4 July 2024

Ashamed and sad

My mother, my sister and I reacted the same way: we were somewhat relieved he was dead. I’m talking about my 99-year old grandfather, who passed away late last year. He had fallen from his bed at night, making him lose consciousness and provoking haemorrhage inside his brain, from which he wouldn't recover during the last couple of days of his life. He was 42 days shy of turning 100. In fact, he had always appeared to me as invincible, perhaps even immortal. His death affected me all the more that I couldn't attend his funeral, as I was heading to remote Tanzania to volunteer on the ground to help the poorest of the poor.

My grandfather, just like his wife (my grandmother), was an ordinary hero. At age 20, he had actively resisted against the Nazis in France, something only about 5% of his fellow French citizens did. Throughout his entire life, he most certainly always voted for left-wing parties. And while France most often proved conservative, leaning to the right side of the political spectrum at most elections since WWII, democracy prevailed. The ghosts of the collaborationist past were confronted, whether at the trial of the Gestapo commander Klaus Barbie in 1987 after he was finally extradited from Bolivia or at the trial of the criminal civil servant Maurice Papon as late as 1998.

Yet little by little, a far-right party founded by French members of the SS managed to gather steam. At the latest European and parliamentary elections a few days and weeks ago, it convinced a third of the population to vote for it. The party's founder had been condemned multiple times for denying the Holocaust. The latest president of the party – a 28-year old who dropped out of university with terrible grades and has never worked – sarcastically mentioned Jean Moulin in a live debate on TV last week. For the record, Jean Moulin is one of France's heroes during WWII: not a perfect man by any means, but someone who actively found ways to undermine the Nazis. One of the youngest prefects at the time, he fled undercover via Spain and Portugal to report to De Gaulle in London, before being parachuted twice into France to attempt to unify the resistance movements. He would end up being betrayed, dying from the torture inflicted to him by the Nazis, in particular by Klaus Barbie mentioned above, in 1943 at age 44. His stature is so immense in French history that his ashes are in the Panthéon in Paris, the repository for the few "great men" of the nation.

So to hear an uneducated president of a fascist party make fun of this past (“that's it, Jean Moulin is back!” said far-right Bardella to the left-wing debater) felt like a dagger to the memory of my grandfather – I didn’t expect to break down in tears when talking about this to my (German) doctor. That's the reason why my mother, my sister and I felt sickly relieved that my grandfather didn't have to witness the idiocy of that party and, unfortunately, of the 11 million people voting for it. 11 million people are ready to consider immigrants as scapegoats, dual citizens as second-class citizens, and traditional left-wing parties as extremists (the irony). 11 million people don’t seem to care that 154 parliamentary candidates of that party have documented evidence against them that portray them as racist, xenophobic, homophobic, sexist, violent, etc.

My grandfather was a good and kind man; one of those few human beings with a golden heart. He never raised his voice even if he could be firm, undoubtedly a quality that served him well as a primary school teacher and headmaster. During the war, he was convinced to join the Resistance movement by his former primary school teacher, Henri Vrillon. Initially, he served as a liaison officer, conveying secret messages from one village to another, one time avoiding getting caught by hiding them in the heels of his shoes and giving a faint nod to German soldiers on duty. Another key mission handed over to him consisted in hiding the containers of weapons and ammunition that were increasingly parachuted by the Allied forces after D-Day (June 6th, 1944). At times, he and other youngsters would practise shooting in the forest – there’s a group photo with him behind a machine gun. The objective of that group was to slow down the Germans. Ultimately, no shots were fired because the Germans quickly surrendered in that region of France. Henri Vrillon would then say those words that my grandfather never forgot: “We may not have had the opportunity to fight with weapons, but we came back proud to be men and proud to be French”.

Am I proud to be French? I’m not. I can’t be. I can only be happy to be French, as I did nothing to be so. Just like I can’t really be “proud” to have had such a grandfather, as I just happened to be born in his lineage. His actions throughout his life have however certainly inspired me, striving to fight for the right thing, whether at work or in my personal life. I have failed, too often to my taste, but I can only aspire to be a calm, erudite, composed, ethical man like my grandfather had been.

I felt guilty to have missed his funeral as I was volunteering on the ground with Karimu. I still managed to connect to the funeral thanks to my family who dialled me in so I could read the text I had prepared. I’m tearing up as I read my text once more. The local population in Ayalagaya in Tanzania also surprised me by collectively praying for him. I had indicated during my welcome speech that I had just lost my grandfather – they had not only understood what I said in my broken Swahili, but remembered. Imagine something like a few hundred people, perhaps a thousand, all praying for someone they had never met, simply to honour an old man who was connected to me.

I miss him, all the more that my childhood context had deprived me of seeing him often. At the same time, I’m too ashamed about the widespread lack of historical and political culture, as sociologist Edgar Morin talks about (it’s so heartening to see a 103-year-old still be so sharp although I wonder what he still sees through his almost-completely closed eyes). I’m too sad at the spread of ignorance and mythology, for instance the notion of a so-called “pure” French identity when France is in reality a mix of so many waves of immigration over centuries (a quarter of its citizens today have at least one grandparent who was born abroad). Part of me still wants to run for elections, but I would likely not be able to fully subscribe to any political party’s programme. Also, my foreign-sounding family name, my career in American companies and my residence abroad would deter any Frenchman who would have mistakenly seized a ballot paper with my name on it! I suppose the only remaining option would be to seize power in true French revolutionary fashion :-).