8th November 2008

The French are no different to others around the world in harboring resentment for years and years, sometimes deep within themselves. Take last Tuesday. Thirty people were arrested and three police officers wounded after a protest against European immigration policy turned violent in the French city of Vichy. This was the town that was the shamed capital of France's horrific WW2 experiences, and locals have never forgotten that time.
The world tries to move on, and indeed brave organisers tried to reinvent the town by hosting its first international conference there since the war so that they could shake off their wartime stigma and become a popular spa resort once more. But several busloads of militants had other ideas, with many linking current French policy to that of the pro-Nazi past.
I have often thought that too much of what happened during WW2 has been airbrushed away by nations (especially Germany) who wish only to forget what happened and to move on to what is happening today. What they fail to realise is that by pushing all those wartime attrocities into a locked compartment - things that changed families' lives for ever - people can never be free of the memory.
My solution would be to hold an international conference, but not one on immigration. My proposed agenda would be to confront all the international issues that arose in the years immediately preceding WW2 and trace the individual events that happened, one by one, that led to what happened in that fateful holocaust. It's never one thing, but many - sometimes coming together by chance - that cause eventual disaster. Having a megalomaniac at the helm of a non-democracy is one!
Sometimes you have to confront a festering boil, even one that has been fermenting for over 60 years, and probe deep within to see how it happened before lancing the boil once and for all. A quick clean cut. At a stroke then we learn to recognise how atrocities happened so that they may never happen again. Then, and only then, can proper healing take place.

18th October 2008

There's a village in the Var region, on the southern Mediterranean coast, which has recently made a surprising change. Shops there are accepting francs as currency again. The trend was begun by baker Nathalie Lepeltier, who says that people still have a lot of old notes at home, and the last series of franc notes can be exchanged at the Banque de France until 2012. Apparently all the businesses in Collobrieres, the village in question, are now taking part in the experiment and Mme Lepeltier has agreed to collect all their francs and to send them to the bank. I can't imagine that happening in the UK - too much chance of the collector disappearing abroad with all that cash, I'd have thought! But then I'm an English cynic and have lived a bit. Anyway, all the shops in Collobrieres now have pictures up showing the notes that are allowed: the last series which includes 500s with a picture of Pierre and Marie Curie, 200s with Gustave Eiffel, 100s with Cezanne, 50s with Saint-Exupery and 20s with Debussy. All said they didn't like the Euro notes anyway - all those pictures of buildings no-one's heard of. They much prefer the colourful personalities pictured on the old notes. Apparently four out of 10 households in France still work out their budgets in terms of francs, then translate painfully. Some still even think in ancien francs, the currency that went out in 1960 (when a hundred old francs became one new one). Although elsewhere in the EU they have euro 'cents', it's actually still 'centimes' in France now, avoiding confusion with the word for 100. The name of Madame's Collobrieres shop, Le Pain de Jadis, actually means 'the bread of yesteryear'. It made me think of the current Hovis advert on English TV, with scenes of wartime neighbourliness. When times are hard, take people back to an airbrushed past when everything was good, neighbours actually spoke to one another and everyone was content with what they had. Trouble is, the dream soon fades when you're faced with the hard reality of the present again, but it's nice while it lasts.
P.S. Don't miss Part 2 tomorrow of the Bruno serial.