#Histoire de la France

[defenderoftheearth]

Cinéma:un film a voir absolument :Vaincre ou mourir

Ne rêvons pas, l’industrie du cinéma est sous contrôle, comme tous les média. Si les média nous parlent de quelque chose, c’est que ceux qui les dirigent veulent d’une manière ou d’une autre nous focaliser sur le sujet. J’ai un peu hésité à faire cette petite publication, mais je pense qu’elle est nécessaire. « Vaincre ou mourir » est un film français réalisé par Paul Mignot et Vincent Mottez,…

[bleublancrage]

« Vous en êtes comme malade de votre désir d'en savoir toujours davantage... Voilà tout... Enfin, ça doit être votre chemin à vous... Par là, tout seul... C'est le voyageur solitaire qui va le plus loin. Vous allez partir bientôt alors ? »

Voyage au bout de la nuit - L-F Céline (1932).

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"The Vichy regime incorporated the forest into its ‘back-to-the-land’ programme constructing the forest as a traditional, stable site in which to morally regenerate France. Jacques Chevalier, conservative philosopher and minister for public instruction between December 1940 and February 1941, considered that ‘life in the forest is the most healthy there is for the body and the soul, freeing us from the artifices of modern society’. He suggested that ‘eternal’ France resides in the forest. The forest constituted:

A living symbol of tradition, perpetuating history; old France is preserved better here than anywhere else; the present unites effortlessly with the past. In the silence and depth of the forest centuries replace one another, slowly, continuously, in the same way that the oak’s sapwood binds a new layer to those of springs and autumns past.

For Chevalier, trees represented a link between France’s past and present and acted as a guarantor of French traditions. Chevalier’s musings on trees and tradition are by no means uncharacteristic of the symbolic appropriation of trees. In the words of Douglas Davies, the tree is ‘a living entity, spanning many human generations. As such it avails itself as a historical marker and social focus of events’.

Forestry associations strove to incorporate the forest within the ‘National Revolution’. Just after the defeat, J. Jagerschmidt, the general secretary of the Comité des forêts argued that the forest was a ‘refuge of [the] old principles’ of Work, Family, Homeland. For Jagerschmidt, the forest epitomised the virtues of labour because ‘woodcutters and charcoal burners laughed at the paid holidays and forty hour week that the [Third Republic] wanted to impose on them’. Forest workers did not need to be told to work ‘from sunrise to sunset’. Family and forest also went together, according to Jagerschmidt, because the latter was a

symbol of tradition . . . of which the evolutionary rhythm exceeds several times the length of human life, [so] chimes perfectly well with the notion of the family, the linking of successive generations.

Furthermore, it was in the depths of the forest that the country’s ‘heart’ belonged. It is unclear whether such rhetoric represents deeply held beliefs or lip service to the newly installed regime. Either way, the forest’s politicisation is evident. The irony was, however, that such ‘back-to-the-land’ rhetoric simultaneously politicised the forest and constructed it as a space of ‘natural’ (and therefore apolitical) values and traditions

In a similar way to the peasant, the bûcheron (or woodcutter) was transformed into a patriotic figure labouring to regenerate France. Working in the forest helped strengthen male bodies and remake masculinity in post-defeat France. Two state foresters, Roger Blais and Gérard Luzu, published a guide to the ‘tough school’ of the forest, which presented forestry work as the most ‘radical’ return to the land and ‘an integral part of rural reconstruction’. They highlighted the ‘physical and moral enrichment’ the forester gleaned from the forest, ‘contributing to the affirmation of values and personal autonomy within the framework of nature’s laws and collective life’. In contrast to the ease of city living, life in the forest was ‘hard and healthy’ and woodcutting a ‘noble and free occupation’. Blais and Luzu also called for the forestry profession to conform to the principles of ‘social spirit and true hierarchy as outlined by the head of state’. Similarly, a 1943 article in Revue des Eaux et Forêts argued that ‘living in nature’ is the ‘best school’ and working in forestry teams countered individualism and selfishness because it cultivated the qualities of ‘sacrifice and charity’. These visions of forest life chimed with Vichy’s assumption that hard work was redemptive and served a national purpose.

Likewise, the forestry work of the Chantiers de la Jeunesse was supposed to contribute to male moral and physical regeneration. The Chantiers leadership viewed the forest as a safe and wholesome place, distant from the supposed immorality and decadence of modern society that reached its zenith in the city. From the outset, the Chantiers strove to remove its recruits from the ‘deleterious influence of the towns’ by making them camp out ‘in the great outdoors (en pleine nature), in the middle of the forest, hidden from all forms of trouble or agitation’.

