Stories from France

France is the most visited country in the world, yet it's one of the most unknown ones. I will tell you why. ||| CATEGORIES ||| Art - #ucrart // History - #ucrhistory // Music - #ucrmusic // Quotes - #ucrquotes //

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French Music

"He's a spacer, a star chaser..."

Sheila is a French singer born in Créteil, a city in the Parisian region of Île-de-France, who achieved success with this banging disco track in the 1979, written and composed by American disco group Chic.

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"Je pense, donc, je suis"

"I think, therefore, I am"

René Descartes

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French Art

"The Raft of the Medusa" is a milestone of Romanticism. Théodore Géricault, sometimes called one of the first reporters of history, shows his interest in real, documented events on this canvas, long 7 metres per 5 in height, depicting, as the title suggests, the aftermath of the wreck of this French naval frigate, Méduse, off the coast of Mauritania on 2nd July 1816. The captain of the ship is considered the probable cause of this disaster, since it said that he hadn't driven a boat for more than 25 years when he was appointed captain of Méduse. About 150 passengers could escape the dark fate by improvising the raft, but eventually, after 13 long days of desolating wandering in the ocean, only 15 of them could return home alive.

Géricault was only 27 when he painted "The Raft of the Medusa". He was so fascinated by this particular subject that he planned and studied every detail possibile before even starting to paint it. It is known that Géricault interviewed two of the survivors of the disaster, inspected some of the corpses of the ones who lost their life in the incident and even built a scale model of the raft.

The composition is paradox. There is a meticulous work of symmetry, with all of the characters standing within a classical art scheme, the triangle, symbol of the sacred trinity and, according to Plato, of Man and Earth as well. This air of symmetry, tragic heroism and almost divine perfection that the painting breathes is only contrasted by what's actually within the triangle.

Desperation, survival, chaos, hope, death.

Man.

As Théodore had imagined it to be, his work of art proved to be controversial when it was first displayed at the Salon de Paris in 1819. Nowadays, it is regarded as a masterpiece of French art, and, I would dare to say, of the entire world, too.

Théodore Géricault, "The Raft of the Medusa" 1819, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris, France

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French Music

M83 is a band from Antibes, Côte d'Azur, initially formed by members Anthony Gonzales and Nicolas Fromageu, who eventually abandoned the project.

This single, extracted from their sixth album, "Hurry Up, We're Dreaming", published in 2012, reached a fair success for being featured, that same year, in the fifth season of "Gossip Girl", in the 2014 movie "The Fault in Our Star" and, in the same year, in the sixth season of "The Vampire Diaries".

Both the name of the band and, arguably, its music took inspiration from a distant galaxy, M83.

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"La liberté commence où l’ignorance finit"

"Freedom begins where ignorance ends"

Victor Hugo

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French Art

Jean-Léon Gérôme is a Franc-Comtois painter who was born in Vesoul in 1824 and died in Paris in 1904. As an artist, he opposed to the Impressionist movement and wanted to revive and preserve French Neoclassicism, painting about historical characters and events, mythology and orientalist themes.

"Pygmalion and Galatea" is one of his most beautiful works, representing the Greek mythological tale, then retold in Ovid's "Metamorphosis", of Pygmalion, a sculptor who falls in love with a statue he had carved, Galatea, and gives her life, a story which might have inspired Collodi's "Pinocchio".

Jean-Léon Gérôme, "Pygmalion and Galatea" 1890, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, United States of America

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Football is more French than you might think.

France has been part of my life since my birth, probably, but, through the years, this feeling grew stronger and stronger. There is actually a year where it started, and that's 2015, but it peaked in the summer of 2016, thanks to the European championship which took place in France. That tournament ended with France losing the final against Portugal, but that inspired me to research for the story of this sport I had just begun following (end of 2015). So I did. I am a perfectionist, so I wanted to dig as deep as possible into this mystery, the first of a long series of origin stories of inventions, sports and more, which, to be honest, were the main reason why I created this blog in the first place. So, I thought that the first one of these stories to share with you had to be the first I researched.

So, we will start from the very beginning and with the premise that, since the dawn of times, every civilisation having roamed Planet Earth has played games, and many of them involved a ball. There are evidences of ball games everywhere in the world, from Pre-Columbian America, where Mayans played the Tlachtli, the probable precursor of basketball, to Asia, and this is where our tale begins.

