Category: Learning

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Les Bonnes de Jean Genet

Yesterday I finished reading Les Bonnes, the first play on the reading list for the 20th century French Theater and Performance course that I’m working through. I also watched a filmed version of the unusual 2011 production of Les Bonnes, directed by Jacques Vincey. The play was written in 1947 by Jean Genet and saw its first production that same year at Théâtre de l’Athénée, under the direction of Louis Jouvet. (I’ve encountered Jouvet’s name several times, more as an actor than as a director, though I gather he was quite renowned in both roles. Jouvet was famous enough that the theater has been renamed “Théâtre de l’Athénée Louis-Jouvet” and the plaza it faces renamed “Square de l’Opéra-Louis-Jouvet”). Les Bonnes is a warhorse in the repertoire of French theater. Wikipedia lists 10 notable productions since 1970, and my own web search revealed dozens of others at all levels of professional, amateur, and student theater. It has been translated into English as “The Maids”, which has been regularly performed since 1952. There are film adaptations of both the French and English versions, as well as many video recordings of live theater productions. The play is assigned reading au lycée for many French high school students. In short, a classic.

The play has three characters: Claire, Solange, and Madame. Claire and Solange are sisters, and work as maids for an haute bourgeoise woman known to us only as Madame. The place and time period are unspecified, but it’s French enough for there to be mansards, balls, operas, fancy dresses and furs; modern enough for there to be a telephone in the house; and ancient enough that there are no labor-saving electrical household appliances, leaving the onerous work to the maids. The two sisters hate their life as impoverished, dependent maids, hate Madame, and to some degree also hate each other and themselves. There’s a lot of hate to spread around. One gathers they have been in this situation for years and developed some deep-seated pathologies. Over the course of the play, we learn that Claire and Solange have managed to have Madame’s husband falsely imprisoned based on their own anonymous accusations. The maids are now conspiring to murder Madame herself. Although Jean Genet insists that his play was not inspired by it, there was a well publicized murder by two maids, the sisters Léa and Christine Papin, that transpired in western France in 1933.

The play is structured in three scenes, although no explicit boundaries are provided in the text. In the first scene, Claire and Solange are engaged in a role-playing game for their own benefit, with Solange pretending to be Madame and Claire pretending to be Solange. Claire dresses up in Madame’s clothing, puts on her makeup, and ironically adopts her airs and unconscious arrogance. Exactly why Solange pretends to be Claire rather than herself is never clear, although it contributes to the overall theme of confusing fantasy with reality. The two heap insults and derision on each other and play-act the strangulation of Madame, while also sporadically dropping out of the game to discuss what to portray next or to remark on their unrolling murder plot. A phone call interrupts them: it’s Monsieur, announcing that he’s just been released from prison and requesting that Madame meet him at a restaurant to celebrate. As the expected time of Madame’s return approaches, Claire and Solange end their game, hurriedly restore Madame’s things to their usual places, and otherwise hide traces of their mummery.

The second scene begins as Madame enters (after a failed attempt to visit her husband in prison), still unaware of Monsieur’s release. We now get to see the real interactions between Madame and the maids, which is not far off from the play-acting of scene one although the maids must be more circumspect and subservient in expressing their opprobrium for Madame. Claire prepares poisoned tea, but the two sisters are unsuccessful in maneuvering Madame to drink it. Madame notices many of the things that are awry in her bedroom after the play-acting and starts to suspect that her maids may be misbehaving, possibly even to the point of listening at doors and rifling through sensitive papers. Worried that Madame will realize they must be the source of the anonymous accusations about Monsieur, the sisters distract her with news of Monsieur’s release and the phone message requesting a rendez-vous. Madame is overjoyed and rushes off to meet him, despite the maids’ attempts to delay her long enough to drink the tea.

In the third scene Claire and Solange rip into each other, venomously trading blame for who botched the assassination and who left suspicion-raising evidence of their role-playing. Solange urges them to flee the house, but Claire despondently points out they are trapped by their poverty. The sisters fall back into their fantasy games, but this time with a harder edge. Solange performs a more realistic strangling of Claire-as-Madame, though it is still a mock killing. Solange then bitterly denounces Madame for couching her condescension in terms of kindness and generosity. She apostrophizes at length that she will no longer tolerate going through life bent over, but will stand up straight from now on. Claire resuscitates from her faux-death and insists that they enact the poison drinking scene that failed materialize. Solange is resistant, but finally agrees to serve Claire/Madame the poisoned tea. Claire knowingly drinks the poison and actually dies as Solange imagines herself in handcuffs and the play ends.

I understood most of this material in my first reading of the text, but was confused at a couple of levels. First, it was very unclear from the text which words are intended to be spoken “in real life” from one character to another, which are spoken “in the game”, and which are spoken as an aside to the theatrical audience. Often a single speaker turn contains two or three of these, with no stage directions indicating which words belong in which frame. Some critics assert this is a deliberate editing choice intended to give to a reader the same ambiguity between fantasy and reality that a spectator would have watching the show, and that the characters have in their fictional lives. Second, there are definitely sexual undercurrents in many of the interactions between Claire and Solange, but my French is not strong enough to know where the subtext is glaringly obvious, where the meaning is more implicit, and where I invented hidden meaning when none exists. So, my next stop was to watch a performance of the play.

