Już 62 372 użytkowników uczy się języków obcych z Edustation.
Możesz zarejestrować się już dziś i odebrać bonus w postaci 10 monet.
Jeżeli chcesz się dowiedzieć więcej o naszym portalu - kliknij tutaj
Jeszcze nie teraz ZAREJESTRUJ SIĘlub
Zaloguj »
ZAREJESTRUJ SIĘ
Nie masz konta?
1. France Since 1871: Introduction
Poziom:
Temat: Społeczeństwo i nauki społeczne
Professor John Merriman:
This is History of France,
1871 to the Present.
And my name's Merriman,
and we meet Monday and
Wednesday in this room,
which is a pretty good room.
And the third,
the famous third hour to be
arranged is a section.
At the moment we have been
assigned four TAs,
though looking around we won't
need four TAs,
but at the moment we have
Da-Ihn Yoo, we have Michael
Verriman, we have Andrey Ivanov,
and we have Brian Reilly.
And knowledge of French or
anything at all about France is
not required in this class at
all.
Some of you have had my
introductory class,
a lot of you haven't.
A couple of you have had the
first half of this course,
most of you haven't.
Many of you won't be here the
next day, that's what happens
with shopping period,
and then the third day we see
how many folks we have.
We do have, for those people
who want to take it,
a travaux dirigés en
français,
we have a section that's French
speaking.
It's an idea that Chris Miller
in the French Department and I
came up with in the late '90s,
and my old dear friend Dick
Broadhead provided the funding.
And what this is,
is that if you want to take the
section in French,
you should have about an
equivalent of 130,
and the discussion's in French
and a couple of the books--I'll
talk about them in a minute--you
can read in French,
the others you read in English.
And it's not a la-di-dah thing
where--I'll tell you,
once there was a student in
there who had really fantastic
French and I said,
"Why is your French so good?"
And this person looked at me
and said, "Well the maid was
from Dijon."
And another time,
somebody's French was very good
and I said, "Why is your French
so good?"
"Well mommy used to take us to
Chamonix for the--pour les
vacances d'hiver."
Or, "our apartment next to the
Tour d'Eiffel gave me
contact with zee French
people."
And so it's not like that,
I assure you,
it truly isn't.
And you're not counted off for
errors that you make in writing,
either, if you're writing in
French;
and it really rocks, trust me.
We've done this for year after
year.
One year we actually had
something like forty-two people
signed up, and the course was
much bigger,
and we thought they all thought
they were getting a free prize
or something for signing up,
there were so many of them.
We ended up with about
thirty-two.
We've had a few with eight.
As long as we have five it will
go;
but, it's really fun and you'll
know people around here,
if you're above a first-year
student who have taken this,
and it really rocks,
it's really great.
And Brian Reilly is going to do
this.
He's from the French Department.
So, I would encourage you,
if you have that kind of
interest, to do that.
And you won't regret it,
there's never been anybody who
regretted doing it,
and it's just a lot of fun.
The other sections will meet in
English.
And usually what we do in this
course is we offer some night
sections, because people are
kind of busy,
and so we--there'll be
certainly a section Wednesday at
seven, certainly one Wednesday
at eight,
there'll be certainly sections
Thursday at 1:30 and 2:30,
and the French section is
tentatively scheduled for-- what
did we say?
We said Wednesday at 1:30,
isn't that it?
Or something like that.
It all shakes down,
and it is fun.
Now what do you got to do in
the course?
Well you have to come with good
humor, and that I hope you'll
have;
come to the lectures and do the
reading, see the films,
which I'll talk about in
awhile, and go to sections,
and hopefully participate in
sections;
and the sections tend to be fun
in this course.
So, as so far I know,
you're dying to know about
midterm and final and those
wretched things.
I wouldn't give a midterm,
because I think it's a waste of
time, except we have to have
some sort of--it gives you an
indication how you're doing in
the course.
If you screw it up we don't
count it as much as if you do
well.
And the final is--we will give
you on the last day of class the
questions for the final.
We give you six questions.
And we will ask you on the day
of the final to respond to three
of those--our choice,
it would be hardly sporting if
you got to pick the three.
And we also give you an oral
exam option that if you want to,
say, not be here on Christmas
morning taking your last final,
because they tend to go to the
twenty-third,
you can just blow off those
days and go off to Bermuda,
or go home, or do whatever you
do, and take the oral final,
which we used to cheat and have
it during Reading Period but
they caught on to me and you
can't do that so--they
frequently catch onto me--but so
now we have it on the first two
days of the Final Exam Period,
and you sign up for--it is not
an interrogation,
it is a friendly exchange about
the themes of the course.