The civilisation is the Chinese one. The dynasty reigning is the Han. The century is the third B.C. The name of the game is Cuju. Born as a military training, this game, officially recognised by FIFA as the earliest form of the game, initially saw players trying to kick a feather-stuff ball into a goal made of two wood sticks planted on the ground. This game spread from the army to the royal courts and upper classes, always during the Han Dynasty, which lasted from 206 BC to 220 AD. Cuju evolved into something more complex where its popularity during the Tang Dynasty, and it started to resemble football even more. It became a team-oriented game and clubs started to be established, but its popularity exploded during the Song Dinasty (960-1279) and in the X century the first Cuju league was created, 800 years earlier than the British Football Association. Not bad. Eventually, cuju began to fade around the XVII century and soon disappeared.

In the same period cuju was being invented in China, in Europe the spiritual father of European football and rugby was being developed by the Greeks. Despite the image of the lone Greek athlete trying to reach for glory by himself, like a mythological hero, Greeks also played team-oriented games, and Episkyros was one of these. The teams of this violent game, especially in Sparta (where else?), were usually made up of 12-14 players. The field and the teams were divided into two by a line, and another line was behind them. The goal of the game was to push the ball to the other end of the field. This game incorporated, therefore, elements of both football and rugby, which actually were two sports of the same root at the time of their "inception" in XIX century England. But, according to some sources, even the atmosphere was similar back in Ancient Greece. One of these comes from the Egyptian writer Athenaeus of Naucratis' Deipnosophistae, which contains an excerpt dating from the IV century by Antiphanes, the famous comedy writer who describes a moment during an Episkyros game and the consequent reactions from the supporters, all written in a modern television commentary style:

"Once he took and passed the ball, he was enjoying that, while he was dodging an opponent and making another one of them fall on the ground. Then, he helped one of his team mates lift off the ground. All around were strong yells saying "out!", "long ball!", "high!", "low!", "short ball!", "shoot it back to the fray!"

Episkyros never was an Olympic sport in Ancient Greece, but, as you can read above, the agonism was all there, both from the athletes and the audience, unlike cuju, which was merely an exercise, a game. Sports and games always were a serious thing for the Greeks.

Once the Romans conquered Greece in 146 BC, one of the many things they "borrowed" from the Greeks was this game. Romans renamed it Harpastum and it is said that they introduced the rule which forbade to touch the ball with the hands. Plus, when Rome built the empire we all know, this game got immensely popular among the centurions defending the limes of the Roman Empire. This means that, while Greeks invented this game, Romans spread all over Europe (which means the British Isles, naturally).

Actually, the first mention of an unidentified ball game in Britain comes from the IX century AD. We cannot know whether it had anything to do with football, but probably this game was the Harpastum of some game deriving from it. What we know, though, is that the game which officially started it all came from... France.

In fact, if we want to find the actual origins of modern football we have to move to Northern France where, around the same time above mentioned, a new game developed and spread in Normandy and Picardy named Soule (or choule). This game was usually played after a religious function or during the holidays between two teams composed of people coming from two villages, usually close and rivals, but also between two different social statuses or situation (for instance, married men against bachelors et cetera). The game ended when one of the teams, composed of a potentially unlimited number, managed to push the ball with any means (besides the feet, sticks and hands were also allowed) towards the opponents' village, and then shot the ball into the portal of the local church, scoring de facto one gol. The ball disputed in a Soule game was made either of leather or animal bladders, filled with bran, hay, moss or horsehair. The field was of variable dimensions and could include ditches, streams, woods and wetlands, but the game started in the "midfield", which could be the border between the two churches (or "goals", in this case), the square of the village, a graveyard or even the castle of the local landlord.

As my description of this game may suggest, la Soule was a manly, violent game. While this was true, it was unexpectedly regulated and accompanied by an actual code of rules. Surely, it was much less violent than believed, since any type of violence towards the opponents was allowed. If today this sport is remembered as a barbaric, medieval game is surely thanks to the infamous, so called "remission letters", in which real court cases involving injuries and, some times, deaths, were evoked and told. When we actually think about the amount of players involved in a single game of this ancient sport, though, these sad cases were possible, as they are in every sport up to this day. Despite this, these letters helped give this game a bad, and equally unjustified, fame.