Kitchen gloves are all he’s wearing …

The performance listed in the course materials is a professionally filmed recording of a 2011 production directed by Jacques Vincey. I watched it (text in hand) and got a very different sense of the play than I had by simply reading it. The print edition I have begins with a five page note from the author: Comment jouer «Les Bonnes» (“How to perform The Maids”). It declares that the atmosphere should be furtive and that the maids should be proper, yet still sexual, but not overtly erotic. The author also acknowledges that the dialogue may not be a realistic representation of how maids talk when they aren’t observed, but asserts that when he goes to the theater he wants to see himself on stage, stripped of conventions and niceties, naked. Director Jacques Vincey decided to start his 2011 production with an abridged version of this note recited by a completely naked man who does not otherwise figure in the rest of the show (though I believe he participates later as clothed stage hand). This introductory scene is presumably why the video merits a YouTube warning “This video contains content that may be offensive to some viewers. Are you sure you want to proceed?”, which also prevents it from being embedded on this page. You’ll have to click the link if you want to see stage directions recited nude.

The Jacques Vincey production is highly stylized with stark sets, dark lighting, minimal costuming, and eerie music. Almost all props are absent, replaced by pantomime. Many lines are spoken slowly with an emotionless, dispassionate affect, while others are delivered in a stentorian shout. I don’t know enough to be confident that labeling this production “avant garde” is formally accurate, but that description will give a non-professional the right impression. I came away from watching it with the thought “Ah, I see, that’s what this play is. An abstract psycho-drama infused with social commentary, class politics, and post-war despair. Got it.”

Only it turns out, this description is heavily influenced by the directorial choices of the production. I was fortunate enough to wonder if this is how it’s always played and looked for other recording of other productions. I found dozens of them on the web, both complete shows and excerpts. They illustrate a wide range of stylistic interpretations of the text, among which Jacques Vincey’s is an outlier. There are productions with more traditional, fully realized sets, props, and costumes. There are productions with less overtly deranged portrayals of Claire and Solange. There are productions where the maids are younger or prettier, ones where Madame is more natural or more horrible, ones that emphasize or ignore the sexual tension in Claire and Solange’s play-acting. There are productions set in prison. By far the oddest one I found was a production by Centaur Theater where the actors are on horses most of the time.

Centaur Theater presents «Les Bonnes»
Must watch: equestrian acting at its finest

All in all Les Bonnes (and Jacques Vincey’s production) was an unusual and satisfying first dish in the nine course meal that I’ve ordered for myself. And I’ve been reminded that not only must one not judge a book by its cover, but one must also not judge a classic play by just one of its productions.

Next week: L’Amante anglaise, by Marguerite Duras.

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Harvard Course: French Theater and Performance

Last month somebody introduced me to the existence of a course at Harvard University on French Theater and Performance. The one-line description of the class is “In this course, we will trace the history of French theater from the early twentieth-century to the present: its major trends, figures, and forms as well as its intellectual, historical, and political contexts.” I live just a few miles from the university, so briefly flirted with the idea of arranging to audit the class this semester (lectures in French!). But after a few minutes, I settled on a more modest undertaking: read all nine plays on the reading list. I might have to go more slowly than the one play per week pace that the course follows, but I figure it will be a good way to get a sampling from the past 120 years of French theater.

Here’s the reading list for the course:

  1. Jean Genet Les Bonnes, Gallimard Folio
  2. Marguerite Duras, L’Amante anglaise, Gallimard Folio
  3. Albert Camus, Les Justes, Gallimard Folio Plus Classiques 
  4. Samuel Beckett, Fin de partie, Editions de Minuit
  5. Bernard-Marie Koltès, Combat de nègre et de chiens, Editions de Minuit
  6. Nathalie Sarraute, Le silence, Gallimard Folio
  7. Jean-Luc Lagarce, Juste la fin du monde, Solitaires intempestifs
  8. Marie NDiaye, Papa doit manger, Editions de Minuit
  9. Wajdi Mouawad, Tous des oiseaux, Actes Sud Papier

The books were all available via the Harvard Coop bookstore. They very nicely put them all in a list so I could fill my cart with just a few clicks. A week later, I had a nice stack of reading for the Fall.

Perhaps if I get wrapped up in this I’ll contact the professor, Matthew Rodriguez, and ask if I can sit in on just one or two lectures to get the feel of it. In the meantime, Allons-y!

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Joséphine Baker to Enter the Panthéon

My French homework this week from teacher N.M. was to read and write a response to a pair of texts about the Panthéon and the decision last month to admit Franco-American Joséphine Baker into its elite ranks. At present only 71 luminaries are buried in this «nécropole laïc».

The prompt asked for 30 lines addressing the question: «Pourquoi selon vous a-t-on besoin de sacrer des personnalités et de les faire entrer au Panthéon?» (“In your opinion, why must we venerate great people and admit them into the Panthéon?”). Here’s my 400-word response:

Version originale

Quand Achilles, le héro grecque, délibérait aller à la guerre de Troi ou rester chez lui, sa mère Thétis lui a dit «Si tu restes ici, tu vivras. Tes enfants t’aimeront et tes petits-fils se souviendront de toi. Mais, tes arrière-petits-fils t’oublieront. Si tu pars pour la guerre, tu mourras. Mais, tu resteras dans la mémoire pour toujours». Pour les Grecques, la mémoire c’est la vie, peut-être la façon de vivre la plus puissante. Et donc Achilles est parti, a gagné sa mesure de la gloire autant qu’une place dans notre connaissance collective pendant deux mille sept cents ans.

