The epic story of D-Day can never be fully told—these were the most intense and desperate moments in thousands of lives.
By Jonathan W. Jordan May 31, 2019 10:37 a.m. ET Among American martial milestones, D-Day, June 6, holds a reverence in our collective memory equaled only by the Battle of Gettysburg and Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River—an eminence whose warm glow has deepened as twilight falls over the Greatest Generation. Nearly every American president since Jimmy Carter has made the pilgrimage to Normandy’s windswept cliffs to pay tribute to the “Boys of Pointe du Hoc” and thousands of others who launched Western Europe’s liberation on five blood-soaked beaches. The battle’s resonance lies not only in its epic scale—history’s largest amphibious invasion—but in its easily comprehended, “High Noon” format: democracy versus tyranny, free citizens hurling themselves at an Atlantic Wall studded with cannon, machine guns and Hitler’s Übermenschen. Since the invasion’s first grainy photos were snapped by Robert Capa on Omaha Beach, writers have labored to capture the invasion’s sound and fury. Cornelius Ryan’s “The Longest Day” (1959) remains the early high-water mark, though the story has been recounted in varying styles by the likes of Stephen Ambrose, Antony Beevor and John Keegan. As the invasion’s 75th anniversary approaches, a fresh platoon of books have hit the beach and dropped their landing ramps. The spearhead version, lean and effective, is Alex Kershaw’s fast-paced “The First Wave” (Dutton Caliber, 368 pages, $30). Mr. Kershaw, a British-born resident of Savannah, Ga., has walked Normandy’s beaches and bluffs many times, and tackles the invasion through the eyes of Allied soldiers shouldering a jumble of interconnected missions, talents and emotions. Capt. Frank Lillyman, son of an American mercenary, leads the first boots into Fortress Europe at the head of 18 pathfinders, who set up landing lights for the first wave of paratroopers. Maj. John Howard, a British glider-troop commander from London, survives a 95-mph landing on a stone-studded field and battles his way through German fire. Lt. Col. Terence Otway, who “looked more like an introspective academic than the leader of 750 of the toughest men in the entire British invasion force,” is welcomed to France by German gunners firing tracer bullets into his parachute. In the American sector, Lt. George Kerchner, a Baltimore railroad guard, scales the 100-foot cliffs of Pointe du Hoc alongside fellow Rangers in one of the war’s most incredible feats. “His men quickly formed up and within moments were launching more grappling hooks over the bluff edges, dodging ‘potato masher’ grenades dropped from above, then clinging to ropes as they began to climb up the cliffs,” Mr. Kershaw writes. The fighters are hard men, quick to move, quick to kill, but Mr. Kershaw returns time and again to the oppressive psychology racking those about to die. British commandos, he writes, “had waited to board trucks, waited to board ships, waited as they puked up their breakfasts, bouncing all the way across the bloody English Channel. They were sick to death of waiting. That was when their hearts and minds were weakest. Once they landed, they’d be too busy to worry, too focused to wonder if they’d die a virgin or ever down a pint again.” As paratroops, commandos and ground-pounders fight for a toehold, Mr. Kershaw revisits themes of bravado, suffering and fatigue. Otway’s worn-out paras, having destroyed heavy howitzers menacing Sword Beach, drop from wounds and fatigue by a roadside crucifix. “Below the white stone figure of Jesus Christ hanging from the cross, Otway sat, exhausted, as around him dozens of wounded, many on stretchers, were attended to by medics,” he writes. “Some stood motionless, in a daze, no doubt replaying the fierce firefight and unnerving close calls in their heads. One lieutenant stared at his commanding officer, seated below the Christ, head in hands.” As in his earlier works, like “Blood and Champagne” and “The Liberator,” Mr. Kershaw’s strength is his ability to place characters within their settings and tell their stories honestly. Some tales are far from heroic. One anecdote begins with Maj. Elliot Dalton, a Canadian rifleman who barely missed his end courtesy of a German mortar round. “ ‘It blew off part of my uniform and one shoe,’ he recalled. ‘But the worst part was the indignity. I fell face down in a cow flap and I had this . . . this stuff all over me. Two girls looked over a wall and started laughing. I was so mad I wanted to shoot them. I even took out my revolver. I was only half-conscious, you see.’ ” Focusing on a well-chosen selection of warriors, “The First Wave” brilliantly sweeps the arc of fire that was the Sixth of June. But several other books, riding the same flood tide, join the battle with different literary tactics. Take Giles Milton’s “Soldier, Sailor, Frogman, Spy, Airman, Gangster, Kill or Die” (Holt, 486 pages, $30), an exquisitely written narrative that weaves individual tales into a modern tapestry. The characters on both sides are intricate, wonderfully developed and entirely human. Unlike the camera angles of Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” which relegate Germans to dark shadows lurking behind machine guns, Mr. Milton’s vivid descriptions give Normandy’s defenders the freedom to leap off the page. The first German we meet on Hitler’s Atlantic Wall is Eva Eifler, a teenage girl sent to Normandy to transcribe Allied radio signals. On June 5, Mr. Milton writes, “as the clock slowly ticked its way towards midnight, Fräulein Eifler detected a change to the pace of the incoming messages. . . . There was a sense of urgency. They were coming faster. Every few seconds. And then, at exactly 01.00 hours, ‘everything erupted.’ ” Mr. Milton’s characters move through the story with a novelistic smoothness. Lord Lovat, a commando leader who invaded with a bagpiper at his elbow, “had the wind-blown air of an Elizabethan pirate-adventurer,” Mr. Milton writes in one of his many lyrical flourishes. This modern Odysseus leads his men onto Sword Beach to the skirling of pipes playing the Scottish folk song “The Road to the Isles.” Mr. Milton notes: “Few hesitated on the beach that morning, least of all the men of 6 Commando who ‘moved like a knife through enemy butter.’ They blasted a passage off the beach, achieving in seconds what the lads of the East Yorks had failed to do over the course of forty minutes.” As the battle unfolds, Mr. Milton spices his narrative with canny asides. The assault on Pointe du Hoc, he writes, “was a nod and a wink to Major-General James Wolfe’s attack on Quebec almost two centuries earlier, relying on stealth, subterfuge and physical stamina.” The man who led the Rangers up those cliffs, Texan James Rudder, he writes, was “big-boned, broad of chest and fueled by a heady cocktail of testosterone and stamina.” Mr. Milton’s subjects blend flair with malice aforethought, and his spearheads cut through defenders in Feldgrau with cold efficiency. After lobbing a grenade into one German bunker and spraying the dugout with bullets, Wally Parr, one of John Howard’s British glider troops, heard voices “groaning and moaning” and knew there were wounded Germans inside. “It was no time for squeamishness,” writes Mr. Milton. Parr “pulled a 77 phosphorus [incendiary] grenade from his belt and lobbed it inside. ‘If the shrapnel didn’t get them,’ he said, ‘the phosphorus would.’ There was another massive explosion and Parr gave a little smile. ‘It went off a treat.’ ” Mr. Milton sums up the bloody work of elite units: “They had been trained not to feel any emotion: this was a fight to the death. ‘We were not taking any prisoners,’ said one. ‘Anything that moved, we shot.’ ” Mr. Milton does one of the best jobs in recent memory of capturing the emotions of men and women huddled in bunkers, straining at radio receivers, vomiting in boats and crouched behind bullet-stitched shingles. His antagonists stride on and off stage like characters in an Aaron Sorkin screenplay. Of the Longest Day’s assault-class books, “Soldier, Sailor, Frogman, Spy” stands as the best of the best. British historian James Holland expands D-Day’s beachhead in “Normandy ’44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France” (Atlantic Monthly, 649 pages, $35). While the invasion’s first wave consumes half the book’s ammunition, Mr. Holland holds plenty in reserve for the Allied crawl through hedgerow country, the battle with Hitler’s panzers at Caen, the brilliant breakout of Operation Cobra seven weeks after D-Day, and the corpse-strewn German retreat through the Falaise Gap. At its heart, “Normandy ’44” is a pleasantly straightforward history, embracing tactics, logistics and the bayonet end of combat. Mr. Holland glides up and down the chain of command, from Eisenhower, Montgomery and Bradley down to the Poor Bloody Infantry who stood at “the coal-face of battle.” In 1943, Joseph Stalin had remarked that the war would be won by machines. Unlike “The First Wave” and “Soldier, Sailor,” “Normandy ’44” presents the combatants’ equipment—the fearsome German MG-42 machine gun, the 6-pounder antitank gun, the venerable .45-caliber pistol—as mechanical characters. “The MG42 had its faults, but there was no question that it could spray a huge number of bullets on to a target very rapidly—bullets that now tore into the young men trying to get clear of the beach,” Mr. Holland writes in one of many evocative passages reminding the reader that 