The first mention of the Soule in France dates back the year 1147, but it's almost sure that it was played in Northern France way before that date, since scholars are nowadays sure that this game was introduced in England by the Normans after William the Conqueror invaded the island in 1066. Moreover, this theory sounds incredibly plausible because the so-called "mob football", medieval English ball game from which modern football as we know it today descends, has no anterior mentions than 1174 on British soil, and, also, this mob football was characterized by almost identical features and rules than the French soule. However, I think it is right to specify that from the moment the soule was introduced in Britain, every development of the game that eventually led to the codification of modern football, the establishment of the Football Association in 1863 and the birth of the first football clubs (the first of which is Sheffield F.C.), all occured in the British Isles, even though soule kept being played, with discontinuity, on French soil at least until the XIX century.

A special mention goes to all the other subsequent ball games which were played throughout the history of Europe, from the Icelandic Knattleikr, first mentioned in XII century (but probably older) to the Italian Calcio Fiorentino from the Renaissance.

Finally, we can say that this long story tells us that we should never write or talk about history with the verb to be. Football, as in many other inventions and other things in history, is not English. This verb sounds like something definitive, an ended argument, as sure as death. As we can learn from this story, instead, history can surprise us with a lot of beautiful "maybes", "ifs", "actuallys", by showing us Ancient Chinese people kicking a ball, an Ancient Greek young man freestyling and medieval French people scoring goals by shooting balls inside churches, by playing a primitive form of the sport which eventually became the most popular one in our world.

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French Music

My trip in Occitanie started and finished in the mesmerising city of Toulouse, la Ville Rose where in each corner you can breathe scents from the Middle Ages, Renaissance and la Belle Époque.

This creative artist, Jain, was born there.

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French Art

If you noticed I haven't been posting anything in the past week, well, there is a reason behind it. I spent a week in Occitanie, where you can literally breathe art and history everywhere. I have been in many amazing places, which inspired me to write many things for you, but I will start with one of the many highlights of my trip. In Albi, next to the magnificent Cathédrale Sainte-Cécile, there's another beautiful building, Palais de la Berbie, an ancient episcopal palace dating back the XIII century which, since 1924, hosts the museum dedicated to l'enfant prodige of the city, Henry de Toulouse-Lautrec. This museum owns many of the most famous works of the tormented artist, but this one is the one that hit me the most, and I don't think I need to say why...

Henry de Toulouse-Lautrec, "Au Salon de la Rue de Moulins" 1895, Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi, France

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French Music

1943 was the year when Charles Trenet, a narbonnais chanteur, composed this classic. France was occupied by the Nazi at that time, so Trenet wrote this song to moral support to the "expatriés de force", that is all the French war prisoners who were taken by force from their homeland to Nazi Germany. And we can only imagine how warming could have been for those French people to hear verses like "(France) Bercée de tendre insouciance, je t'ai gardée dans mon cœur".

The title of the song is a reference to a truism first appeared in the XI century medieval epic "La Chanson de Roland" and his "dulce Francia". In a part of the epic poem, in fact, count Roland was lying under a pine tree and, when he turned his head towards Spain, a strong sense of nostalgia made him think about the many lands the baron had conquered, the men of his lineage and about his lord Charlemagne, who had raised him. Beside these painful memories, Roland couldn't help but sobbing and crying for his "douce France".

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French Art

From today on, I will be uploading French paintings and sculptures, both known and unknown. As for it happened for the music, I did feel the need to start this collection with a monument of art, a milestone which instantly echoes the words "France" and "art" with a single breath. This, I think, will do.

Eugène Delacroix, "La Liberté Guidant le Peuple" 1830, Louvre Museum, Paris, France

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"L’air de France éclaircit les idées et fait du bien... beaucoup de bien"

"The French air cleans up the brain and does good... a world of good"

Vincent Van Gogh

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Gothic, the French style.

The horrible images of Nôtre-Dame de Paris, the most famous cathedral in France and one of the most visited monuments in the worlds, burning down under the Parisian sky are still very vivid in our minds. When, on April 15th this year we saw that iconic, almost familiar, spire fell down on the ground, we all lost a piece of our hearts. Yes, either we are French or not, all around the world we felt the same void that day, because the arts, all of them, belong to all of us. They would be, with no doubt, the only worthy heritage we would leave if our race disappeared one day... so, seeing how vulnerable art can be in front of nature, made us feel quite insignificant, small, without purpose.

