la peste ~ CV19

Covid-19 hit the news and the world jolted awake to a new reality.

The French government has been slowly increasing pressure on its citizenry to pay attention to their surroundings and other people and to stay home.   The struggle is for this country to not go the way of Italy where things have gotten particularly bad.

Many of our friends and neighbors have asked us what we see here and we, in turn, ask them how things are wherever they are.  It's been an on-going conversation.

Our Parisian friends M and G were concerned enough about the developing situation that two weeks ago they cancelled their one week stay in Nice.

Our American friends B and I who are here for the winter told their son not to come.  They couldn't guarantee that he'd not be infected.  The man was a well known physician back in Chicago, so his words carried more than a little strength to them.

This morning France awoke to find itself at Stage 3 of emergency in it's fight to keep from over-stressing the healthcare system.  Stage 3 is the highest level of concern and people have been told to stay home.  Period.

In response to the new orders our friends M and F who'd come to Nice for the month signaled that they're thinking of going back to Paris.  They said the markets here in Nice were busy today and that shelves are emptying pretty quickly.

An American woman we met is flying home early.

Another American woman we met will be leaving Nice soon, too.

Which leaves us wondering what to do next?

We were sick last week with the flu.  We wondered about if it was the dreaded CV19 or not.  We had no respiratory distress, but had many other symptoms.  Out of concern, we stocked up on provisions and stayed home.

Then Jude found new research that talked about CV19 symptoms and their relative probabilities.  It was then that we realized what we had.  Good thing we stayed home, right?  Going forward, we should be fairly immune to la peste.

Now we're faced with making a decision.  Do we return to Paris at the end of the month?  Our apartment there will be colder and darker than the one we're in here in Nice.  Jude has a few doctors appointments next month and, um, our wine cave is well stocked up north.  As a bonus, we'd be strongly encouraged to shelter in place.  Huh.

On the other hand, if we stay one more month in Nice we'd have the sun and sea and gorgeous weather.  Basically we'd have more of the same.  Boring after awhile, perhaps.  Yes, we will need to find Jude some medical support, but maybe that'd not be half bad after all is said and done?

They've arrived! [part two]

A week ago a second wave of swallows arrived, seemingly riding the crest of the air waves of a rather large storm that blew through the south of France.

We hadn't seen anything of the first batch of swallows after the February group arrived.  They were here one day and then they were gone.  But this group seems determined to stick around.  We've watched them scour the skies all week.

This reminds me of my youth.  My mother and father had moved us to Dana Point in 1964.  We used to celebrate the Swallow Festival each year when the swallows would come to Capistrano.

In fact, Nice feels a lot like Dana Point and San Juan Capistrano.  They're both beach-side areas with similar "laid back beach vibes."  The only thing missing here in Nice are the sometimes large waves that would hit the California coast and bring surfers out in droves.

They've arrived!

Nice, 17 January, 2020 - 12:30pm

The swifts have arrived from Africa.

They were not here this morning when we woke up.  But as we were putting the food away from our shopping trip around 12:30pm I couldn't help but notice that the sky had suddenly filled with swifts.  They are paying particular attention to the courtyard of the blue awning buildings outside our apartment window.  They are a month early.

To think that fly from Gabon, across the Sahara, and the Mediterranean Sea to get here...

Making sense of les gilets jaunes and the country-wide greve...

We are trying to get to Nice soon and, well, the transportation unions are on strike.  What to do?  Get annoyed?  Act like this is a huge inconvenience?  Or???

Labor and the trades are powerful in Europe.  It is an important part of history as it clearly defines the interface between the idle, observing, judging, entitled rich and those who use their hands.  The distinction is very important.

In the 10th century guilds were formed by trades people, students, and professors.  These guilds helped organize people into self-managing, self-protecting groups.  They created well organized systems of education and provided support for members.

In the guild system young people learning a trade would take a seven year apprenticeship to travel around Europe.  They would go from one place to another to learn their crafts at the feet of acknowledged craft master guild members.  In this way people would learn a trade and would return to their village or city to take up this work to provide the local community well crafted materials of daily living.

Coming forward nearly 800 years, Louis XVI lost his head, in part, because he was a weak king and "the people" had seen that a certain measure of wealth and survivability (ie: longer lived, less harsh lives)  might be within their reach.  Revolutionaries did away with the monarchy and swept away the Sainte Eglise. Former business owners and managers to the king created a new power center for France.  Labor at first supported the Bourgeois class overthrow of the Monarchy thinking they too, the workers, would benefit.

Labor, in Paris at least, soon learned that the Bourgeois class now led by an Emperor (of all things) were not interested in sharing power nor in giving much to trades-people and laborers.  After spectacular collapse of the Second Empire, and after the Prussians had surrounded the city to dictate harsh terms of surrender to Adolph Thiers, and after the Army blundered a canon reclamation exercise on Montmartre in 1871 a new political power vacuum was created.  Labor quickly organized a Parisian government.

The new government passed laws that perhaps surprisingly lowered wages, improved the plight of the poor, ended child labor, ended night work at bakeries, separated church and state, returned tools that had been pawned during the Siege to their original owners, restricted business owners from fining employees, and allowed employees to claim business abandoned by their owners.

Organized labor was not concerned simply with economics.  The trade unions worked for rights of self determination and rights to be respected as individuals.  Their struggle was and still is against the idle, judging, entitled, restraining forces, including monarchies, royalists, the bourgeois, the rich, and the Sainte Eglise that represents and works for those restraining forces.

