Vladimir Putin's obscene attack on a neighbouring sovereign state, accompanied by the deliberate targeting of civilians, strikes many as a barbaric criminal enterprise carried out by a deranged dictator without trace of humanity or compassion. It reminds us, too, of an unquenchable global thirst for conflict. The Second World War ended 77 years ago but few visitors to Salut! would struggle to add to my list of the wars that have polluted post-war history: Korea, Israel-Palestine, Northern Ireland, the Falklands, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen ... and, of course Algeria.
This is my piece for The National, a newspaper published in Abu Dhabi and which I helped to create, on today's 60th anniversary of the signing of the Evian Accords. The editor kindly permits me to reproduce my work here:
The signing of the Evian Accords on this day 60 years ago officially ended not only a bitter and bloody war of independence between France and Algeria but 132 years of colonial rule.
Named after the spa resort on the shores of Lake Geneva, where the French and Algerian delegations met to ratify its text, the 93-page agreement was meant to herald a new era of mutual respect and friendship.
From l'Algerie Mon Amour, an art exhibition marking the year of Algerian independence from France. It will continue ar the Institute of the Arab World in Paris until July. This item is listed as 'Baya, Musique, 1974, Gouache sur papier' and was donated by Claude and France Lemand
By the early evening of Saturday June 10, 1944, the bold fighting men of a Waffen SS unit were able to start relaxing after their day's work.
No fewer than 642 French civilians had been slaughtered in Oradour-sur-Glane, a village set in lush Limousin countryside. The victims included 247 women and 205 children, among them little Désirée Machefer (pictured above), who were herded into the parish church and either burned alive or shot - or both.
Job done, the Germans must have been thinking as they embarked on a night of celebration, singing heartily and sinking copious amounts of plundered wine from the remaining houses not already set on fire. Those buildings could await their turn next morning when the hungover Nazi soldiers would complete the task of turning a bustling village into a charred and ghostly testament to a monstrous war crime.
In the 50 years I have been visiting and, at times, living in France, I have often thought of going to Oradour to pay my own insignificant respects to the martyred village. Only this month, breaking a long journey from the Mediterranean coast to London, did I finally get round to it.
I have nothing much new to say about the massacre. What happened that day - at the end of a week in which Allied forces landed on Normandy beaches and, so much more mundanely, my mother had her 30th birthday - is an essential part of the history of warfare in general and the Second World War in particular and is therefore well documented.
Of the officers responsible for the slaughter, one (Gen Heinz Lammerding, who had also ordered the hanging of 99 Resistants the day before 113km away in Tulle), avoided trial altogether, except in absence, and resumed a prosperous business career in Dusseldof. Another, Major Adolf Dickmann, described as a bloodthirsty drunkard, was killed in action in Normandy later the same month.
And, as a rare survivor, Robert Hébras, recalls in his slim volume, 10 June 1944: The Tragedy Hour by Hour, a third, Lt Heinz Barth, finally brought to trial in East Germany in 1983, insisted it was a completely normal act.
No, he is said in other accounts to have added, he had no regrets; "in wartime, one acts harshly and with means available".
He was jailed for life but released after 14 years, on account of age, health and having finally "expressed remorse", and lived for a further 10 years.
There are, of course, people of the far right in France, Britain, Germany, the United States and elsewhere who struggle to find fault with the Nazis and their evil acts, to the point in some cases of feeling the wrong side won the war. They occasionally pop up in Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National despite her attempts to detoxify its rotten image; her father, Jean-Marie, founder of the party as the Front National, has infamously dismissed the Nazi occupation as relatively benign and the death camps as a mere detail of war.
In August, one or more persons preceded my own visit to the impressive memorial centre adjacent to the preserved remnants of the old village, now a neighbour of the new Oradour that has developed since the war. But the mission not to pay homage.
He, she or they proceeded to daub the exterior wall, changing the word "martyr" to "menteur" - liar - and asking when the real "truth" would be told*, adding for good measure the name of a much-convicted Nazi apologist, Vincent Reynouard.
We do not know yet who was responsible. It could ,in theory, have been the work of anti-Nazis but why would anyone see a need to demonise demons?
To be fair, Mme Le Pen was among those quick to condemn the desecration.