20th-century industry produced everything on a mass scale. Even death. Detail and scope are the twin strengths of “Normandy ’44.” While emphasizing GI and Tommy less than Messrs. Kershaw and Milton, Mr. Holland effectively balances human drama with the science of war as the Allies knew it. For the technical purist, Peter Caddick-Adams’s “Sand and Steel” (Oxford, 1,025 pages, $34.95) provides wonderful insight into war on the Western Front. With this follow-up to his magisterial “Snow and Steel” (2014), on the Battle of the Bulge, Mr. Caddick-Adams weighs in with a detailed chronicle that hard-core World War II buffs will relish. The preparation leading up to D-Day runs to 393 pages, not including a postscript chapter dedicated to the “Fortitude” deception plan—which successfully misled Hitler into believing that the main attack would come at Calais, not Normandy—and the spies who helped carry it out. The chronological flow of “Sand and Steel” takes occasional detours for side characters such as Lt. James Doohan, who survived D-Day with six machine-gun wounds to become famous as “Star Trek’s” dour engineer Scotty, or British Brig. K.P. Smith, who in 1984 felt compelled to write an autobiography in defense of his failure to take Caen in the early hours of the campaign. Mr. Caddick-Adams captures the invasion the way Eisenhower’s planners saw it: as tonnage shipped, sorties flown, objectives taken. In a different approach from Mr. Milton’s, the “who” is oft subordinated to the “what” and “when.” “Sand and Steel” plays to Mr. Caddick-Adams’s strength, telling a story of machines, logistics and events that decided the fate of France. Pulling back from the wide-angle lenses of Messrs. Kershaw, Milton, Holland and Caddick-Adams, Daniel Guiet and Timothy Smith complete the literary landings with “Scholars of Mayhem” (Penguin Press, 252 pages, $28), a riveting story of Mr. Guiet’s American father, Jean Claude Guiet, who parachuted into France and coordinated an army of 10,000 brave but untrained French Resistance fighters. Working for the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s predecessor, Guiet and his teammates armed French guerrillas with plastic explosives, submachine guns, radios and other tools of sabotage and trained them in assassination and violent resistance. The narrow focus of “Scholars of Mayhem” allows us to follow Jean Claude Guiet’s journey intimately. We get to know his confederates, known as Corinne, Bob and Major Staunton. We learn what they eat, whom they trust, how they survive. In one scene, Violette—“Corinne”—and Jacques Dufour, another Resistance fighter, flee into a cornfield to escape a pursuing company of SS soldiers when Violette goes down with the bane of movie-chase scenes: a twisted ankle. “Dufour tried to pick her up and carry her, but she pushed him away, insisting that he keep running and save himself. She crawled to an apple tree, hauled herself upright, clamped a fresh magazine into her Sten [submachine gun], and opened fire,” Messrs. Guiet and Smith write. “Violette kept the German soldiers at bay for the better part of half an hour, firing when she saw movement in the cornstalks. But she couldn’t run on her bad ankle, and the gunfight’s conclusion was foregone. She emptied the last of her magazines, and her Sten fell silent.” A true-life mix of James Bond, Lawrence of Arabia and “Casablanca,” Jean Claude’s story of resistance and heroism is beautifully told. “Scholars of Mayhem” packs the punch of an armored division and adds weight to the fresh titles taking on the Normandy landings 75 years after Eisenhower opened the Longest Day. Mr. Jordan is the author of “Brothers, Rivals, Victors: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, and the Partnership That Drove the Allied Conquest in Europe.” Review shared courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.
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Victor Hugo was not enamored with the title of Frederic Shoberl’s English translation of his 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris. For the future “great man” of French literature, the book’s main attraction was the gothic cathedral itself, not its hunchbacked bell-ringer. Hugo thought that Notre Dame’s sublime features could take us to new heights, both physical and spiritual, from which we could sense a fervent connection to our world and to one another. Nearly two centuries later, his words still compel us to consider the cathedral with awe. This is not to discount the Hunchback of Notre Dame’s importance. Proving that a monster can still be a man, Quasimodo’s awakening humanity is integral to the novel’s pathos and to its many adaptations on stage and screen, from 19th-century theatre and opera to the 1996 Disney animated film and the hit French