Most people,
particularly in this course,
do that, but it's not
necessarily an advantage to do
it.
People--this is not the
course--if they're doing,
working hard in this course,
this isn't the one out of five
they're blowing off,
then they tend to do that and
instead of writing for three and
a half hours and getting writing
cramp--and inevitably our final
exam was in that horrible place,
Osborne Hall,
where you're sort of tilting
like this, like you're leaning
out of an airplane,
and you sit up there for three
and a half damn hours writing
your brains out,
and you can have a sporty
conversation of twenty-five
minutes with one of the teaching
assistants,
and you're out of there.
So, that's what a lot of people
do;
in fact, about two thirds of
the folks do that.
I have some very funny stories
about those, but now is not the
time to do that,
especially because we're being
filmed.
But most people do very well.
Let me tell you a little bit
about the reading.
The books are available at the
Yale Bookstore,
Barnes &
Noble--here you guys,
here's some of these--and the
textbook is a good textbook,
it's really good in cultural
history.
A guy called Chip Sowerwine,
Charles Sowerwine,
who's a buddy of mine
from--lives in Melbourne,
in Australia,
and it's a good book.
And the other books are,
in their own way,
sort of classics that you'll
enjoy.
Now, many of you,
if you've had French anything,
have read Germinal,
and if you haven't read
Germinal,
now is your chance to read it.
Zola was one of the first great
naturalist writers and he would
go up to the nord,
to the Anzin,
to the mines of Anzin,
up here in the north of France,
and he would go down in the
mines and see how people worked.
He would see how
fifteen-year-old girls worked in
the mine--Catherine,
who grows up rather quickly in
the mines.
And germinal means "the
budding," it's a reference to a
calendar of the French
Revolution.
It also kind of implies hope,
and it's about what happens
when people try to mobilize
these braves gars,
these workers in the mines.
And if you've never read it,
it's a great,
great, novel.
A Life of Her Own is a
book that I became obsessed
with, oh, about five or six
years ago.
Emilie Carles was born in
abject poverty in the High Alps,
in the Hautes-Alpes near
Gap,
up really high in the mountains
here, and she became a
schoolteacher as a common sort
of means of social ascension for
a poor person from a village.
She was born right near the
Italian border,
but just in abject poverty.
She married an anarchist from
the Department of the
Ardèche,
where we happened to live or
are,
at least were legally residents
and spend much of our time down
here;
and she moved from one school
to the next.
And when she was a very old
lady, she led a demonstration to
try to protect her little part
of France on the Italian border
from being exploited by tourism,
more about that at the end,
and with her tractor she led
this demonstration.
It was a phenomenal thing,
and she ended up on this very
famous French television show
called Apostrophe,
with Bernard Pivot,
who said that she was one of
the most interesting people that
he'd ever had on his show.
And she died in 1977.
And she published her memoirs;
it was called A Soup Made of
Wild Herbs.
And of course it was translated
into English with that title,
and then they changed it
to--what did they change it to
in English?
A Life of Her Own.
And it's about being a young
girl and a woman,
but it's an extraordinary
thing.
I became so obsessed with it
that we drove up there so I
could visit every school at
which she had taught,
and we actually found somebody
who--we knew he wouldn't like
her because he was sweeping out
the church,
he worked for one of the
churches, and she was very
anti-clerical.
So, we actually met somebody
who knew her;
and the school is now named
after her;
but, it's a wonderful,
wonderful read,
it's just great.
My family got a little tired of
this and said,
"do we have to--how many more
of these places do we have to
see in which this woman taught?"
But anyway, we saw most of them.
And then Henri Barbusse,
who was a Communist,
became a Communist,
who was a writer in World War
One and who served in World War
One,
and he wrote a great book which
is called Under Fire that
my dear friend and colleague Jay
Winter has just written a new
introduction for,
and that's about the horrors of
the trenches.
It's just the sheer--it's
amazing, it's an amazing read
too.
And then, Marc Bloch;
I once had the pleasure when I
was giving a talk at the
University of Strasbourg and
sitting in Marc Bloch's office.
Marc Bloch taught people like
me in the way to do history.
People like me grew up on
reading Marc Bloch,
though I assure you he was much
older than me,
and he created a way of doing
history called the
Annales School.
