May Day
Here in France, we are having the loveliest spring since COVID lockdown 2020. I am trying to enjoy it, but our fast unraveling world makes me feel like screaming "Mayday!" M'aidez! Mais aidez-nous!
I’ve been trying to preserve myself from the madness unleashed upon our world. I am not succeeding very well, despite the most glorious spring we’ve had since COVID lockdown in 2020. “It’s going to be a year for fruit,” our village neighbor told us the other day. Indeed, our fruit trees are laden with tiny cherries, pears, apples and quinces as they’ve never been in the nearly six years we’ve had our home in the French countryside. The roses are covered with buds about to burst into bloom. The peonies are so heavy with hard knobs of flower, I’ve already had to prop them up with iron supports. We have doves nesting in our carport and sparrows nesting under the eaves of the house and chickadees nesting in the holes in the garden’s old stone walls. The birds start chittering and singing before dawn at around 5:30 a.m. and keep it up until after dusk until 10:00 p.m. All is flower and song and perfume and warmth and buzzing with life.
Beauty and the Beasts
In the midst of such beauty, I refuse to let Donald Trump and his minions haunt every minute of my life, ditto for our collapsing climate, the rise of European MAGA, and the green light on conquest and ethnic cleansing being brightly shone to the entire world with nary a peep of protest by Benjamin Netanyahu’s now openly trumpeted plan to level and empty Gaza. I’d just end it or collapse into some kind of blithering heap if I did. On the other hand, it is impossible to ignore what is happening, and morally unconscionable to pretend that everything is okay just because I have been lucky enough, so far, to be spared a direct hit by any of the awfulness going on. It’s all happening at a speed I cannot keep up with and on a multiplicity of fronts I am losing track of.
It’s also getting harder and harder to tell the real from the fake, the spoof, the meme and the surreal. I have never used AI but I see its effects everywhere and I am more and more frequently forced to interact with it. I don’t like it, not one little bit. Thank you New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino for writing My Brain Finally Broke, because it really captures the point where so many of us are after just a few months of “Insane Trump Regime, the Sequel.” Jia Tolentino:
Fake images of real people, real images of fake people; fake stories about real things, real stories about fake things. Fake words creeping like kudzu into scientific papers and dating profiles and e-mails and text messages and news outlets and social feeds and job listings and job applications. Fake entities standing guard over chat boxes when we try to dispute a medical bill, waiting sphinxlike for us to crack the code that allows us to talk to a human. The words blur and the images blur and a permission structure is erected for us to detach from reality—first for a moment, then a day, a week, an election season, maybe a lifetime.
Brain Freeze and Heartbreak
In frozen-brain and broken-heart mode after seeing in a single day: 1) Trump in an official White House AI-generated image depicted as the pope; 2) people of all ages violently abducted from their homes and disappeared into overflowing for-profit prisons; 3) the latest images of children stunted and starving in Gaza, I head out to my garden. Meticulous weeding, watering, pruning and planting physically exhaust me and is my way of betting on a livable future. As I’ve written here, a garden is by definition an enclosed space, protected from the world beyond and all its horrors, at least until the barbarians arrive at the garden gate and the bombs start to fall. Thankfully, we’re not at that point yet in rural France, but you can ask the Ukrainians — or even French elders who were alive during World War II — what it’s like when that happens.
The German romantic poet Heinrich Heine wrote that France resembles a garden from which the most beautiful flowers are gathered and made into a bouquet called Paris. (French people who live where most of the flowers actually grow, and who feel about Paris a lot like Americans in the hinterland feel about New York City might retch at this image, but it is what a lot of foreigners besotted with Paris, and even actual Parisians, think about the City of Light.) On May Day this year, Paris was like the finest bouquet of all: All fragrance of a multitude of flowers blooming in the parks, the plane trees and the chestnut trees leafed out in tender green, the temperature soaring to an summery high of 30 degrees Centigrade (86 degrees Fahrenheit). Women bare-legged in summer dresses. Men in T-shirts. Café terraces full of people enjoying the sun and the wine and the ambiance and each other.
