Francofile

Romanesque Holiday

As much as I admire the perfection and idealization of classical forms, I have a soft spot for the sculptors of the 11^th and 12^th centuries. Their creations are naive, exuberant, and expressive. What they lack in technical finesse, the make up for in humor and emotion. There are not many well-known examples of this style of architecture in the places I have lived in France. Romanesque cathedrals in and around Paris were mostly destroyed and replaced by Gothic ones. And in Nice, the predominant style remains the Baroque. There are superb examples of Romanesque cathedrals in the Southwestern quadrant of France (Poitiers, Toulouse, Moissac, etc.) and many others scattered around France in places that were less touched by the march of progress. 

A well-preserved example is in the town of Vézelay, southeast of Paris. In 1146, Bernard de Clairvaux, at the urging of King Louis VII, preached on behalf of the first Crusade from the Ste Marie Madeleine Basilica in Vézelay. The interior is characterized by the simple rhythm of graceful rounded arches (thus the name "Romanesque"), but the eye is also drawn to the proliferating capital sculptures at the tops of the pillars.

When I observe the outside of a Romanesque church, I always check out the "modillons," which are playful little demon, human or animal faces that decorate the underside of the roof line. And I always visit the cloister, if possible, as the capitals there often display delightful relief sculpture as well. It is in the cloister where I find it easiest to imagine what the solitude and serenity of monastic life might be like.

                   

Another favorite is Saint Lazare Cathedral in Autun, which dates from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and was formerly the chapel of the Dukes of Burgundy. The sculptural program of the tympanum centers around Christ in glory, also showing the weighing of the souls. Notice the reactions of the cartoonish figures as their souls are either condemned to hell or elevated to heaven.

Spain (Catalonia in particular) is also a rich hunting ground for Romanesque churches. Barcelona has a museum of Romanesque Art, containing many fresco fragments removed from country churches, where they had been in a deteriorating state. Some good examples of Romanesque sculpture produced in France can be visited in New York City, at the Cloisters. An outlying part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Romanesque cloisters are presented in a way that recreates, to the extent possible, their original setting. If one is in the mood to see art and architecture that can be at once primitive, grotesque, whimsical, emotional, and spiritual, a Romanesque church is a good option.

Wish I Were Here

Although I loved traveling in Quebec this summer, I am suffering from France withdrawal.  I had the opportunity to go there three times in the preceding year, and will go again next summer with a group of students.  Fellow bloggers (especially Elisabeth--merci!) and other friends help me keep current with what is going on in France, but I am having pangs of nostalgia.  To console myself, I am trying to remember things that I didn't like about last summer's trip.  It was hot.  Very hot.  Sometimes my fellow travelers and I got cranky waiting in line or carrying bags or squeezing onto a bus in the heat.  We had little access to electronic devices or automobiles.  Can you tell from the pictures we were panting from the heat?

This exercise is not much consolation, because there was a lot to love about the trip.  My colleague, Joe and the students were wonderful, darned near all the time.  I was delighted as always by some old stand-bys: the socca in Old Nice, the scents of lavender and herbes de Provence, Berthillon ice cream (caramel is the best), falafel in the rue des Rosiers in Paris, cheeses from the five corners of the hexagon, the cool stones of medieval cathedrals, favorite canvasses in the Seine-side art museums, the puffy clouds against the blue Parisian sky, and the liveliness of the street life.  This time we also took a side trip to Florence, Italy, where we stayed in the shadow of Brunelleschi's dome.  Each trip is unique in the chance encounters one has with regular French people when wandering off the beaten path.  I have always found them generally helpful, generous, and friendly.  Another source of wonderment is the students' reactions to what they are seeing.  Seeing it through their eyes makes it new for me every time.  France is a text that is open to a wealth of interpretations.  That's what keeps us coming back.

 

Decrypting French Culture

I just finished a book that added to my knowledge of an area I thought I didn't have much left to learn about.  Wrong!  Two Canadian journalists, one anglophone and one francophone, spent 2 1/2 years in France and produced an incisive and informative book called Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong:  Why We Love France, But Not the French.*  Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoit Nadeau set out initially to determine why the French are resistant to globalization, but over time the question was reframed.  The book is a broader exploration of France and French thinking.  It focuses on present-day France, but includes a wealth of insights on how the past informs contemporary culture.   

Barlow and Nadeau make the case that we tend to judge the French according to our own models.  They explain Anglo-Saxon incomprehension of France in this way:

The typical traveler to Japan, China, or Africa is more open-minded than the typical traveler to France.  The fascinating rites of the Chinese, Japanese, or Zulus may cause travelers considerable discomfort and inconvenience, but travelers in these countries tend to accept these obstacles stoically, reasoning (rightly) that things are just done differently in foreign cultures. For some reason, when it comes to the French, North Americans drop this reflex.  ( . . . ) When North Americans, or more broadly, "Anglo-Saxons" are faced with France's peculiar way of doing things, they do not reason that they are dealing with an ancient people who have their own way of doing things.  Actually, they accuse the French of being inefficient, overly bureaucratic, unhygenic, and stuck in their ways.  And they take it personally.