The 60 day old political experiment called the Paris Commune ended in a hail of monarchist bullets.  The bloodbath is, even now, strongly remembered.  Flowers are even today placed along the wall in the cemetery of Pere Lachaise where 150 of Paris' citizens were lined up and executed. 

The church of Sacre Coeur that was built atop Montmartre to celebrate the monarchist "victory" over the Paris Commune remains a contentious symbol of power.  Many Parisians would even today to this symbol be pulled down and forever destroyed.

During the second world war, rail workers formed the basis of the Résistance-Fer, the French Resistance against the invading Nazis.  Employees of the SNCF railroad company organized themselves, sabotaged portions of the rail system, and fought against German occupiers.  As the Allies were landing in Normandy, the Nazis rounded up SNCF employees executing 150 people and deporting over 500, many of whom died.

A year ago les gilets jaunes largely located in the countryside organized to protest actions of the current banker led government. This is an interesting development because during the Paris Commune paysans remained aligned with the monarchists.  But today paysans reacting to the movement of production overseas (to China in particular) and they are reacting to the laws and policies of the banker government that wishes to accelerate the upward flow of money.  President Macron has said he supports the failed Reagan economic policies of "trickle down economics."

It is against this long history that the current strikes take place.  President Macron has made it clear he wishes to reduce the number of different retirement systems from 40 down to something "more reasonable."  However, the labor unions knew that the government's lead negotiator had not declared (as he is required to by law) his connections to industries that would benefit from the proposed changes. 

This sniffs of corruption at the highest levels.  This sniffs of government working with corporate leaders against the trade unions.  Only yesterday the negotiator has left his post to be replaced by a different minister who said immediately that the government will continue with the prior plan to change the retirement system

President Macron has none of the warmth of character that someone like Jacques Chirac had.  Macron is a spread-sheet number-cruncher banker by trade.  His attitude appears to be that by enabling the rich, work and money will "trickle down" to the working classes.  He doesn't seem to consider that the rich will simply keep the money and to send work off-shore, just as they do in the US.

Just the other morning one of the ministers was interviewed on France2 and he said the current situation is not the fault of the government.  My chin hit the floor when I heard that.  While on the one hand the strikes have severely restricted our ability to move around and enjoy this city and this country, I have a hard time blaming the workers or trade unions.

As for our winter travel plans, we've heard that car rental agencies are "sold out."  We've heard that air-traffic controllers are sympathetic to the trade unions and flights in-country may or may not be flying.  We've watched as the train we booked to Nice is only one of two trains a day that are leaving for the south of France, so we might be going afterall.

The situation is not clear.

Hidden Lives...

This year Jude and I visited Bretagne to see more of what there is to see.

After collecting our rental car we headed over to an organic food market to do a bit of shopping before we met the apartment owner in who's place we would be staying.

As I parked the car along a granite stone edged curb an elderly gent commented on my parking job and remarked on the distance to the front door of the market.  He was a nice guy and we had a pleasant, short chat.

Soon Jude and I were gathering our provisions when I happened upon the elderly gent for a second time.  One thing led to another and before we knew it we were talking about family origins and political histories.

He asked, of course, about my accent, so I told him where we were originally from.  I told him I grew up in the Los Angeles area but couldn't speak Spanish.  He was surprised so I explained to him how Americans tend to view citizens with a Hispanic surname.  To further illustrate my story I showed him my Carte de Sejour and my name.

The gentleman pulled out his Carte d’Identité to show me his name.  He asked if this meant anything to me.  My eyes grew big with recognition and I asked him if, perhaps, he was related to someone of the same name.  He smiled and said "no", but that his family up to the time of the first world war had lived in Normandy.

His grandfather had moved the family to northern Spain at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.  They were involved with the Republican efforts against Franco, the ultra-conservative nationalist Catholic fascists, and Germany.

While I'm not sure precisely what collective effort the family was involved in, but when the Republican struggle against Franco failed the entire family returned to France and went into hiding.

Out of concern for Spanish agents working on behalf of the regime they remained in hiding for the entire time Franco was alive.  It is only rather recently, in fact, that anyone feels safe enough to talk about what happened.  The man's son came to encourage his father to follow him to la caisse to pay for their own items so they could go make dinner.  The son confirmed his father's story.

I can't imagine the idealism and optimism for the future that encouraged a grandfather to move his family to a different country, to start a new life, and to defend those ideals.  I can't imagine the fear and concern he must have had once he realized the effort had failed and that he'd placed his family in danger.

How can an American experience compare with any of this?

RIP Regine

One of the first people we met when starting to attend a French/English conversation group here in Paris was a woman named Regine.  She had a kind, patient, and sweet disposition.  She had a wicked sense of French humor, too.

A year ago we talked to her after a group sing-along.  She told us about how difficult it is to deal with members of France's Bourgeois class.  She told us about the student uprisings of 1968.  She told us not to sweat the language strains and stresses as it's a nearly impossible language, and that we all can understand each other in the end. We told her we missed her at group  (she'd stopped coming regularly for various reasons).

It was a shock to learn this week that Regine had died suddenly.

Her enterrement was held on Friday under a dark sky that spit rain mixed with snow.  Very few people were in attendance.  There is seldom any justice in life, or so it seems.

Ah... the language... and counting...

Yes.  It can be exactly like this.