The forest supposedly held important lessons for these young men, as it did for the rest of society. At Tronçais, Group One of the Chantiers dedicated a tree to their leader, Commissaire Furioux. In his speech during the ceremony, Forestry Inspector Desjeux pronounced that

it is through the living example of the forest, an example of tradition, continuity, and grandeur that [Furioux] wanted to impress on all those who had the honour of obeying [his] orders.

In a similar vein, Forestry Conservator Pascaud used his speech to identify the forest’s exemplary demonstration of ‘solidarity’. In particular, the oak tree towering serenely above surrounding trees protects them so that they grow to share the ‘light in which he bathes’. Addressing the Chantiers, Pascaud continued:

This solidarity of all plants, is it not the image of the best of societies where the leader must dominate in his pre-eminence while feeling himself surrounded, supported, [and] aided [by his followers]? If his entourage fails him, he succumbs, whatever his qualities. Let us remember this example at a moment when divisions lie in wait for us.

There was, however, some discrepancy between the regime’s rhetoric and the reality of forest life. The Chantiers’ leaders were well aware of the young men’s indifference, even outright hostility, to their new role as woodcutters. A 1943 report lamented that the Chantiers’ early enthusiasm and their ‘mentality of explorers out to discover new lands’ had since dissipated. Instead, the men no longer recognised the ‘usefulness of their work’ and the leadership itself admitted that ‘forestry work, interesting at first, quickly becomes monotonous, [and] tedious. Their hearts are not in the felling. Boredom is the dominant characteristic’. The joys of being a woodcutter were lost on those forced to work in the forests.

Nonetheless, the image of a stately oak leading and protecting his followers was a popular one. Yvonne Estienne’s illustrated children’s story La belle histoire d’un chêne (1943) compared France to a forest that had just been struck by a fierce storm. During the storm, trees swayed alarmingly in the wind and petrified birds and animals rushed to find shelter 'all the forest is unhappy. It looks for help’. Help came from the forest’s leader, a ‘tall, solid, upright tree’ who fears nothing and protects its charges. In case her young readers had missed the analogy, Estienne moved the story onto contemporary events: during the military defeat the French had fled from the enemy and its bombs ‘like the rabbits of the wood’. But luckily for France there was hope:

there existed, as well, in the forest of France – because men [sic] resemble trees – a tall, beautiful oak, already old but so valiant that he stood strong to protect everybody. And this tall, beautiful oak was called Marshal Pétain.

Helpfully, the Pétain oak tree carefully explained where the forest had gone wrong and how it should reform itself.

Vichy’s ideological appropriation of the forest reached its high point in Tronçais where an oak tree was named after Pétain on the initiative of Chevalier (his godson) and in the presence of forestry officials. Like the supposedly exceptional qualities of Pétain, the oak tree chosen to bear his name stood out from the rest: it stood 35 m high, was 260 years old and boasted good foliage. During the naming ceremony, Pétain unveiled a plaque bearing the words ‘Chêne Maréchal Pétain’ and made three marks on the tree with a Forestry Administration hammer. On one level, this event can be interpreted within the framework of the cult of personality created around Pétain, who admitted that he hoped that he would be able to ‘remain as upright as this tree in order to be able to devote [himself] to the service of the country’. The ceremony also implied that Pétain, like his oak tree, embodied the latest in a vulnerable line of strong, upright men devoted to France. As Chevalier asked during the ceremony; ‘who could doubt a country which produces such trees and such men?’

But beyond the construction of Pétain’s cult of personality, it is not too fanciful to see this marking of the tree as a performative device to reinforce the importance of the forest and the state’s claim to govern it. The occasion also served as a reminder of the forest’s historical role as ‘saviour’ of France. During the ceremony, Chevalier reminded his audience that this ancient forest provided wood for the Navy in 1793 and timber for the Army in 1917. Caziot, in a speech prepared for the ceremony, also emphasised the forest’s role as a productive space of ‘exceptional value for the material reconstruction of the country’. Now that France had crumbled under German invasion, forests would enable the nation to recover its former glory.

The ceremony suggested that Tronçais, which the state had replanted in the late seventeenth century, was physical evidence that France could rebuild itself under Vichy’s guidance. Caziot called for a contemporary display of determination equal to that of foresters who had replanted Tronçais:

The state of the Tronçais forest in 1670, was it not the image of France today, of the ravaged France, morally demolished by more than half a century of hideous demagogy? The war then added its own disasters. Today, everything must be remade, morally and materially. It is a fearsome task and one which demands long and patient effort as the rot runs deep. But the base has remained healthy and solid and allows for hope . . . On this solid base, which is the foundation of France, we can, in the image of Tronçais, remake a vigorous and healthy France. The oak which bears [Pétain’s] name must be a lesson and a symbol for everyone.

