King Henri’s Head

Royal reconstruction is rather the fashion at the present.  First we had England’s Richard III, discovered illegally parked in Leicester, now we have France’s Henri IV, the other king who lost his head during the Revolution!  

Buried in the Basilica of Saint Denis, along with the other monarchs of France, his body was dug up by revolutionaries in 1793 and thrown into a mass grave, though some mystery admirer managed to make off with the head.  It finally turned up, after a two century gap, in the attic of a retired tax inspector, or so it is claimed. 

Henri, who was assassinated in May 1610 by a deranged religious fanatic, was one of France’s better kings.  The first in the Bourbon line, he converted from Calvinism to Catholicism, thus ending the Wars of Religion that had troubled France for a good bit of the sixteenth century.  Paris was worth a mass, he famously said, just as famously promising the French people the means to have a chicken in the pot every Sunday. 

The reconstruction, carried out by Philippe Froesch, a craniofacial expert linked to Barcelona University, certainly looks convincing, resembling the king’s portraits in life, though the addition of the hair,  the beard and the ruff has certainly helped!  Identification was apparently aided by a gash near the nose, as well as a beauty spot and a pierced ear along with other key features.  But, alas and alack, Good King Henri has been the cause of a new civil war between France’s squabbling royals.  Yes, they are still around.

The head comes, you see, at the head of a new book – Henri IV, The Mystery of the Headless King by Stéphane Gabet and Philippe Charlier.  “Oh, yes it is”, they say.  “Oh, no it isn’t”, the critics reply.  The brain was still in place, they say, though that would have been removed after death by the royal embalmers. 

The royals have weighed in, the Bourbons on the pro side and their Orleanist cousins on the anti.  Prince Louis Bourbon, a banker and Henri’s distant descendant, says that the head is genuine.  There is no question of it, he explained to journalists Le Figaro, “It is both highly moving and a great responsibility.”  Well, I suppose it would be, coming face to face with a face from the past.  In the other corner there is Henri d'Orléans, Count of Paris and Duke of France, described the book as a "pseudo inquiry". "This affair seems closer to a novel than scientific or historic truth," he told French journalists. "What are we supposed to see from this supposed facial reconstitution – that he had a Bourbon nose?"

Yes, I suppose he has the point, by a nose at least.  Support here has come from Oliver Pascal, president of the French Institute of Genetic Testing, who told Figaro that there is no conclusive proof that the head is Henri’s.  “The information would not stand up in a court of law”, he added. 

Meanwhile the head that may or may not have been that of the king sits in a bank vault, ironically enough, in the Bastille district of Paris.  The mystery of the head looks set to intrude into French testimonials for some time to come, rather like that of King Charles, which continually troubled poor Mister Dick. 

‘Do you recollect the date,’ said Mr. Dick, looking earnestly at me, and taking up his pen to note it down, ‘when King Charles the First had his head cut off?’   I said I believed it happened in the year sixteen hundred and forty-nine.

” ‘Well,’ returned Mr. Dick, scratching his ear with his pen, and looking dubiously at me. ‘So the books say; but I don’t see how that can be. Because, if it was so long ago, how could the people about him have made that mistake of putting some of the trouble out of his head, after it was taken off, into mine?

Oh, well, long live the King’s Head! 

Winter of Discontent

I’m a polemicist by nature and inclination; I simply can’t help myself. Questioning and debating are habits I learned early. I’ve been refining them all of my life. I love taking people by surprise, appearing as if by ambush. Give me a nice meaty subject I can get my teeth into and, boy, that’s when I really bite!

The French Revolution was a ‘good thing’, a view that was put to me not so long ago. Yes, the Terror was bad but think of all the virtues, the Rights of Man and the Citizen and so on, a positive step forward for France; a positive step forward in history. What rot, what complete rot. It was a view that was originally expressed by that pain Paine, who professed himself competent in The Rights of Man to speak on behalf of the English nation.

I can only ever speak for myself but when I look at events like the French Revolution, when I see references to abstractions like the ‘rights of man,’ I see ideological purity translated into political action; and when purity acquires arms it kills and kills with abandon, removing all of the perceived impurities of life. From Rousseau and the Social Contract to Robespierre and Madame Guillotine, it’s a path followed through Virtue.

And for France, what did the Revolution bring? Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood were the watchwords, proved in practice to be no more than lying hypocrisy. What it brought was fanaticism, dictatorship and war and more war. How prescient Edmund Burke was in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. If anything his single fault was in underestimating the scale of the disaster to come. If the French could only have looked far into their own future, one of sudden and frantic energy followed by long and slow decline, they would have hurried back to the Ancien Régime, the old gentle monarchy of Louis XVI.

Think of France in the two hundred years after 1789, a whirlwind of political turmoil and instability, an ever downward spiral, a nation in search of a stable political identity, achieved at one point only to be lost at another. What a progression it is from monarchy, to republic, to empire, to monarchy, to empire, to monarchy, to another form of monarchy, to republic, to empire, to republic, to authoritarian state, to republic and then to another republic! Exhausted? I am.

The Fifth Republic, the latest metamorphosis, is still with us. Fifty-four years old this year it may exceed the seventy years of the Third Republic. I say may because when it comes to French politics and history it makes sense to err on the side of caution. With the euro crisis set to deepen, with the country facing uncertain economic and political times, with a crisis affecting the very identity of the French nation, a nation being consumed by the European Monster, a nation being eroded by culturally alien elements from within, who can say what the future will bring. Wise countries avoid revolutions. They do not usher in the springtime of the people but the winter of their discontent.

The Plague

There are two movies which gave me some limited understanding, like an archaeological evaluation, of the tragic modern history of Algeria – The Battle for Algiers and Of Gods and Men.

On the face of it they are about two completely unconnected events. The first deals with an episode in the Algerian War of Independence, which lasted from 1954 to 1962; the second with an incident in 1996, when a small community of French Cistercian monks, living in a monastery in the Atlas Mountains, were kidnapped and murdered, allegedly by mujahedeen guerrillas, fighting a prolonged and brutal war with the government.

The connection lies at a deeper level; it lies in the nature of French colonialism in Algeria and the reaction of the local people; it lies in the nature of the resistance movements created in the drive for national liberation; it lies in the nature of a particularly brutal war that, so far as France was concerned, at lest until fairly recently, wasn’t a war at all; in lies in forms of uncompromising extremism, in torture and murder as legitimate political techniques; it lies most particularly in the pursuit of power, to he seized and held at all costs.