musical. Moving performances from actors such as Charles Laughton and Anthony Hopkins have helped to solidify Quasimodo’s place at the story’s centre (even if they were more than twice as old as a character who’s barely in his 20s), and no less than three different versions using the “Hunchback” title have been announced by Netflix, Disney, and ITV over the past year alone. But Quasimodo’s story has to be framed within that of the cathedral he calls home, and whose frontal rose window mirrors his single eye. Just as the Hunchback challenges classical ideas of beauty and virtue, so too does Notre Dame defy easy categorization. Both figures embody a heterogeneity that Hugo saw as a reflection of nature’s fundamental versatility. Like Quasimodo, the cathedral is alive. It inspired a poetic vision in Hugo akin to time-lapse photography, allowing him elsewhere to imagine mountains as granite waves and the lunar surface as a rolling tide. When viewed across the infinite expanse of creation, a natural order of freedom comes into Hugo’s focus, in which nothing remains unchanged and everything flows with time. Notre Dame testified to this protean reality in its varied composition. “Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries,” Hugo says, whereby “each wave of time lays down its alluvium”. “The universal history of mankind might be written from these successive weldings of different styles at different levels.” The cathedral is therefore a communal rather than individual achievement: monumental but not superior, and dynamic rather than set in stone. Hugo likens these human feats to the prodigious labour of bees, as for him both society and nature are driven by the same mysterious life force. The news that the bees from the three hives atop Notre Dame’s sacristy have survived last week’s devastation would have no doubt been seen by him as symbolic of such solidarity and resilience. Therein lies Notre Dame’s transcendent appeal. As the broadest of churches, the cathedral is a democratic rather than simply religious icon that belongs to the people and not to the priesthood. She is our lady, providing sanctuary to Esmeralda when the innocent Gypsy has been failed by society’s usual standard-bearers of law and order. Hugo was in fact a staunch critic of the church, believing true spirituality to be at odds with the self-interest of institutionalized religion. It is not by chance that in his novel, Notre Dame’s archdeacon, Claude Frollo, causes much of the sorrow that the characters endure, himself included. Much like Inspector Javert’s own rigid morality in Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), Frollo’s dogmatic mindset cannot accommodate a world of natural passion and creative spirit. By the same token, the contrast with that novel’s kindly Bishop Myriel shows that religious faith and open-mindedness need not be mutually exclusive. In these respects, it is not just Hugo’s intensely visual imagination that makes Notre Dame so vibrant. He made Sir Walter Scott’s successful model of historical fiction more lyrical and more philosophical in order to thicken and heighten his writing’s dramatic qualities. Through his vivid reflections on how its history has been written by masonry and glasswork, Hugo envisages Notre Dame as the heart of a dawning civilization in which compassion and community could triumph over insularity and inequality.At the centre of Paris, Notre Dame indeed stands as a unifying presence. Hugo invites the reader to climb the cathedral’s towers and tune into the harmony of the capital’s many bells “singing as one” in “this city which has turned into an orchestra”. It is a distinctly romanticized image that channels the progressive values of the French Revolution freedom, equality, brotherhood – as an ethos for all humankind, irrespective of nationality. Such was this portrait’s massive popularity that Jules Michelet felt this “cathedral of poetry” needed little further comment in the third volume of his enormous History of France. Hugo enabled Notre Dame’s hybridity “to touch the popular imagination in a way it never had before”, as Oliver Wainwright and others have pointed out this week. Far from celebrating the decline of architecture in his digression This Will Kill That, Hugo yearned for the cathedral’s rebirth through the power of the written word, and paved the way for Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s renovations in the mid-19th century. This desire is why the novel has topped Amazon France’s bestseller list following the fire, and why extracts have been circulated and recited worldwide, including at Thursday’s ceremony in Paris to honor those firefighters who saved the cathedral. It also helps to explain why Notre Dame is the city’s most visited tourist site and why