In this speech, Caziot compared the Third Republic with the damaged pre-1670 forest, but suggested that all was not lost because the forest’s essential nature (like France’s) had remained intact. There is also a sense that the forest’s and France’s ‘true’ essence lay beneath the surface of democracy and modernity, waiting to be recovered and restored. This speech was a manifestation of the right-wing idealisation of ‘True France’, which, as Herman Lebovics suggests, relied on a ‘discourse [that] employs the essentialist determinist language of a lost hidden authenticity that, once uncovered, yields a single, immutable national identity’.

Yet the forest’s political symbolism need not be reactionary. Vichy’s appropriation of the oak tree echoed previous state manipulation of this species. Ironically, given Vichy’s hostility to the French Republic, in the years following the French Revolution oaks were moulded into ‘Liberty Trees’. Like Vichy, revolutionary governments elevated the oak to the status of a ‘beacon tree’ controlling and sheltering surrounding trees. Moreover, French resistance units occupied the forest’s physical and symbolic space, transforming it into a site of resistance.

As the Occupation dragged on, resistance fighters identified the forest as a place to seek refuge and a base from which to oppose the Vichy regime and the German occupier. In places this development manifested itself symbolically. At Tronçais in February 1943, a resister reportedly scaled Pétain’s oak, replacing the plaque bearing the Marshall’s name with the following:

Chêne Gabriel Peri French Patriot Shot by the Nazis

Consequently, Pétain’s oak is now officially known as the ‘Oak of the Resistance’. But beyond this symbolic act, the resistance reclaimed the forest in more material ways." - Chris Pearson, Scarred Landscapes: War and Nature in Vichy France. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. p. 56-61.

[lejournalfaitmain]

Une histoire de haute couture

Bien que toutes les maisons royales et aristocratiques possédaient des vêtements sur mesure, et rivalisaient pour la création de tendances de mode, le terme haute couture est associé rétrospectivement aux robes de la créatrice de mode Rose Bertin pour la reine Marie-Antoinette. Les vêtements étaient illustrés et imprimés dans des magazines de mode, inventés au siècle précédent, puis copiés par des couturiers locaux, créant ainsi une mode plus rapide. Cependant, la haute couture telle que nous la connaissons aujourd’hui n’est apparue que vers la fin des années 1850.

Charles Fredrick Worth (1825-1895) a contribué à définir cette industrie du luxe telle que nous la connaissons actuellement. Il a été le premier à présenter ses nouvelles collections une saison à l’avance, à engager des modèles pour présenter ses vêtements, à les vendre en exclusivité ou en copie, ainsi qu’à introduire une étiquette cousue à l’intérieur de chaque vêtement. Il est également amusant de constater que sa femme a été la première modèle rémunérée de l’histoire, dans les années 1850.

Sa boutique parisienne habillait entre autres l’impératrice Eugénie de France et l’impératrice Elisabeth d’Autriche, mais son véritable héritage pourrait être sa participation à la création de la Chambre syndicale de la haute couture, une réforme des corporations professionnelles médiévales désuetes.

Le terme haute couture vient de « haute » signifiant « élevée » ou « élégante », et « couture » signifiant « confection de vêtements ». Pour bénéficier de ce terme, les vêtements doivent être confectionnés aux mesures individuelles du client, l’atelier doit être situé à Paris et employer au moins 15 personnes à temps plein et au moins 20 employés techniques, à temps plein ou à temps partiel, et présenter deux collections annuelles d’au moins 50 créations originales par saison.

De nos jours, le terme désigne également des pratiques similaires dans d’autres capitales mondiales de la mode.

[cheminer-poesie-cressant]

sur la chaussée des vides qui jouent avec la lumière ; l’enfant y voit l’innocence d’un puzzle à combler ; l’adulte sait que le pavé manquant est la marche d’une révolte en cours ; le révolté sait que ce vide est déjà une défaite, un droit vaincu qui a existé dans un passé qui était hier

© Pierre Cressant

(samedi 15 avril 2023)

[o-link]

Jeu de pétanque la mollette

[daffodil--lament]

speech writing going so so so bad

[transparentgentlemenmarker]

La petite histoire de France

Grant Lawrens : Baptiste

David Salles : Jean Plancher cousin par alliance de Napoléon, Karina Marimon Renata Plancher cousine de Napoléon et femme de Jean