In Algeria: France’s Undeclared War Professor Martin Evans, who has previously published on Algerian history, weaves the various threads together. It’s an exhaustive piece of work, looking deep into the prehistory of a conflict that stands apart from Africa’s other wars of liberation in the intensity of its brutality. It also draws attention to its lasting significance, an unhappy postscript.

For a long time the Algerian conflict, like Vichy and war-time collaboration in general, was a particularly sensitive area in French national consciousness, visited at some peril. How could it not be, given that over a million settlers, the so-called Pieds-Noirs, were obliged to resettle in metropolitan France after Algeria achieved independence in 1962? Full of bitterness and resentment against the right-wing government of General De Gaulle, they went even further to the right, forming an active constituency that would eventually become the backbone of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front.

That’s perhaps the central paradox of France’s Algerian conflict: it was started by the left and ended by the right. In 1956 Guy Mollet, head of the Socialist-led Republican Front government, ordered the army to begin ‘pacification’ operations against Algerian nationalists. Although himself opposed to colonialism on principle, he had a duty, as he saw it, to defend the civilising mission of the Fourth Republic against the fanatical and barbarous forms of Algerian nationalism. As so often the defence of civilization descended into the forms of barbarism allegedly being fought against.

Evans writes that Algeria was one of the longest and most difficult episodes in the whole decolonisation process. There is one simple reason for this: officially it wasn’t a colony at all; it was part of metropolitan France - it had been since the 1880s -, no different from Brittany or Normandy. It was an illusion, of course, a legalistic fiction, but one with particularly bloody consequences.

The civilising mission was always barbarous. From the outset in 1830 the French intrusion into what was then an Ottoman province was marked by savagery. This was a genocidal war, one of partial ethnic cleansing, which might usefully be compared with the American expansion in the West at the expense of the indigenous peoples. It is estimated that by the mid-1850s Algeria had lost almost half of its pre-colonial population of some four million people. That’s when the settlement was planted, with roots so deep that they could only be pulled up in extreme violence.

The difference between the French and American example is that there were never enough settlers; that strong as they were the native Algerians were stronger. Fighting a war against history and demography, the French settlers, unlike the American colonialists, could never go their own way, which meant that France could not go its own way either without difficulty; without the death of one republic and the birth of another.

The French were brutal, certainly but, as Evans shows, the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN), their leading opponent, were just as brutal, not just towards the colonialists but towards rival nationalist movements, applying savage cruelty even to deviationists within their own ranks. Liberation for them was about achieving power, to be held at all costs, which was to lead eventually to their own ‘pacification’ campaign against the Islamists in the 1990s.

The French mission was always hopeless. It gave rise to the ‘long hatred’, one of the key themes, as the author argues, that led to the revolt of 1 November, 1954, a new plague, that Albert Camus, author of The Plague and himself a Pied-Noir, had not anticipated.

There had been a prologue several years before in eastern Algeria, when a hundred Pieds-Noirs were killed in violent demonstrations, their corpses afterwards horribly mutilated. In wholly disproportionate acts of retaliation, the French slaughtered thousands, destroying many villages. “Nothing could be the same again,” Evans writes, “Rural Algeria had confronted European Algeria, producing a society more polarised than ever.”

The war caused thousands of lives and has left an unresolved legacy that exists so far as today; in Algeria, where the FLN ensures that there is no end to the Arab Winter; in France, where the 2005 riots by alienated migrants showed that the country still suffers from the ‘Algeria syndrome.’ For De Gaulle Algeria was a millstone around the neck of France. It still is.

Evans is to be congratulated on splendid piece of research, lucid, scholarly and balanced. He unfolds a tale whose lightest word harrows up the soul. Once again the lesson of history is that we learn nothing from history, otherwise we would not have had other ‘civilising’ missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, other plagues.

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise

Immoral tales

I thought that the facts in the case of Captain Alfred Dreyfus had long been settled. Here was an innocent man sent to Devil’s Island on a false accusation of treason. The real culprit, almost a pantomime villain, was Major Ferdinand Esterhazy. The whole sordid affair was then complicated by the division between the progressive and reactionary elements in French society; between those determined to prove the innocence of Dreyfus and those determined to preserve the honour of France and the French army, regardless of the facts, regardless of the treason.

A recent article by Nigel Jones in History Today (A Tale of Two Scandals) caused me to look at the old details in a new light. The scandal that followed the trial and conviction seems to have completely obscured the fact that their never was any treason; that the military information, really low grade stuff, that was to be passed to the Germans was part of a deliberate operation by the Statistical Section, the French intelligence service. Most important of all, Esterhazy was part of the sting, a plant no guiltier of treason than Dreyfus.

It gets murkier. The Germans were deliberately fed fake information or fluff, to use the jargon favoured in espionage circles, to distract them from the real secret, the development of the new 75mm light field gun. It was Esterhazy who came with the promise of secrets that were not secrets, playing a part allotted to him in an evolving drama.

To ensure that the Germans took the bait, there was one definite way of increasing Esterhazy’s credibility as a spy: offer a sacrificial goat. That was easy enough: there was Dreyfus, the unpopular Jewish officer attached to the Statistical Section, thoroughly disliked by Colonel Jean Sandherr, the anti-Semitic chief. He was also given a role: he was destined to be the greatest patsy in history.

What then follows, the whole political earthquake that shook France in the years leading up to the First World War, with aftershocks so far as Vichy in the Second, was in part shaped by issues of national security as well as prestige. For the army and sections of the intelligence service Dreyfus’ guilt had to be maintained, no matter what. Esterhazy, accused of being the real traitor by the opposition, had to be defended, no matter what.

Reactionaries on one side, liberals on the other, that was the other preconception I harboured about the whole affair. But again matters are not so simple; for the anti-Dreyfus camp contained none other than Oscar Wilde, the great dramatist living as an émigré on the Continent after his disgrace and imprisonment in England. In 1898, while living in Paris, he formed an unlikely friendship with the disreputable Esterhazy, who he referred to as ‘the Commandant’, listening sympathetically to his rants against Dreyfus in particular and Jews in general.

It’s an odd episode which, as Jones says, is omitted by most of Wilde’s biographers. One would have expected to find the Irish dramatist and political progressive, author of The Soul of Man under Socialism, to be on the side of Dreyfus, not just because of this but because he, too, knew what it was like to be an outcast, consigned to a brutal penal regime, one which ruined his health. But he took to Esterhazy, even though he was personally convinced of his guilt, simply because he had a fascination with life’s underside, with a decadent amorality. To put this another way: Esterhazy was the Dark Picture, not the light Dorian Grey.