And his first book actually was
called The Healing Kings,
because in Medieval French
times and Medieval English times
when a king was crowned there
was this sense that if the king
could cure you by touching
you--excuse me for touching you.
If you had scrophula,
which was sort of a
degenerative disease--it's hard
to find people who have
scrophula anymore--the king
could touch the person and cure
it,
and it became part of sort of
the popular culture of royalty.
And they tried this in 1825
with disastrous results;
but, this was his first great
book.
And at the age of about
fifty-five the war came along,
and he wrote a book called
Strange Defeat,
explaining why in 1940 France
fell so rapidly.
And then he'd been--he was
Jewish, and he was fired from
his post in Strasbourg,
under Vichy,
that is the collaboration
government of World War Two,
because he was Jewish.
And then he caught on at the
University of Montpellier,
and then they realized that he
was a Jew, so he was gone.
Then he went back to a farm
that he owned in the Limousin,
in the Creuze,
up here near a boring place I
used to work called Gerais.
And he sat around and thought,
"well, I'm going to do
something."
So, not at a horribly advanced
age, I would like to think,
he went to Lyon,
which was a capital of the
Resistance because they have all
these things called traboules in
Lyon,
was one reason--they're
passageways where you'd keep the
silk, raw silk dry.
But he got set up by somebody,
by a French person--more about
this in a minute,
and he was supposed to meet
somebody on a bridge overlooking
the Saône River--Lyon was
at the confluence of the
Rhône and the Saône.
You'll learn a lot about France
in here, but we don't ask you
questions like that,
"what two rivers meet in
Lyons?"
But, he was set up and he was
hideously tortured here and he
was killed.
So Marc Bloch taught us,
in a way, how to do history.
But he also,
writing this book,
taught us how to think about
the past, and more about that in
a minute,
and how to think about what
happened in France between 1940
and 1945.
I do a seminar on that next
semester.
And then what?
I forgot one,
I forgot to put one in;
no, no here it is.
Sarah Farmer,
who sat in the same classroom
literally, before it was
remodeled,
had written a wonderful book
called Martyred Village
which first appeared,
chez Gallimard,
in France, and it's about a
village that I know very well
because I used to live in
Limoges,
in which on the tenth of June,
1944, the SS,
German troops came and simply
slaughtered everybody.
They shot the men,
and they put the women and the
children in the church,
and they killed them.
But what's interesting about
that is why this particular
village became the symbol for
martyrdom in France.
Why?
Because it was thought to be
virgin, they weren't resistors,
they weren't collaborators--it
was there, it was martyred.
And so, she wrote this book;
but, what's more interesting
than that is that the people who
did the massacre,
in the SS,
many of them were Alsatian.
Now, Alsatians were French,
even though many of them spoke
German dialect.
And so after the war they said
we are the
malgré-nous,
we were put on trial
because--we were in the Army
because we were forced to be,
because Alsace was the
next--directly into Hitler's
Reich.
And when they were acquitted,
only two people who were
condemned from those forces,
they had joined voluntarily and
the others, the
malgré-nous were,
"in spite of ourselves," were
pardoned.
There were riots Limoges that
they were pardoned.
There were riots in Colmar and
in Strasbourg,
in Alsace, that they had been
condemned at all.
So identity,
national identity is very
complex, and we talk about the
war--this is,
it's a sparkling account.
And what they did with this
village, ghoulish,
you might say,
is they left it just the way it
is, or was, on the tenth of June
1944.
They left all the buildings
blown up or caught on fire,
and they have crosses where
people were shot,
and there was,
there used to be a ghoulish
museum with a knife opened up
that indicated they tried to
defend themselves.
And then now they've put in a
centre de mémoire,
sort of a memory site there,
that's kind of slick but it's
fine.
A friend of mine who's a
senator is the president of it
there.
But they kept that village just
the way it was,
and they built one next to it.
In about 1952 some people,
about your age,
started to party,
and somebody came out with a
gun and said we don't party in
Oradour-sur-Glane.
So, imagine growing up in a
place like that where the past
was so--was written not only in
the death of people that you
knew,
because everybody you knew died
basically.
One woman got out,
she went through the--there was
a vitrau,
a window behind the altar,
and she was able to get out.
Anyway, so those--the reading
is great.
So, what can I say?
I'm certainly biased but the
reading is great,
the reading rocks.
Now, what about the films,
the movies?
Inevitably there is Paths of
Glory, Les Sentiers de la
Gloire.
