LA COURNEUVE: This small medieval village close to Paris eventually became a fashionable country retreat for the gentry, with two notable châteaus. In the 1960s, with immigration from former French colonies pressuring the expanding population of Paris, the construction of public and low-cost housing boomed in many suburbs of the capital, and the population of La Courneuve essentially doubled. Emblematic of La Courneuve’s proud industrial past and turbulent history of working-class struggles, the Mécano factory, opened in 1914 and specializing in precision tool manufacturing, was finally forced to close in 1978 but will reopen as a multimedia and administrative center.
FRANCIS DE PRESSENSÉ (1853–1914): Born in Paris, Pressensé fought in the Franco-Prussian War (the War of 1870) and had distinguished careers in public service, the diplomatic corps, journalism, and politics. As a socialist he fought for the separation of church and state. During the Dreyfus affair (1894–1906), his support of Alfred Dreyfus and of Émile Zola’s fiery campaign on his behalf cost Pressensé his membership in the National Order of the Legion of Honor, the highest French order of merit, the motto of which is Honneur et Patrie (“Honor and Country”). He does, however, now have the honneur of a few streets to his name in the patrie.
JEAN JAURÈS (1859–1914): Another defender of Alfred Dreyfus, Jaurès began as a moderate republican and wound up a socialist and antimilitarist and one of the most important writers and figures of the French Left. The founder of the (originally) socialist paper L’Humanité, he tried to help head off the Great War and was assassinated for his pains by a French nationalist at a Parisian café, now called Le Taverne du Croissant, marked by the traditional commemorative plaque.
DIVISION-LECLERC: It is impossible to overstate the affection and esteem in which Philippe François Marie Leclerc de Hauteclocque is held in France. Posthumously named a marshal of France, he is commonly known simply by his nom de guerre: Leclerc.
Born in 1902, this aristocratic soldier first fought the invading Germans in 1939, then went to French Equatorial Africa on the orders of General Charles de Gaulle in Britain. In 1943, Leclerc’s force was reequipped by the Americans as the French Second Armored Division, the 2e DB, often called La Division Leclerc or Leclerc’s Army. The 2e DB was shipped to Britain to participate in Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of northern France, and landed at Utah Beach in Normandy in 1944 as part of General George S. Patton’s U.S. Third Army. After liberating Paris, the 2e DB fought on the western front and in the final battles in southern Germany.
With the European war over in May 1945, Leclerc took command of the French Far East Expeditionary Corps and was France’s representative at the surrender of the Japanese Empire on board the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945, in Tokyo Bay. Leclerc’s mission was to regain control of French Indochina, but he soon realized that the situation demanded a diplomatic solution, and he warned the French and American politicians arrayed against Ho Chi Minh that nationalism, not communism, was the issue. He is said to have advised them to negotiate at any cost, in which case he was prescient indeed. He was replaced as commander of the French forces in 1946, and on November 28, 1947, he died with his staff in a plane crash in French Algeria.
DANIEL–CHARLES TRUDAINE (1703–69): This French administrator was a civil engineer of genius. One of the chief architects of the French road system, he is well known for the Trudaine Atlas, a monumental work (1745–80) of road maps and attendant features in astonishing cartographic and topographic detaiclass="underline" more than three thousand plates in sixty-two volumes, individually embellished with watercolor, showing actual and planned roads, waterways, the nature of the terrain, castles, houses, churches, cemeteries, ruins, plus designs for bridges, canals, and other civil engineering projects. Look up “Atlas de Trudaine — Wikipédia” to see a few of these lovely plates, the satellite photos of their day, and “L’atlas de Trudaine — YouTube” will bring you a French video about the book.
8 MAI: At three o’clock on May 8, 1945, Victory in Europe Day, church bells rang throughout France to mark Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender to the Allies of World War II. General Charles de Gaulle paid his respects at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe, and all around the world there was, naturally, dancing in the streets.
2. Erik Satie (1866–1925) was a French composer, pianist, writer, and eccentric whose unconventional compositions were much admired by his contemporaries in the Parisian avant-garde, including Mallarmé, Verlaine, Breton, Man Ray, Cocteau, and Picasso. Debussy, Milhaud, Poulenc, Ravel, and Stravinsky were among those influenced by his ideas, which presaged such later artistic movements as musique concrète, indeterminacy, and minimalism. The youthful anarchist Satie became a socialist and in 1914, after the assassination of Jean Jaurès, joined the French Section of the Workers’ International. He never invited anyone home to his bleak studio without water or electricity in the southern suburbs of Paris, where after his death his friends found scores of umbrellas, several identical backup suits of gray velvet (his customary attire), and two tied-together, out-of-tune pianos full of unopened letters.
3. A French singer-songwriter and poet, Jean Ferrat (1930–2010) was known for singing poems, particularly the work of Louis Aragon. When his Russian-born father was deported to Auschwitz in 1942, Ferrat left school to go to work. He released his second single, “Ma Môme,” in 1960. Googling “Paroles Ma môme de Jean Ferrat, Clip Ma môme” will bring up a video of the song and provide the text of the French lyrics, the gist of which is “My girl’s not stuck-up, doesn’t act like a movie star, doesn’t wear dark glasses, and she works in a factory in Créteil”—a town in the southeastern suburbs of Paris.
4. Ordering French sandwiches separates the wheat from the chaff. Requesting un sandwich au jambon will get you a ham sandwich — made of bread and ham. If you want that sandwich with butter, you order un jambon beurre, a “ham butter.” A ham-and-cheese sandwich is not a “ham sandwich with cheese” (un sandwich au jambon avec du fromage), but a “ham cheese” (un jambon fromage). Which does not include butter! Un saucisson sec means a salami, a “dry sausage,” and if it’s a sandwich order, it means salami and bread, period. No butter. To get that, you order un sec-beurre: a “dry butter.” Go figure.
5. Elected by universal male suffrage to draw up a constitution after the overthrow of the monarchy, the Convention Nationale governed France from September 20, 1792, until October 26, 1795, a crucial time for the French Revolution. The Convention’s internal power struggles are the stuff of legend, and the most famous of its avatars is the Committee of Public Safety, a triumph of Orwellian doublespeak. Created to defend the fledgling republic against internal rebellion and foreign attack, this committee essentially ruled France during the Reign of Terror (1793–94). As internal repression accelerated, an antireligious campaign to dechristianize society — through execution if necessary — culminated in a celebration of Reason in Notre Dame on November 10, 1793. The intransigent Maximilien de Robespierre, however, denounced this cult and sent many of its practitioners to the guillotine. In June 1794 he announced his own establishment of a new state religion, the deistic Cult of the Supreme Being. This cult, too, was short-lived, however, for it died with its creator on July 28, 1794, when Robespierre, who had sent so many of his former allies to the guillotine, followed them to the scaffold.