L’existence du Panthéon français est une réaction non seulement à la réalité inévitable de notre mortalité individuelle, mais aussi à la crainte que notre société elle-même puisse disparaître. Nous imaginons que nos achèvements et nos valeurs continueront après nos morts, mais comment assurer qu’ils perdureront et ne sont pas au gré de la mode de nos héritiers? Si l’on veut que quelque chose dure, la construisez en pierre! C’est pareil pour une église, un musée, une banque, ou une tombe. Il y a peu de monuments en bois ou en boue qui nous restent d’Antiquité. Mais d’artefacts en pierre, il y en a beaucoup. Donc, on grave les noms des renommés dans les roches de ce bâtiment célèbre.

Version rédigée avec N.M.

Quand Achilles, le héro grecque, délibérait aller à la guerre de Troie ou rester chez lui, sa mère Thétis lui a dit «Si tu restes ici, tu vivras. Tes enfants t’aimeront et tes petits-fils se souviendront de toi. Mais, tes arrière-petits-fils t’oublieront. Si tu pars pour la guerre, tu mourras. Mais, tu resteras dans la mémoire pour toujours». Pour les Grecques, la mémoire c’est la vie, peut-être la façon de vivre la plus puissante. Et donc Achilles est parti, a gagné sa mesure de la gloire autant qu’une place dans notre connaissance collective pendant deux mille sept cents ans.

L’existence du Panthéon français est une réaction non seulement à la réalité inévitable de notre mortalité individuelle, mais aussi à la crainte que notre société elle-même puisse disparaître. Nous imaginons que nos achèvements et nos valeurs continueront après notre mort, mais comment assurer qu’ils perdureront et ne seront pas au gré de la mode de nos héritiers? Si l’on veut que quelque chose dure, construisez-la en pierre! C’est pareil pour une église, un musée, une banque, ou une tombe. Il y a peu de monuments en bois ou en boue qui nous restent de l’Antiquité. Mais d’artefacts en pierre, il y en a beaucoup. Donc, on grave les noms des renommés dans les roches de ce bâtiment célèbre.

Pourtant, la Panthéonisation n’est que pour ceux qui nous suivent en maintes siècles, c’est également pour nous-mêmes aujourd’hui. Nos sélections actuelles définissent notre présent autant que leurs mémoire nous définiront dans l’avenir. On peut évaluer une société par examiner ceux auxquels elle accorde l’argent et la gloire. Admettre Joséphine Baker à ce club exclusif c’est valoriser non seulement son art et sa lutte contre le racisme, mais l’Art et la lutte contre le racisme. Aussi, par extension, la lutte contre le harcèlement sexiste, l’homophobie, et pleins d’autres pestes sociales actuelles. Même si le Panthéon délabre au cours des siècles, même s’il est détruit en quelques années, la choix elle-même est une acte politique qui peut lever des gens privilégiés en affranchissant un peu plus leurs esprits.

Toutefois, on ne doit pas imaginer que sacrer certaines personnalités suffit pour sécuriser une société dans les yeux du futur. Nous pouvons les ériger commes idoles et les vénérer comme les déités, mais si nous ne les honorons pas avec nos actions la société qu’elles représentent va écrouler. Car on doit rappeler les mots de Friedrich Schiller dans Die Jungfrau von Orleans: «Contre la stupidité, les dieux eux-mêmes se battent inutilement».

Pourtant, la Panthéonisation n’est pas ciblée que à ceux qui nous suivrons dans maintes siècles, mais également à nous-mêmes aujourd’hui. Nos sélections actuelles définissent notre présent autant que leurs mémoire nous définiront dans l’avenir. On peut évaluer une société en examinant ceux auxquels elle accorde de l’argent et de la gloire. Admettre Joséphine Baker à ce club exclusif c’est valoriser non seulement son art et sa lutte contre le racisme, mais l’Art et la lutte contre le racisme. Aussi, par extension, la lutte contre le harcèlement sexiste, l’homophobie, et pleins d’autres pestes sociales actuelles. Même si le Panthéon se délabre au cours des siècles, même s’il est détruit dans quelques années, le choix lui-même  est un acte  politique qui peut remonter le moral des gens marginalisés  en affranchissant un peu plus leurs esprits.

Toutefois, on ne doit pas imaginer que sacrer certaines personnalités suffit pour faire admirer notre société dans les yeux du futur. Nous pouvons les ériger comme idoles et les vénérer comme les déités, mais si nous ne les honorons pas par nos actions la société qu’elles représentent s’écroulera. Car on doit rappeler les mots de Friedrich Schiller dans Die Jungfrau von Orleans: «Contre la stupidité, les dieux eux-mêmes se battent inutilement». 

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Learning Log, 2021 Week 36

I’m logging what I do each week to improve my French. Maybe it will motivate me to do more. No need to post the details here, but I’ll see if posting a skeleton log of my actions helps motivate me to keep it up. I’ll update this post over the week rather than make new articles each time.

  • J’ai fait…
    • GPdF Chapitre 4: Les Temps de l’indicatif.
      • Les Passés
        • Mettez les verbes au passé composé, puis imaginez une suite à cette histoire.
    • GPdF Chapitre 5: Le Subjonctif
      • Emplois du subjonctif.
        • Répondez en utilisant le subjonctif selon le modèle.
  • J’ai lu …
    • La Nuit des temps, de René Barjavel, pp 238 – 410.
  • J’ai écrit …
  • J’ai écouté à …
  • Cours particulier (x2)
    • Tout, toute, tous, toutes.
    • Conversation.

