As I mentioned, my father’s family had been obliged to leave the city during the war, taking part in what was called the “exodus.” They ended up far from home, on a farm near Mimizan, a small town in the Landes. Having spent several months there, they came back to Reims as soon as the armistice was signed. The north of France was occupied by the German army. (I was born long after the end of the war, and still the only word used in my family to talk about Germans was “les Boches,” for whom there was a fierce and seemingly inextinguishable hatred. It wasn’t at all uncommon, well into the 1970s and beyond, to end a meal by proclaiming: “One more that the Boches won’t get their hands on!”14 I have to confess that I have myself used the expression more than once.)
In 1940, my father was 11 years old, and every day until he was 14 or 15, during the entire period of the Occupation, he would have to go out to neighboring villages to find food for his family—in wind, rain or snow, no matter what the weather. He would sometimes have to cover as much as 20 kilometers on his bicycle in the freezing cold typical of the Champagne region’s severe winter, to find potatoes or some other foodstuff. He was in charge of nearly everything at home.
They had moved into a fairly large house—I’m not sure if this was during the war or just after—in the middle of a housing complex built in the 1920s for large working class families. It was the kind of house that had been thought up by a group of Catholic industrialists who, at the outset of the twentieth century, set out to improve the housing conditions of their workers. Reims was a city divided in two by a conspicuous class barrier. On one side of the divide was the upper middle class, and on the other the impoverished workers. The philanthropic societies of the former worried about the poor living conditions of the latter, and about the harmful consequences arising from them. Worries about a declining birthrate had produced a remarkable change in attitudes towards large families: if, up until the end of the nineteenth century, they had been considered by reformers and demographers to be one of the causes of disorder and of juvenile delinquency, at the beginning of the twentieth century, they became an essential bastion of defense against the depopulation that was threatening to weaken a nation confronted by foreign enemies. If these large families had once been stigmatized and combatted by the supporters of Mathusianism, now the dominant discourse—on both the left and the right—was bent on encouraging them, valorizing them, and therefore also supporting them. Propaganda in support of a rising birthrate now went hand in hand with urban renewal projects so that these new pillars of the revived nation could have decent living spaces. It was hoped that such spaces would make it possible to ward off dangers that had often been emphasized by bourgeois reformers, dangers associated with a working class childhood in which poor living conditions meant that children spent too much time on the streets: an anarchic proliferation of rough boys and immoral girls.15
Inspired by these new political and patriotic points of view, philanthropists from the Champagne region founded an organization whose function was to build affordable housing. It was called the “Foyer rémois” [Habitations of Reims], and its charge was to construct housing projects offering living quarters that were spacious, clean, and healthy, intended for families with more than four children, with three bedrooms—one for the parents, one for the boys, and one for the girls. They didn’t have a bathroom, but they did have running water. (The inhabitants washed themselves one at a time at the kitchen sink.) A concern with physical cleanliness was, of course, only one aspect of these city planning programs. Moral hygiene was another primary consideration. The idea was, by encouraging a high birthrate and family values, to wean workers away from bars and the alcoholism they facilitated. Political concerns were also not absent. The bourgeoisie imagined it might in this way put a check on socialist and union propaganda that it worried might flourish in working class meeting places outside the home, just as, in the 1930s, it hoped by the same means to shield the workers from communist influences. Domestic happiness, at least the way the bourgeois philanthropists imagined it for poor people, was meant to keep these workers invested in their home life and to divert them from the temptations of political resistance and its forms of organization and action. In 1914 the war interrupted the implementation of all these programs. After the four apocalyptic years that swept over northeast France, especially the region around Reims, everything had to be rebuilt. (Photographs taken in 1918 of what was called at the time the “martyred city” are terrifying: as far as the eye can see, there are only fragments of walls left standing amidst piles of rubble. It is as if some malicious god had gone out of his way to wipe this area off the map, an area saturated with history, sparing only the Cathedral and the Saint-Remi Basilica. And even they were severely damaged by the deluge of fire and iron that rained down on them.) Thanks to American aid, city planners and architects built up a new city from the ruins, and around the perimeter of that city they laid out the famous “garden cities,” housing tracts in the “regionalist style” (although, if I’m not mistaken, the style was in fact Alsatian). Some of the houses were single family dwellings, some were duplexes or town houses. All of them had a yard, and all were built along wide streets with interspersed green spaces.16
