering about colonialist revisionism and a manhunt.

Boudarel was freed under the terms of an amnesty.

Daniele Minne, aka Djamila Amrane, was also amnestied.

She was part of a group that planted bombs

in three Algiers cafes on 26 January 1957.

Four women died, 40 people - again mostly women - were wounded.

Five children and many adults suffered amputations.

She, too, pursued an academic career

which culminated in Chair at Toulouse University.

Her disciplines you couldn't make this up were women's studies

and the history of decolonisation.

There are countless instances of the scum rising to the top.

The French state's masochistic honouring of its enemies

and its sadistic contempt for "les petites gens" is ingrained.

It's only comprehensible when you realise that the French state,

having no-one else to rebel against, rebels against itself.

Claude Nicolas Ledoux's Royal Saltworks was a utopian saltworks.

Utopianism is relative.

It must be measured against the norms of its time.

For those who lived and worked here, it was humane, salubrious

and a world away from the incarceratory treadmills and noxious slums of saltworks thitherto.

The fragment that was built is cyclopean,

aggressive, fetishistic, proto-Brutalist,

lowering, exhilaratingly sullen.

Ledoux was French, his architecture wasn't.

His inspiration was Jon Vanbrugh,

whose buildings he visited in 1769 and 1770.

Vanbrugh is pigeonholed - wrongly pigeonholed - as Baroque.

Ledoux is pigeonholed - wrongly pigeonholed - as Neoclassical.

These labels are fatuous. There is only school - the school of talent.

Among the city's many unrealised buildings was a utopian brothel,

whose utopian ground plan was in the form of a utopian penis.

That's to say, fully and permanently erect.

Such architecture whose function is advertised literally

would come to be called "architecture parlante".

The public toilet in the form of a syringe.

A new House of Commons in the form of a suitcase full of money,

or a cash dispenser. That sort of thing.

Jean-Baptiste Andre Godin was an oven manufacturer in Picardy.

The company that bears his name still exists.

So, too, does his Familistere.

Realised according to the ideas of Charles Fourier soon after the Revolution.

Fourier's plan was for the world's population to be divided

into groups or phalanxes of 1,620 people.

Autonomous, polyandrous, communal, distributist.

Godin's scheme was more modest.

Nonetheless, he housed over half a phalanx.

Children were educated according to Fourier's methods,

precursors of today's discredited child-centred learning.

The modernism of "les trente glorieuses" was a direct reaction

to the formal, smooth, pre-war Modernism whose master was Le Corbusier.

The reaction to Le Corbusier was led by Le Corbusier -

an artist who was for ever reinventing himself.

He was a Swiss peasant who wanted to be a French genius.

He was a sculptor, collagist, a activist, a catastrophic theorist,

a totalitarian toady, a collaborator,

a monk, a socialite,

a cultural colonialist

and a utopian follower of Fourier and Godin.

The five "unite d'habitations" that he designed owe much to the example of those pioneers.

Once the machine is taken for granted,

it no longer demands glorification.

Like Roger Excoffon's typefaces,

Le Corbusier's post-war manner uses machines, but doesn't worship them.

The architecture is plastic, expressive.

There are deliberately rough edges. The materials play at primitivism.

Purity of form is suppressed,

impurity of form is more interesting.

Did I realise this in 1962? No.

But it did prompt wonder and delight.

I didn't ask why.

Nor did I make the link to the Citroen DS and the Mistral typeface.

Ronchamp was a piece in an unmade jigsaw

which, whatever that ended up looking like when finished,

would proclaim the conjunction of France and tomorrow.

In my second country, the future had already arrived.

Rather, "a future" had already arrived.

A future that had nothing to do with nuclear-tooled ideological gangsters

in 405-lines black-and-white.

That future did not belong to us.

The French future, on the other hand, might have looked as though it had suffered multiple amputations

and would scream if it could. But we had a share in it.

It was ours, it was here.

The future existed in the present.

Pascal Hausermann, who designed it, was Swiss.

Like Godin, like Le Corbusier, like Rousseau, like Frisch...

"Les trente glorieuses" saw the advent of mobiletes,

transistor radios, kitchens.

It saw the advent of bathrooms and salubrious lavatories.

The line that Peter Nichols gave to one of his grotesques in The Gorge...

Where the French fall down is in their toilets.

-Have you noticed?

-Sorry?

I say, where the French fall down is in their toilets.

..became ever less applicable. Soon everyone had a telly.

Once Britain was able to boast smugly

that the French also fall down on television. No longer.

And soon, everyone had white goods, electric blenders,

and Vespas, Bic pens, Colibri lighters

shaped like a pebble, 45rpm discs,

multi-changer record players, gadgets, more gadgets,

and the world's most thrilling car, the Citroen DS.

People could at last go beyond window-licking.

"Les trente glorieuses" had their own colours.

There was a time when every other car was cobalt blue.

Somewhere between the colour of Gitanes and Gauloises,

two of the country's predominant scents -

along with urine, sewers and two-stroke fuel.

They had their own materials -

Formica, Tergal...

Nations and cultures covetly define themselves by their type fonts,

just as they more manifestly define themselves

by the languages written in those fonts.

Alte Schwabacher and Plagwitz in Germany.

Euskara, Etxeak, Kaxko, in the Basque country.

Corcaigh and Paternoster in Ireland.

Brito and Breizh in Brittany.

These are logos.

They are as political and exclusive as a uniform or a flag.

They expressed nationalist sentiments

and secessionist longings.

Les trente glorieuses had their own fonts.