There is an even deeper irony. When Emile Zola, the author and a leading pro-Dreyfusard, learned that Wilde was in receipt of confidential information from Esterhazy, revealing that he had acted under orders, he asked for details of the confession. Wilde refused, not just to protect his new friend, but because Zola, the greatest of the French progressives, notorious for a series of uncompromisingly naturalist novels, dismissed in England as the ‘apostle of the gutter’, was a homophobe!

Wilde now had an opportunity for some return against a man who had once conspicuously refused to sign a petition calling for clemency after his own conviction. Not only did he refuse to reveal any details of his conversations with Esterhazy, which might have lead to Dreyfus’ early release, but he dismissed him with characteristic flourish as a “writer of immoral romances.”

So Wilde, a progressive British literary exile in France, dismissed Zola, soon to be a progressive French literary exile in Britain, chased there after a conviction for criminal libel. Irony is clearly the gods’ favourite form of humour.

The Witch Priest

I first came across the story of the Loudun possessions in the course of my researches on seventeenth century English history. To be specific, it was in reading about the life of John Maitland, duke of Lauderdale, one of the figures in Charles II’s infamous Cabal ministry, who as a young man had visited the Ursuline convent at Loudun in western France, where a number of the nuns were said to have undergone demonic possession.

Lauderdale, a man of formidable and rational intellect, quickly concluded that the whole thing was a fraud. Fraud it may have been but it had particularly serious consequences for Father Urbain Grandier, the local priest, who was burned in the town in August 1634 after being convicted on a charge of witchcraft.

The Loudun possession is an altogether fascinating tale, involving sublimated sexual frustrations and grand politics. Grandier had a bit of a reputation, distributing his masculine favours among some of the nuns. Loudun was a hothouse of frustration, jealousy and potential hysteria, something I suspect true of most nunneries of the day, refuges often for genteel women who had little or nothing in the way of a vocation.

Grandier was unlucky enough to have attracted the obsessive attention of the Mother Superior, Sister Jeanne of the Angels, who accused him of using black magic to seduce her. Now the latent hysteria of the place came to the surface, with other nuns coming forward with similar accusations. While this is impossible to prove, I suspect that these charges were mostly levied by those who had not attracted Grandier sexually. He was duly arrested, interrogated and acquitted by an ecclesiastical tribunal, clearly not convinced of the value of the ‘evidence’ against him.

But Grandier was unlucky enough to have attracted the enmity of a far greater person than Sister Jeanne. It took a brave or a foolish man to attack Cardinal Richelieu, the leading figure in both church and state, and Grandier had been both brave and foolish, criticising the Grey Eminence in word and writing. The Loudun accusations were all that Richelieu needed to rid himself of a turbulent priest.

Grandier was rearrested and although the previous accusations were not renewed he found himself arraigned on an altogether more abstract and sweeping charge of witchcraft, one which involved consorting not with nuns but with demons. A document was produced ‘proving’ that he had entered into a diabolical pact. He was clearly a person of some importance to the satanic community, given the names of those who witnessed the pact;

We, the influential Lucifer, the young Satan, Beelzebub, Leviathan, Elimi, and Astaroth, together with others, have today accepted the covenant pact of Urbain Grandier, who is ours. And him do we promise the love of women, the flower of virgins, the respect of monarchs, honors, lusts and powers. He will go whoring three days long; the carousal will be dear to him. He offers us once in the year a seal of blood, under the feet he will trample the holy things of the church and he will ask us many questions; with this pact he will live twenty years happy on the earth of men, and will later join us to sin against God.

Bound in hell, in the council of demons. Lucifer Beelzebub Satan Astaroth Leviathan Elimi The seals placed the Devil, the master, and the demons, princes of the lord.
Baalberith, writer.

Thinking of this in present-day terms it would be like some minor spy being signed up by the Prime Minister or the President, along with leading members of the cabinet! But Grandier, despite the most extreme torture, never confessed to witchcraft.

A Devil’s Tale

I read a review of Ruth Harris’ The Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France, published earlier this year, in which the author said that the affaire Dreyfus tore apart French political and social life for more than a decade. Actually it tore it a part for several decades, introducing arguably the greatest fault line into modern French political life, the cause of several earthquakes, ending in the transient ‘victory’ of the anti-Dreyfus forces in the Vichy state of Marshal Petain.

The whole business arising from the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French army, on a blatantly false charge of treason, was only superficially about ‘justice’. The struggles that took shape around the head of this man, incarcerated on Devil’s Island in a way that made the Man in the Iron Mask look almost fortunate, saw France divide into two great political camps: the traditionalists, the church, the conservatives and the anti-Semites on one side, the liberals, the secularists, the republicans and the modernisers on the other.

The key, if there is a key to the whole business, lies in differing perceptions of the Jews as a race and Catholicism as a religion. People are often quick to remember some of the hysterical polemics of the more obscurantist among the anti-Dreyfusards, not stopping short of the blood liable, the accusation of medieval origin that the Jews collected Christian blood to make matzos. But the Dreyfusards did not baulk from hitting back with their own nonsense, spreading the stories of bestiality among Catholic priests, of clerics who supposedly had sex with chickens and goats.

In the end the victory of the Dreyfusards came not just with the release and rehabilitation of a man who had in some ways become almost irrelevant as a man but with the formal separation of church and state; with the formal creation, in other words, in a fully secular republic, embodied in the statute of 1905.

It was this republic that the right grew to hate, expressing its mood through new politically militant organisations like Charles Maurass’ Action Française. This hatred of the secular, liberal and - as the right saw it - Jewish state came to a head in the February riots of 1934, arising from a scandal caused by the revelations about the affairs of the embezzler Alexandre Stavisky, like Dreyfus also a Jew.

France’s political civil war really only came to an end, paradoxically, with the initial success followed by the ultimate failure of the Vichy counter-revolution, a reaction against all aspects of French republican history from 1789 onwards. France of the reactionary right took shape in its hostility to one man and all he represented for them. Its death perhaps began with the sacrifice of one woman, a French citizen and a Jew. Her name was Madeleine Levy, arrested by the Gestapo in November 1943 and sent to Auschwitz, where she died. She was Alfred Dreyfus’ granddaughter.

The French Goebbels

In the summer of 1944 Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris was the setting for a state funeral in what was to be the last symbolic act of the regime of Marshall Petain that had governed France with ever diminishing authority since 1940. There was something bizarrely unreal about the whole occasion. To the north-west of the capital the Allies were fighting to break out of Normandy; within six weeks they would arrive in Paris itself. To all but the most deluded it was clear that the Germans were losing the war.

