Something rare in France, a day off that has no connection to Saints. It seems to me that throughout my life, everytime I set foot on French soil without checking first, it's always a Saint's Day and thus France has closed up shop, like the famous quote from WC Fields, 'I went to Philadelphia once, but it was closed.' Just...substitute France obviously.
When I turned on TV5 this morning for the news, there was President Chirac talking with his hands to two journalists. One of the journos seemed more uncomfortable than the other. Both were men, just saying like.
Eventually the delayed news came on and we were able to see the Bastille Day celebrations on the Champs Elysées.
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. The underpinnings of the first republic, bought with the blood of their elite. Female military personnel sang,
'Allons enfants de la Patrié, le jour de Gloire est arrivé,
Contre nous de la Tyrannie, l'étandard sanglant est levé...' stirring stuff and accompanied by marching service men and women, tanks all rolling in synch and helicopters flying over.
And the Légion Etrangère. Yes, they still exist. And they looked étrange indeed. The French word for strange also means foreign, stranger - foreigner. Many of them wore long, full beards, Castro beards, ZZ Top beards. And their ceremonial dress is bizarre, it has a hint of the masonic, long leather apron, axe carried in one hand.
Being sent to join the foreign legion was always synonymous with being made to disappear and of a hard, disciplined life.
Arabian-looking gentlemen would pop-up in films and cartoon, even Belgian Hergé's Tintin would meet mysterious foreign legionnaires at moments of tension in the stories.
Joining the foreign legion in real life however, was a way of buying French nationality by spilling the blood of France's enemies, and of reprieving yourself if you were a petty criminal or a down and out. Human recycling.
The legionnaire's code of honour is arguably what sets them apart as such an exemplary fighting force and in the beginning bound together a bunch of such disparate people. It is based on honour, discipline, comradeship, courage and loyalty. A legionnaire must keep their body and weaponry in peak condition. Each mission is sacred and must be accomplished at all costs and you abandon neither wounded nor dead. The ultimate soldiers.
The French are a complex people. I feel that when you read a nation's literature you understand them better. You look inside their heads like looking at the workings inside a clock. But then is that an adequate way of knowing a people? Can we British be judged on Shakespeare and Chaucer, on Mallory, Gaskell, Austen, Bram Stoker, Kazuo Ishiguro? Pretty much, yes, I think so. I think maybe there is an extent to which we allow our literature to define us too.
On the other hand, I've read more French literature than most of the French people I know, but that doesn't make me more French than them.
One of my favourite French authors of all time was the Irish writer Samuel Beckett. He lived in France for a goodly part of his life and he wrote both in English and French, so I studied him as a French author but only ever saw performances of his work in English.
I could just ramble on forever, there is simply no end to my thoughts about things French, because so much of my knowledge about all kinds of stuff came to me through my study of French. I'll stop. It'll keep anyway.
Vive la France ! (And long may her hypermarkets provide us with wine,cheese and croissants)
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