Tales of Peter Morwood: The One With l'Escalade
There's usually a reason that something date-related starts tickling the back of my brain, and the Tickle went off a couple of days ago (and I didn't really pay it that much attention because I was working on something else). But then today, off a comment from a reader on Bluesky a bit earlier, I remembered what it was.
It's just now been l'Escalade.
For people not particularly into the business of French-speaking Switzerland (or what's sometimes called The Other Side of the Röstigraben*), this needs some explanation.
Adding a break here, as this goes on a bit before we hit the punchline. CAUTION: contains 17th-century politics, boiling vegetable soup, chocolate, financial politics masquerading as religious politics (wow, there's really nothing new, is there?), fondue, and noise.
This needs a bit of backstory. Keeping it (relatively) short:
People are always invading Switzerland... or thinking real hard about it. It's just one of those things.
Sometimes, historically speaking, this is a way more idiotic impulse than other times. Back in the day (meaning any time between sort of the 1200s and the mid-1800s), if you were a potential invader you would ideally pick an invasion-time during which as few as possible of the Swiss cantons or cantons-to-be—if you're in the US, think of them as states, it's simplest—were getting along with one another.
At any time when a nontrivial number of cantons were in some kind of alliance, your odds of success were poor. Ideally you wanted to invade somebody who wasn't allied with other cantons that were militarily strong enough to make your life difficult.
But frankly your odds of success were never great (or not for long...), because the Swiss were for a long time the major exporter of mercenaries to the rest of the western European continent. Swiss soldiery was famed everywhere for its skill, its intractability, and its widespread bizarre refusal to sell a given group's contract (to fight on one side or another in a battle) to a higher bidder when the quartermasters got together to dicker over terms before the fighting started. —This peculiar habit earned them the nickname "the dirty Swiss": not because of any issues with their hygiene or typical dress**** (which you can glimpse below)...
...but because (their enemies muttered in tremendous annoyance) "the fuckers stay bought." One physical commemoration of this stubborn tendency is the famous Löwendenkmal in Luzern, made in honor of the guys who could easily (and absolutely understandably) have dumped what remained of the royal house of France on its butt and absconded to save their own skins... but elected instead to honor their contract and die in (futile) defense of their soon-to-also-be-dead employers.
At any rate: eventually many Swiss mercenary soldiers—because they were famously good at this job—made enough money from fighting abroad to say "Yeah, you know what? I think I'm done with this...", and go home. And if you then invaded them... well. The guys who'd come back to their wives and children after years abroad tended not to take your advances kindly. 😏
Some areas, though, tended to get invaded (or to have invasion attempted) more often than others. In the case we're discussing here, that would have meant places that were cheek-by-jowl with larger countries with restive political factions. And in this case, we're discussing the Savoyards, who were then the power to be reckoned with in that part of what we now think of as France.
So let's zoom ahead to the very early 1600s.
The Swiss city of Genéve (and capital town of what would become the canton of that name) was Protestant. The counts of Savoy (especially this guy), just across the way (so to speak) in France, were Catholic. Savoy, therefore—encouraged by whoever was Pope then: frankly, I lose track—wanted to invade Geneva and put a boot into all that Protestant shit.
At least that was the excuse. (amused eyeroll) The truth is that Geneva was wealthy and prosperous, and the Savoyards wanted that chunk of money and power for their own (not to mention taking control of the terrain and trade that the Genevois controlled), because their goal was to push their own power and influence straight across the Alps into northern Italy and down to the Mediterranean. (sigh) If you like, just read the Wikipedia article to get into more of this. It'll give you plenty of hints as to what was actually going on.
...Anyway! So the Savoyards roll up to Genéve, on the evening of the 11th of December in 1602, and try to go over the city walls and take everybody by surprise. (And this is where “l’Escalade” comes from: to “scale” or climb up over something: to go “over the top.”)