But still the funeral was conducted with due solemnity. The man being honoured was Philippe Henriot, appointed Vichy’s head of propaganda in January 1944, who had been assassinated by the Resistance on 28 June. Why was this considered necessary? Quite simply because, in the twilight of collaboration, it was Henriot who had become the voice of Vichy, not Petain or Pierre Laval, his prime minister. And a highly effective voice he was too, so effective that the Free French, broadcasting from London, had taken to calling him the French Goebbels.

Henriot, besides being a skilled radio broadcaster, possessed one key advantage: the French may have been tired of the war, even more tired of the German occupiers, but they were still immensely fearful of the destructive consequences of liberation. For weeks prior to the Normandy landings Allied bombing raids on France had increased in intensity, providing Henriot with plenty of material for his twice-daily broadcasts. He contrasted the suffering of his fellow countrymen with those who had taken refuge with de Gaulle in England. And the native Resistance, the Maquis, he told his listeners, was made up of communists, terrorists, criminals and gangsters. The true heroes of France, he said, were the men of the Milice, Vichy’s paramilitary police force, who would restore order to a chaotic world.

Henriot had an interesting background, emerging from the Catholic and Anti-Semitic right that had felt itself increasingly beleaguered ever since the days of the affaire Dreyfus earlier in the century, which had introduced one of the great fault lines into French political life. At the beginning of the war he had also been strongly anti-German, a patriot like most patriots of the day who rallied to Marshall Petain after the fall of France and not to the band of émigrés who followed Charles de Gaulle to London. He was a French patriot, yes, a believer in the nation’s Catholic civilization and a hater not just of Jews, whom he did not consider to be French, but of communists.

This fear and hatred of communism is the key to understanding the most crucial metamorphosis in Henriot’s career. After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 he saw Germany as the great cleansing force, one that that would deliver Christian civilization from the contagion of communism.

In the early months of 1944, such was Henriot’s effectiveness, the French were fighting a civil war ‘on air.’ Resistance agents had reported that his broadcasts were having a strong influence on a fearful and uncertain population. From London a counter-attack was launched, with a number of people, headed by Maurice Schumann, warning people against Henriot’s seductive words. He continually referred to the exiles as the “the Jewish shirkers in London”, who responded by calling him a “Judas”, seemingly quite unaware of the irony here.

Counter-broadcasts were not enough. In the end the only way to stop Henriot was to kill him. That same evening Schumann proclaimed that “We will not hide our joy at this event. France will do very well without the voice of Philippe Henriot.” The rest was silence.

De Gaulle and the Myth of Resistance

Tomorrow is one of the most famous days in French history. It marks the anniversary in 1940 when Charles de Gaulle appealed on BBC radio in London to his countrymen urging them to continue to resist the Germans, even though the government of the day had formally surrendered to the invading army. Famous, yes, an event being marked by commemorations across the land. President Sarkozy himself will attend a ceremony at Mont Valereien near Paris, where a memorial to the French Resistance is situated, before flying to London to visit studio B2, from where de Gaulle made his broadcast, saying, in noble words, that "Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not and will not be extinguished."

There is only one small problem: it’s a myth. Oh, not the broadcast; that's real enough, something that happened because Winston Churchill, the prime minister, allowed it to happen in the face of opposition from the rest of the war cabinet. It's a myth because de Gaulle was probably heard by enough people to fill a village hall. The chances are, moreover, few of those who did listen on that bleak day in French history, when a great part of the nation was on the road fleeing from the German advance, had ever heard of this figure, a senior soldier but a minor politician. It's a myth - and here is the uncomfortable truth -because the vast bulk of the French population were relieved by the call for the armistice. The vast bulk of the French population rallied behind another soldier altogether and were to remain behind him for years to come. He was Philippe Petain, the new Prime Minister and subsequently head of the French state established at Vichy.

But history is often made retrospectively. De Gaulle, in the end, was on the side of the winners and Petain, Petain, whose side was he on? The losers, the answer has to come because he was tried and condemned as a traitor in 1945. But Petain was not Pierre Laval, who did more or less take the side of losers he believed were to be winners; Petain, rather like de Gaulle, took the side of France, though there are few now who would admit to this, preferring to sweep Vichy into a shameful oblivion. There is much about the Vichy regime that is shameful but the shame is not Petain's it is not even Laval's: the shame is France’s

No matter; in the end the obscure figure in London, stiff, totally lacking in humour, unimaginative and uncompromising came like a new Joan of Arc to save the conscience of the nation. He came in time to create the myth of resistance passing into shameful memory the realities of collaboration. Thus is history born; thus are nations made.

Killing Cats

The setting is Paris in the 1730s, the Rue Saint-Severin to be exact, a printer's shop run by one Jacques Vincent to be even more exact. And as every story requires a hero so, too, does this one. There are, in fact, two heroes, heroes to be found amongst the lowest class of all - the shop's apprentices, a much abused class of humanity at the time. Their names are Jerome and Leveille. The lives they have are not to be envied. They sleep in a filthy and freezing room. They have to rise before dawn to be sent on all sorts of tasks. They are abused by all with the least power over them, from the journeymen to the master. Worst of all the food they are given to eat is not fit for human consumption, not fit even for...cats.

This is really a story about revenge, a story that points back to the superstitions of the middle ages and forward to the excesses of the French Revolution. Jerome and Leveille served an uncaring master, or bourgeois, as he was known to the workers in the printer’s shop, one who, along with his equally callous wife, cared more about cats than people. This passion for cats seems to have been a feature of the printing trade at the time. One bourgeois kept as many as twenty-five, having their individual portraits painted and feeding them on fowl. Jerome and Leveille, in contrast, had to live on whatever slops they were offered, scraps from the master's table. To make matters worse the cook often sold the leftovers, leaving them with old rotten bits of meat that even the cats refused to eat.

How these cats played on the minds of our heroes. Insulted and degraded by the presence of the household cat, including one known simply as La Grise (the grey), the mistress's favourite, they were kept awake at night by the howling of the alley cats on the roof above their bedroom. Unable to get a full night's sleep, they had to rise as early as four o'clock in the morning, exhausted at the beginning of the day and even more exhausted at the end of it.

One night they had had enough; they decided to take action in the most effective way they knew. Leveille was particularly talented as a mimic. He crawled over the roof to that part of the house where the bourgeois and his wife slept, presumably isolated from the usual cat chorus. Once there he howled and meowed so horribly that neither could get any sleep. After several nights of this they decided that they must have been bewitched. Orders were given to Jacques and Leveille, dogs rather than dogsbodies, to get rid of the cats.

