Who Can You Trust?

 

Last summer my sisters and niece came to visit me. One day I took them to the local store and community of the Emmaus Foundation. It’s in Bernes-sur-Oise, a small town on the banks of the Oise River near where I live.

I love that store, which sells recycled or donated goods. Its bookshop is as good as a “real” bookstore. You can also find great buys on furniture, and often there are special sales: stationery supplies, all new, at the beginning of the schoolyear, a “white sale” of antique linens, a sale of picture frames.

White sale of antique linens

Connected to the store there are residences where the “companions of Emmaus” live, men and women down on their luck, with nowhere else to go, looking to pull themselves back up. Many of them work in the store, some are managers in charge of a department, like the “bookstore man,” quiet and efficient. In the clothing department, where my sister Susan found some good buys on children’s clothes, we met the manager from Bangladesh, speaking perfect English.

Emmaus was founded in 1949 by Henri Grouès, best known to the French as Abbé (Abbot) Pierre. It was a community that opened its doors to the poor and those in need.

On February 1, 1954, in a radio broadcast, Abbé Pierre cried out for help: That night, at 3 AM, a woman was found frozen to death in the streets of Paris, clutching the eviction notice that left her homeless. In March of that year, so great was the outpouring of aid that Emmaus became a charitable foundation dedicated to decent housing for all.

In 1971 Emmaus went international. In 1988, the Abbé Pierre Foundation for Decent Housing for the Poor was created. Today there are more than 425 local groups of Emmaus around the world.

In November 2023, a biopic of Abbé Pierre’s life, was released. The movie was relatively successful, and those who saw it were deeply moved.

Perhaps the film would have had more success if, in June 2023, a woman had not contacted the Emmaus Foundation to reveal she had been sexually assaulted by Abbé Pierre. Since then, more women have come forward. In July of this year, Emmaus called for an internal investigation undertaken by outside counsel, choosing Egaé, a consultancy firm dedicated to equal rights for men and women.

Since then, the number of complaints has multiplied: forced fellations, sexual attacks, and some cases of child abuse. Many women who did not dare speak for decades—there are complaints against Abbé Pierre going back 70 years—are now coming forward. Some went to their graves with their secret. Others spoke of their distress but were not believed. A son witnessed for his deceased mother. For years, she claimed she had been abused by Abbé Pierre. No one in the family took her seriously. 

One thing is certain. Already, in the 1950’s, Church hierarchy knew as did many in the Emmaus movement. During a 1957 trip to the United States, a young student who helped organize Abbé Pierre’s stay complained of sexual assault. A high-up member of Emmaus resigned in protest over Abbé Pierre’s behavior. In the end, the affair was hushed up. “Anglo-Saxons,” as the French sometimes call us, were just too hung up about sex.

In 1957-58, Abbé Pierre was quietly sent off to Switzerland for a rest cure. It doesn’t seem to have done much good, for the abuse continued till the abbot’s death in 2007.

Americans may have a hard time measuring the impact of these revelations on French society. Abbé Pierre was God, as some of the women now coming forward say. He represented the very best of France and of the Church. He did much to help the poor and homeless—all the while abusing women and threatening those who wanted to speak out.

The Abbé Pierre Foundation and Emmaus have two mottoes: “Etre humain,” Be human,” and “Ne pas subir, toujours agir,” Don’t suffer, always take action.” This is what women were unable to do for 70 long years. Abbé Pierre was a saint. Those who knew kept silent. Those who spoke out were not believed.

Now there is outcry about sexual abuse in the priesthood, but another “sex scandal” currently playing out in a French courtroom in Avignon proves that the Church is not the only source of sexual abuse. In fact, today in France, less than 2% of reported cases of sexual abuse and violence concern the Catholic Church.

The case I am referring to is that of Dominique Pélicot, 71 years old, accused of drugging his wife of 50 years, Gisèle, also aged 71, and inviting into their home men who raped her while her husband filmed the scene. This continued for ten years. So heavily and frequently was Gisèle drugged that her children believed she suffered from Alzheimer’s and wanted her confined to an Alzheimer’s-care unit. 

Gisèle Pélicot entering the courtroom in Avignon. It was her choice to not have the trial take place behind closed doors. She believes it is the perpetrators, not the victim, who should bear the shame.

Dominique Pélicot and 50 ordinary men recruited on the internet—and identified by the police—have been declared “monsters.” The same has been said of Abbé Pierre. Yet, who can deny that violence against women has been tolerated for pretty much as long as men and women have inhabited this earth?

Crying out in horror is easy. For all of us to accept that any form of sexual violence is intolerable, society as a whole must change.

Women’s rights, in France or in the USA, remain a work in progress. In an American presidential election year, can a man who brags about “grabbing pussy” be trusted to respect women’s rights? Can his running mate, supported by a billionaire who believes it was a mistake to give women the vote? What about Project 2025, which seeks to severely curtail a woman’s access to adequate healthcare?

Worth thinking about, isn’t it?