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Songs for Grammar: Embrasse-les tous

Césaire de Heisterbach

I’ve often heard the advice that it’s a mistake to learn vocabulary words in isolation, either as memorized english translations of French word or as memorized French synonyms of a French word. Better, says the recommendation, to remember a sentence that uses the target word so that you learn it in context. I’ve found this advice hard to implement, as I have difficulty remembering whole sentences, especially for the full range of words I’m trying to learn.

But this technique may be more viable for grammar rules. This morning I was doing an exercice on the words tout, toute, tous, and toutes. One of the examples shown was an excerpt from Césaire de Heisterbach, who chronicled the siege of Béziers (between Narbonne and Montpellier) in 1209. It contains this well known (if often re-attributed) passage:

«Comment distinguer les hérétiques des catholique», se demandait-on lors de la prise de la ville de Béziers où vivaient de nombreux cathares, en 1209.

«Tuez-les tous, Dieu reconnaîtra les siens», répondit Arnaud Amaury, légat du pape Innocent III.»

“How shall we distinguish the heathens from the catholics?”, they wondered upon capturing the city of Beziers which, in 1209, still housed many Cathars.

“Kill them all, God will know his own,” replied Arnaud Amaury, the representative of Pope Innocent III.

Ah yes, a classic in the annals of tactics. Bloodshed aside, the point of this passage was illustrate that the word tous, when used as a pronoun meaning “everyone, all of them”, comes after an imperative verb, and also after any direct object there may be. Thus «Tuez-les tous» and not «Tous les tuez», «Tuez-tous-les», etc. Moreover, because «tous» is a pronoun here you pronounce the final “s” rather than leaving it silent as you would in «Tous les deux» or «tous les gens» where it is an adjective. That makes this Béziers passage less than ideal as a canonical example. Even if I overcame my qualms about memorizing a passage about killing heathens, there’s no hint to help me remember to pronounce that final “s”.

Fortunately for me, there preamble to the exercise gives a second example that is right up my alley: a Georges Brassens song excerpt!

De Pierre à Paul en passant par Félicien
Embrasse-les tous, Embrasse-les tous
Dieu reconnaîtra le sien
Passe-les tous par tes armes
Passe-les tous par tes charmes
Jusqu’à ce que l’un deux les bras en croix
Tourne de l’oeil dans tes bras

From Peter to Paul, by way of Félicien
Kiss them all, kiss them all
God will know his own
Dazzle them all with your wiles
Favor them all with your smiles
Til one of them faints in your arms
Swept of his feet by your charms

I love the reference that Brassens makes in this song, and I am thankful to the authors of this grammar text for drawing my attention to it. I vaguely knew the “Kill them all and let god sort it out” line, but didn’t know the particular french structure of it, nor did I think of it when I first herd the Brassens song. I thought he was just doing his usual anarchy-and-free-love thing. But it’s a great bit of literary jiu-jitsu to add in his anti-clericalism and turn the Church-inspired slaughter into an endorsement of promiscuity. That said, if you look past the sentimental and nostalgic music, there’s still a bit of misogyny to these American-in-2020 ears

Anyway, from a pedagogical view point I like this example is a better fit for me. It has the advantage that it is a song with music, which makes it easier for me to remember, and also that I can listen to the recording of Brassens singing it and pronouncing the final “s”.

It so happens that I know another Brassens song, even more ribald, which shows the contrasting pronunciation of «tous» when used as an adjective «Tous les gars».

Quand Margot dégrafait son corsage
Pour donner la gougoutte à son chat
Tous les gars, tous les gars du village
Étaient là, lalala la la la
Étaient là, lalala la la la

When Margot would unclip her blouse
To let her cat nurse from her breasts
All the men, all the men of the village
Would come hooting and howling
Lalala la la la!

If you listen to the whole song, Margot is presented as a simple (but wise?) shepherdess, innocently thinking that the men are there to see a cute kitty-cat that she had adopted when its mother was lost. The men are happy to let her think whatever she like so long as they get their daily peep show. The women of the village are none too happy about it, though, and end up organizing themselves and beating the cat to death. Margot is distraught by this turn of events, takes herself a husband, and from then only shows her charms to him only. Echos of Il était une bergère if you think about it (translation).

And just in case you thought it was only men who sang ribald Brassens songs, here’s a recording of Patachou singing the same song. Recall that Patachou (née Henriette Ragon) is the cabaret nightclub singer who discovered Brassens in 1952, first singing his songs on stage and later getting him up on stage to perform them himself. According to her account, she convinced him to sing because some of his songs were told in the first person by an obviously male character, and presenting audiences with a woman singing them was too much of a stretch.

Finally, I can’t resist including this all-instrumental version of Brave Margot, posted just a few months ago by a classical guitarist

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Touchez pas à la charentaise!

Les charentaises are a particular style of slippers made in La Charente, a department of France some 80 miles north east of Bordeaux. I’ve driven past it, but never gone there. These slippers have been made in La Charente for over 350 years, first by hand and then by machine. They were originally intended for military and rural life, as a comfortable indoor shoe that you could keep on all day long while you donned and doffed your outdoor boots or wooden shoes. A number of charentaises-making factories opened there in the first years of the 20th century, and they started aggressively exporting the slippers globally in the 1950s. At its peak in the 1970s, this French industry was exporting over a million pairs of slippers each year. Together with a beret and a baguette, a pair of charentaises became part of the French caricature.

