The French television documentary detailed how Jacques Jaujard, the deputy head of the Louvre, was keenly aware of the threat posed to the gallery’s treasures by the Nazis, who were likely to seize what they wanted for themselves. Jaujard had form in this respect; during the Spanish civil war in 1938,he had taken the treasures of the Prado in Madrid to Switzerland for safe keeping.
Just days before the Nazis invaded France, Jaujard organised thousands of volunteers to crate up the art works in the Louvre. One August morning in1940, a fleet of just over 200 vehicles set out with nearly 2,000 wooden crates. The works were categorised by colour; yellow meant a very valuable art piece, while green was for major works and red was for world treasures. The Mona Lisa got three red circles. The art works were sent to chateaux all over France, where they remained safely for the rest of the war, safe from both Nazi looters and the pro-Nazi government in Vichy, which would have handed them over to the Germans as an act of appeasement.
Once D Day and the liberation of Paris came in 1944, all the art collections stashed away, not just those from the Louvre, were returned to their original art galleries, all undamaged. It was a remarkable story with an even more remarkable twist. In 1944, the French resistance sent a liaison officer code named Mozart to liaise with Jaujard. The agent turned out to be a blonde film actress well-known for her film work with Jean Renoir in the 1930s and within days, she and Jaujard became lovers. It’s a lovely, affirmative story and the TV documentary has had a sensational reception in France.
On the subject of treasures, anyone who’s into skiing should consider what insiders say is the best French ski resort of all, a big improvement on the modern resorts built in the last few decades. Samoens is in the Giffre valley in the French Alps. It’s a small town with a population of about 2,500 and it’s considered one of the most beautiful in France. With its limestone quarries, the town’s stonecutters created many fine pieces and their descendants are still at work today. In the old days, the stone cutters used their own dialect, called mourmé, to make sure that outsiders couldn’t understand what they were talking about.
Samoens also has a wonderful botanical garden, called Jaysinia, set up in 1906 by Marie-Louise Cognac-Jay, the founder of La Samaritaine department store in Paris. The whole town is a treasure trove, a wonderful place to stay in, even if you aren’t into skiing.
And in the same region of France, the city of Grenoble, which now has a Green mayor, has just decided to become the first city in Europe to ban all street advertising. In place of garish billboards, trees will be planted.
Conservation of a sort is also on the menu at a supermarket in the eastern town of Devecey in the Franche-Comté, where the owners of the Super U supermarket have bought a large field near their supermarket. There, they intend to graze their own herd of about 15 cows, so that shoppers can see exactly where the meat they are buying comes from.
On an historical note, I bought a wonderful book about Paris the other day, Paris Mon Amour, which runs to well over 200 very large pages. Within those pages are the works of many photographers from the earliest days of the art in the mid-19th century right up to the 1990s. The photographs are absolutely superb. This particular edition was produced by Taschen in Cologne and a brand new copy will cost you only just over €11,wonderful value.
While all this has been going on, the deeply unpopular French government has published a list of 10 achievements that should make people proud of France and rightly so. France remains the top tourist destination in the world and the country is also the fifth largest economic power in the world. It is also the world’s top wine producer, while it has also produced 58 Nobel prize winners, including 15 for literature, which makes France the world’s top literary prizewinner. France also has 1,200 museums, which attract 62 million visitors a year. On the business front, too, France is very innovative. Over the past two years, half of the businesses employing more than 10 people, and one society in six, has produced a new product that wasn’t previously available. This is all a welcome change from the endless dreary news about how the French economy is stagnating and how everyone is fed up with President Hollande and his government.
Mind you, despite all these good tidings, the Eurostar trains still grind to a halt. The other evening, two Eurostar trains from London, one bound for Paris, the other for Brussels, came to a halt near Lille because of a massive power failure. Passengers on the Paris train were stuck for the best part of six hours in a train with no heat and no lights, while those on the Brussels train were stranded for some nine hours.
Something else that looks like being stranded indefinitely is the French warship order for the Russians. The first of the helicopter carriers is ready for delivery, but France now says it won’t be delivered until the fighting in eastern Ukraine stops. It’s one of the great fictions of our time, that this separatist fighting isn’t being fuelled by the Russians. How anyone can believe the Russian notion that this is nothing to do with them is a very pertinent question indeed.
The French government is coming under fire from the Russians, while the Front National is coming under fire for accepting funding from a Russian bank. The French government is also very unpopular for its plans to create 13 new regions in France. Only five existing ones will remain, including the Ile de France, the Provence region and Brittany. Alsace is up in arms because it doesn’t want to merge with Lorraine and people in Alsace are saying that you can’t mix choucroute with quiche.
On the bad news front, last Sunday,3,000 people had to be evacuated from Rennes while a 250 kg bomb of British origin,from the second world war, was defused. It turns out that the authorities had known all about the bomb for the past month but hadn’t got round to telling the public! There was also the sad story of Roger Voyer, an elderly farmer from Roche-sur-Yon in Loire Atlantique, who was using his tractor to clear brushwood. The fork on the tractor disturbed a nest of Asian hornets, frelons asiatiques, and one of them attacked the farmer, killing him. These Asian hornets came to France via a container shipment from China that was landed in Bordeaux. These insects are now installed in three quarters of French departments and people are being advised to be very careful when they are pruning trees or clearing brushwood.