If you've never seen it,
it's a Kirk Douglas movie
that's a good movie,
and it's about the mutinies on
the Western Front,
and it's very good.
We used to say,
well come to 101 and it'll be a
film that'll be shown at 8 p.m.
or something;
but, nobody ever does that,
they all watch it in the
privacy of their rooms or you
can go watch it--we'll figure it
out;
but, it's a really wonderful
movie.
And then you'll see a film
called Au Revoir,
Les Enfants,
sort of see you children,
goodbye children.
How many have seen Louis
Malle's Au Revoir,
Les Enfants?
Ah, many of you have seen it,
it's a great film.
It's a true story,
it's about Fountainebleu,
which is southeast of Paris,
sort of a fancy place,
and it's about his childhood
when he was in
collège;
collège is a
middle school--you'll learn
about French schools.
My kids have been in French
schools for many years so I know
about these places.
And he--one day this boy showed
up in the class--this was during
Vichy, about 1943,
maybe it's '44,
and he's new and he's not
different, he's just not from
there.
He's obviously from Paris,
and he was Jewish.
And it's about the attempt--the
role of the Catholic Church in
Vichy is not a very savory one,
the French hierarchy and many
priests, but many priests were
very heroic and when this
particular priest,
who was a real live guy called
Père Jean,
Father John,
tried to hide this boy in the
school so he wouldn't be
arrested and sent off to the
camps,
but he was denounced by
somebody who was in the militia,
the milice is what it's
called,
which is sort of paramilitary
thugs that worked for Vichy;
and, of course,
it does not have a happy
ending.
And then the last film,
most of you won't have seen it,
called La Haine;
hate, I guess you would
translate that as hate,
or hatred.
And I'm very interested in what
happened in the French suburbs
two years ago;
in fact, I wrote an instant
article on it for an
encyclopedia because some of the
work I'd earlier done was about
why French suburbs and European
suburbs are different than
American suburbs.
American suburbs,
many of you come from
them--Hillsborough,
California;
Darien, Connecticut;
Grosse Pointe, Michigan;
places like that.
That's not what the suburbs are
in Europe.
Suburbs are where people
unwanted by the center go,
and the fear of the suburbs has
been something that--by the
prosperous center has been a
very long,
important theme in French
history, particularly written in
Paris;
and I'll talk more about that.
And La Haine,
which was a small budget movie,
became this great success;
and it's a tough movie to
watch, it's tough,
it's verbally tough to watch,
and it'll have subtitles.
But it was done in 1996 or '97,
but it's really superb.
So, what kind of--I don't want
to give everything away--but
what kind of themes do we have
in a course like this,
what have I forgotten about?
Oh me.
I'm Merriman,
I said that,
I still am actually,
and sometimes I feel after a
day like yesterday that I'm sort
of, you know what,
I'm not;
but, anyway,
my office hours are--when are
my office hours?--Monday,
one to three,
in Branford College,
where I was a Master long ago,
K13, Branford College.
And I'm also like everybody
else on emails;
and I'll get your emails,
panic emails at 3:10 in the
morning and I'll reply at 4:45.
So, it goes like that.
What kind of themes?
Let me talk a little bit about
some of them.
Let me just talk about,
oh, about three or four of
them, just so you can see what
hopefully you'll be getting
yourself into.
And you'll have fun,
you'll learn a lot about
France, I'll tell you that.
Okay, one theme I'm interested
in is--well let me tell you
about lectures,
first of all.
I do not do chronological
lectures, "well in 1882,
and then it was followed by
1883."
I don't do that.
I lecture about what I like to
talk about, what's interesting,
that'll hopefully make you
understand what the big issues
are in all of this.
So, that's why it's a good
thing to come to lecture and
also to read the books.
But, one of the things I'm
interested in is national
identity, in fact because we
kind of have complex attitudes
toward our own identity I
suppose,
me and my family.
But, if you took--and a few of
you have heard me say this
before so forgive me--in 1789 if
you tried to guess how many
people spoke French,
in France, you might come up
with eighty percent as a guess
or ninety or whatever--it was
about fifty percent.
Some people were bilingual.
So, what did they speak?
Well, start anywhere you want.
Breton, which is a language
that has nothing to do with
French at all--here,
oh I've got a really funny
story I was going to tell about
a Breton priest,
a French speaking Breton
priest, but that's for another
day.
Anyway, they spoke Breton here.