My grandparents moved into one of these housing projects either during or shortly after World War II. When I was a child, towards the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s, the spaces dreamed up and then realized by the philanthropists had deteriorated quite a bit. The Foyer rémois “garden city” in which my grandparents and their youngest children still lived had been poorly maintained, and was utterly rundown, eaten away at by the very poverty it had been devoted to housing, a poverty that was everywhere visible. It was an extremely unhealthy environment, and in fact incubated many different social pathologies. In purely statistical terms, a drift into delinquency was one of the prime options open to young people from the neighborhood. This of course remains the case today in those similarly appointed spaces of urban and social segregation—the historical durability of these phenomena is striking. One of my father’s brothers became a thief, went to prison, and was banned from Reims; we would catch glimpses of him from time to time, sneaking in at nightfall to see his parents or to ask his brothers and sisters for money. He had long been absent from my life and from my memory when I learned from my mother that he had become a street person, and had in fact died in the street. As a young man he had been a sailor. (He did his required military service in the navy, and had then enlisted permanently before being discharged because of his conduct—fights, thefts, and the like.) It was his face, in profile, from a photograph of him in uniform that my grandparents had on the buffet in their dining room, that came to my mind when I first read Querelle. In general, petty or serious crimes were the rule in the neighborhood, as if they constituted some kind of obstinate popular resistance to the laws imposed by a state that was perceived on a daily basis to be an instrument wielded by a class enemy, an enemy whose power was visible any and everywhere, all the time.
In accordance with the initial desires of the Catholic bourgeoisie and with what it considered to be the “moral values” it wished to inculcate in the popular classes, the birth rate was a healthy one. It wasn’t unusual for families in the houses close to that of my grandparents to have 14 or 15 children, or even 21, my mother claims, even though I have a hard time believing this could have been possible. Yet the Communist Party also thrived. Actual membership was reasonably common, at least among the men. As for the women, while sharing their husbands’ opinions, they nonetheless stayed away from organized political activities and “cell meetings.” But official membership wasn’t even necessary for a certain feeling of political belonging to spread and perpetuate itself. The feeling was spontaneously and tightly tied up with the social situation of the people involved. People spoke easily about the “Party.” My grandfather, my father and his brothers—and also on my mother’s side, her step father and her half-brother—commonly went as a group to attend the public meeting
s organized by national party leaders at regular intervals. Everyone voted for the Communist candidate at every election, ranting about the false left that the socialists represented—their compromises, their betrayals. But then, in the runoff, they would grudgingly cast their vote for the socialist when they had to, in the name of realism or the “republican discipline” no one dared go against. (Yet in these years, Communist candidates were often in the strongest position, so this kind of situation only rarely presented itself.) The words “the Left” really meant something important. People wanted to defend their own interests, to make their voices heard, and the way to achieve that—aside from strikes or protests—was to delegate, to hand oneself over to the “representatives of the working class” and to political leaders whose decisions were thus implicitly accepted and whose discourses you learned and repeated. You became a political subject by putting yourself into the hands of the party spokespersons, through whom the workers, the “working class,” came to exist as an organized group, as a class that was aware of itself as such. One’s way of thinking about oneself, the values one espoused, the attitudes one adopted were all to a large extent shaped by the conception of the world that the “Party” helped to inculcate in people’s minds and to diffuse throughout the social body. To vote was to participate in an important moment of collective self-affirmation, a moment that affirmed your political significance as well. So on election nights, when the results came in, people would explode with anger upon learning that the right had won yet again and would rail against the “scabs” who had voted for the Gaullists, and thereby voted against themselves.