They did, with all of the passion and exuberance they could muster, making sure that La Grise was drawn into the holocaust. But this wasn't simply an orgy of killing. Oh, no; for with the aid of the shop's journeymen the neighbourhood cats were rounded up to appear before the tribunes of the people. The cats were tried in accordance with the forms of process favoured by revolutionary tribunals, given the last rights and duly hanged on an improvised gallows. It was a cause of huge amusement, a diversion from the usual drudgery of the working day. In this workshop in this small quarter of Paris a prelude was acted out for a drama that was to come later the same century. The mistress came. She saw La Grise hanging from the gallows, retiring in horror. The workers had the day.

This bizarre episode, true in every detail, can be found in Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. It's taken from one Nicolas Contat, the Jerome of the story, who later set down an account of his life as an apprentice. There is so much richness here, so much which tells us about the politics and, more particularly, the attitudes of the day. A lot of the subliminal messages would have been better understood by a contemporary audience than a modern one. There is the obvious resentment of the workers against the bourgeois, the resentment of the abused apprentices against the pampered cats. But in sweeping up La Grise there were clear references to old witchcraft superstitions, clear references to the cat as a familiar and the mistress as a witch.

No matter that this was the Age of Enlightenment, cats still carried a long legacy of fear and superstition. In the carnivals held before Lent they were often subject to the same kind of treatment and torture that those accused in the Great Witch Hunt once were. The abuse and torture of cats was also a feature in the festival of Saint John the Baptist on 24 June. Then cats were burned at the stake by people hoping avoid ill-fortune for the rest of the year, a variation of the Scottish Taigherm of which I wrote recently. The scream of the cat, the Katzenmusik, was a background to much anarchy and jollity. Anarchy and jollity in death, a reference to the persecution of witches, a leitmotiv for the coming French Revolution.

For those who are interested on the folklore of cats, France and witchcraft I would highly recommend Ancient Sorceries, a wonderful story by Algernon Blackwood, along with M. R. James my favourite writer in the ghost and horror story genre.

Recalling Henri IV

The French Republic has recently celebrated a new hero. The odd thing is he is a King and he’s been dead for exactly four hundred years!

We have not long passed to four hundredth anniversary of the death of Henri IV, the first of France’s Bourbon kings, who was assassinated on May 17 1610 by religious fanatic by the name of Francois Ravaillac.

The French have every reason to celebrate his rule, which contrast so sharply with the miserable performance of the present-day monarch, Nicholas Sarkozy. Not only did Henri end the Wars of Religion, which had torn the country apart for a good bit of the preceding century but he managed to reduce the country’s deficit by a third, while increasing state revenues by a half without resorting to large hikes in taxation. He is the sort of leader that we need now in England!

Henri for a King had a remarkable common touch and his death was widely mourned by the nation. He famously promised all French workers the “means to have a chicken in the pot every Sunday”, contrasting sharply with the ruinous tax and spend policies of his successors, which by 1789 was to impoverish the peasants and bankrupt the state.

He was also something of a pragmatist and a cynic. Formerly as King of Navarre he had been a leading Huguenot, a French Calvinist, who converted to Catholicism to save his life in the wake of the 1572 Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of his co-religionists. Afterwards he reverted back to Protestantism, which made him in the eyes of Catholics a ‘relapsed heretic’ and therefore unworthy to be King of France.

His succession was opposed by the powerful Catholic League, particularly strong in Paris and the north. But with the assassination in 1589 of Henri III, the last of the Valois kings, Henri Bourbon had by far the strongest claim. Saying that “Paris is well worth a mass” he converted back to Catholicism, easing his way to the throne.

Though his legitimacy was accepted by most in the Catholic party that still left a semi-lunatic fringe; it left the likes of Ravaillac, not just a fanatic but almost certainly clinically mad, so mad that he was even expelled after three weeks by the Cistercian order of the Feuillants on account of his ‘visions.’ Believing that Henri was about to make war on the Pope, whom he heretically believed to be God, Ravaillac determined to kill the king, stealing a knife from an inn for the purpose and stabbing him while he was travelling through the busy Paris streets in his couch.

But now Henri is back, a symbol of national nostalgia, the embodiment of the legend of the good king whose image is to be seen across the country on billboards, on magazine covers and him shop windows. Vive Henri Quatre!

Crimes of the Commune

The Law of Hostages, introduced by the leaders of the 1871 Paris Commune, was a response to stories that the Versailles Army of Adolphe Thiers was executing captured Communards. It was actually modeled on the 1793 Law of Suspects, rather than the similarly named act passed by the Directory in 1799. The difference, I suppose, is that the Law of Suspects was passed in a time of national emergency, whereas the Law of Hostages was intended as an act of terror and intimidation, aimed against those who took a different political position from the Communards. The text of the act justifies the measures taken as follows;

...that the government of Versailles tramples under foot the rights of humanity as those of war; that it is guilty of horrors that have not even sullied the invaders of French territory...All persons accused of complicity with the government of Versailles shall be decreed accused and imprisoned...the jury will pronounce judgement within twenty-four hours; all the accused detained by the verdict of the jury shall be the hostages of the people of Paris; for every execution of a prisoner of war or a partisan of the legal government of the Commune will be followed by the execution of three times the number of hostages.

This decree became law on 6 April, 1871. Although passed by the Council of the Commune no action was taken for some weeks. But there were those like Raoul Rigault and other extremists, who took their inspiration from the likes of Gracchus Babeuf and Auguste Blanqui, who saw in the Law a way of advancing their own political and ideological ends. And high among their objectives was the destruction of the French Catholic Church. The Committee of General Security, a body set up by Rigault, and packed with his associates, duly ordered the arrest of Georges Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, and other clerics.

The whole thing was complete error of judgement; not only was Darboy far from being the kind of cleric so hated by the left (he had attacked the doctrine of Papal Infallibility) but his arrest played right into the hands of the Versailles press, which argued that the fight was simply against common criminals.

Darboy and the others were eventually shot, an act of political terrorism that served as a model for Lenin and all those who later attempted to walk in the path of the Commune

Ana in Paris

Paris really is lovely at this time of year. I spent the Easter weekend in the city, the second time I’ve been in as many weeks. I’ve been so often now that the city might be thought to have lost its capacity to charm, surprise and delight. Not so; even walking down familiar paths is a comfort and a reassurance.

I went this time with my boyfriend, playing out all of the old romantic clichés of young lovers in spring-time Paris, hand-in-hand along the banks of the Seine, lunching in little out of the way restaurants on the left bank, sitting in the chestnut groves of Versailles. It’s a welcoming city; the stones are welcoming, the broad boulevards and the little hidden squares; a city for lovers; a city for dreamers.