Now, Nantes isn't considered
technically part of Brittany,
but they spoke Breton there,
which is basically a Gaelic
language.
And then if you go up,
you think, well they spoke
French there,
certainly in Normandy,
but they spoke in many parts a
patois.
In about 1844,
this kind of crazy guy took a
big knife and he slit the throat
of his mother and his two
sisters,
and they were--the police were
looking for him.
And he was from Normandy,
he lived near Cannes in
Normandy, and they found him
eating clams and things for
survival on the beach.
And they had to bring in a
translator, somebody to
translate.
Before he was guillotined he
dictated his life.
The book, Michel Foucault,
a famous philosopher,
got a hold of and wrote a
preface for it;
in French is,
was, Moi,
Pierre Rivière,
ayant égorgé
ma mère and mes deux
soeurs.
And me, Pierre Rivière,
having slit the throat of my
mother and my two sisters,
I'm going to tell it like it
was.
And he did.
But the important thing is that
they had to have a translator
for him in the 1840s.
When Bernadette of Lourdes,
in 1856, believed that she saw
the Virgin Mary,
of course they had to have
somebody come and translate
there what was a mountain patois
influenced by Spanish.
But, if we'll move north here,
up here a lot of the people
spoke Flemish,
very few now.
You don't have to know this,
it's just kind of fun;
I love it, but,
anyway, and then in parts of
Lorraine they spoke a German
dialect that's very much like
what's spoken in Fribourg.
In Alsace almost everybody,
as you will see later,
spoke German dialect.
But it didn't mean,
if you asked somebody,
"Are you French?"
and they reply in German,
"Yes, I'm French," that
doesn't--language doesn't
necessarily tell you how people
feel about their identity.
Some sage once said,
I don't know who it was,
but I love this expression,
that a language is a dialect
with a powerful army.
Look at Spain.
Why was Catalan illegal to
publish until Franco croaked in
1975, clutching the left elbow
of St.
Therèse or something
another?
Because Castille,
Spanish speaking Castille,
with its command economy,
had conquered the Basques and
conquered the Catalans.
And so, all this will change
during this period.
Or, if you move further down,
you get into Savoie,
which was Savoy,
Hautes-Savoie,
Savoie, which were next in 1860
and they spoke in essentially
Piedmontese, they spoke an
Italian language.
If you go to Provence then,
Provençal is a written
language.
You get a sense of that if you
see a really great movie like
Jean de Florette,
with the inevitable
Gérard Depardieu who's in
every single film made this side
of Disneyland,
Disneyworld, he is there;
but, with Daniel Auteuil,
who was fantastic,
he had to put one of those
things that dentists put in your
mouth when they're going to give
you an x-ray that make you feel
uncomfortable in order to
pronounce perfectly this
Provençal language.
And it's not just the accent of
"ain,"
"quatre-vain" or
"enfain" instead of
enfin-- it's a whole
language.
And, moving along here,
you get down to Catalonia,
to French Catalonia,
speaks the same--we still know
old ladies down there who speak
Catalan,
the same language spoken down
all the way to Valencia,
at least along the coast.
You move in here,
you go to Basque
country--besides all the patois,
you go to the Basque country,
Basque is only remotely related
to Finnish and to Magyar,
to Hungarian.
And then you've got all these,
you've got over in the patois
here, you've got Limosin patois.
You've got all these languages.
So, the only point of interest
about this is that when do
people start thinking that
they're French,
as opposed to from a certain
family, from a certain village,
from a certain region?
When do they start thinking of
themselves as French?
And this has been hotly debated
in the literature for a very
long time.
There are still people now that
live--there's a woman that lives
near our village and she's lived
in our village,
she was born in the next
village, and she's lived in our
village for forty years because
she married a guy from the
village;
and she's from the next
village, about twenty football
throws away, or a little more
than that.
And somebody as a joke once
asked her, "how do you feel
living in this village after all
these years?"
And she said,
"oh sometimes I get homesick."
There was a sense that she'll
never be from the village,
she's from somewhere else;
but, sometime between 1750 and
maybe 1990 most--almost
everybody in France began seeing
themselves as French.
And the schools play a major
role in this and thus all these
kids who grew up speaking patois
or Provençal or Gascon--I
forgot Gascon,
around Bordeaux,
they can sing the Marseillaise
in acceptable French as they
march off to be slaughtered.
When do peasants become
Frenchman, as someone posed.
And it's an interesting
question, because it tells you a
lot about regional identity and
about national identity.