The global center of shoe manufacturing today is in Asia, as China, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia account for 75% of all output. While French production of slippers fell precipitously in the past 50 years, it’s having something of a resurgence, both in La Charente and in Brittany. The French government has been pursuing a “Made in France” industrial initiative for the past few years, and generally has a soft spot for saving culturally iconic production. My French teacher assigned me to watch a documentary about the re-opening of one of the original charentaise factories and write a response about the importance (or not) of preserving industries like this.

Here’s my rather rambling response, after applying corrections suggested by my teacher N.M. In other posts I include both my original draft and the final draft after editing in order to display my errors. But as this post is long enough already, I’m posting only the final draft.

Version rédigé avec N.M.

C’est quoi la forme de la vie? La pomme est ronde, un cristal de sel est cubique, la coquille d’un escargot est spirale. Quelle est la morphologie de la vie? Dans son livre La Maison de joie: Une histoire de la vie et de la mort, l’historienne Jill Lepore constate que de l’Antiquité à la Lumière les peuples de l’Ouest ont imaginé que la vie est comme un cercle. On est né, on reçoit la sagesse et les traditions du passé, on habite dans la maison de son père, on laboure les champs de son grand-père, et on mange les recettes de ses arrières grand-mères. Au cours des années, on grandit, on a des enfants, et on leur apprend à faire comme leurs parents. Finalement on vieillit, on sourit aux petits-enfants, on leur enseigne les comptines patrimoniales, et on meurt conforté par le fait que le cercle recommence.

Pourtant depuis la Lumière, cette notion d’une vie cyclique a été remplacée par la vie linéaire. On utilise la raison pour améliorer les techniques. On progresse. On grimpe vers le sommet, on se hisse à l’échelle. L’arrivée de l’industrialisation et des idées de Darwin au XIXe siècle a accéléré cette réorientation de la conception de la vie. On doit construire, accumuler, foncer plus loin ou plus vite. Regardez les milliardaires de nos jours, messieurs Bezos et Branson, qui se hâtent de se lancer dans l’espace. Ruons-nous vers l’avenir!

Mais faites attention! Parce qu’on ne peut pas être au four et au moulin. En se dépêchant sur la longueur du chemin de progrès, il faut qu’on lâche maintes coutumes du passé. On ne peut pas dire «Rien à jeter» en surchargeant les malles de notre culture actuelle. Nos boulevards sont ou pour les chevaux, ou pour les automobiles, mais pas les deux. Un stationnement au centre ville est ou une écurie ou un parking. Et un travailleur doit choisir un métier, soit fermier, soit ouvrier, soit enseignant, soit avocat. Quel choix fera-t-il?

D’où venons-nous ? Que sommes-nous ? Où allons-nous ?

Ça me rappelle des questions du peintre Paul Gauguin, dont une œuvre est sous-titrée «D’où venons-nous ? Que sommes-nous ? Où allons-nous ?». Parce que la question de «que garder, de quoi se débarrasser» est à son cœur une question d’identité. Pour les circulaires, répondre à ces trois questions est facile. Nous venons d’un chemin déjà arpenté par nos parents; nous sommes des gens qui entournent cette orbite familiale sans aucun souci; nous repasserons les mêmes chemins à nos tours. Mais chez les linéaires, chez les dévots du progrès, les questions d’identité sont plus difficiles. Il faut changer pour s’améliorer, et un changement de mode de vie exige un changement d’identité. Choisir d’abandonner nos pratiques habituelles, de bouleverser nos affaires, c’est choisir de nous laisser mourir un peu pour permettre de faire naître le prochain «nous». Sommes-nous prêts à mourir?

Enfin, au bout de cette route sinueuse, j’arrive au sujet des charentaises. Cette pantoufle particulière est née il y a trois cent cinquante ans. En 1907, Théophile Rondinaud (parmi les autres) à lancé une usine à Rivière en Charente. Dès les années 1950, son fils James Rondinaud exportait ce produit dans le monde entier. Pendant les années 1970, l’usine Rondinaud employait 1300 travailleurs. La Charente était renommée pour ces jolies pantoufles douces. Mais cinquante ans plus tard, c’est la faillite. Les fabricants asiatiques ont surpassé ceux de la Charente, les chiffres d’affaires ont chuté. Même avec une consolidation de quatre fabricants sous le nom «la Manufacture Charentaise» (LMC), et avec la protection inédite du titre d’Indication géographique «charentaise de Charente-Périgord», cette société a dû mettre la clé sous la porte en 2019.

Est-ce qu’il faut être en deuil pour cette industrie française? Il y a deux ans qu’Emmanuel Macron a annoncé son initiative de relocaliser certaines chaînes de valeur pour les produits critiques. La crise sanitaire du Covid-19 a démontré la sagesse de fabriquer les molécules pharmaceutiques intra-pays. Une usine pour faire les semi-conducteurs en France c’est stratégique pour ne pas être dépendant de la Chine pour nos ordinateurs et nos portables incontournables. Mais les pantoufles? Forcément un manque imprévu de chausseurs duveteux ne serait pas une crise nationale. Les orteils patriotiques de la France survivraient.