François Levantal : comte Philippe Honoré de Roche Saint-Pierre cousin de Louis XIV, Anne-Sophie Girard : comtesse Marie-Louise de Roche Saint-Pierre femme de Philippe, Philippe Beglia : Frémont majordome des Roche Saint-Pierre, Sébastien Castro : abbé Martin, Jean-Luc Couchard : Feuillade, Émissaire du Roi et ami des Roche Saint-Pierre qui leur apporte des nouvelles de Versailles, et leur fait toujours de fausses joies

Alban Ivanov : François d'Arc, cousin de Jeanne d'Arc, Ophélia Kolb : Ysabeau d'Arc épouse de François d'Arc, Fatsah Bouyahmed : Gaspard le gardien de brebis, Philippe Duquesne : Adelin beau-frère et ami de François d'Arc, mari de Guillemette père d'au moins 10 enfants

[tmc-consulting-club]

Thibaut-Marc CAPLAIN vs La mafia amiénoise

Madame, Monsieur, Afin de confirmer l’envoi à la Présidence de la République, vous devez cliquer sur le lien suivant : xxx Sans confirmation de votre part, le message posté sur le site sera effacé sous 72 heures. —L’outil Ecrire au PrésidentPrésidence de la République ========================================================================================================= Voici, pour votre…

[agentfascinateur]

Quand l'Afrique libéra la Provence 💜 👏🏼👏🏼

“Parmi les 250 000 soldats français qui débarquent en Provence, 80 % sont d’origine africaine, d'un point de vue géographique. Sans ces soldats africains, quel que soit leur statut ou leur origine, l'armée française n'aurait pas été en mesure de participer au débarquement de Provence”

Et ce sont les Africains aujourd'hui qui aident à libérer les Palestiniens. 👏🏼👏🏼

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

DES FORÇATS ONT QUITTES LA ROCHELLE De nombreux forçats sont partis mercredi dernier de l'Ile de Ré pour le bagne. Notre photo montre un convoi quittant La Rochelle a destination de l’Ile, l'homme au chapeau mou est Castaner, danseur mondain, qui tua un de ses camarades. (Voir page 12.)

- Police Magazine. 2ieme année - n° 42. 13 Septembre 1931

[jaimelire-france]

Les Mémoires de Louise Michel : Un ouvrage essentiel pour comprendre l'histoire du mouvement ouvrier et du féminisme.

[thomtmexploration]

Je visite un Moulin à eau l’Abbé a la Mothe Saint Héray

La vidéo 👇

Les photos 👇

La description 👇

Je visite un moulin à eau l’Abbé a la Mothe Saint-Héray (79800).

Moulin à eau créé dès le début du XIè s. en bordure de Sèvre niortaise par l’abbaye de St-Maixent. Moulin à tan au XVIIè s. (usage de poudre d’écorce pour rendre les peaux imputrescibles), il est transformé en moulin à blé vers 1700 et modifié durant le 2è quart du XIXè s. En 1920, le meunier y adjoint une minoterie à reprise dont le mécanisme est inscrit en 1991 à la liste supplémentaire des Monuments historiques (en parfait état de fonctionnement de nos jours). La cessation d’activité remonte aux années 1960. Sa fille célibataire, Madeleine Gélin, le donne en viager à la commune de la Mothe-St-Héray en 1988. Tout est pratiquement à l’abandon. Depuis 1991, l’établissement est aménagé à des fins touristiques. Il accueille, en plus de la minoterie, une exposition permanente sur le thème de la géologie et le musée de la Rosière.

[lire1x]

La cuisinière des Kennedy de Valérie Paturaud

As-tu également été bercé.e au rêve américain, aux histoires de succès éclatants à la Bernard Tapie, aux paillettes et à la jet-set ? Pour ma part, un peu, surtout à travers le magazine Paris Match que mon père rapportait à la maison chaque semaine. Les Kennedy sont indéniablement l’une des familles les plus exposées médiatiquement depuis les années 50. Même si leur présence est moins marquée de…

[vagabondageautourdesoi]

Philippe Collin - Le Barman

Présentation du premier roman de Philippe Collin, Le barman du Ritz, sur le grand hôtel de l'entre-deux-guerres à la fin de la seconde guerre mondiale.

Du Ritz Philippe Collin prend à bras-le-corps la vie de Franck Meier pour nous la proposer à sa lumière. Et, cette vie, exceptionnelle, devient savoureuse tant l’historien journaliste aime recréer, en sept parties, l’ambiance de l’époque de l’entre-deux-guerres jusqu’à la fin de la seconde guerre mondiale. Le bar élégant du Ritz évolue sous nos yeux avec ses privilégiés, artistes, banquiers ou…

[demots]

Citation attribuée à De Gaulle par André Frossard.

Le Sursaut, Histoire intime de la Ve République