And the role of the schools is
important in that because what
happens is that the Virgin Mary
gets elbowed off the walls by
Marianne,
the female image of the
republic, and that,
it starts with the French
Revolution,
but it's a very long process.
So, we'll talk some about that,
but not that much.
I guess the other two themes I
want to discuss,
and not in great detail,
but--are the wars.
Obviously, World War One
is--unleashes the demons of the
twentieth century;
nobody could have anticipated
that all these empires would
collapse.
Anti-Semitism was out there
before that, in Germany and
France, as you'll see with the
Dreyfus Affair,
all sorts of places;
but, World War One transformed
Hitler from a man who hated
social democrats,
who hated socialists,
into a man obsessed with
killing Jews.
World War One has an enormous
impact on the way people viewed
themselves, in France and
everywhere;
everybody knew people who died
in the war.
It was the defining experience
of the twentieth century,
and the violence of the war
continues into the 1920s and
'30s.
So, you can see the whole
period till 1945 is an even more
horrible thirty years war than
that of the seventeenth century.
There are 35,000,36,000
communes in France,
that is administrative units.
Paris is a commune,
but so is a village of twelve
people, is a commune--36,000.
In World War One,
only twelve didn't have
somebody killed.
France in the 1920s was a
country of widows dressed in
black, of people missing limbs
or coughing their lungs out from
the poison gas,
if they were lucky enough to
survive, putting huge strains on
welfare systems--obviously it
was very important that they be
taken care of,
in a country in which the
birthrate had stopped in most of
the country in the
mid-nineteenth century--unique
in the world.
There weren't enough men to go
round, they were dead.
You can go into villages and
towns almost anywhere,
particularly in the lower
Massif Central,
down here, and you can find in
towns of just tiny,
tiny towns, seventy-four.
I'm a counter,
I count things all the time,
it drives me crazy.
I'll count up the number of
people killed in every church
that I go to visit to look at.
It's simply extraordinary.
We can't even imagine what
that's like.
There are only three people
left in Britain who fought in
World War One,
only three, and they're about
110-years-old or something like
that.
But it's difficult to
understand what the impact was,
and the poisoning of the
political atmosphere.
We'll talk about the Battle of
the Somme, s-o-m-m-e.
And the Battle of the Somme,
in the first day of the Battle
of the Somme,
the first of July,
1916, there were 20,000 British
soldiers killed.
In the first three days,
just counting the British,
there were more British
soldiers killed and seriously
wounded than there were
Americans killed in World War
One,
Korea and Vietnam combined,
in three days;
comparable chilling effects in
Russia, and in Britain,
and in Austro-Hungary as well.
Where was the flower of English
youth, this used to say?
Well, they were hung up on that
old barbed wire,
they were dead,
and your life expectancy wasn't
very good,
because of foolish military
decisions, because of a war that
ended up being the war fought in
which no one,
outside of a few people who had
seen the Russo-Japanese War
around Muckton,
could have ever imagined.
The finest, some of the finest
books on any topic are those--of
history--are those on World War
One,
the great war in modern memory
of the British--of Siegfried
Sassoon, about Siegfried
Sassoon,
and Wilfred Owen whose mother
got the news that he'd been
killed on the day of the
armistice.
There's an extraordinary
literature, the close
concurrent,
the close competition for that,
the richest literature would be
the Spanish Civil War with
Orwell, and Borkenau and
Brennan.
But, we'll talk a lot about
World War One,
how it started,
what it meant,
and what the impact was.
And there's nowhere you can go
in Northern France where you're
not just awash with military
cemeteries around Reims there,
anywhere up in the end near the
Chemin des Dames.
These are battlefields in which
every day--in fact,
in the Battle of the Somme
there was one casualty for every
meter of the entire front of the
war,
of that particular battle--it's
really extraordinary.
And it goes--it went on and on
and on.
And we'll talk about the impact
of what this happened,
there were obvious impacts,
but what happened on civil
society and on politics.
Where were the leaders of the
'20s and the '30s?
They were dead,
they were dead,
killed at eighteen,
killed at nineteen.
I was in The British War
Museum, the Imperial War Museum
the other day,
and I'd been there four or five
times,
and I went--and they have a
thing where you can look up dead
people.
And so I said,
well, I wonder if there's
somebody with my name who was
killed.
And there was.
And my uncle had an extremely
odd--my grandfather had an
extremely odd name,
and there was somebody of his
name too that was killed.