The one thing I often do when in the city is to visit the Conciergirie, the old royal castle that was used a prison during the Revolution of 1789, the place where Marie Antoinette lived prior to her execution in October, 1793. It’s possible to see a reconstruction of her cell, a place that fills me with poignant sadness, with thoughts of prisoner 280, as she was known. There is perhaps no figure in history that comes closest to fulfilling my sense of high and tragic romance than the beautiful Austrian princess, the wonderful, incomparable Marie Antoinette. I pass in silent tribute, wearing my blue fleur de lys scarf.

Aimless Absolution

I know the papacy is going through something of a rough patch at the moment. Even so, is it right and proper, I have to ask, to extend the inquisition (oops!) back through history? I ask this because I was surprised to see a small portrait of Jacques de Molay, the grand master of the Knights Templar, in the present issue of the BBC History Magazine, carrying the caption “Jacques de Molay was tortured and killed by the pope.” Fortunately the accompanying piece, an answer to a question about the Chinon parchment, makes no such contention.

De Molay was, of course, tortured and killed on the orders of King Philip IV of France. Not only was it a convenient way of wiping out his debts with the Crusading order, who also acted as his personal bankers, but it was a wonderful opportunity for the impecunious monarch to get his hands on their loot. The master was arrested along with over six hundred fellow members of the order on a charge of all sorts of heretical and blasphemous crimes, the kind of acts that would have kept tabloid journalists busy for weeks.

Submitting to pressure from Philip, Pope Clement V banned the Templar Order. De Molay himself was burned in March 1314 as a relapsed heretic, on the orders of the King, I stress once again, and not the Pope. The pressure Clement was under at the time was confirmed when Dr Barbara Frale found a copy of the so-called Chinon parchment in the Vatican Secret Archives, confirming that he absolved de Molay and other leading members of the Order in 1308, subsequent publishing her findings in The Journal of Medieval History. The purpose of this particular inquisition was to show that the Templers were not irremediably immersed in sin but were capable of reform under the guidance of the church. In the face of Philip’s determination it was a wasted effort.

The parchment is notable in one other regard: it might be said to mark the point when the state began its ascent and the universal church its decline, its decline from a position of almost absolute political power that had been such a feature of the papacy of Innocent III, only a century before.

A Tale of Collaboration

This year will mark the seventieth anniversary of the Fall of France in May 1940. It’s time, I think, to reflect on what followed; time to reflect on how the French conducted themselves during the ‘dark years.’ It’s not a comfortable picture.

France, of all the countries attacked and invaded by the Nazis, is almost in a unique position in that it retained its own government, a distinction shared only with the Danes. It’s salutary to compare the two examples. There was collaboration in Denmark, yes, though only to a limited degree. The spirit of national independence and self-respect was kept alive and symbolised in the person of King Christian X. Throughout the occupation the Danes consistently resisted German pressure to introduce discriminatory laws against the country’s Jewish minority. Danish Jews never had to wear the yellow star. When discussing the possibility that they might, Christian remarked to his chief minister “perhaps then we should all wear it.”

Now look at France. It’s still wrongly assumed by some that the government of Philippe Pétain was imposed by the Germans, that it was a puppet administration. It was not. Pétain’s government was legally constituted after the Chamber of Deputies granted him plenipotentiary powers, effectively voting the Third Republic out of existence.

It’s also wrongly assumed that his authority only applied in the unoccupied zone whereas in fact he had control over government agencies in the whole country, including the civil service and the police. In 1941 the Germans had a mere 30,000 troops in the occupied zone, most concentrated in the costal areas opposite England. At this stage control would have been all but impossible without active and widespread collaboration.

Ah, but there is collaboration and there is collaboration; the Danes at a minimum, the French at a maximum. Nowhere is the contrast greater than in French treatment of the Jews. There was, of course, a strong pre-war tradition of anti-Semitism in France, a tradition that found full expression in the policy of the Pétain government.

The French police were active in rounding up the Jews on the authority of Vichy, even exceeding German expectations. Drancy Concentration Camp in the suburbs of Paris was set up by the French and run by them until 1943. In the notorious Vel' d'Hiv Roundup of July 1942 some 13,000 people, including children, were taken, eventually being sent to Auschwitz. In the south Jews took refuge in those areas occupied by Italy, where in the acutest of ironies the fascists offered them greater protection than their own government.

It seems to me that France of these years is not best depicted in the face of the semi-senile Pétain or even in that of Pierre Laval, his sleazy-looking premier, but in the likes of Joseph Darnand, the head of the notorious Milice, and most particularly in that of the altogether loathsome Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Vichy’s Commissioner for Jewish Affairs.

Yes, there were resisters and there is eternal and honourable example of Jean Moulin. But the resisters were a tiny minority in a nation of active and passive collaborators. Many of those who did resist were killed not by the Germans but by other French people. A nation of resisters was a post-war myth created by a country anxious to bury so many aspects of its recent past.

The truth is that French conduct under the occupation if not cowardly was supine in the extreme. Not a good example by any standards; not a good example when contrasted with other nations who had not the same historical reputation to defend. It’s a sorry and wretched tale.

France-Revolutions Never Glorious

The problem for France was that the Revolution of 1789 had taken history at a rapid trot through several stages, effectively creating some serious fault lines in civil society, the underlying structures of law, culture, society and political tradition that help sustain more stable forms of constitutional development. Put this another way: in the brief period from 1789 to 1791, France covered the kind of political ground that had taken close on a hundred years in England.

Thereafter, the Revolution went into overdrive, pushing matters to an extreme undreamt of by even the most radical of the English Whigs. One by one, as Edmund Burke had predicted in Reflections on the Revolution in France, civic and political institutions were knocked flat, until only the army remained; and with the army came Napoleon; and with Napoleon came dictatorship. Napoleon overcame the weakness and the fractures of civil society by force and by force alone.

A return to more traditional forms of rule would demand high degrees of political awareness and sensitivity. Above all it would require an understanding that politics in France had undergone a fundamental change, that there could be no return to the older forms of absolutism. Progress would therefore require the kind of partnership between the crown and the dominant sections of the civil community, in essence the solution of the Glorious Revolution.

But the Bourbons came back in the person of Louis XVIII and, more particularly, in the person of Charles X, having learned nothing and forgotten everything. Tensions built, only to be released not in a mature parliamentary system, but by the valve of revolution. It might even be said that in the period from 1815 to 1870, French history played out many of the events of the Great Revolution in a kind of slow motion.