I’ve begun a new substack publication called “Paris on the Skook.” Subscribe. It’s free. https://nancyhonicker.substack.com/

 

In Praise of Aunts, in Praise of Love

 

When I was a little girl, aunts played a big role in my life. I grew up in an extended family, where aunts and grandparents lived with my parents, my sisters and me. This was a source of great wealth for our family and it taught me a lot about love.

In my earliest childhood my Aunt Jean, my mother’s sister, lived with us. She was not married and worked as a payroll clerk for the Pottsville schools. She was slender and dressed very stylishly. Outside of work hours, she also had time to play. She and I drew pictures together at the dining room table. Once my sister Susan and I were bigger, she took us for long walks in the woods or we roamed the streets of Pottsville, from Greenwood Hill to Yorkville.

When I was five, we moved to a house divided into apartments. My aunt did not accompany us, but she still took us for lots of walks. This time, my father’s family moved into the apartment above us, my grandparents and my aunt Mildred, who was the principal of Yorkville School. I think I spent more time upstairs than down and when my grandparents died, I moved in with my aunt.

Those years remain some of the happiest of my life. My aunt and I shared everything, the same bedroom, the same card table in the living room, where we sat and did our schoolwork while we watched my aunt’s color TV.

My aunt belonged to a bridge club and sometimes she hosted “the card-club ladies” in her small living room. On those evenings, I ran downstairs to the vestibule to welcome her guests. I led them upstairs, took their coats, and once they were seated, served them pastel mints and chocolates. Those women made a big fuss over me.

And they all had something in common. They were all teachers and childless, hired at a time, in the 1930’s and 40’s, where entering the teaching profession was comparable to becoming a nun. My mother began teaching in the early 1940’s. At her job interview, she was asked if she was planning to have children. She was not yet married. The answer was no. Had she said yes, she may not have been hired.

By the 1950’s, things had changed. The United States was in the midst of a baby boom and soldiers recently home from the war were trying to put it behind them. Everyone was marrying, creating families, returning to family life after the terrible disruption of World War II. School districts were no longer telling their recruits to remain celibate.

It was also the beginnings of consumer society and parents loved us by giving us things. Both my parents worked hard outside the home. Our aunts often picked up the slack when it came to listening or keeping us company. Those two childless women were as much my family as the mother and father who brought me into the world.

I am also a childless aunt. I will not sing my own praises, but I will say my nephew and nieces, and now my great-nieces are my precious family. I have always tried to do my best for them but, I’ll admit, times have changed. In the 1950’s and 60’s, my parents had their economic ups and downs. They didn’t always have time for us and were relieved when others stepped in to help. Nor do I think they gave much thought to what it meant to be a family. I’d say, today’s families have become more insular.

In recent years, the nuclear family has moved to center stage, and aunts and uncles have faded into the background. More recently, the choice to remain childless has been labeled as selfish. There is even a vice-presidential candidate who has suggested the life of a parent is worth more than that of a person without child. Parents should have more weight, more votes, at election time.

In my life, I’ve been asked why I “chose” to not have children. It is a callous question and when someone asks it, I brush it off as politely as I can. The American poet Emily Dickinson, childless like her contemporary Walt Whitman, wrote to a friend in 1862, “My business is to love.” This is the business of parents, of aunts and uncles, of us all.

On my bookshelves, I have two book by the French anthropologist Françoise Héritier (1933-2017). Their titles? Masculin/Féminin and Masculin/Féminin II. No need to translate. Beginning with her fieldwork in Burkina Faso in Africa, she devoted her studies to the inequalities between men and women in societies throughout the world. 

The first volume of Masculin/Féminin, published in 1996, was a hard read for me. Héritier explores kinship relations, religious traditions and world mythologies. She studies the construction of sexual difference, and how societies turn learned functions and skills into the essential traits of each sex. For example, men are hardwired for working outside the home; women, for staying home and taking care of the kids. 

A true researcher spends a lifetime thinking about difficult questions, proposing hypotheses, with no guarantee of finding answers. In her second book published in 2002, Héritier came up with the hypothesis that convinced me:

From time immemorial, men have observed that women have the power to reproduce not only themselves but to reproduce the opposite sex. Men cannot do this. They do not carry babies. It thus becomes imperative they control the reproductive function of women because their lives depend on it!

In earlier times, no one understood how fertility worked. From Aristotle’s day in the 4^th century BC till the 1970’s, men were arguing that women were no more than the ovens where men placed the staff of life.

Now we know better. Or do we? Some men seem unable to let go of wanting to control women’s bodies and defining what women are. How could any woman, endowed with a power men envy, not use it to produce a child!

To conclude, I’ll praise fathers and mothers, aunts and uncles, teachers, friends, all whose love has been essential to making us who we are.

And I invite readers who like to travel more often between Schuylkill County and France to subscribe to my free newsletter on Substack. Here’s a link to the first article, where you can also subscribe:  https://nancyhonicker.substack.com/p/first-the-skook

Coal-cracker Elegy

 Those of us born in the anthracite region of eastern Pennsylvania are invested with a strong and complex identity. There is pride: the coal of our region powered the US industrial revolution, turning a nation hardly 100 years old at the time into a world leader. Coming from Great Britain, Ireland and Germany, later from Eastern Europe and Italy, immigrants flowed into the region and found work in the mines. They built homes and communities and became Americans. Without the coal, without their hard work, the United States would not be what it is today, one of the leading industrial nations in the world, surpassed only by China.

