This year marks the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Normandy. Each year, there is a memorial ceremony, but only the ten-year commemorations bring together the leaders of the 13 nations that participated in the liberation of France. In 2034, will any veterans of the battle be alive?
Some of these men remain hale and hearty. Harold Terens, born in 1923, who enlisted in the US Army Air Corps in 1942, took advantage of his time in Normandy to marry his fiancée, Jeanne Swerlin, age 96, at a ceremony in Carentan-les-Marais, twenty miles from Omaha Beach. Between the ceremony at the Normandy American Cemetery, the international commemoration at Omaha Beach and a dinner at Elysée Palace with President Macron, Cpl Harold Terens, member of the 350th Fighter Squadron, 8th Air Force, had the time to get married and take a few spins around the dance floor with his bride.
June 6th was a perfect day. At Omaha Beach, the air was cool and a stiff wind came in off the Channel. At low tide, the beach was a mirror reflection, a study in blue and white, of the changing sky overhead, and the only sound was the distant breaking of gentle waves, a far cry from the sounds of bombs and bullets, the cries of the wounded and dying, the fear and horror of June 6, 1944.
As leaders from around the world paid homage to the veterans, wrapped in warm blankets to protect them from the wind, on a wide platform constructed on the beach, a youth choir sang songs of freedom: le Chant des partisans, the hymn of the French Resistance, first broadcast from London, the headquarters of Free France, to occupied France on May 17, 1943; and le Chant des Marais, in English known as the Peat Bog Soldiers Song, written in 1933 and sung by political prisoners in German concentration camps, taken up as a song of resistance throughout Europe.
I was not there to attend the ceremony. It was almost impossible to get near Omaha Beach on June 6th, but I was glued to my TV screen because my friend Tiago Lucet-Rémy was among the singers, with a solo part in le Chant des Marais. Some readers may remember him from my October 2023 article on the World Rugby Cup. His choir, the Youth Chorus of Opéra comique, sang the French national anthem for rugby fans around the world. This time their songs were powerful reminders of the cost of peace, freedom and democracy. And in France, this past month, we’ve needed some reminding…
Between June 6th and 9th, Europeans voted for members of the European Parliament, with chambers in Brussels, Belgium and Strasbourg, France. In France, the National Rally, a nationalist far-right party, came out on top, with more than 30% of the vote, a searing defeat for the presidential party’s list, which garnered less than 14%.
On the evening of June 9th, once the results became official, President Macron dissolved the lower house of Parliament, provoking shockwaves throughout France. He called for legislative elections to begin today, June 30th, leaving it up to the French people, obviously dissatisfied with the center-right party supporting the president, to decide how they wish to be governed.
I ask Americans, used to political campaigns that go on for years, to imagine this. At the snap of his fingers, President Macron exercised his prerogative to dissolve the National Assembly. Between the moment of dissolution and the first round of the two-part electoral process, candidates for the new Assembly have 21 days to get their act together, which includes all the administrative rigmarole to simply get their names on the ballot. Next, paper ballots must be printed and delivered to polling places all over France. Then there are the meetings, the speeches, the media coverage, the opinion polling, the almost-certitude that for the first time in the history of the French Republic a far-right party may govern France.
We’ve tried everything else, French voters say. The left-right divide that has marked French politics since the Third Republic (1870-1940) has lost its meaning. Too many foreigners, France is no longer France, and nobody is looking out for the poor and middling sort—unless they happen to be immigrants.
Sound familiar? Not exactly the same words, but you can hear similar refrains in the United States. Let’s destroy everything, even democracy, and start all over again…
I am writing these words before the first debate between President Biden and former president Trump. By the time this goes to press, we’ll know the outcome. This month of June has also been a busy one in the United States.
Following US news from this side of the Atlantic, I’ve noticed a lot has been going on with guns. There’s the June 21st mass shooting in Fordyce, Arkansas, leaving 4 dead and 9 injured, another added to the list of at least 234 mass shootings having taken place in the US this year.
I was also dumb-founded by the June 14th Supreme Court ruling to strike down the bump-stock ban. In other words, it is once again legal to convert semiautomatic weapons into machine guns, making the job of anyone dead set on carrying out a mass shooting a whole lot easier—and more effective in terms of the potential for destroying lives.
Today, the French vote with fear and trembling. After the second round,
on July 7th, will the French Republic have the first far-right government of
its history? Many Americans, months beforehand, feel the same anxiety about
November 5th.
That’s why, to conclude, I’ll remember only the best of this past month, June 6th, Omaha Beach, the veterans who fought for a country that was not their own; the Youth Choir of Opéra comique, a group of very talented young people, multiracial, multireligious, totally French, exactly the kind of people those veterans, on June 6, 1944, were fighting for.