Beneath grey skies and amid incessant rain, my wife and I walked, mostly in silence as requested, around the blackened streets.
Signs denote where once could be found schools, the baker's shop, a Renault garage, several cafes with some also offering hairdressing, a couturier, a dentist's surgery, the workshops of the blacksmith and wheelwright and so on.
Almost at the end of the walk, but before heading for the cemetery, we arrived at the shell of the church and wandered inside in awe, noting the confessional box where two children were found shot dead after surviving the fire, the altar and a plaque commemorating Oradour's 1914-18 war dead.
My consoeur Anna Pukas James, writing at Facebook after I had posted photographs and the two videos seen below, recalled her own visit a few years ago: "A haunting - and haunted - place." Dave Eyre, another Facebook friend, said it was "most moving places I have ever visited".
As for us, it was a bleak reminder, not of collective German guilt but of man's capacity for inhumanity to his fellow man, woman and child. not a death factory in the sense that Auschwitz was but, because of the calculated destruction in a single day of a large village and all or most who inhabited it, even more disturbing.
I am glad I went but, even 76 years on from the awful event, aware that I shall never forget what I saw there.
* A German version of the 'truth' of the tragedy of Oradour appears at this link and purports to show that the church was set on fire when explosives stored there were detonated by a civilian, possibly a Maquis Resistant and possibly not even French but intent on heaping blame on wholly innocent Nazis (save for the admitted murder of men in Oradour they failed to separate from activists). I am unaware of any evidence that any trace of Resistance or Maquis arms and explosives was found in the village)
This is my most recent piece for The National, which kindly permits me to reproduce my work here. And posting it gives me an opportunity to wish all Salut! readers, even those who support Brexit, a very happy Christmas and New Year ..
France’s long struggle to acknowledge the iniquities of its imperial past has taken another significant step forward with President Emmanuel Macron’s declaration on a visit to the Ivory Coast that colonialism was a “grave mistake”.
Mr Macron’s choice of words on Saturday recalled previous comments, notably including a famous admission in another former French territory, Algeria, while campaigning for office, that colonisation was a “crime against humanity”.
But the tone was unequivocal. As he stood alongside the president Alassane Ouattara, in the Ivorian capital, Abidjan, there was no attempt to qualify the recognition of colonial sins by insisting, as he had done in Algiers in 2017, that it was important not to “sweep away all of the past” or descend into a culture of self-guilt.
I heard this song, great words set to a familiar tune, for the first time today, during France 2's coverage of the D-Day commemorations ... this is how I described it at salutlive.com
Forgive me for being late with this but, come to think of it, the timing is right.
On French news this lunchtime, amid generous and impressive coverage of commemorations on the 75th anniversary of D-Day, this song popped up. I realise the story may well be old news for some.
It was not the battle to end all battles and it was certainly not the war to end war. But 100 years ago today began the slaughter or maiming of more than one million men in the Battle of the Somme and it is right we should remember their sacrifice.
The photograph is by an esteemed former colleague, Geoff Pugh, reproduced with his consent, and the context takes us back 10 years. As I have said before, forgive me if you have read this here previously. It bears repetition.
An excellent opportunity to use this great juxtaposition caught by Bill Taylor
Now and then, a sudden burst of traffic towards these pages turns out to be inspired by an old posting. This article, about international rally of Citröen 2CVs, is one of them. It appeared four years ago and drew lots of interest then - see http://www.francesalut.com/2011/07/tin-snails-and-upturned-prams-a-festival-of-citroen-2cvs.html - and, probably because a similar event is due to take place at the end of next month in Toruń, Poland, has sparked renewed activity now. Here, mostly untouched, is the original...
A very happy Christmas to all Salut! readers. This seems a seasonal enough posting, more or less what will have appeared in the last day or so at The National, Abu Dhabi ...
One year ago today, David Cameron marked the first visit by a sitting British prime minister to the holiest Sikh shrine, the Golden Temple at Amritsar in Indian Punjab, by endorsing Winston Churchill’s condemnation of a “deeply shameful” event in colonial history.