They all died.
And it was--not everybody,
but in France 1,500,000 people
died, and that's a huge
demographic chunk,
it's like a big shark took a
big bite out of your basic
pyramid of your demographic
tree.
And something like Hitler--
this isn't a course on Hitler
but it's from the other
course--but why this guy who had
no friends,
who was just a pain,
just a pain,
he was so peinible,
he was such a pain;
and he had one guy that he used
to bore with his stories about
architecture and painting,
and Wagner whom he loved
dearly.
And you could never imagine
that he would be somebody that
people would listen to on the
radio, hour after hour,
because that's how long he
talked;
or that when Stauffenberg tries
to kill him in 1944 the Germans
would pour out of the--into the
street to thank god for saving
the Fuhrer.
Why did he become somebody
Seig Heil?
He was one of the guys,
he was one of the gars,
he was one of the guys.
He'd been wounded three times,
and he was a runner,
he carried messages to the
trenches,
from the generals who were all
drinking champagne in Reims,
to the front.
And he was wounded three times,
and he was one of them.
He had that stamp of having
been one of the guys.
And the violence keeps going.
You have to explain why all of
this has happened,
and you have to find people
that made it happen,
and it was the Jews,
and it was the socialists,
and it was the communists,
and it was the homosexuals,
and we'll kill them all.
And that's what he did.
And for the point of view of
France, they emerged from the
war with the reality that they
are in victory a weaker nation
than Germany is in defeat.
And so it's a big shadow over
the whole damn
thing--incredible.
And Marc Bloch,
when you read The Collapse
of France,
it's very interesting,
interesting stuff.
World War Two,
I'll give you two stories.
When I was working in a place
called Tulle,
which is down here--t-u-l-l-e,
not Tours,
but Tulle-- I knew vaguely that
there had been a massacre there
in June sixth,
1944, and a lot of people had
been hung.
I didn't have any money.
My kids would say,
"oh dad, not that I don't have
any money story again."
But I didn't have any money and
so I would be eating ice-cream
and I got to know this guy with
my not very good French then,
and we talked and I said,
"do you remember the day the
Germans came back and hung all
those people?"
And he said, "yeah."
And I said, "well how did you
get away?"
And he said,
"well,"--Tulle is in a,
there's a big valley,
it's a real long town,
and these houses have balconies
like this.
So he went up and he hid.
He was twelve,
he would've been killed,
fourteen, they didn't care.
And one day so I was eating my
ice-cream because the archives
were closed, and this woman came
up,
and she was probably about
fity, or something like that,
and she ordered ice-cream,
and so this guy says,
"well, Madame whatever,
Madame Dupuis,
you remember that day don't
you,
when the Germans came back?"
And she said,
"oh I sure do,
they hung my husband from that
pole."
And that pole was right next to
this ice-cream stand in front of
the theater in Tulle.
And that was 1970--more about
that in a second.
And I have a friend who's a
Parisian lawyer who works in
Africa a lot,
and when he was a little boy
the Germans came to get his
father who was a Greek Jew,
and he was taken away and
killed, of course.
And one shouldn't forget that
the people who rounded up the
Jewish children in the Marais,
where lots of Jews lived,
were French--the Germans
would've been happy to do
it--but were French police,
they were French police.
And his father was denounced by
a policeman, by a policeman.
And after the war that
policeman directed traffic at
the market every Saturday,
and the widow walked by and saw
this man, knowing he had
denounced her husband who had
been taken away and killed.
Now, in 1970 there was still
this collective amnesia in
France.
The myth, perpetuated by De
Gaulle, the big guy,
was that in France everybody
had resisted except for a few
elites,
and then France had risen up to
follow his great shadow and had
thrown off the oppressor and
founded a republic.
In 1953 there was a documentary
made about the deportation of
Jews, from Paris,
and there was a film made about
this.
They put together a
documentary, and in one of the
scenes it's a camp place called
Drancie,
which is out near the airport,
halfway to the airport,
to Roissy Airport.
And there was a French gendarme
who was guarding the French
Jews, a French gendarme guarding
the French Jews,
and they lifted him out of the
movie;
they literally took him off the
screen.
So if you see it,
he ain't there.
Why?
Because the image was nobody
collaborated or hardly anybody,
and everybody resisted.
Now, that amnesia which--and
part of it was De Gaulle didn't
want to give the communists
credit,
because they were the party of
75,000 martyrs,
because they were organized and
they resisted;
other people did too.