How easy it has become to deplore the communist influence over various (but not all) populist milieus from the 1950s through the 1970s. It is worth remembering the meaning that influence had for all those people whom it is now all the more easy to criticize since it is so unlikely they could make themselves heard in a public forum. (Are they ever offered a chance to speak? What means of their own do they have to do so?) To be communist had next to nothing to do with a desire to establish a government resembling the one found in the U.S.S.R. “Foreign” policy, in any case, seemed a distant concern, as is often the case amid the popular classes—and even more so for women than for men. It was a given that one took the Soviet side against American imperialism, but the topic almost never came up. And even though the military enforcement operations that the Red Army carried out against friendly nations were disconcerting, we preferred not to talk about them: In 1968, as the radio covered the tragic events unfolding in Prague after the Soviet intervention, I asked my parents “What is going on?” and found myself sharply rebuked by my mother: “What do you care? It’s none of your business.” Surely this was because in fact she had no answer to give me, and was as perplexed as was I, a mere 15 year old. In fact, the reasons people adhered to communist values were linked to more immediate and more concrete preoccupations. When in his Abécédaire, Gilles Deleuze puts forward the idea that “being on the left” means “first of all being aware of the world,” “being aware of what’s on the horizon” (by which he means considering that the most urgent problems are those of the third world, which are closer to us than the problems of our own neighborhood), whereas “not being on the left” would, in contrary fashion, mean being focused on the street where one lives, on the country one inhabits, the definition he offers is diametrically opposed to the one incarnated by my parents.17 In working class environments, a leftist politics meant first and foremost a very pragmatic rejection of the experience of one’s own daily life. It was a form of protest, and not a political project inspired by a global perspective. You considered what was right around you, not what was far off, either in time or in space. Even if people were always saying things like, “what we need is a good revolution,” these pat expressions were linked to the hardships of daily life and to the intolerable nature of the injustices around them rather than to any perspective involving the establishment of a different political system. Given that everything that happened seemed to have been decided by some hidden power (“that was no accident”), invoking the “revolution”—without any idea of where or when or how it might break out—seemed one’s only recourse (it was one myth against another) in the fight against the powers of evil—the Right, the rich, the bigwigs—who inflicted so much hardship on the lives of the poor, of “people like us.”
My family divided the world into two camps, those who were “for the workers” and those who were “against the workers,” or, in slightly different words, those who “defended the workers” and those who “did nothing for the workers.” How many times did I hear sentences that encapsulated this political attitude and the choices that resulted from it! On one side there was “us” and those who were “with us”; on the other side was “them.”18
Nowadays who fulfills the role played by the “Party”? To whom can exploited and powerless people turn in order to feel that they are supported or that their point of view is expressed? To whom can they refer, who can they lean on, in order to provide themselves with a political existence and a cultural identity? Or in order to feel proud of themselves because they have been legitimized and because this legitimation has come from a powerful source? A source that, in the simplest terms, takes into account who they are, how they live, what they think about, what they want?
When my father watched the news, the remarks he made revealed a visceral allergic reaction to both the right and the extreme right. During the presidential campaign of 1965 and then during and after May 1968 he would lose his temper simply upon hearing the voice of Tixier-Vignancour, a figure who seemed a caricature of the old French extreme right. When Tixier-Vignancour denounced “the red flag of Communism” that people were waving in the streets of Paris, my father fulminated: “the red flag is the flag of the workers!” A bit later he would feel himself attacked and offended by the way Giscard d’Estaing, through the medium of the television, would manage to inflict on all French households his grand bourgeois manner, his affected gestures, his grotesque manner of speaking. My father would also direct his insults at the journalists who hosted political programs, and would be overjoyed when someone he considered a spokesperson for his own thoughts and feelings (this or that Stalinist apparatchik with a worker’s accent) would manage to break the rules of the television program in a way no one would dare do today, given how nearly total the obedience of most political figures and intellectuals has become to the powers of the media. To break the rules meant to speak about the real problems affecting workers instead of responding to the typically political questions to which the discussion was supposed to be limited. To break the rules meant to do justice to all those whose voices are never heard under these kinds of circumstances, to those whose very existence is systematically excluded from the landscape of legitimate politics.