And I wonder how devastated the artists and writers who fell in love with that symbol of medieval Europe which is Nôtre-Dame would have felt by seeing it devoured by the flames. I am thinking about Victor Hugo, who made it the "main character" of one of his most celebrated novels, but also about the numerous painters who immortalised the cathedral in their works of art, of which Jean Fouquet (with "La Descente du Saint-Esprit" from "Livre d'Heures d'Étienne Chevalier", XV Century), William-Adolphe Bouguereau (with "La Bohémienne", 1890) and Paul Signac (with "Pont des Arts", 1925) are among the most famous ones. But, ultimately, I am thinking about who built the monument. All the masons, all the architects who, from 1163 (year when the choir and its two ambulatories started being built) to nowadays have contributed to make Nôtre-Dame "Nôtre-Dame", some of which actually saw it burn, around 1225-1230 (according to Eugène Viollet-le-Duc's findings, who also restored the cathedral in the 19th Century). April 15th, for them, would have seen their worst nightmare come true.

But, even though it might have sounded like that, this is not the main topic of this post, so let's go straight to the point, shall we?

When the first architects of Nôtre-Dame started their projects, they had to choose how to build the new cathedral that the Bishop of Paris, Maurice de Sully, ordered to erect in 1160. The bishop wanted a new church that could do justice to the prestige of his growing city. The population of Paris (just like many important medieval cities), in fact, saw a considerable rising in population from the XI to the XII centuries, due to many factors, such as an established economic stability and new technologies. De Sully chose a pre-existing site for the new church (the site in the past had already been a Gallo-Roman temple during the Roman occupation, a paleochristian church in the IV century, a Merovingian basilique, a Carolingian cathedral and, finally, a Romanesque cathedral) and, in order to have the big, shiny, monumental cathedral he wanted, he chose for it a new style that was emerging in those years in that same region.

We are obviously talking about the Opus Francigenum, better known as Gothic architecture.

This style, named "Gothic" for the first time in the XVI by Italian humanist Giorgio Vasari to indicate a Nordic, barbaric and in general opposed to the symmetrical classicism of the Renaissance echoing the Greek and Roman times, characterised the last centuries of the Middle Ages. Vasari was actually right, because the Gothic was the first completely original architectural style since the Greek one and, in fact, it was the first style to break out the oppressive chains of the past. Plus, Gothic architecture is probably the only architectural style in the world to have a creator, with a place and a date of birth, which will make us easier to tell its story.

The place is the Basilique de Saint-Denis. The year is 1144 circa and the creator is abbot Suger.

In his life, Suger was the prime minister of the kings Louis VI and Louis VII, and he was already the abbot of Saint-Denis, a commune in the northern suburbs of Paris, in the Île-de-France region, when he decided, around 1135 to renovate the choir, the capocroce and the nartex of the Saint-Denis basilica in order to enlighten the prestige of what had been the burial place of French monarchs since the 10th century, and literally, since light, height and lightness are the key words when it comes to Gothic buildings.

"Now that the new posterior part was linked to the anterior one, the church shines forth in the middle. Living light, in fact, brightens what luminously joins what is bright. And bright is the noble edifice pervaded by new light"

With these words, Suger describes his love for the word "light" and all of its synonyms, but he also outlined the aesthetic of the new style he had just invented. So, in the Basilique of Saint-Denis, he built a nartex with two towers and a decorated rose window in the middle, the first of the kind, and the equivalent of a bomb of light exploded into a building for the first time. Light really was the main character of this Opus. Suger's conception of God seen as transcendental light derives from the writings of John the Scot, but even more importantly, of Denis Areopagus, which was often mistaken with Saint Denis, the first bishop of Paris. Denis Areopagus merged the Christian teachings with the Plotinus' neoplatonic philosophy, which said that the multiple aspects of life were dictated by the "One". Denis, thus, wrote that "this stone or that piece of wood are light, for me, because all the visible things are "material lights".

From that time on, though, everywhere in France and then in Europe, the pointed arch substituted the round arch of the Romanesque, the walls became to disappear more and more, making way to large windows which could be invaded by divine light, the buildings became taller and taller, thanks to a sophisticated game between rampant bows and buttresses.