It was a stunning day for the annual May Day protest march and parade in honor of workers and their rights. The turnout in Paris, and throughout France, was high. Le Monde reported:
Some 782,000 people protested across France, including 112,000 in Paris alone, the interior ministry said. The CGT union said it counted 2.3 million protesters across France, including 550,000 in the capital.
But labor unions, workers and French citizens still angry over French President Emmanuel Macron’s unpopular pension reforms weren’t the only people in the streets on May 1st. There were also hoodlums. Dressed in black, these troublemakers, known as black bocs, had chosen their targets. In Paris, they set upon prominent members of France’s center-left Socialist party at a stand set up along the parade’s path. Random couples heading to the Métro to go home found themselves attacked by the black-masked thugs. According to media reports, fifty-four people were arrested, including one who is suspected of setting off mortar attacks near the Socialist Party stand.
The Barbarians at the Garden Gate
Writing this two days after George Simion, the far-right candidate who trumpets his kinship with MAGA and Donald Trump, won an astounding share of votes in the first round Romania’s presidential elections on Sunday, May 4, I feel less and less safe in my French garden. George Simion is J.D. Vance’s candidate, in case you missed the American vice president’s Valentine’s Day speech in Munich. Simion represents the Europe of white blood and Christian soil, purged of “woke” efforts to end racist and sexist discrimination; the Europe that both Russia and Trump’s America want to replace the European Union and the tattered yet brave remains of democracy and human rights. If Simion wins the second round of voting, Romania will join Hungary, Italy, Croatia, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, which already have hard-right governments.
The prospects of the European Union surviving being pincered between a hostile Russia and a hostile America feel as if they are diminishing by the day. Today, Friedrich Merz, Germany’s winning candidate for chancellor who has been firm about the urgent need for Europe to assure its own security and to protect itself from Trump’s American aggression, failed to garner, in a first round, the absolute majority of parliamentary votes he needed to be confirmed and was expected to get. It was the first time since 1949 that a winning candidate failed to be confirmed by parliament. Merz got the votes he needed in second vote later in the day, but his government starts out on a weakened foot, the cracks in its coalition government yawning wider. Trump and Vance and Musk-supported Alternative for Germany leader, Alice Weidel, fairly chortled as she called for fresh elections. How long before Germany’s neo-Nazis are voted into power?
Wild Red Roses
The flower historically associated in France with workers on May Day was red wild roses, red for the blood of workers spilled when the violent repression of a May Day workers parade in 1891 resulted in nine deaths and thirty-five wounded. France’s fascist leader, Maréchal Pétain, preferred the white Lily of the Valley to the red wild rose associated with the Left and the communism Pétain despised. I offer here, untranslated, a quote from Le Monde’s explanatory on why Lily of the Valley is given on May Day in France.
Mais ce n’est qu’en 1941, sous le maréchal Pétain, que le muguet est officiellement associé à la « fête du travail et de la concorde sociale » instaurée par le chef du régime de Vichy. Ce dernier préfère en effet la fleur blanche à l’églantine rouge, cette dernière étant trop associée à la gauche et au communisme à son goût.
Comme l’appellation « fête du travail », la tradition qui associe le muguet au 1er mai tire donc en partie ses racines du régime de Vichy.
With the change of flower, Vichy France erased the violence of workers’ struggle with a “celebration of work.” This history, the history of French politics in the 1930s, which deserves a much more detailed airing than I can give it here, hangs heavily over unfolding events in France and in Europe.
What will France’s hard-right National Rally party, formally the out-fascist National Front, replace if it is, as it is all too likely to be, elected to power in 2027? We shall see during the coming months whether European history will repeat itself as tragedy or as farce, or whether we can somehow find a way to keep it from repeating itself and move on to something more life-affirming.
Did I mention the French billionaire working hard to swing France to the extreme right? Not yet. I will in a future post.
In the meantime, I leave you with the words of 17th-century English poet Robert Herrick:
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
