My ancestral village (by kerouac2)
Jun 18, 2010 19:07:24 GMT
Post by Deleted on Jun 18, 2010 19:07:24 GMT
The village of my grandparents, Batilly, in northeastern France is just one of many identical villages all through the region of Lorraine. The typical architecture is considered to be one of the most uninteresting of the entire country, with none of the charm of the beamed architecture of Alsace or Burgundy, the bricks of Picardy, the lacy wooden balconies of Savoie or the red tiled roofs and warm colors of Provence. The buildings are very functional and mostly greyish beige, to the extent that when people build something out of cement, there is hardly any reason to paint it, if there weren’t the French regional “paint police” to make sure that the buildings are all of the authorized boring hues (but oh lordy, if you drive across the nearby border into Luxembourg or Belgium, you learn to appreciate the paint police! What is wrong with those north border foreigners?).
Except for giving the rest of the country the recipe for quiche, cabbage stew (potée lorraine) and mirabelle tart, Lorraine is of absolutely no use to the rest of France. Along with French Flanders (the Nord-Pas de Calais region), Lorraine was the industrial zone of France with mines and mining towns everywhere, steel mills and various other ugly polluting industries. Not only were there huge belching smokestacks everywhere, but there were big pipelines of smelting gasses going over and under the roads, conveyer belts or bucket lines moving ore or rubble along and flaming burn offs coming out of tall thin steel pipes in the air. Nothing unusual for the industrial countries of the world, but not a region to which people are spontaneously attracted. In the United States, I never heard anybody say “I’m taking the family to Pittsburgh on vacation this year” unless they had relatives there.
The mines and most of the steel mills closed in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Hundreds of thousands of Italians, Poles and Algerians had immigrated to the industrial regions over the previous 50 years, married, raised their families and became completely assimilated, so there was no going back. ArcelorMittal still has plenty of steel mills which hire and fire with the ebb and flow of the economy, so people hang on waiting. Some of these towns are extremely grim and rundown, but some of the others have become greener and more appealing as industry retracted its claws.
"My" village had an iron mine. I don’t know when it opened, but it closed in 1981. There is an entire section of the village built around the mine, mostly in the 1950’s which must have been the high point of activity – houses, a school and even a church. The church is abandoned now, and it’s hard to tell if anybody is still using the athletic field, which had a claim to glory in bygone days. It has Olympic rings on the gate, because it was the principal training ground of the former track star Michel Jazy (Melbourne 1956, Rome 1960, Tokyo 1964). I have no idea what he was doing in the village, because he was from the Pas-de-Calais mining region, and the reason he went into sports was because he refused to become a miner like his father and grandfather, who both died of silicosis. Anyway he won two silver medals in Rome, which was reason enough to put the rings on the gate. I saw that in his entire career, he held 9 world records (including the mile in 1965), 17 European records and 51 French records. I’m sure the old-timers still talk about him.
Strangely enough, this part of the village is called “Paradis.” That made me snicker even when I was little. Actually, if you take away the buildings, it might almost merit its name if you like green, rolling fields that can be seen in every direction. Out on the main road, it has its own little nightspot, L’Hacienda, which I suppose is better than nothing.
Once the mine closed, that whole sector of the village might have been abandoned, except for a very lucky event that occurred in the 1970’s, this being the construction of the A4 autoroute (Paris-Strasbourg) skirting the edge of the village territory (not near any buildings, thank goodness). Normally, this is not considered to be a good thing in rural areas, but it is the reason that Renault decided to build a factory there, so the village even got its own exit, which made all the difference.
Now when I say “village,” I really mean village, because the population was about 200 when my grandfather was born there, 337 when my mother was born, 1000 during the year I lived there (1964) and at the last census, the population was 1297 – and this is a village with 3 distinct sections so technically it is 3 villages.
no country for the pious: the door of the Paradis church
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Did my grandfather save the village? Maybe. He was mayor from 1945 to 1971, and he is the one who proposed the creation of an industrial zone along the old rail line, right next to where the autoroute was going to come through. The municipal council went along with the plan. And yet it was the precise location of his beloved Fond de Champel meadows, where my brother and I accompanied him sometimes when he went hunting. It was a delightful vale with hedgerows and grazing cows and a small brook running through the bottom. Hares would come bolting out of the hedges in front of us. Most of them survived, but some of them ended up on the dinner table, where my brother and I learned to chew the meat carefully as one sometimes encountered buckshot. Sometimes there would be pheasants or partridges, but it was always a lovely day in the fields, listening to my grandfather’s wealth of knowledge about the vegetation and fauna, sometimes hushing to hear movement in the bushes, sometimes taking a break to eat some bread and cheese and saucisson.