The monarchical solution failed in all of its forms, Bourbon, Orleanist and Napoleonic because it was too narrowly conceived; because it lacked firm foundations, party foundations, in society; because it lacked a clear sense of direction and commonly accepted goals; because it failed to heal the fractures of the past. In the end only the Republic would do, the form of government that divided the French the least; tolerated not for what it was but for what it was not.

Death on the Metro

I’ve not long finished a truly beguiling article in the January issue of History Today, written jointly by Annette Finley-Croswhite and Gayle K. Brunelle. Headed Murder in the Métro, it concerns the mysterious fate of one Laetitia Toureaux, found dying in May 1937 in a first class carriage with a knife through her neck, in what shows every sign of being a professional assassination. The crime caused a sensation at the time because it was the first ever murder in the Métro and because the French press played the crime up in lurid detail thereafter. Although heavily investigated at the time no witness was ever found and no convincing suspect was ever produced. It is a crime that remains unsolved to this day.


The death of Laetitia could so easily have been forgotten like so many others, then and since, as history and events quickly pass over such small and personal tragedies. But it’s a crime that casts a little light into some of the darker corners of pre-war French political life, to a world of violent intrigue, terrorism and counter-revolution.

Laetitia herself, who was twenty-nine years old at the time of her death, was found to have some very shady political associations. Of working-class background and Italian origin, she worked in a glue factory during the day though she clearly ambitious to improve her condition. She was a social climber slightly on the model of Thackeray’s Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. She also liked to socialise in some of the nightclubs in the more sordid parts of Paris, in places where she was known as ‘Yolande’ by the pimps and prostitutes. It was also in these places that she met men who shared her right-wing politics, the fascism she professed. At some point in 1936 she became the lover of Gabriel Jeantet, a wealthy intellectual with political ambitions and extreme right-wing views. But Laetitia was a dangerous commodity; for she was also a paid police spy, a mouche, to use the contemporary jargon.

In the January after her murder, with the case not that much further forward, the police began to suspect that her death had political overtones, that it was a professional assassination linked with the murder in the same year of Dmitri Navachine, a Russian economist, and Carlo and Nello Rosselli, two Italian anti-fascist exiles. The murders of the Navachie and the Roselli were traced to the extreme-right Comité secret d'action révolutionnaire, better known as the ‘Cagoule’ , the ‘hooded ones’, an orgnaisation violently opposed to the Third Republic and the then Popular Front government of Leon Blum. One of their aims was to overthrow the government by violent terrorist action. Jeantet, Laetitia’s boyfriend, was in charge of arms-smuggling operations.

In 1936 and 1937 the Cagoule was responsible for a series of crimes, including bombings in Paris and at least seven murders. On more than one occasion they attempted to assassinate Blum himself. Throughout France Cagoule militias stockpiled arms with the help and support of Mussolini’s Fascist government in Italy. Jeantet met Mussolini in person on a number of occasions and may have brought Laetitia with him on at least one of these occasions.

After an abortive attempt to start an anti-government rising in November 1937, a number of Cagoulards were arrested. Under interrogation two of them, Rene Locuty and Frenand Jakubiez, swore that the organisation was also responsible for the murder of Laetitia. According to their testimony she was killed by Jean Filliol, the Cagoule’s principal hit-man, because it had been discovered that she was a police spy. Even with such a solid lead the case was still closed, an action which the authors put down to the complex politics of France before, during and after the Second World War. The Cagoule leaders were simply too well connected to pursue for the murder of an Italian immigrant with, as the authors put it, a shady love life and a penchant for espionage.

So, on the face of it looks as if Laetitia was no more than the victim of her circumstances. Doubts remain, though, over the exact circumstances leading to her death. There is reason to suppose, as Finley-Croswhite and Brunelle suggest, that it was not the Cagoule but the Italian Secret Service that was responsible for her death. The Cagoule, as a terrorist organisation, had little in the way of subtlety; its crimes, including its murders were open and excessive. Its victims were stabbed, bludgeoned or blown up.

Laetitia, in contrast, was killed in a highly professional manner by a silent and anonymous assassin, who left barely a trace of blood before the police pulled the knife from the dying woman’s neck. At the time the police investigation discovered that she had fallen foul not just of the Cagoule but of the Italians. She was known to have inside knowledge of the plan to assassinate the Roselli. It was also known not long after that she was a police informer. The suggestion is that rather than trust the Cagoulards with her disposal-there had already been two abortive attacks on her-the Italians brought in their own operative. Again, though this was a reasonable conclusion, it was not pursued because of the sensitive diplomatic implications. Laetitia was a little person caught in big events, of no importance to anyone.

So, this poor women’s personal tragedy was caught up in the history and politics of France and Italy. After the war her story was forgotten at a time when France was going through a collective ‘memory loss’ over so many aspects of its recent past. After all, even people as highly placed and respected as Francois Mitterrand had close ties with many members of the Cagoule in his youth. The story of Laetitia, as the authors conclude, forms part of France’s refusal to come to terms with the interwar era when so many French people sympathised with extreme right wing politics, fascism and anti-Semitism. With the passing of this generation a new willingness has arisen to look afresh at the past.

Father of his People

As an example of early modern kingship Louis XII of France bears quite a close relationship to Henry VII. Although he came late-and unexpectedly-to power, he acted with vigour, reforming the French legal system, reducing taxes and improving government, much like Henry in England. He also occupies the same ambiguous position in history, being both a late Medieval and a Renaissance monarch. His marriage to Anne of Brittany, conceived for political purposes, might also be said to parallel that of Henry to Elizabeth of York. Louis was also skilled in managing his nobility, including the powerful Bourbon faction, which greatly contributed to the stability of French government.

Although Louis' administration was not dominated by lawyers and financial specialists to the same degree as that of Henry, he was just as innovative. In the Ordinance of Blois of 1499 and the Ordinance of Lyon of 1510, he extended the powers of royal judges and made efforts to curb corruption in the law. Highly complex French customary law was to be codified and ratified by royal proclamation. Although he was less financially astute than the parsimonious Henry, he was reasonably careful, unlike many of his predecessors, with crown revenues. At the end of his reign the crown deficit was no greater than it had been when he succeeded Charles VIII in 1498, despite several expensive military campaigns in Italy. His fiscal reforms of 1504 and 1508 tightened and improved procedures for the collection of taxes.