We know that France has only existed as a country in the modern sense for a few hundred years.  Before the the rise of the monarchy, it was a patchwork of barbarian tribes.  However, as Barlow and Nadeau point out, the ancestors of the French go back to the Cro Magnon man of the Paleolithic age.  Although France is a melting pot and has gone through plenty of upheaval, the French people never arrived in the midst of a primitive culture, wiped the slate clean, and started over as we did in America.  This framework of a modern country influenced by a past stretching back twenty thousand years provides the backdrop for their ethnological analysis of the French relationship to food, the land, war, education, governance, economics, law, religion, language, Europe, and other topics.  The study can be read cover-to-cover, or by cherry-picking chapters.  These Montreal-based journalists are now working on their next book--The Story of French.

*I initially balked at reading this book because of the title, but learned from one of the co-authors that the second part of the title had been imposed by the publisher.  It does not accurately reflect the content of the book.  The authors clearly grew to love both France and its inhabitants while working on the project.

A France-Bashing Watchdog Site

Just discovered this interesting site that monitors images of France in the media and entertainment world.  It contains information not only about who is doing mindless France-bashing, but about who has repented of it.  For example, the North Carolina congressman who came up with the idea of calling French fries "freedom fries" regrets that his joke was taken seriously and has since denounced the war in Iraq.

http://www.miquelon.org/

French/American Mind/Body

Having had the opportunity to spend a number of stays in France over the decades, as long as a year and a half, I have been able to adopt, fleetingly, the feeling of processing existence through a French mind. This did not come about quickly or easily. People ask me at what point one "knows" one has become French. Is it when you first realize that you have dreamed in the language? Has "Frenchness" then become the default mode of existence? I cannot pinpoint a pivotal moment. But I know that at various times I have been that cultural chameleon who crosses over, then eventually back, with both identities intact.

Before viewing the world through a "French" mind, I spent a lot of time sensing the world through a "French" body. As a college student on my first summer trip to France, my corporeal existence was transformed--by the food, the air, the sights, sounds, and textures around me. The air was different from the moment of stepping off the airplane. A special automobile exhaust smell mingles with the smoke of Gauloise cigarettes, the steam of espresso, and the slightly greasy smell of baking croissants. (If this sounds unpleasant, it is not.) People speak more softly, but motorcycles and sirens rip through the silence. Cobblestones meet the foot in a way that feels and sounds different from asphalt. The food is infused with the essences of the French “terroir”--the land, the sun and the air. Cheese might be covered in mold, ash, bits of straw, or even an occasional goat hair. The rituals of the table provided a discipline and a structure for the rest of daily life–the reverse of my prior experience. As one lives these sensations and rhythms, one comes to feel almost French.

One recalls Blaise Pascal’s 17th-century exhortations to adopt the rituals of Christianity first and true faith will surely follow. Similarly, if I lived as if I were in a French person’s skin, “Frenchness” might be conferred on me. This did happen at certain moments, after long periods of immersion. I only became conscious of it after the fact when I realized that I had negotiated an obstacle with no extra effort, no feeling of awkwardness, and no sense of being an outsider. When I realized I had handled a situation with nonchalant discretion, with a light dusting of understated irony, I knew that my transformation had been--at least momentarily--successful. When I realized that my interpretation of a situation showed the “esprit critique” of a French person, I knew I had crossed over into “Frenchness.”

I do not claim to be French. In France I would not pass for French. I am an American who is several inches taller that most French women, and most French men, for that matter. But part of my being was forged by living among the French, by breathing the same air, walking on the same stones, tasting the same earthy flavors, using the same words, and thinking with the same independence. So I have experienced the world, at times, as a person living in a French body, and as a person thinking with a French mind. Bi-culturalism is sometimes attained through wrenching or disagreeable circumstances. In my case, it was voluntary and desired. It has been one of the privileges of my life to experience this delicious duality. If only it could be available to all who desire it . . .

What France Means to the Rest of Us

This site is meant to provide a space for those who see France as providing an alternative approach to the domination of big business and the pursuit of self-interest at the expense of the collectivity we see in the US and elsewhere today.  It is a site for those who have found their association with France and the French to be transformative and life-affirming.  If the "French exception" is often vilified in US pseudo-news outlets, it does provide a constructive critique of the conformist mentality that is "de rigueur" in Bush's America.  If you are one of those who have come to know France as a place where where the humanizing values of civility and civilization are still important factors in public discourse and decision-making, this blog is intended for you.  As a long-time French educator, I have seen generations of students who have spent a summer, a semester, a year, or more in France, and who, without exception, have been enriched and transformed, as I have been and continue to be.  I invite those who want to get beyond today's stereotypes of France to post their own experiences with "la belle France" and its people.