But the Fond de Champel was sacrificed on the altar of industry so that the village could live. My grandfather was lucky not to see what he had done. He died in 1972, and the construction did not start on the factory until 1977, after routing the brook into some concrete pipes and filling the vale with tons of earth to make it all flat. The factory opened in 1979 and currently employs 2,850 people. It is actually the largest private employer in the département of Meurthe-et-Moselle, whose principal city is Nancy. It builds Renault Master commercial vans. The record year of production was 2006 when it built 123,000 of them. In 2010, they are planning on building 90,000.
If you look at the Google Earth view of the village, the factory is as big as the entire central village. In 30 years, though, many trees have grown full size and you would never even guess that the factory was there when you are in the village.
Between the factory and the main village, there is first the cemetery where I like to stop. After all, my grandparents are there, as are my great grandparents, great uncles and aunts, family friends and people whom I just knew at the “postlady,” the “egg woman,” “the mason,” etc. Oh yes, and there is my (adoptive) father, which is really weird, because he certainly never expected to be there. His father is buried somewhere in North Carolina and his mother in Texas. He died and was cremated in Florida, and I brought him to France in a cardboard box in a suitcase (which American Airlines temporarily lost) when I repatriated my mother. But he lived in the village with my mother from 1975 until 1981, and I think that he would approve.
The graves are a total mix of the families who settled in the area.
(The last grave is one of the Roma graves. The Roma families all try to outdo each other.)
I was told by my village sources that a television film crew asked a lot of questions about the grave when they saw my father's name on my grandparents' grave. They were making a documentary on the Battle of Metz a few years ago, about when General Patton’s division fought their way through the region going east. They thought that maybe he was a soldier who had stayed on. (In fact, my mother met my biological father after the battle when she was serving as railroad interpreter in Thionville on the Luxembourg border.)
The cemetery was doubled in size about the same time the factory opened, and I have watched it slowly fill up over the years. It was probably one of the first ways that the village spent its tax windfall from Renault. They are absolutely rolling in money now and they are constantly figuring out new ways to spend it.
(more on the way)
Except for giving the rest of the country the recipe for quiche, cabbage stew (potée lorraine) and mirabelle tart, Lorraine is of absolutely no use to the rest of France. Along with French Flanders (the Nord-Pas de Calais region), Lorraine was the industrial zone of France with mines and mining towns everywhere, steel mills and various other ugly polluting industries. Not only were there huge belching smokestacks everywhere, but there were big pipelines of smelting gasses going over and under the roads, conveyer belts or bucket lines moving ore or rubble along and flaming burn offs coming out of tall thin steel pipes in the air. Nothing unusual for the industrial countries of the world, but not a region to which people are spontaneously attracted. In the United States, I never heard anybody say “I’m taking the family to Pittsburgh on vacation this year” unless they had relatives there.
The mines and most of the steel mills closed in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Hundreds of thousands of Italians, Poles and Algerians had immigrated to the industrial regions over the previous 50 years, married, raised their families and became completely assimilated, so there was no going back. ArcelorMittal still has plenty of steel mills which hire and fire with the ebb and flow of the economy, so people hang on waiting. Some of these towns are extremely grim and rundown, but some of the others have become greener and more appealing as industry retracted its claws.
"My" village had an iron mine. I don’t know when it opened, but it closed in 1981. There is an entire section of the village built around the mine, mostly in the 1950’s which must have been the high point of activity – houses, a school and even a church. The church is abandoned now, and it’s hard to tell if anybody is still using the athletic field, which had a claim to glory in bygone days. It has Olympic rings on the gate, because it was the principal training ground of the former track star Michel Jazy (Melbourne 1956, Rome 1960, Tokyo 1964). I have no idea what he was doing in the village, because he was from the Pas-de-Calais mining region, and the reason he went into sports was because he refused to become a miner like his father and grandfather, who both died of silicosis. Anyway he won two silver medals in Rome, which was reason enough to put the rings on the gate. I saw that in his entire career, he held 9 world records (including the mile in 1965), 17 European records and 51 French records. I’m sure the old-timers still talk about him.
Strangely enough, this part of the village is called “Paradis.” That made me snicker even when I was little. Actually, if you take away the buildings, it might almost merit its name if you like green, rolling fields that can be seen in every direction. Out on the main road, it has its own little nightspot, L’Hacienda, which I suppose is better than nothing.