The one big difference between the two monarchs was in military affairs. For Henry war was simply 'bad for business.' Louis, in contrast, through his obsession with the duchy of Milan, to which he had a claim in right of his grandfather, embarked on several campaigns in Italy. His greatest success came in his war with Venice, with the victory at the Battle of Agnadello in 1509. Things became much more difficult for him from 1510 onwards, especially after Julius II, the great warrior Pope, took control of the Vatican. Although his Italian ambitions unravelled, Louis managed to end his reign in 1515 as a well respected monarch, who had withstood a great European coalition of powers. He had duly earned the title of 'Father of the People', conferred upon him by the Estates in 1506

The Princess in the Tower

Ingeborg of Denmark is, perhaps the least fortunate of all the Medieval brides, a woman whose life was blighted for reasons that are still not entirely clear.

Those familiar with the tribulations of Katherine of Aragon may be interested to know just how 'fortunate' she was compared with Ingeborg, married to Philip Augustus on August 15, 1193, only to be rejected a day later. At the time Philip's only declaration was that he wished the marriage dissolved for 'bodily reasons'. His assumption is likely to have been that the whole matter would be over quickly; but he reckoned without the determination of the Danish princess, which had the effect of dragging the whole business out for twenty years, involving France in a dispute with the Papacy in the person of Innocent III, not a man to be tangled with lightly. Ingeborg was to be held prisoner in the castle of Étampes for more than ten years, from whence she wrote a heart-breaking letter to Innocent;


Set me free, from those who hate me, so that I shall not drown in the deep waters since I am being pursued for no reason. It is my master and husband, Philip, the famous king of the French...who wishes to scoff at my youth. Through isolation in prison he continues to torment me through his men...so that I shall conform to his wishes against the law of marriage and the law of Christ...I suffer from innumerable and unendurable indignities. No one dares to visit me, not even monks or nuns in order to comfort me, neither can I hear the word of God to strengthen my soul nor confess to a priest...I do not get sufficient food...I have no medicines to bear the weakness of humankind...I am not allowed to have a bath...I do not have enough clothes, and those I do have do not befit a queen...the detestable people who surround me, by order of the king, never give me any kind words, but torture me with sneering and offensive words...these things and others...make me tired of living.

History abhors a vacuum, and the gaps in this story have been filled with a variety of explanations. Amongst other things, it has been suggested that Philip may have suffered from temporary impotence on his wedding night, and developed an aversion to Ingeborg as a result, though she was always to adhere to her claim that the marriage had been consummated. We do know, though, that Philip came back from the Third Crusade with some unspecified disease, which seems to have affected his mental condition, bringing on periodic panic attacks. He even convinced himself that Richard I had arranged with the Assassins of Syria to have him murdered. However, the specific cause of his sudden rejection of Ingeborg cannot be determined with any degree of certainty.

Politically Philip's actions weakened his relationship with the Vatican, at the very apogee of its Medieval greatness. In 1213 Ingeborg was finally reinstated as Queen of France, although not as Philip's wife, thus ensuring he could be reconciled with Innocent. The Wikipedia article says that the reason for his action was to allow him to press his claim to the throne of England through his connection with the Danish crown, though no source is given for this statement. Besides, he had earlier tried to get the Danes to accept this claim as part of the marriage negotiations, though this was rejected by Canute VI, Ingeborg's brother

The Revolution was a mistake; long live the King!

One small thing helped to bring a little extra brightness to my day-a report that Prince Jean, Duke of Vendôme, has published a book calling on the French, groaning under the weight of public debt and moral decay, to admit that the Great Revolution was a mistake! In his book, Un prince français, a kind of royalist manifesto, he goes that one step further, calling for a restoration of the monarchy.

He is absolutely right of course, the Revolution and all that followed was an absolute disaster for France, as Edmund Burke anticipated. The record is there: a revolution drowned in blood followed by a brutal military dictatorship. What came after was weakened monarchical experiments, followed by a succession of unstable republics, punctuated by a comic-opera empire. Where he is wrong is to believe that contemporary France is without monarchy: that was reestablished by Charles de Gaulle in 1958 with the erection of the Fifth Republic, far more stable, so far, than all of its predecessors. One can never tell with the French. :-)

But the antecedents of the dear old Duke were part of the problem that ailed France, not the solution. He is a representative of the Orléans family, the junior branch of the French Royal house, and a descendent of the last king of France, the unglamorous, pear-like Louis Philippe, deposed in 1848. The senior branch, the House of Bourbon, overthrown in 1830, still exists and has a far superior claim to that of the Orléanists, treasonable in 1789 and treasonable thereafter.

Vive le Roi!-just as long as he is not the Jean III, erstwhile Duke of Vendôme.
:-))

The Army of Crime

I always make a point of keeping up with the latest productions of the French cinema industry, seeing what I can, when I can, where I can. I have a particular interest in anything to do with life in France during the German occupation, movies like The Army of Shadows and Lacombe Lucien, the first about resistance, the second about collaboration. So, off I trotted at the weekend to see The Army of Crime (L'armée du crime), directed by Robert Guédiguian, now on limited release in this country.

The story centers around a resistance cell in Paris, later depicted after their execution in the infamous Affiche Rouge (Red Poster), a widely distributed poster in which the Vichy authorities tried to show resisters not as liberators but as criminals. The cell itself was largely made up of foreigners, headed by Missak Manouchian (played by Simon Abkarian), an Armenian poet who lost his family in the Turkish genocide. Although some limited success is obtained in hit and run attacks on the Germans, the cell is finally destroyed after the assassination of a senior officer.

What might surprise people who know little of the historical background is that the worst persecutors of the resistance-and the worst torturers-were not the Germans but the French themselves, in the shape of the police force. Though the active pro-German faction, the fascists among the so-called Paris collaborators, was of no great significance, the Germans were greatly aided, both in combating resisters and in rounding up Jews, by the agencies of the French state. The director makes no concessions to any residual national sensitivity here: the police are shown bussing Jews to Drancy and the notorious Vel d’Hiv, transit points for Auschwitz. There are also shown torturing suspected partisans in the most hideous manner, which I take to be a truthful account. The moral corruption and venality of the police is well-captured in the character of Inspector Pujol, played by Jean-Pierre Darroussin

The movie itself is, well, worthy but largely unfocused. It rambles slightly and there are too many overlapping plots, overlapping lives. It’s certainly interesting though, given the subject matter, I found it surprisingly unengaging. It’s simply too ambitious, too broadly conceived to serve the purpose that Guédiguian intends. I don’t think The Army of Crime could ever have been a great movie, but with a little more discipline, fewer characters, a little more structure, and a firmer story-line it might have been more than simply a good one. Even so, I much preferred it to the inane Inglourious Basterds.