The creations of the greatest typographer of the age,

Roger Excoffon.

Excoffon's creations represent a rupture in typographical practice,

a break with the formality and sobriety of San Serif modernism,

which was supposedly functional and which adhered to the machine ethic.

They make a further break.

Most typefaces that are founded in handwriting, scribes,

take as their source italic or copperplate scripts.

Mistral is based on Excoffon's own hand.

The sheer ingenuity is extraordinary.

Other scribes do not attempt to join the letters.

Excoffon devised a method of doing so, of eliding all the letters of the alphabet,

of accommodating every permutation.

Each letter is moulded, even contorted,

so that it possesses a sort of universal joint.

Legibility, sense, is often apparent only through a letter's conjunction with its neighbours.

In isolation, the marks do not invariably read as letters.

This tendency is taken further in choc,

which is heavier, and which lacks ligatures.

It is based not so much in handwriting as an scrawl.

Characters are pushed to the limit, abstracted.

Hieroglyphs, ideograms, sketches of fleeting phenomena

glimpsed out of the corner of an eye from a fast train,

a bird swoop, a pollard,

a gamboling lamb.

Within a couple of years of its publication in 1953,

Mistral was being used in the most improbable circumstances,

on the cover of the Playfair Cricket annual,

which is where I, a child obsessed by handwriting, first saw it.

But it remains sutured to France, a cricket-free zone.

And of all the works of applied art of "les trente glorieuses", it is the most enduring.

It had no precursors and no successors, save a few borrowings.

The Radisson logo, for instance, attempts to combine Mistral

and Picasso's signature.

Alsace-Lorraine.

They are spoken in the same breath,

as though they are more than geographically akin.

But the gulf between Strasbourg and Nancy

is immeasurably greater than 100 miles.

Strasbourg is a border city, Nancy most decidedly is not.

It strives to represent itself as French France.

Not in some folkloric way. There is nothing franchouillard about it.

At least not about its architecture.

It is the city that most physically embodies the Enlightenment.

It was near here, at Luneville, that Stanislas Leszczynski held his court in exile,

after he had abdicated from the throne of Poland.

Abdicated for the second time.

His daughter, who had the misfortune to inherit his looks,

married Louis XV, who disliked him,

but nonetheless granted him the Duchy of Lorraine.

He devoted himself to receiving such figures as Montesquieu Voltaire and Emilie du Chatelet,

whom he treated to patisseries that he had himself made.

He's supposed to have invented the madeleine and the Rum Baba.

More likely, he introduced from Poland recipes then unfamiliar in France.

He wrote several works of Epicurean philosophy.

He counselled happiness, optimism, virtuous hedonism,

philanthropy, good fellowship, and self regard.

For him, happiness was owning a dwarf.

Baby Nicolas, whom he had bought as a child from his peasant parents.

Bebe was sometimes charming, sometimes intemperate,

always exhibitionistic, always illiterate,

always jealous of dwarves smaller than he was.

Stanislas's greatest work was Nancy, the Versailles for the people.

Stanislas's architect, Emmanuel Here, spent his entire life in Nancy.

His buildings are magnificent, and they are vectors of happiness.

Here may have been French, and his work may have been on French soil,

but it's stylistically indebted to Bavaria, to Italy,

and to Stanislas's Poland,

where all the major works were undertaken by Italians.

These were countries that were temperamentally sympathetic

to the essential irrationality of the Baroque.

Countries where Here's work would not have seemed so atypical.

Nor would it have seemed so dated.

The architecture belongs to the fashion of half a century before it was designed.

But so what?

The worth of art has nothing to do with novelty,

with being ahead of the game.

1962.

The porousness of France's borders

could hardly have been more clearly or more potently or more humanly demonstrated to me.

We drove in slow-mo past a bucolic wedding in the garden of a half-timbered inn,

with steep gables and dormer windows and garlands.

The guests merrily raised their glasses to us, in response to the parping of the car's horn.

We arrived at a farm, high on the eastern side of the Vosges.

I remember the lunch, a sumptuous lunch,

one of the finest lunches of my life, hare simmered in red wine,

with spices and bitter chocolate, the sauce thickened with its blood.

I remember the buttery noodles it was served with.

I remember drinking eau de vie de mirabelle for the first time in my life.

I remember a silver thread in the far distance - the Rhine.

And beyond it, on its right bank, an indistinct spectre.

A once troubling spectre - the Black Forest, Germany.

I remember the nonagenarian great-grandmother

whose 70-year-old daughter had cooked the hare.

I remember her telling me that this was the house

where she had been born, and from which she had never moved.

Yet she had changed nationality four times.

French, German, French, German, French.

She told me this without rancour. It was merely what had happened to her.

She hoped to die French.

She did.

Every man has two countries. His own and France.

Wrong.

Some men have no country.

The displaced of Algeria found that out in 1962.

Their choice famously was,

"la valise ou le cercueil" -

"the suitcase or the coffin".

Expatriation or death. Hundreds of thousands left Algeria.

Hundreds of thousands were murdered.

The authors of this overlooked genocide

were the terrorists of the FLN,

the National Liberation Front, and their new friend, Charles de Gaulle.

# Meme s'il y a toujours mon village

# Ou les enfants du quinzieme age

# Sautaient les feux de la Saint-Jean

# Meme s'il y a toujours le cimetiere

# Ou les filles faisaient des prieres

# Et repartaient en se signant

# Je ne le reconnaitrais plus,

# Ils ont change le nom des rues

# Je viens d'un pays qui n'existe plus

# Je viens d'un paradis perdu. #