In France, the Gothic style eventually evolved into the rayonnant style first and in the flamboyant style then, before spreading everywhere in Europe, especially in Germany and England, but also in Italy and in Spain, but, since this is not intended to be an architecture lesson, I will not delve further into the argument (at the moment). What is actually crucial for us to know right now is that, with the Gothic revolution, the face of Europe changed forever in a way that only the Romans and the Greeks before them could do, and that this revolution began in the actual land of revolutions.

France.

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French Music

The first song of this blog couldn't not be this one, "La Vie en Rose", which, in my opinion, could easily be France's national anthem, but this iconic classic will actually lead the way to a new format I called "Artists not everyone know they are French", where I will post songs by singers and bands from the francophone world (France, Belgium, Quebec) who people think they are not French (mostly because they sing in English), but, also, who people think they are French (mostly because they sing in French).

Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy this legendary milestone in the history of music.

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The Beginnings of this Blog and of Humanity.

Whenever asked, the first landmarks which certainly come to our minds when we think about France certainly are the Tour Eiffel, Nôtre-Dame de Paris, Versailles, the Louvre Museum, Mont Saint-Michel. These monuments and places are undeniably fascinating, iconic, beautiful, nothing to say about that, but they all come from the modern era or the Middle Ages, suggesting that rise of civilization in France occured around the time when Vercingetorix and his Gauls battled Caesar and his Romans. As most of you will surely know, though, reality is well different, witnessed by the numerous prehistoric decorated caves we can find in Southern France and Northern Spain, the oldest ones in Europe and among the oldest ones in the entire world. However, today I will not talk about these caves (but I will, soon) as I do not have to go that far back in history to tell you about this magnificent, criminally unknown place I discovered only a few months ago.

There in the distance, on the other side of this shore, you can see the silhouette of a prehistoric site. Can you recognise it at a first glance? I mean, that is no Stonehenge, no Jericho, no Giza. So, if you are wondering why this unrecognisable place has made the very first topic of my new blog, you'd better find yourself a seat, because I assure you will need it.

Believe it or not, but that is the oldest building in the world.

Before continuing our discussion about this ancient place, we shall outline the official definition of "building". Let's start by saying that this is not, by any means, the oldest building ever built by Man. That honour, in fact, belongs to Turkey, with its famous Göbekli Tepe, but that and all of the other, few, older site than the above pictured one are considered either as monuments or as simple structures (I am thinking about dolmens, for instance). So, what makes a structure a "building"? By definition, a building must have a recognisable shape, with walls higher than 1,5 metres for most of its perimeter and it must have an enclosed area with at least one entry.

Now that I explained everything I can reveal the name of the main character of this post. This is Barnenez, a cairn (a stone construction) situated near Plouezoc'h, a small village of nearly 1.200 inhabitants in Brittany, France. The radiocarbon dating told us that this monumental site was built around 4.850 B.C., meaning that yes, it predates by age Greek temples, Egyptian pyramids and Mesopotamian ziggurats. With its eleven chambers, Barnenez perfectly qualifies as a building, although its actual purpose remains a mystery. Many scholars, though, think that, instead of being a mere burial site, Barnenez was a spiritual place, a sort of gateway between our world and the afterworld where people would gather in order to communicate with their dearly departed ones. This theory would also be validated by the fact that the chambers are different from each others, suggesting that each one of them had a different purpose.

Whatever the reason it was built for was, the cairn of Barnenez is a fascinating testament of our past as human beings and, specifically for this blog, how ancient and vast "French" heritage actually is.

And this is only the beginning of our journey into this astonishing nation.

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"Impossible n'est pas français"

"Impossible is not French"

Napoleon Bonaparte

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Prologue.

France is not just Paris. France is not just la Tour Eiffel, la Révolution, Versailles or l'impressionnisme.

The history of this country begins way before Charlemagne, way before the Romans and even before than the Gauls.

The Hexagone was the land of thinkers, inventors, builders, artists, writers, musicians who have influenced not only Europe, but the entire world for centuries and centuries to come.

This blog aims to put the home of the Ville Lumière under a new... light, highlighting everything this people have done for the planet Earth by sharing with you my personal knowledge about this nation that I have always been involved with since I was a child from an unbiased point of view, since I am Italian. Some stories will be amazingly famous, some will be ignored, forgotten or neglected by many. All of the stories will be eye-opening, unexpected, engaging, this is all I can promise to you.

France is the most visited country in the world, and yet it is one of the most unknown ones.