there has been so much debate about both the nature of its reconstruction and the philanthropic donations it has received. At a time of widespread unease towards political expediency and social disparity, Notre Dame matters deeply, whether we speak French or not. Bradley Stephens researches and teaches French literature at the University of Bristol. His recently published biography of Victor Hugo is available from Reaktion Books Article shared courtesy of The Guardian. By Adam Nossiter PARIS — Balzac tried and failed. Zola knocked on the door dozens of times and was always refused. Verlaine got no votes. Hugo got in, barely, only after multiple tries. The august Académie Française — the elite club of 40 “Immortals,” as the members are known, that serves as the official guardian of the French language — does not admit just anybody. So exclusive is it that most of France’s greatest writers never made it. But lately the sacred job of protecting France from “brainless Globish” and the “deadly snobbery of Anglo-American,” as a member spat out in a speech last month, has rarely been more difficult to attain. Four vacancies — lifelong tenures — have opened since December 2016, and the members cannot even fill the first one. Three times they have voted, most recently in late January, and three times they have failed to achieve a majority. The deadlock, some academy members say, reflects France’s own — between the proud, timeless France determined to preserve itself at all costs, and the France struggling to adapt to a 21st century defined by globalization, migration and social upheaval, witnessed in the “Yellow Vest” revolt. “We’re the reflection of the society, and it’s a society that’s questioning itself,” said Amin Maalouf, the Lebanese-born novelist and a member of the academy. Then there are those who grumble that, for a conservative institution rived by mutually hating factions, it is merely business as usual. The academy has been around since 1634, when it was founded by Cardinal Richelieu to promote and protect the French language, and it is not in any hurry. The academy “is an old lady, and very sensitive,” said one of the newer members, the Haitian-born Canadian writer Dany Laferrière. The French Institute is home to the Académie Française. The group is so exclusive that most of France’s greatest writers were never admitted as members. Actually, it is mostly old white men. There are just five women among the members, and Mr. Laferrière is the only person of color. The average age was well over 70 in a recent tally by the French media. Whether the academy is struggling to update or diversify itself, or even wants to, is difficult to divine. The deliberations of its members,under the graceful 17th-century dome of the Institut de France, are swathed in mystery. But the rejections are humiliatingly public: The former education minister Luc Ferry saw his name in the headlines recently, and not in a good way. The vote on his membership was decisive. Mr. Ferry declined to comment. Aside from renewing itself, the academy’s real business is updating the definitive dictionary of French, which it has been doing since the 17th century. So sacred is the task that the updates are published as an official government document. On Thursday, the members approved the feminization of professional titles. It was a veritable breakthrough for an academy that has for years resisted the adaptation, which is already practiced widely in France, with or without the sanction of the Immortals. Language may change, and society, too, but slowly in the view of the academy. “The question is, should the academy guard its principles?” Mr. Laferrière said. “We could fill all the seats tomorrow.” That is not likely to happen. The academy chooses you, you do not choose the academy. Nonetheless, no one can become a member without writing a strongly worded letter soliciting a place. Some French writers never bother, as is rumored to be the case with some of the country’s best-known contemporary authors. Neither of France’s two living Nobel literature laureates, Patrick Modiano and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, are members. Neither is Michel Houellebecq, reckoned to be among the most penetrating of all contemporary European novelists. Others are encouraged to apply, then lose the vote. “We are alarmed at not finding académiciens that are to the taste of the academy,” Mr. Laferrière said. But some members reject the argument that no upstanding defender of France’s language and cultural values can be found, and hint at a deeper crisis. “It’s absurd,” growled Jean-Marie Rouart, a critic and novelist who has been a member since 1997. The real question, for some, is what the deadlock says about the beleaguered France of today. “What was special about