France

Cockburn dislikes the latent misogyny behind the rise of this term ‘Karen’, which is used to describe any white woman who is caught being aggressive on social media. Then again, Karens don’t have to be female; plenty of men fit the term perfectly. One of them is the President of France.Yes, Emmanuel Macron lost his rag again on Wednesday, this time berating a French journalist who dared to try to cover the President’s complicated maneuvers in Lebanon.

The Moulinards had inhabited the old stone hilltop house for centuries, ekeing out a hard living among the sun-baked boulders. They were peasants. In the winter of 1962 there was one Moulinard left. Henri: old, alcoholic, feeding the furniture into the fire for warmth. A delegation of relations came up the hill to persuade him to go into an old people’s home. When they’d left, old Henri took himself off to a large oak tree and hanged himself from a branch, dangling there for several days before being found. The house passed to a Marseille butcher who sold it on to an English couple who asked us to house-sit last week while they went on holiday to Austria. We were three: Catriona, me and my ten-year-old grandson, whom I hadn’t seen since Christmas.

Phone calls aside, the only human contact I had on my ten-day Somme battlefield tour was with the lady who ran the bed and breakfast establishment. My bed was on the upper storey of a disused light railway station in a clearing in a beech wood. Madame lived with her husband in a modern bungalow 100 yards down the line, but came along each morning to cook my bacon and eggs. The greater part of her clientele consists of British Great War buffs. But Covid-19 had kept them away and I had the breakfast table, the old station and indeed the Somme battlefield entirely to myself. The dining room was once the waiting room.

Avid Spectator reader Mr Brown had endured the very strictest of lockdowns for family health reasons in Tunbridge Wells. Since March he had interacted only with delivery drivers, his wife and their two children. He was therefore quite unsocialised when he stopped with us for a night on his journey from Kent to the Pongo Delta in Guinea, where for the next 12 months he will be organising the security for a mining company trucking bauxite 200 miles through bandit country. I found him standing outside a village bar looking at his watch because I was an hour late. He heaved a shopping bag for life filled with booze and groceries into the boot of my car, urging that it must go into a fridge as soon as possible.

Chatting on the café terrace with my new friends Didier and Emile made me aware that certain political ideas, which before the Covid-19 pandemic I had comfortably assumed belonged on the wilder shores of political discourse, are now mainstream among the under thirties. I felt a little envy, perhaps, for Didier’s undoubting conviction that questions of equality, gender, race and white supremacy were the ultimate verities for humankind. But a single word often betrays a great design, and his supplementary advocation of voluntary euthanasia for the chronically sick and elderly indicated all too clearly in which direction his ideal post-Covid society would be headed.

I took a table on the terrace of the reopened bar and ordered une pression from the waitress. ‘Back to normal, thank goodness,’ I ventured to the chap sitting alone at the next table. He was staring at the centimetre of lager remaining in the bottom of his glass. The cheapness of his clothes and the loneliness enveloping him like a caul was contradicted by his youthful glamour. ‘Normal?’ he said. ‘Normal doesn’t work. You can shove your old man’s normal up your backside.’ My sociable, celebrant spirit recoiled from the aggression. ‘I only meant that it was good to see the bars and shops open again,’ I said lamely.

I walked to the salon in fiery sunshine. Gorgeous, zaftig Elody was wearing a short satin dressing gown of silver and gold. She was alone. ‘Ça va?’ she said, helping me into the gown. ‘Black dog,’ I said. ‘What is black dog?’ she said. ‘Cafard,’ I said. ‘A black ox trod on my foot.’ I sat in the chair, removed my glasses and stared in the mirror. The straps of my black face mask made my ears stick out. And strewth, the hair. ‘Two owls and a hen, four larks and a wren,’ I said. Elody speaks no English and my French is rudimentary. ‘What?’ she said. I had a stab at translating the limerick into French. She stared at me via the mirror with rapt, sceptical attention.

The most visible local landmark is a solitary two-headed Jurassic mountain called Le Bessillon, six miles long and 800 metres tall at the highest peak. These are unimpressive vital statistics for a mountain perhaps, but the Bessillon exerts a tremendous, almost uncanny presence on us all. The foreign correspondent and his wife have bought an 800-tree olive farm on a nearby hillside. From their outside dining table this great primeval slab and its forested sides can be seen in profile, like a finely drawn illustration in a Victorian encyclopedia. Between the dining table and the mountain is nothing but oak forest and pylons, and beyond it more oak forest until a distant village on a plateau. (The elegance of French electricity pylons and barbed wire makes me laugh.

France is divided into a red zone and a green zone. We’re green. Green for go. From this morning we no longer need a signed and dated permit to leave the house; we can socialise with up to ten other people at a time; and we can travel up to 60 miles in any direction. In theory we could fill a minibus and go on a beano down to the coast tomorrow. And in spite of the government ordering bars and restaurants to remain closed, the village beer bar unexpectedly opened for business last Saturday, and the lights were on in the poshest village restaurant where people inside could be seen tucking in. Perhaps, in truth, the delicate decision about when to open the bars and restaurants has been quietly devolved to the local mayors’ offices.

From my hospital bed in Hyères I could look out of the window and see the old town and Edith Wharton’s old house, the Castel Sainte-Claire, away on the hillside. Christophe, a male nurse, came in to welcome me and take my temperature, pulse and blood pressure. He was masked and gloved against possible infection from the old Covid Dix-Neuf and he spoke English. As he slipped on the finger thermometer and inflatable sleeve, he reminisced about his rugby-playing days. Thirty-five years ago, he said, he had competed against an English team who played rugby with a violence that was incredible.

Statistics is the continuation of politics by other means, to misquote Clausewitz. One hundred and fifty years after the crushing of the revolutionary Paris Commune, historians still clash aggressively about the death toll. Was it as high as 40,000 or as low as 10,000? It matters because the Paris Commune is a shibboleth, a great left-wing site of memory and martyrdom, made famous by Karl Marx’s pamphlet The Civil War in France. He presented the Paris Commune as the first great experiment in communist government. Its crushing by the army of the conservative Adolphe Thiers is depicted in left-wing folk memory as the ‘reactionary, repressive forces of capitalism’ ending an idyllic experiment in socialism.