Now this, to Bill and Louise but not to "Bridget Jones", will seem like cheating....but if the time of the year puts me in a sort of French mood, then there could hardly be a better moment to republish this as a follow-up to my thoughts, revisited, on London v Paris. It appeared as part of a "France in Flashes" series at Old Salut! on Nov 16 2006 - the anniversary of my wedding, the church bit of which occurred in provincial France and the honeymoon (if a few nights in a grubby hotel, obliged to stand outside humble restaurants and do mental arithmetic with the menu prices, counts as a lune de miel). It also attracted 50 replies, over which fact I might these days have drawn a veil had most of them not come from about three people.
But having visited France only once this year - eight lovely days in the Var in June - and absent from Paris since 18 months before that, I wonder if Francophile/Francophobe readers can fill me on whether some or all of it still applies. London is mentioned only en passant, but feel free to make direct comparisons.
Competition? You never know. If some interesting comments**** start trickling in - witty or wry, gentle or robust - I may well come up with a prize. Clicking away at my Google ads, buying incredibly cheap advertising space of your own or choosing items from my Amazon bookshelf is not a prerequisite of entry....and I may include the responses posted to London v Paris Revisited (1) as valid entries.
Two years ago, newly redundant, I went back (from Paris) to London to see family and sort out a few things concerning my future. I was doing quite a bit of that at the time, when I knew I would soon be setting myself up as a freelance journalist in the south of France but had no idea that, only a year later, I would be heading to the Middle East.
I came across this piece from that time while pottering about behind the Salut! scenes, peeking at where visitors to the site were coming from - and what had lured them here.
Now, of course, I am in neither city. But both are in my thoughts; I will see one of them - London - for Christmas, and one of the press releases I continue to receive from France informed me that the excellent Claire Chazal switched on the seasonal (pre-seasonal) lights at Galeries Lafayette in Paris a few nights ago. Forgive me for thinking it was worth sharing the results of my backstage meanderings. So many of the things I said then are still likely to apply two years on....
All that flitting between France and Britain has sharpened my appreciation of the little things that separate the two countries.
There are bigger distinctions too, of course, and I have a feeling these will crop up here as they did at another blogging place.
Picture by Paul Cooper
I always look forward to visits home but this has a lot to do with the people I want to see when I get there, and - as a past master of juggling travel plans with football fixtures lists - what I may want to do.
But on a largely football-free weekend (my regulars know of my less than wholehearted passion for internationals, though I will make a point of watching my younger daughter play for Acton Ladies tomorrow), I have been reduced to contemplating matters London vs Paris.
There is plenty wrong with life in Paris. It is stressful, crossing the road is perilous even on green, you get ripped off in many restaurants and bars and there is never an employee on hand to help when the machine rejects your perfectly valid Metro ticket.
But no Parisian, or French for that matter, barman has ever asked me to accept a cardboard cup for wine, as happened in the cafe next to Eurostar arrivals at Waterloo as I waited for my wife's train.
And no one is yet accosting me in Parisian streets with copies of free newspapers they want to shove in my face. Effectively unemployed for the first time since I was a teenager, I grudgingly acknowledge the boost this war of the freebies has given to a certain corner of the labour market.
Yet I cannot help sympathising with one wit I saw trying to win readers and reduce his pile of papers in the rain outside the Monument Tube station. "They're rubbish but they're free," he cried. "And they make good umbrellas."
Then there are the first stirrings of Christmas and New Year promotional activity, perhaps even more pronounced in the provinces. I came across Xmas dinner ads in Britan at the end of September; I don't think we'll see much of that in France for weeks to come.
London did threaten a late equaliser, though. A simple Indian meal in Chiswick, nowhere near the best I've encountered even in London W4, was nevertheless so good that I was quickly reminded of a significant downside to expat life in France.
Then a visit to the National Gallery enhanced our London experience by being free, which the Louvre isn't. Unfortunately, the paintings of Cezanne, Monet, Manet and Renoir made me homesick for the places depicted: the Bois de Boulogne (yes, by day), the Tuileries, Montmartre and Provence.
The honest truth is that I cannot wait to get back to the Gare (Gard for one reader's benefit; see comments) du Nord tomorrow night.
From l'Algerie Mon Amour, an art exhibition marking the year of Algerian independence from France. It will continue ar the Institute of the Arab World in Paris until July. This item is listed as 'Baya, Musique, 1974, Gouache sur papier' and was donated by Claude and France Lemand
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