There is also shame. What happened? How could things have changed so fast? How does a thriving downtown become a stretch of smoke shops and empty storefronts? What happened to the industries, the mines, the well-paying jobs, the unions (in 1868 John Siney organized one of the first miners’ unions in Saint Clair), a strong sense of community?

 

I don’t have the answers and I know what I have just described is not limited to mining regions, yet the men who wrested coal from the tortuous Mammoth Vein, which runs west from Carbon County into Schuylkill and beyond, were doing one of the hardest jobs in the world and had every reason to be proud. Have we recognized the depth of their courage and sacrifice, doing a job where death was always at their side?

That lack of recognition has produced a legacy of injured pride.

In 2012, the coal fields of northern France, in a region bordering the English Channel and Belgium, were inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. In many ways this part of France resembles the anthracite region of Pennsylvania. In both, coal mining was once the dominant activity and most industry revolved around it. Also, immigration was essential to its growth.

The Arenberg Pit, part of UNESCO World Heritage Site c. H. Bouvet

Geographically, however, the two regions could not be more different. In northern France, the coal fields stretch across 75 miles of plains. Mining activity, now over, was limited to underground mines, their presence marked by impressive redbrick collieries with massive steel headframes for transporting men and material underground. Company towns, experiments in creating an ideal environment for workers, were also built of brick.

 

Another difference with the Pennsylvania fields, those French mines were located near important urban centers, the city of Lille (population: ± 232,700), once the heart of France’s textile industry, Valenciennes, known for its lace, and the port of Calais. In the early 19^th century, the Allegheny Mountains of eastern Pennsylvania were considered hostile and inhospitable territory. Many early mining operations failed and many investors lost the shirt off their backs.

Forests, though, were abundant and the collieries, the mine shafts and the company towns were built of wood. Such was the case of the first Saint Nicholas Breaker of Mahanoy City, built in 1861, torn down in 1928, replaced by the monumental steel and glass Saint Nicholas, razed in March 2018. There was once talk of making it a heritage site, but the plans never panned out. I remember the breaker, as I’m sure many readers do. It is a shame that more of that mining heritage has not been preserved with pride.

Destruction of the Saint Nicolas Breaker in 2018

 

As for politics, northern France and Schuylkill County are in synch. In the 2022 French presidential elections, Marine Le Pen, the candidate of the National Rally, a far-right movement, came out on top, though Emmanuel Macron won nationally. In the first round of legislative elections this past June, Le Pen, representing northern France, was easily reelected to her seat in Parliament.

In Schuylkill County, in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, Donald Trump won almost 70% of the vote.

Today, many towns in the mining region of northern France are held by the National Rally. One such town is Hénin-Beaumont, whose mayor, Steeve Briois, until recently a member of the party’s national committee, has been in office since 2014. That year, he won the first round of elections with a little over 50% of the vote. In 2020, his score increased to 74%.

Briois’s supporters claim the town has become a better place. The downtown has been beautified; the façade of city hall, cleaned; a new swimming pool, built (privatized since, though paid for with taxpayer euros). Yet unemployment has increased and the poverty level, 24%, is among the highest in France.

19th century miners' housing in Hénin-Beaumont

Critics say the mayor has prettied up the surface but deep problems remain, beginning with a clampdown on all dissident voices. Municipal authorities have removed subsidies from local clubs and organizations that critique Briois’s politics. Stridently anti-immigrant, the mayor calls for “national preference” for jobs and housing, a position that runs contrary to the French constitution.

Many ask if Hénin-Beaumont, once an important coal town, is a microcosm of what National Rally politics would look like if the party held power at the national level, power that slipped through its fingers in legislative elections earlier this month.

Now, in US politics, a grandchild of the mines has reached national prominence. Here I refer to J. D. Vance, whose grandparents moved to Middletown, Ohio from the coal fields of southeastern Kentucky. In his acceptance speech at the recent Republican Party convention in Milwaukee, Vance claimed he would bring jobs back to the United States, fight for American citizens, produce American energy, build factories, sink mines. He promises to protect the wages of American workers, help them build a better future and buy affordable homes.

Strip mining in eastern Kentucky

 

Yet J. D. Vance, for his successful 2022 election bid for the US Senate, received 10 million dollars in campaign funding from tech giant and PayPal founder Peter Thiel. Vance opposes Pro-Act, the bill that would allow workers to freely form unions and bargain collectively. He supports free medical care for childbirth but is against free daycare, which he considers a boon for the affluent, overlooking the working-class moms who need it most.

Perhaps we’ll see how those promises play out on a national stage. Perhaps we’ll find out if this man truly stands for the working class. Perhaps he’ll surprise us if, after accepting millions in funds from the super-rich, he proves he can still fight for the little gal and guy.

Perhaps. Perhaps not.