Once the mine closed, that whole sector of the village might have been abandoned, except for a very lucky event that occurred in the 1970’s, this being the construction of the A4 autoroute (Paris-Strasbourg) skirting the edge of the village territory (not near any buildings, thank goodness). Normally, this is not considered to be a good thing in rural areas, but it is the reason that Renault decided to build a factory there, so the village even got its own exit, which made all the difference.
Now when I say “village,” I really mean village, because the population was about 200 when my grandfather was born there, 337 when my mother was born, 1000 during the year I lived there (1964) and at the last census, the population was 1297 – and this is a village with 3 distinct sections so technically it is 3 villages.
no country for the pious: the door of the Paradis church
coat of arms of Batilly | A brief aside France has 36,783 independently administrated municipalities and by itself possesses half of the municipalities in the EU. (Germany comes next with 13,000, Spain and Italy have 8,000.) Most countries have fused their villages into larger districts to save money and effort. For example, Belgium only has 589 municipalities. The median population of a municipality in France is 411, compared to 11,265 for Belgium, 2,343 for Italy or 5,505 for Spain. More than 10,000 villages in France have a population of less than 200. Some of the villages of France have 1, 2 or 3 inhabitants. Clearly, this is not very efficient, but it might be a factor in keeping part of France’s charm intact. There are no anonymous decisions taken far away to change something in a village, rip down old buildings or change the streetlights. Those decisions are made in the villages by people who know every factor of village life. |
[/left][/td][/tr][/table][/center]
Did my grandfather save the village? Maybe. He was mayor from 1945 to 1971, and he is the one who proposed the creation of an industrial zone along the old rail line, right next to where the autoroute was going to come through. The municipal council went along with the plan. And yet it was the precise location of his beloved Fond de Champel meadows, where my brother and I accompanied him sometimes when he went hunting. It was a delightful vale with hedgerows and grazing cows and a small brook running through the bottom. Hares would come bolting out of the hedges in front of us. Most of them survived, but some of them ended up on the dinner table, where my brother and I learned to chew the meat carefully as one sometimes encountered buckshot. Sometimes there would be pheasants or partridges, but it was always a lovely day in the fields, listening to my grandfather’s wealth of knowledge about the vegetation and fauna, sometimes hushing to hear movement in the bushes, sometimes taking a break to eat some bread and cheese and saucisson.
But the Fond de Champel was sacrificed on the altar of industry so that the village could live. My grandfather was lucky not to see what he had done. He died in 1972, and the construction did not start on the factory until 1977, after routing the brook into some concrete pipes and filling the vale with tons of earth to make it all flat. The factory opened in 1979 and currently employs 2,850 people. It is actually the largest private employer in the département of Meurthe-et-Moselle, whose principal city is Nancy. It builds Renault Master commercial vans. The record year of production was 2006 when it built 123,000 of them. In 2010, they are planning on building 90,000.
If you look at the Google Earth view of the village, the factory is as big as the entire central village. In 30 years, though, many trees have grown full size and you would never even guess that the factory was there when you are in the village.
Between the factory and the main village, there is first the cemetery where I like to stop. After all, my grandparents are there, as are my great grandparents, great uncles and aunts, family friends and people whom I just knew at the “postlady,” the “egg woman,” “the mason,” etc. Oh yes, and there is my (adoptive) father, which is really weird, because he certainly never expected to be there. His father is buried somewhere in North Carolina and his mother in Texas. He died and was cremated in Florida, and I brought him to France in a cardboard box in a suitcase (which American Airlines temporarily lost) when I repatriated my mother. But he lived in the village with my mother from 1975 until 1981, and I think that he would approve.
The graves are a total mix of the families who settled in the area.
(The last grave is one of the Roma graves. The Roma families all try to outdo each other.)
I was told by my village sources that a television film crew asked a lot of questions about the grave when they saw my father's name on my grandparents' grave. They were making a documentary on the Battle of Metz a few years ago, about when General Patton’s division fought their way through the region going east. They thought that maybe he was a soldier who had stayed on. (In fact, my mother met my biological father after the battle when she was serving as railroad interpreter in Thionville on the Luxembourg border.)
The cemetery was doubled in size about the same time the factory opened, and I have watched it slowly fill up over the years. It was probably one of the first ways that the village spent its tax windfall from Renault. They are absolutely rolling in money now and they are constantly figuring out new ways to spend it.
(more on the way)