Ici ce n’est pas une question de nécessité mais d’identité. Si un membre de la famille Rondinaud, comme l’arrière petit-fils Olivier Rondinaud, veut continuer l’entreprise, qu’il y aille. Mais si la rentabilité est insuffisante, on doit poser la question: d’où viendra la subvention? À mon avis, ceux qui s’identifient aux charentaises doivent subventionner eux-mêmes leur fabrication en France. Si c’est Olivier Rondinaud seul, je souhaite qu’il ait une grande fortune personnelle. Si ce sont les travailleurs de l’usine, peut-être qu’ils voudront travailler à des salaires réduits. Enfin, si les habitants du département ou du pays s’identifient profondément avec les charentaises, une subvention nationale serait dans ce cas-là la plus correcte. Pas de problème pour moi.

Mais il se trouvera, peut-être, que les consommateurs de la France préfèrent acheter les pantoufles bon marché, que les contribuables préfèrent renouveler les autoroutes, et que Mais peut-être qu’il se trouve que les consommateurs français préfèreraient acheter des pantoufles bon marché, que les contribuables préféreraient renouveler les autoroutes, et que les électeurs préféreraient revaloriser les salaires des soignants. Évidemment, il y a des limites budgétaires. Donc, qui sont les Français? Un peuple qui donne priorité à ses pieds? Ou un peuple en marche vers l’avenir sur des chemins modernes, avec des soignants correctement payés, mais avec les pieds à la chinoise?

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Learning Log, 2021 Week 35

I’m logging what I do each week to improve my French. Maybe it will motivate me to do more. No need to post the details here, but I’ll see if posting a skeleton log of my actions helps motivate me to keep it up. I’ll update this post over the week rather than make new articles each time.

  • GPdF Chapitre 3: Les Négations
    • La Place de la négation
      • Dites dans les exemples suivant si «ne» est explétif ou s’il est négatif.
      • Créez des interdictions d’après les contextes proposés.
  • GPdF Chapitre 4: Les Temps de l’indicatif.
    • Le Présent
      • Utilisez le présent à la place des passés quand c’est possible pour donner à ce texte un caractère plus vivant.
    • Les Passés
      • Mettez les verbes entre parenthèses à l’imparfait.
  • GPdF Chapitre 5: Le Subjonctif
    • Formation et caractéristiques
    • Utilisez le subjonctif comme dans le modèle.
    • Complétez avec le subjonctif.
  • J’ai regardé …
    • Dix pour cent
      • Juliette (s2 e6) with French audio only.
  • J’ai lu …
    • La Nuit des temps, de René Barjavel, pp 62 – 237
  • J’ai écrit …
  • J’ai écouté …
    • L’Univers . Cours « tout public » Aurélien Barrau.
    • L’Invité de 8h20: Le Grand Entretien (FranceInter)
      • Pierre Rosanvallon : “Il y a un désir d’égalité, que chacun soit reconnu dans sa singularité”
      • Atiq Rahimi, écrivain et réalisateur, et Jean-Pierre Filiu, historien. Afghanistan : “Maintenant les islamistes, les djihadistes partout dans le monde, se disent que c’est possible”
      • “10 à 11% des enseignants pas vaccinés” affirme le ministre Jean-Michel Blanquer
      • Gérard Larcher, président du Sénat, sénateur LR des Yvelines, est l’invité du Grand entretien de France Inter.
      • Bruno Le Maire : “le pass sanitaire n’a ralenti ni la consommation, ni la croissance”
    • Le 7/9 par Nicolas Demorand , Léa Salamé (FranceInter)
      • Sept 1 émission, 70 minutes.
  • Cours particulier

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Learning Log, 2021 Week 34

I’m going to try doing some simple French exercises daily as a supplement to consuming organic language (reading books and articles, listening to podcasts, watching videos). Exercises were a big part of how I learned French in high school, but I haven’t done much with them in the past 10 years. Maybe the habit of a little each day will be helpful.

I randomly picked a source of exercises from my shelf: Grammaire progressive du français (niveau avancé). Long ago I had written in the answers to the first few exercises, so I’m starting with Chapitre 2: L’Adjectif. No need to post the details here, but I’ll see if posting a skeleton log of my actions helps motivate me to keep it up. I’ll update this post over the week rather than make new articles each time.

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Summer Lessons Day 13: Codenames

One last day of vacation, one last lesson with Sofia to close out the series. The focus of our final session was code-names – not the award-winning word game by Vlaada Chvàtil, but the actual French legal code and the actual geographic names of places. We also did some grammar and some writing.

The grammar section touched on the timeline of indicatif verb tenses and how they can indicate the relationship between the action being described and the present moment (or more precisely, the moment where the narration is situating itself). So the plus que parfait comes before the passé composé. The passé récent, présent, and futur proche are all considered as “present-ish” moments. And the futur comes further along in time, with the futur antérieur sneaking in between the present and the future when one needs to talk about sequenced future events.

Mille bornes ou temps borné?

There’s one more commonly used indicative tense I haven’t listed, which is the imparfait. I’ve heard the distinction between the imparfait and the passé composé described in many ways: the passé composé is for one-time actions, while the imparfait is for habitual past actions; the imparfait is for descriptions while the passé composé is for events; the imparfait is for continuous action in the past; the imparfait is for background scenery while the passé composé is for the focus of a narration, the plot. But Sofia gave me a new one that I find helpful: the passé composé is a bounded tense (un temps borné), while the imparfait is an unbounded tense (non borné). If you don’t know (or don’t wish to indicate) when an action finished, use the imparfait. Note that the present is implicitly an unbounded tense, while both plus que parfait and futur antérieur are bounded tenses, as they are only used when you need to indicate an event that has finished before some other event you wish to mention (either past or future relative to now). I don’t know why borné is a more helpful concept to me than “continuous”, but it does give me a new lens for the imparfait / passé composé distinction.

