A Letter Home

 

Autumn is different here in France, muted and muffled, pale yellow and silver-gray. The sun is pale too, and like a 19^th century Parisian courtesan, rarely appears before noon. In the park of the chateau next to where I live, the leaves of a centuries-old beech tree turn copper before they fall.

I spent October in Pottsville and experienced a Pennsylvania autumn for the first time in nearly 40 years. Now I pass my phone to friends in France, show them my photos. They can’t believe their eyes. In this part of the world, we don’t have the sunburnt blue skies, the riot of color.

Nor, in 2024, do we have the riotous politicians, real men, real women, but stranger than fiction when compared to America’s political past.

When I was a child, we were taught to revere the Founding Fathers. In our classroom, far above our heads, hung a portrait of George Washington, his head and bust buoyed by fluffy clouds. On Washington’s birthday, to celebrate, we went downtown and bought candy cherries. 

George Washington floats above my mother's 4th grade class in 1964

“Mother, I cannot tell a lie. I chopped down the cherry tree.”

When we asked our parents for a ride downtown, we were reminded of the example of Abraham Lincoln. From his family’s log cabin in the wilderness, he walked miles to go to school. We could certainly walk a few blocks.

In childhood, the history we learn in school is closer to myth, and in my day, we did not question dates or events. The Boston Tea Party (no taxation without representation!), the midnight ride of Paul Revere, the Spirit of ’76, represented in painting, defined as “general and individual liberty.” 

Archibald Willard, "The Spirit of '76," 1875

Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator, the president who brought an end to slavery. Perhaps because I’d visited Gettysburg with my father, even witnessed firsthand the last surviving Union veteran of the Civil War, Lincoln held a special place in my heart. He was the President who allowed me to progress from myth to history. He was a real man who did real things of lasting importance.

On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring “all persons held as slaves…henceforward shall be free.” On November 11^th of that same year, honoring the dead on the battlefields of Gettysburg, Lincoln declared, “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

To mark the 100^th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, on August 28, 1963, in a speech on the National Mall in Washington, Martin Luther King reminded his listeners, “… one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.”

As for women, their fight to gain the vote, ratified by the passing of the 19^th amendment in 1920, was a struggle that spanned more than a century. While the suffragettes organized and rallied for their cause, some American men feared (jokingly) that the Revolutionary War had been fought in vain. Surely, those patriots could have never imagined—nor wanted—women in the voting booth.

History is messy. Many things got smoothed over when we were kids.

In France, there’s a lot more history to learn! The ancient Greeks founded the French port of Marseille, and the Romans built their baths and an amphitheater in Paris, where ruins still stand. In the Parisian suburbs, in the basilica of Saint-Denis, at its very heart, is a chapel dating back to the 5^th century.

French school children also learn about the Ancien Régime, the “old order” of the monarchy. In 1655 King Louis XIV declared, “L’Etat, c’est moi.” I am the State. In the late 18^th, Louis XV, in a more cynical vein, whispered to his lover Madame de Pompadour, “Après moi, le déluge.” In simple American, “After me, all hell breaks loose.” 

Juste d'Egmont, Louis XIV (1654)

And with the French Revolution of 1789, which led Louis XVI to the guillotine, that’s what happened. 

The United States and France are two proud republics. In each the people led a revolution to free themselves from the chains of monarchy. “L’Etat, c’est nous”—we are the State, citizens of each nation can proclaim.

Legend has it that Marie Antoinette, upon hearing the people of Paris lacked bread, suggested they eat cake. Today in France, the price of a basic baguette is one euro, about $1.05. Other food staples, potatoes and onions, apples and pears, cost about half as much as in the US. During my October stay in Pottsville, I saw for myself that food is much more expensive than in Europe. On the continent of social democracy, government steps in to keep the price of basics down.

When I was a child, The Republican was an evening paper, delivered every afternoon to nearly every house on the block. Everybody read it, and the newspaper was a builder of community. 

In 1979, Gilbert M. Gaul and Elliot G. Jaspin of the Pottsville Republican won the Pulitzer Prize for local investigative journalism for their story on the destruction of the Blue Coal Co. by labor leader Jimmy Hoffa and organized crime.

 

Today most people depend on newsfeeds on their phones, tailored to their interests. That’s also where they search for virtual community.

Today in France, the arms industry is gearing up for greater production as the war in Ukraine moves beyond 1,000 days; farmers, earning less, paying more, are on strike; the mayors of France gather in Paris and warn of a crisis in local democracy.

Today in the US, events are moving almost too fast to keep up.

Today many people think with their emotions and believe the truth is what they feel.

Not since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 when even children lived with the fear of nuclear war, have I “felt” so afraid.