This repeat match has cast a pall over France these past two weeks. Will a majority of voters embrace the Far Right and hand a victory to a candidate close to Hungary’s Viktor Orban? Or, as in 2018 when the gilets jaunes, the “yellow vests,” invaded Paris every weekend to remind President Macron that “little guys” turn violent when ignored by those at the top, will five more years of Macron usher in a period of social unrest?
In a few hours we’ll have the answer. For now, rather than concentrate on politics, which doesn’t bring out the best in anyone these days, I prefer to raise my spirits and, I hope, yours, by writing about exemplary lives.
One such life evokes a very quiet Franco-American connection. This is the story of Mary Ulm, born in Ohio in 1920, who died in Caen on March 27th. She volunteered to enter the Women’s Army Corps in 1942 and first set foot in Normandy in June 1944, a member of the WAC Signal Corps field telephone operators and a participant in D-Day operations. In September 1944, she marched down the Champs Elysées. While serving in France, she also discovered “les Petites Soeurs de la Charité,” “the Little Sisters of Charity,” and was deeply moved by their devotion to the poor, the old, the wounded and the infirm.
The order of the Little Sisters of Charity was founded in 1839 by Jeanne Jugan in Brittany. In the winter of that year, she simply decided to bring into her home an old woman, blind and sick, she found dying in the street. She then offered hospitality to others; other women joined her to help and the order was born.
In 1944, in Lisieux, Mary Ulm first encountered the Little Sisters. Upon her return to the United States, she did not forget them and announced to her family she would like to join the order. She became part of a congregation in Queens, NY, and then in 1952 returned to Europe. There she spent 70 year of her life, moving between Paris, Metz, Brussels and Orleans. In 2018, she entered a retirement home for the Little Sisters in Caen. Last March, she quietly died.
Jeanne Jugan, the founder of the order, defined the traits of a good “Little Sister.” You must deeply love God and the poor. You must also know how to forget yourself to better give to others. This is what Mary Ulm, who became Sister Marie Joseph of the Assumption, did for nearly 70 years. She cared for the poor and elderly. She assisted in the management of her order. She had no need of a social-media “platform” to proclaim the good she did.
In the chapel where her funeral took place on April 4th, sisters were surprised to see an American flag draped over the coffin. They were equally surprised by the presence of three women officers of the US Army who had travelled from Brussels to attend the service. Sister Marie Joseph had never mentioned that chapter of her life.
In early April, at about the same time I first heard about Mary Ulm, I also heard a voice on the radio that jolted me back into my past… There I was, standing in a packed metro car, weighed down by a bag filled with books and a laptop. Rush-hour on Line 2, one of the most crowded and problem-ridden of the Paris system. It is almost 8 pm and dead-tired, I’m travelling home from a long day of teaching at the university.
That’s when he gets on, le chanteur de la ligne 2. Not tall, too thin, and with the clouded-over eyes of the blind. Clasped between ear and shoulder, he has a small Casio keyboard. His head cocked, he sings with a husky, haunting voice that makes me want to ride to the end of the line. After one song, my fatigue is washed away.
Many times my homebound commute was illuminated by that softly rasping voice and I often wondered what this man was doing in the metro, why no one had discovered him. Thousands of commuters take the line 2 every day. Surely, some music producers had heard him.
A few weeks ago, I heard that unmistakable voice on the radio. Much has changed—but it has changed slowly—since I first heard Mohamed Lamouri, for that’s this singer’s name, performing in the metro. Born near-blind in Tlemcen, Algeria in 1982, he first came to France in 2003. In La Rochelle, he participated in a festival of Arab-Andalusian music and made the decision to stay.
Before concentrating on line 2, he was an itinerant singer throughout the Parisian metro system. Something about the line 2 attracted him. I have a hard time understanding what, but I’m glad it did because that’s how I discovered him. And I’m far from the only one. For nearly a decade music producers approached him, wanting to record his songs, but only in 2018 did he put out his first EP, and his first album, “Underground Raï Love,” came out in 2019.
On line 2, Mohamed Lamouri sang his own songs along with adaptations of familiar tunes like Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” or the Eagles’ “Hotel California.” On his album, he concentrates on the music of his native Algeria, “raï,” a form of poetic improvisation where the author-singer presents his/her vision of the world.
That’s what Mohamed Lamouri does in “Underground Raï Love,” where the corridors of the Parisian metro meet his native region, which is also one of the capitals of Algerian “raï”. Here is a link to “Tgoul Maaraft,” Lamouri’s tribute to Cheb Hasni, the King of Raï, assassinated in 1994 during Algeria’s civil war: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_8sQXlYmL8 Another to one of Lamouri’s original compositions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6stKK6gQ7o
The campaign slogan of François Mitterrand’s successful 1981 bid for the French presidency was “la force tranquille”: quiet strength. That’s what Sister Marie Joseph and Mohamed Lamouri share. In our noisy, contentious world, they are the kind of models we need.