Coding on a Sunday

After the grammar, we watched another montage of “man on the street” interviews (a «micro-trottoir») asking how people felt about working on Sunday. Traditionally most everything is closed on Sunday in France. Originally this was to reserve it for religious observances, but with la laïcité this historical basis has been de-emphasized. The opinions featured in the clip varied, and I expected to be asked to write several paragraphs about my views. But this day’s lesson had a twist on the timed writing exercise: instead of having 25 minutes to write at length in response to a prompt, I had 25 minutes to read a complicated document and then summarize it in under 80 words.

I have a fair amount of experience reading French fiction, and I’ve also read and listened to a decent amount of French news articles, but I haven’t done much with reading more official French documents. Digesting the opening 20 paragraphs of this government-issued review of the laws and regulations surrounding Sunday hours for salaried workers was a comparatively experience. I’ve done something similar when I opened a bank account in France eight years ago and again when I investigated traveling there this summer amid Covid, but that’s about it.

Here’s an example of the text, beginning with an excerpt from the actual Code itself:

Un salarié ne peut travailler plus de 6 jours par semaine : au moins un jour de repos (24 heures auxquelles s’ajoute un repos quotidien minimum de 11 heures) doit lui être accordé chaque semaine et, en principe, le dimanche (repos dominical). Toutefois, le principe du repos dominical connaît plusieurs types de dérogations qui peuvent, selon le cas, être permanentes ou temporaires, soumises ou non à autorisation, applicables à l’ensemble du territoire ou à certaines zones précisément délimitées, etc.

Le fait de méconnaître les dispositions du Code du travail relatives au repos hebdomadaire et au repos dominical est puni de l’amende prévue pour les contraventions de la 5e classe. Les contraventions donnent lieu à autant d’amendes qu’il y a de salariés illégalement employés. Les peines sont aggravées en cas de récidive dans le délai d’un an.

The text is not fundamentally difficult but it is definitely a different register of language than news reporting. Most of the work is in untangling the nuances that are built into the law, though there is also some specialized vocabulary whose meaning I had to deduce on the fly from context. I imagine the comparable English section of Massachusetts state law would have the same feel.

Summarizing 20 paragraphs in 80 words does not leave a lot of room for fancy constructions or even many modifiers. I ended up writing 110 or so naturally and then trimmed it back to reach the limit. We did a quick joint editing afterwards. Here are the two drafts.

Version originale

En général, la loi de travail dit que le dimanche soit un jour de repos pour les salariés. Mais il y a plusieurs exceptions: certains établissement qui s’occupent des besoins de public ou qui bénéficent de travail en continue peuvent obliger leurs salariés à travailler le dimanche. Autres entreprises définies peuvent rester ouvertes le dimanche avec les salariés à volontés. En outre, il y a une dérogation temporaire pour ces entreprises qui luttent contre la Covid-19 en n’importe quelle mesure.

Version corrigée

En général, le code du travail dit que le dimanche doit être un jour de repos pour les salariés. Mais il y a plusieurs exceptions: certains établissements qui s’occupent des besoins du public ou qui produisent en continue peuvent obliger leurs salariés à travailler le dimanche. Les autres entreprises évoquées peuvent rester ouvertes le dimanche avec les salariés volontaires. En outre, il y a une dérogation temporaire pour ces entreprises qui luttent contre la Covid-19 de quelque façon que ce soit.

Name That Rue

Speaking of Sunday, you might know that it is named for a prominent celestial body, as is Monday. Other days are named for the Norse gods Tyr, Wotan, Thor, or Freya. But who decided these things? Do these names represent the diversity of who we are as a society today? And what if the actions of these Norse gods are no longer acceptable to our modern mores – shouldn’t we stop honoring that one weekly?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlVhJsgTuqs

These questions seem a bit academic in thinking about days (nobody is about to mount a serious campaign to rebrand Saturday as Parvatiday), but they are very much in play in France when it comes to street names. French streets are old, and many are named after people who did very bad things – ruthlessly slaughtered people in Africa, traded in slaves, mistreated poor workers, abused women etc. And behavior aside, the vast majority of honorees are old European white men. So there is a French movement to rename some of the streets that currently glorify some pretty bad people and a parallel movement to name newly constructed streets for people who belong to underrepresented groups. For example, among French streets named for people only 10% or so are named for women. I imagine it’s not much different in the US.

We looked at two articles discussing this: a news item on the Macron government’s release of a list of suggested names that towns and cities may wish to choose from in naming streets; and, a magazine article about the myths behind Greek place names. We also watched a television report from Belgium about renaming problematic street names. After each one we discussed various prepared question in order to check reading or oral comprehension. The hardest piece for me was the Greek mythology one, primarily because it had dozens of unfamiliar names in it, mythological or actual. I do better understanding mechanisms than I do remembering catalogs of examples, so I had to keep referring back to the text to find the answers to the questions.

I’d say it was all Greek to me, but that’s not expression. When something is incomprehensible they describe it with «c’est de l’hébreu» or else «C’est du chinois». Maybe the French already decided that honoring the Greeks in this way was problematic …

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Summer Lessons Day 12: Figures and Registers

Nicolas Hulot and Emmanuel Macron

Oh, no! Vacation is over and I have to go back to work tomorrow morning. That means if I don’t write up the last two days of my summer lessons now, they’ll likely get buried in the onslaught of quotidien concerns that no doubt are currently overflowing my corporate Inbox (I’m afraid to look …).

