Notes from France

The good, the bad, the sad, and the beautiful

In my two-month interregnum between jobs, my partner and I took the rare opportunity to spend six weeks in France, mostly outside of Paris. This trip feels different from other vacations, not only because of the leisurely travel, but also because we are leaving the country at a time of great upheaval at home. This is not a travelogue (although if you plan to go to France, read Ina Caro’s The Road from the Past first and don’t miss seeing Thoronet Abbey between Cannes and Marseille). Rather it is an attempt to get some perspective on our present moment.

Hedwige and Bruno, our informed Airbnb hosts, expressed a sentiment shared by their Lyonnaise friends. Why is no one in America doing anything to stop this political cancer? Michele and Jackie, two travelers from Chicago whom we met in Marseille said the same thing. Yet Timothy Snyder the historian and expert on fascism, in his review of the first 100 days, says he is hopeful because he didn’t expect Americans to fight back as much as they have been doing. We have a chance, he thinks, because we regular Americans are standing up! He references folks who have never gone to a protest before coming out in numbers. Why the disconnect?

In this time of information overload, how can so many people be unaware of the many voices that are rising loudly? Is media coverage lacking? Well sure, especially traditional outlets. But I also think a psychological shift is needed that has been decades in the making. After 911, George Bush told us to go shopping. Contrast this with the individual participation by everyday Americans in the time of our founding. We don’t know the names of all the protesters who dumped tea in Boston’s harbor, but we understand their activism mattered. Sadly, we now understand, we can’t rely on our current leaders alone. We must go back to reclaiming our voices.

Lyon was occupied by Germany from 1940 until its liberation in 1944. If you visit the Resistance Museum, you learn that 1% to 3% of the population in occupied France resisted. This number sounds small until you read about the consequences of resisting. “They were killed (tortured first in many cases) for the smallest thing: singing the wrong song, being caught with a political flyer, smiling when confronted.” If 1% were closer to the true number, every one of those resisters is a hero. We are not there yet and hopefully never will be, but I contend, if you don’t use it, you lose it. How do we support each other to move from a place of passivity to one of activism? Hedwige, Bruno, Michele and Jackie were all moved by the information that there was a resistance movement happening. Hedwige planned to inform her friends including her American ones, and Michele and Jackie downloaded the information about Indivisible. It seems so simple and yet, so difficult.

In the Mucem Marseille, I saw a beautiful exhibit about the Neoclassical period in Europe. All things Roman were quite the rage in the 18th and 19th centuries–architecture and fashion, for example. There was a dark side. Mussolini justified Italy’s invasion of Libya because it was once part of ancient Rome. France justified its conquest of Algeria which lasted from 1830 to 1903 as taming the Barbary pirates, which translated to taming the “inferior hordes”. Of course, we understand this kind of imperialist mindset. What was remarkable to me in this moment was the willingness of the French to turn a critical eye toward their own dubious history in order not to repeat it. Would you find such an exhibit in Trump’s America? The extent of what we risk losing boggles the imagination. But it doesn’t have to be so. The end of the story is not written yet. Let’s make sure we can say, whatever happens, I paid attention and tried to make a difference.