France is that everybody recognized themselves in literature,’’ Mr. Rouart said. “Now, you’ve got to write for the university, or this group, or that group. It’s deplorable. People read more, yes, but what they read are idiocies. The academy is a boat adrift in a dry sea.” Of the inability to move forward, Dominique Bona, a novelist and one of the few women to sit among the Immortals, said, “I’m a little bit astonished.” “We’ve had some remarkable candidates, real choices,” Ms. Bona said. “I’m personally disappointed that the academy is giving them the cold shoulder. Is this a French malaise? The bad mood around us, is it communicating itself to the academy?” To be sure, the ceremonious world of the academy seems a universe away from France’s current Yellow Vest uprising, whose instincts tend more toward revolution than preservation. Last month, the academy members trooped down a wooden staircase of the Institut de France, the sharp drumbeats of the Republican Guard echoing through the marbled halls. They were there to induct the newest member they could agree upon, the novelist Patrick Grainville, an author of baroque fantasies. Mr. Grainville took the seat of Alain Decaux, a journalist, historian and writer who died in March 2016. Generally, the academy waits a year after a death to announce a vacancy, and if a replacement receives a majority vote, a formal induction comes about a year later. Mr. Grainville was elected in March 2018.
Former President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, 93, a member of the academy since 2003, gamely negotiated the stairs supported by two aides. The smartly dressed invited public were scattered amid uniformed academy members, resplendent in their green embroidered uniforms. Their custom-made robes cost in the neighborhood of $50,000, members said, and the swords that are de rigueur for members are not cheap, either. Mr. Maalouf said he had to raise nearly $230,000 for the costs associated with his induction. The induction ceremony for Mr. Grainville spoke to an eternal France faithfully devoted to celebrating words and their ecstatic usage. “Words shoot up like geysers from your pen, tumble in cascades, swirl about, bump into each other, are never at rest,” Ms. Bona said, describing Mr. Grainville’s work in the traditional induction speech. “You are, sir, a writer of jubilation.” There was no hint of the social upheaval that has torn France apart in recent months. And there prevailed a certain vision of French history, in the easy invocation of former members of the academy, celebrated French writers with dubious wartime collaborationist pasts like Henry de Montherlant, cited by Mr. Grainville as a mentor. As with other ceremonious and antiquated French institutions, the pomp provides its own justification, even for those who harbor reservations about it. The academy for them represents France’s consecration of its writers, a nearly unique national status. “It was the idea of getting on the magic merry-go-round,” said the sharp-witted novelist Charles Dantzig, who was encouraged to apply after winning the academy’s prize, and then lost in recent balloting. “It was the idea of protection,” he said of the appeal of being a member. ‘‘Illusory, no doubt.” Indeed, the unusual nature of the academy’s mission, in a world where much of what is it celebrates is under siege, leaves some members pessimistic it can protect even itself. “French society: Will it continue?” asked Mr. Rouart. Then he answered his own question. “The bourgeoisie is dying,” Mr. Rouart grumbled. Before, “you would see the academy members at dinner parties. Now there aren’t even dinner parties. It’s finished.” Article shared courtesy of The New York Times. Prominent writers including Leila Slimani have spoken out against the Salon du Livre in Paris’s use of phrases including ‘young adult’, a ‘bookquizz’ and ‘le live’ by Alison Flood A celebration of the “Scène Young Adult” at the Salon du Livre in Paris next month has drawn the condemnation of dozens of French authors and intellectuals, who have described the adoption of English terminology as an “unbearable act of cultural delinquency”. The proliferation of English words on display at the book fair, where the “scène YA” was set to feature “Le Live”, a “Bookroom”, a “photobooth” and a “bookquizz”, spurred around 100 French writers into action, among them three winners of the country’s Goncourt prize – Lullaby author Leïla Slimani, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Marie NDiaye – and the bestselling writers Muriel Barbery and Catherine Millet. Together they have issued a scalding rebuke to organisers over their use of that “sub-English known as globish”. Pas de 'fake news' – too many English words rile French defenders. “In the streets, on the web … everywhere, in fact, English tends to replace French, little by little, at the speed of a word a day … But even at a book fair in France? In Paris, in a space dedicated to the book and to literature, is it not possible to speak French?” they ask in a letter published last week in Le Monde and La République des Livres. “For us, intellectuals, writers, teachers, journalists and lovers of this language from all walks of life, ‘young adult’ represents the straw that broke the camel’s back … This use of ‘young adult’, because it is referring to French literature, because it is deliberately addressing young French people looking for readings, is too much. It has become an aggression, an insult, an unbearable act of cultural delinquency.” The French have long defended their language against outside influence, establishing the Académie Française in the 17th century as an official custodian. In 2014, then-president François Hollande said that to “defend French is to promote linguistic pluralism, because naming things wrongly means further adding to disorder in the world”. In their letter, the writers called on fair organisers to exclude English language when it is not essential, appealing to the minister of culture not to subsidise cultural events where “a single French word is replaced unnecessarily with an English word”. Similarly, the minister of education was urged not to let a “single unnecessary English word” appear in school curricula: “French lessons must include the rediscovery and the reinvention of our language by students, who are today victims of a stupifying globish,” they wrote. The writers said that the “growing attack” on the French language is “all the more pernicious because it is happening slowly”. “We say to those who knowingly collaborate in this replacement that they are committing, either unknowingly or deliberately, a serious attack on a culture and a thought which spans millennia, and which is shared by nearly 300 million French speakers.” Following publication of the letter, the Salon du Livre website has been updated, according to Le Monde. Although it still refers to the young adult scene, there are no longer any references to a photobooth, a bookquizz or a bookroom. Article reprinted courtesy of the Guardian Invented in Troyes, these travel-sized texts started popping up everywhere. BY EVAN NICOLE BROWN NO MATTER WHERE YOU ARE in the world, during any given morning commute, you will likely see a book. Whether that book is electronic and read from a screen, or a more traditional three-dimensional version in the grasp of a hand, the fact remains: people like to read on the road. In 2018, it’s easy enough to compress a text into a never-ending scroll of a PDF and attach it to an email, which is equally digital and shockingly fast. But in the 17th century, sharing a piece of literature was exclusively tactile and decidedly more slow-going. Troyes is a town in northeast France that sits on the Seine in the Champagne region. It is known for being a main stop on the ancient Roman travel route Via Agrippa, and the site where the standard measurement for gold evolved. It is also responsible for the mass production of literature in France. In 1602, brothers Jean and Nicolas Oudot were printers in Troyes, and sustainably minded to boot. Using recycled paper from previously published books, the innovative printmakers created low quality, travel-sized brochures, protected with covers made from used sugarloaf packaging the color of faded denim. These updated editions of classic texts (think fun-sized SparkNotes) this small-format printing model birthed were thus named livres bleus (blue books). Blue books, and the broader Bibliothèque bleue (blue library) publishing house, were made possible through the Oudot brothers’ association with the family of Claude Garnier, who was a Renaissance-era printer of popular literature himself, primarily for the king of France. Admittedly, these blue books were not beacons of perfection. They were littered with typos and misaligned margins, and had a reputation for being highly (read: egregiously) abridged versions of their parent text, but the possibilities they contained were remarkable nonetheless. The brothers Oudot diluted their literature for a much wider (and less literate) audience, and it wasn’t long before the simplified volumes became relatively mainstream. Because they were cheap to make they were cheap to buy, thus increasing the lower class’ access to books. In a 1979 study, American historian Elizabeth Eisenstein argued that printing was “the unacknowledged revolution” of the Renaissance, due in part to the blue library’s role in situating printed matter as a significant part of popular culture. The tiny texts, measuring 12 by 7 centimeters (4.7 by 2.8 inches), were also