Thursday’s course with Léo was a bit non-standard – quite literally. French teachers, dictionaries, and linguistic theorists pay a fair amount of attention to the idea of linguistic register. Some subsets of a language are only “appropriate” to use in certain situations which are typically characterized by their degree of formality. There are dozens of recognized subsets (see the International Organization for Standardization’s ISO/TR 20694:2018(en) A typology of language registers if you’re a real glutton for punishment), but the main three that figure in French are soutenu, standard, and familier:

  • Soutenu is the language of high literary texts, academic scholarship, and legal documents. It has a rich vocabulary, flowery figures of speech, and complex grammatical constructions.
  • Standard is the language of business documents, office conversation, banking, government publications, newspapers, non-fiction books, traditional classrooms. It uses clear wording, simpler grammar, and unimaginative language.
  • Familier is the language used with friends and family. It is rich with popular idioms, truncated words, incomplete sentences, slang, and sarcasm.

Thursday we left standard behind and focused on the other two.

Soutenu (mais Insupportable!)

To illustrate soutenu, Léonard had me read an ironic blog post by Samuel Gontier about the resignation of Nicolas Hulot. The piece comments on a rather tangled situation, with which by some unlikely coincidence I was already very familiar. Nicolas Hulot is a writer, journalist, and politician who is very well known in France as one of the foremost advocates of environmental and ecological issues. When Emmanuel Macron was elected president in 2017, Hulot agreed to serve as his “Minister for Ecological Transition and Solidarity”. This was intended as a signal that Macron was serious about addressing environmental issues, and the French Greens had high hopes that such a high profile appointment would translate into real progress.

It so happens that I was in France in August 2018, fifteen months later, when I tuned into France Inter’s regular morning radio news broadcast. As I got ready for my day, I heard Nicolas Hulot appear as the guest in the daily interview slot with hosts Nicolas Demorand and Léa Salamé. After complaining about the Macron government’s foot-dragging or even retrograde progress on the environment, Nicolas Hulot said he was not satisfied and felt like he was being used as a fig leaf. At that point Mme Salamé asked “Will you stay?”, and the minister replied by announcing his resignation on the spot, on live radio. Apparently neither the hosts nor the French President knew that this action was coming, and both were taken as much by surprise as the listening public.

But not me – I wasn’t all that surprised. Not that I had an inside track on anything, I just had no preconceptions. Maybe French Ministers resign live on air all the time? Maybe the whole thing was planned in advance and the hosts were in on it? Maybe the writing was on the wall and any knowledgable follower of French politics knew this was coming (just as nobody could have been surprised when scandal plagued Andrew Cuomo resigned as New York Governor last week – though Hulot’s case did not involve any scandals). What did I know?

But it turns out that this was a big deal. My French host had also heard the broadcast and thought it remarkable. So did other news outlets, and the story was all over the news for several days. “Environmental champion resigns, preserves his integrity, blasts Macron” was the basic headline. Next, however, France Inter started patting itself on the back mightily for being the messenger in this drama. Léa Salamé rehashed the moment in the next morning’s show (I heard that one, too), and later sat for an interview (which I also heard) with another member of the station who did an “On the Media” style introspection on how the moment came to be, what it meant for live radio journalism, what special rapport the three participants shared in the making of history.

All of this was a bit too precious for media critic Samuel Gontier. He skewered all this self-congratulatory pretentiousness with a faux-serious piece of his own. It was so full of soutenu constructions that my teacher Léo could use it as atlas of literary figures of speech. Many of them have names that come directly from Greek, and so are cognate with the comparable terms in English rhetoric. The devices we discussed were myriad: la gradation, l’hyperbole, l’euphémisme, la litote, l’anaphore, l’énumération, le parallélisme, la répétition, l’allégorie, la comparaison, la métaphore, la personnifcation, la métonymie, la périphrase, la synecdoque, l’antithèse, le chiasme, l’oxymore, l’ellipse, l’épiphonème. I don’t know that it was all that valuable to remind myself of the names of each technique, but it was fun to locate examples of many in the text. Not sure how much fun it would have been had I not known all the context deeply.

Familier (… or Hiéfamil ? )

After all that high dudgeon it was time for something more casual. A lot more casual. We looked at two aspects of the familier register: verlan (neologisms made by inverting syllables within a word) and colorful idioms.

I was already fairly familiar with verlan as a concept, but I learned several things about its history from the video. There was also an example of the French rail company trying and utterly failing to use verlan in an ad-campaign, rewriting «C’est possible» as «C’est blessipo». This did not go over well: turns out corporations making neologisms is not cool. It reminds me of a failed attempt by Google to introduce the availability of “stickers” in its messaging app by sending users a text saying that “Stickers are lit”. I had no idea what “lit” meant, but it turns out that’s what the cool kids were saying at the time. Since Google was far from being a cool kid at that point, the campaign fell totally flat. I’m pretty sure my hiéfamil is equally clunky.

Finally, we looked at a standard article about Grant Wood’s famous painting and then a familier comedy video parodying same. The figures come to life and give each other grief for their expressions (the literal once on their face, not the idiomatic ones in their mouths). Even if you can’t understand the French, it’s fun to watch how well the actors recreated the poses of the painting. Give it a play!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpFw5LBdIr8&t=11s