There was a Catholic
resistance, there was your basic
Gaullist resistance.
I remember when De Gaulle died
I was in Paris.
I was the only person frisked
going into Notre Dame,
literally, that I saw.
They threw me up against the
wall and checked me out,
because I was a kid and I
wanted to go there and see,
just for the purpose of
history, of being there.
But, De Gaulle perpetuated this
myth about the resistance.
And then there were cracks in
the myth.
And the first crack was a movie
that's so long that it used to
be the janitors,
the people who cleaned
these--the very nice people who
cleaned these rooms used to call
it a two six-pack movie because
it was so long.
I'm not supposed to say that,
we're filmed.
Cut that baby out of there.
But, it's about a four-hour
film, and it's called The
Sorrow and the Pity and it's
about Clermont-Ferrand,
which is in the Massif Central
here.
And there's some amazing scenes
in it where they shave the heads
of horizontal collaborators,
which is sort of a crude way of
talking about French women who
slept with German
officers--horizontal
collaboration.
And at the end of the movie,
there was Maurice Chevalier.
Maurice Chevalier was a
crooner, he was a singer,
he was--if your parents knew
about France,
he was the person that your
grandparents even had heard
about, and he was somebody from
a poor part of Paris,
and he was from
Ménilmontant,
and he had this straw hat and
he sung tunes-- "very good my
boys,"
and all of this stuff.
And at the end of the movie he
says, "You know,
there are zese very bad
rumors about me,
and that I sang for zee
German troops,
and I want to tell you I only
sang for zee boys,"
that is, for the French
interned soldiers in Germany
then.
It may have been true or maybe
not, but it made people start
looking at the past,
what really happened between
1940 and 1945,
or '44, end of '44,
what really happened.
There was a trial of a very old
man in 1998 called Maurice
Papon, tried in Bordeaux.
And he did very well after the
war.
He had signed during the war
all sorts of slips that sent
Jews off to the station,
the Gare St.
Jean in Bordeaux,
to the train station,
to be shipped off to the east;
but, he did very well,
he became a minor Gaullist
official, and he did very well,
and they finally caught up with
him.
And he said,
"I'm a good bureaucrat,
I did--they were pleased with
my work.
I signed those fiches,
those formulas and if I hadn't
been there to save the hundreds
then they all would've died."
And he was--but you can't put
somebody 90-years-old in the
slammaire.
And so, he was in kind of in
this very minimum security and
he finally just croaked a while
ago.
One point that he tried to--he
escaped actually,
with the help of some friends,
and they found him dining in an
elegant Swiss restaurant.
It was too--it was trop beau.
But, anyway,
so the other thing that
happened was a friend of mine,
I'm very proud to say,
called Robert Paxton,
wrote a book called Vichy
France, and he had to use
captured German documents
because the French documents
weren't open,
they were not available,
because the big secret of
collaboration should not be
known.
And we're going through in
France the same thing now with
the War of Algeria too--but more
about that later.
So, give me two more minutes,
I'm going to end,
and a few of you,
faces, I've heard this before,
people that I know;
but, I guess one reason why I'm
in history--well,
because I read a book a long
time ago.
I didn't know what else to do,
and I read one book that really
influenced me.
But, I also read a poem,
and this is kind of a
signature-- not my signature,
but the kind of course it is.
Because you're going to hear
about de Gaulle and you're going
to hear about fancy people,
but you're also going to hear
about very ordinary people who
were caught up in kind of the
torrent of the twentieth century
and the late nineteenth century.
So, let me just read you this
poem, it is short,
and it's a Brecht poem and it's
called "A Worker Reads History."
And then you can go home,
or go shop, shop till you drop,
whatever.
Who built the seven gates
of Thebes?
The books are filled with the
names of kings.
Was it kings who hauled the
craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon,
so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time?
In which of Lima's houses,
The city glittering with gold,
live those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese
wall was finished
Where did the masons go?
Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph.
Who reared them up?
Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph?
Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces?
And even in Atlantis,
of the legend
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed
for their slaves.
Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in
his Army?
Philip of Spain wept as his
fleet was sunk and destroyed.
Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Great triumphed
in the Seven Years War.
Who triumphed with him?
Each page a victory,
at whose expense the victory
ball?
Every ten years a great man
Who paid the piper?
So many particulars,
So many questions."
And if you hang around,
as I hope you will,
we'll get to the bottom of some
of them.
Have a good weekend!