easy to carry on one’s person, which gave birth to our term “pocket book.” Their miniature size made for easy transport, so blue books, small and light, became a perfect vehicle for the popularization of mass media. Book-peddling colporteurs created a network of wide distribution across France by selling the petite books at various fairs and markets. Printers used colportage, this system of literary circulation, to spread their cheap, abridged editions of popular texts to rural areas of Europe in particular, as book shops were exclusively found in major cities. In this way, blue books increased literacy in working-class populations dramatically. Though the Oudot brothers initially focused on reprinting and repurposing local literature, their blue book format took hold in other French cities and towns—proving that readers beyond Troyes, including those in urban environments with the capital to purchase classic works, were devoted to the new blue library. (Even noblewomen read them!) As the years—and the success of blue books—marched on, the blue library became a bonafide family affair. Jean and Nicolas’ sons, four between the two of them, ran the production of blue books in the late 17th century. The family’s eventual literary imprint in Paris, cemented by its publication of satire, religious literature, cook books, and almanacs in large quantities, nearly secured them a printing monopoly over popular French works. But in 1760, the Oudots finally went out of business, as new legislation infringed upon the right to reprint literature. Get our latest, delivered straight to your inbox by subscribing to our newsletter. Today, Troyes’ very own Greater Troyes Media Library--Médiathèque du Grand Troyes—holds over 2,000 volumes of these 17th-century blue books. Print isn’t dead after all. Article shared compliments of Atlas Obscura Shy, pig-tailed Gabrielle Colette’s (Kiera Knightley) world is turned upside down when she is wooed into marriage by an older family friend, a successful Parisian writer named Henry Gauthier-Villars, known as “Willy” (Dominic West). After moving to Paris, Willy starts by having his wife write his personal letters for him. It turns out he has built his writing career with ghost writers who pen his stories and reviews. He then encourages and later forces Gabrielle to write a spiced-up autobiographical novel of her childhood adventures, which he publishes under his name.
After becoming a bestselling sensation, he forces her to write about their life together, which inspires other stories in the “Claudine” series and even goes on to become a play. Willy revels in the fame and financial gains that come from the phenomenal success of her writing and will not share credit. My favorite quote in the movie was, “The hand that holds the pen writes history.” My movie buddy Carolyn felt that West perfectly portrayed the Machiavellian Willy. We were both interested in this movie because it was based on a true story, but were amazed by the progressiveness of France during this time period. This true historical drama showcases the sexual free thinking of France in the early 1900s; while Willy has affairs with other women, he doesn’t mind if Collette, as she now calls herself as her will is progressively strengthening, is involved with other women. She tries to fight for creative ownership, but to no avail. The last straw in their relationship is when Willy sells the rights to the Claudine books and Collette divorces him and goes on a stage tour and continues to have a successful writing career on her own. She is best known for her novella Gigi, which defied all the rules of the 1900s, even for Paris. It was made into a 1951 Broadway musical starring not-yet-famous Audrey Hepburn, and then an Oscar-winning 1958 film. Collette is considered the most successful female French novelist. She went on to marry three times and lived to age 81. Knightley shines in this Indie coming-of-age story of a feminist pioneer with the cinematography perfectly capturing the mood of this period film. Knightley has recently taken time off after the birth of her daughter Edie. But if you are a fan, she will be appearing in three more films this year with another historical drama The Aftermath, the anthology Berlin, I Love You, and Disney’s new fantasy feature The Nutcracker and the Four Realms. Genre: Biography, Drama, History Director: Wash Westmoreland Written By: Richard Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland, Rebecca, Lenkiewicz Actors: Keira Knightley, Eleanor Tomlinson, Dominic West, Running Time: 1 hour 51 minutes Article reprinted compliments of The Coronado Times Experts say they are 99% sure model who posed for L’Origine du monde was ballet dancer Constance Queniaux |
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