4
I remember the yard behind my grandparents’ house. It wasn’t very big, and was separated by a fence on both sides from the identical yards of their neighbors. At the far end, there was a hut (and this was the case for most of the houses in the neighborhood) where my grandmother raised rabbits. We would feed them grass and carrots until finally they would end up on our plates on a Sunday or a holiday. My grandmother could neither read nor write. She would ask people to read to her or to write official letters for her, and would offer vague apologies for her deficiency: “I don’t know my letters,” she would say, in a tone that suggested neither anger nor rebelliousness, but rather a submission to reality, a kind of resignation that characterized all of her gestures and all of the words she spoke and that perhaps enabled her to endure her situation, to accept it as an inevitability. My grandfather was a cabinetmaker; he worked in a furniture factory. To make ends meet, he would build furniture at home for the neighbors. He received lots of orders from near and far, in fact, and literally worked himself to death in order to feed his family, never taking a day off. I was still a child when he died at the age of 54 of throat cancer. (That was a plague that
carried off many workers in those years, as all of them smoked an unimaginable number of cigarettes each day. Three of my father’s brothers would die quite young from the same cause, another having died even younger from alcoholism.) When I was a teenager, my grandmother was astonished by the fact that I didn’t smoke. “It’s healthier if a man smokes,” she would say to me, totally unaware of all the damage such a belief continued to inflict all around her. Of frail health herself, she would die ten or so years after her husband, doubtless from exhaustion: she was 62 years old when she died and was cleaning offices to earn her living. One winter’s night, after work, she slipped on a patch of ice on her way home to the miniscule two room apartment in a low income housing complex where she had ended up. She hit her head hard when she fell, and never recovered, dying a few days after the accident.
There is really no doubt that this “garden city” where my father lived before I was born, and that was one of the major scenes of my childhood (my brother and I spent a lot of time there, especially during vacations), was a place of social ostracism. It was a reservation for the poor, set off from the center of town and from the well-to-do neighborhoods. And yet, when I think back on it, I realize that it didn’t resemble what we nowadays refer to with the word “projects.” It was a horizontal living environment, not a vertical one: no apartment buildings, no towers, nothing of the architecture that would appear at the end of the 1950s and in a major way throughout the 1960s and 1970s. There thus remained something of a human character about this area on the fringes of the city. Even if the area had a bad reputation, even if it resembled a destitute ghetto, it wasn’t all that unpleasant to live in. Working class traditions, notably certain kinds of culture and solidarity, had managed to develop and perpetuate themselves. It was thanks to one of these forms of culture, the Saturday night dance, that my parents met. My mother lived not far off, in a suburb closer to the city, with her mother and her mother’s partner. Both my mother and my father, like all of the working class youth at the time, enjoyed the diversion and the moment of happiness provided by popular neighborhood dances. Such dances have for the most part disappeared today, pretty much only still occurring on July 14 or the night before. Yet at the time in question they were for many the only “outing” of the week, an occasion for friends to meet up and for amorous and sexual encounters. Couples formed and dissolved. Sometimes they lasted. My mother had a crush on another fellow, but he wanted to sleep with her, and she didn’t. She was afraid of getting pregnant and having a baby with no father should the fellow prefer to break up rather than accepting an unsought role as father. She had no desire to have a baby who would be obliged to live through what she had had to live through, and what had caused her so much suffering. The fellow her heart had chosen left her for someone else. She met my father. She never loved him, but she told herself, “it’ll be him or someone just like him.” She wanted some independence, and marriage was the only way to obtain it, since one only became a legal adult at age 21. In any case, they had to wait until my father reached that age. My paternal grandmother didn’t want him to leave home, since she wanted him to “chip in his pay” as long as she could make him. As soon as it was possible, he married my mother. She was 20 years old.
Returning to Reims Page 3