Neither is the news about the pollution in Paris very good-it is still bad and at its worst, it’s like being in a 20 square metre room with eight smokers - very unpleasant and very unhealthy.
I’m also wondering what I can do with the stupendous offer from IKEA in France. I get in a certain amount of special offers by email from France every week and generally, I have a quick look at them before deleting them. But this week, IKEA offered me a cheque for €1,500 to renovate my home, but since I don’t unfortunately have a home in France, I’ll have to pass on this one!
Meantime, the bad news on the weather front continues, this time in southern Morocco, where severe storms have caused much flooding and around a dozen fatalities, with a couple of dozen more people missing. The worst affected areas are around Agadir and Marrakech.
But on the cultural front, there’s one piece of good news. The Rome Opera had planned to make about 200 musicians and singers redundant, replacing them with freelancers, but now following a deal with the unions, this plan is off the table and the jobs are safe. There’s even hope now that the opera’s resident conductor, 73 year old Riccardo Muti, who gave up the Rome Opera as a bad job earlier in the year, might be persuaded to return.
All this makes what the Pope said ion Strasbourg this week so relevant and to the point. He accused the EU of being elderly, feeble and obsessed with facts and economic statistics. He deplored the way in which people in Europe are now treated like mere numbers, so that when they no longer have any economic value, they are discarded. His very pointed condemnation of the unlovely and dehumanised monster the EU has turned into was very pertinent indeed. The present Pope is a wonderful person for getting to the truth of matters and expressing it in simple language that everyone can understand-no academic gibberish there!
At least on the media front, there was one bit of good news this week. The National newspaper was launched in Glasgow this week as a pro-independence publication, the first new national newspaper to be launched in Scotland for some decades. Sales have been close to 100,000 a day, double what was forecast. The owners are planning for it to run for just a week before deciding whether or not to continue, so let’s hope it does so. In Scotland, the Scottish National Party is now so strong and popular that it’s quite likely that the independence issue could be back on the agenda long before anyone had anticipated.
Talking of newspapers, I was reminded of the salutary tale of an old friend of mine in the newspaper business, long since deceased. He was a feisty character and wrote much punchy journalism. He also managed to be editor of a leading regional newspaper for about six years, until one night, when he was in a hotel and seriously under the influence, he happened to meet a woman from the family that owned the newspaper. He then proceeded to tell her exactly what he thought of their management style, which wasn’t very much. Unsurprisingly, the next day, he found himself looking for a new job. A salutary tale of how it often pays to keep one’s thoughts to oneself.
On the international front, Bono is busy recovering from his injuries when he fell off his cycle in Central Park, New York. Those injuries turned out to be far more serious than initially thought, including a fractured eye socket, a fractured collarbone and a fractured hand. Let’s hope Bono heals quickly and is soon back in action with U2 and making his normally very sensible political and social comments.
Last Saturday by date was the 51st anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy. For anyone who heard the news on that fateful day all those years ago, it was unforgettable. It’s also interesting to speculate what his legacy would have been if he had served his full term in office. The present incumbent, President Obama, seems to have recovered his mojo following the recent mid-term elections, which went very much the way of the Republicans. As with his new proposals for dealing with the millions of illegal immigrants in the US, Obama seems to have a new found feistiness, much to be welcomed.
In Belgium, the three biggest unions are having a series of regional strikes in protest at the planned austerity measures of the new government, culminating in a national strike on December 15. Here in Dublin, a massive demo against the planned water charges is planned for December 10 and everyone is wondering how massive it’s going to be or whether the government has managed to lance the boil created by its own incompetence, through the recently announced revisions to the water charges. But other very serious issues remain and the government response is so lackadaisical it isn’t true. There’s a massive housing crisis in Dublin and elsewhere. The number of people sleeping rough on the streets is at its highest level yet. The government response is easy to sum up: the sound of an after lunch snooze is pervasive. But the problem with homeless in France is just as bad; in the past decade, it has risen by just over 40 per cent, with 31,000 children now homeless.
Recently, National Public Radio, one of the big radio networks in the US, was in Ireland doing some programmes. They had three government ministers lined up for interview; none turned up. One of the producers said afterwards that he had done programmes throughout Europe and Africa and out of all these places, the worst for sheer government incompetence was you guess, Ireland. It’s not much better either in Northern Ireland, where there so much bad political feeling that even the power-sharing executive in Belfast looks very shaky indeed.
So what can we do except end on a humorous note. I’m indebted to Popbitch, the always entertaining and usually mucky entertainment industry email bulletin produced in London, for a story about FC Kaiserlautern, one of the big German football clubs. It headlined the piece: “Kuntz, Fuchs and Dick”, referring to the fact that Stefan Kuntz, its chairman, has just signed two new key players, Danny Fuchs and Florian Dick. And I’m indebted to The Irish Times for repeating a famous newspaper libel about the late Nelson Mandela. The newspaper article was about a TV travel documentary and it referred to “Nelson Mandela, an 800 year old demigod and a dildo collector”. There should of course have been a comma after the word “demigod”. What a difference a comma, or the lack of one, makes!