Point is, though: all the people inside those walls are Swiss... and so this situation does not go well for the invaders, who get their butts handed to them in many interesting ways over the course of that night. And one of the most famous of the defenders of the walls is a lady named Catherine Cheynel (later referred to in song and story as Mère Royaume: maybe we'd just now say You Queen!), who when she noticed would-be attackers putting scaling ladders up near her window, grabbed the first thing available to get them to stop climbing—this being a large pot of boiling vegetable soup—and dumped it on them.
...You could not make this shit up. There should be manga: and then, anime! But (shrug) ...history, right? 🙂
What there is, though, to this day, is the tradition that in Genéve around this time of year, the chocolatiers of the town (and bakeries and department stores and so forth**) will sell you chocolate soup-cauldrons full of marzipan vegetables. And when you're sharing one of these with your loved ones, you're meant to say (as you smash the chocolate cauldron), "Thus perish the enemies of the Republic!"
(A sentiment I can get behind at the moment. ...But I digress.)
So where does @petermorwood come into this?
...Well. Our joint strategy for travel to A New Place routinely went like this:
DD would go there (often in the course of business) and scope it out. And then:
PM and DD would go there together.
This particular inversion of (theoretical) gender roles suited us both because, simply... when we hooked up, I'd been a lot more places by myself than Peter ever had: and so he trusted my Scoping Instincts as probably superior to his. And on this count he was correct. 😏
European film and TV business unfolding for the two of us in the 2006-2013-ish period meant that we found ourselves in that central-European part of the world a fair bit. Geneva was initially a hub for me when I went over to hole up in a holiday flat in Leukerbad to do a Spider-Man novel. After that the two of us went to Genf/Genéve a number of times by ourselves and with friends... as the rail line from Geneva is how you get to Leuk, and after that, up the mountain (via bus) to the resort and superlative hot-water spa town.
In any case I no longer remember what the hell year it was when we flew Dublin-Geneva and stayed there in town for l'Escalade. We likely wouldn't have been there just for that: Peter was always frugal-minded and possibly would have considered that "wasteful." ...Yet whatever had been on the schedule just previous, the opportunity to be in town for a full-on recreation of the attack on the walls, with gunpowder, would absolutely have commanded P's attention. One of the things that he'd bonded over with our good friend Ron Moore, way back when, was "The Gunpowder Thing."
So I'll elide, here, the parades, the re-enactments in the streets with crowds of guys with flintlocks, and the noise. AND THE SMOKE. (This is unquestionably where some modern usages of the "Fog of War" idiom came from.) Put together just twenty people firing flintlocks in a street in Genéve, and I promise you that for a good ten or fifteen minutes you won't be able to see anything happening more than a hundred meters away.
Peter just swam in it. He loved it to bits.
Afterwards, eventually, after dinner and drinks and much chatting (in French: Peter was our French-speaker) with many fabulously costumed Flintlock Guys, we decamped to our hotel***. This place had been recommended to me as having "the best fondue in town"—which as far as I knew was true: it was really good—and was also in the very heart of the Old Town where the recreations had been taking place.
(ETA: OMG, as the hotel’s front-page slideshow went by, I saw our room. Those stones were immediately recognizable.)
It was also right next to the old Town Hall, which had an arcaded lower level in which a disco was occurring.
And occurring.
And occurring.
Oh sweet God the noise.
...I got over to sleep eventually. I have to assume that, eventually, so did he.
But in the morning (when he was face down snoring underneath a pillow), I found this on the table on my side of the bed, drawn on the back of a beer mat.
(sigh) Vive l'Escalade.😄
*The 'Fried Potato Ditch:' i.e., the north-to-south line across which the local preferred starch changes from potatoes to pasta (or something else, even rice). Also, not entirely incidentally, the line that roughly divides German-speaking Switzerland from French-speaking Switzerland.
**I hate to think what the Globus charges for theirs. (sigh) Never mind.
***I'm looking at the room rates and thinking we must just have come off something media-oriented, as the current prices for the room we were in would singe your gums.
****If you have trouble believing this image, go google Dürer's drawings of the Landsknechts. He wasn't known for exaggeration. :)
