This was some random "pirate's booty" candy store in La Rochelle, which featured KEGS of all different kinds of candy. Needless to say, we did some significant damage there (to the wallet and to the waistline). But how could we not yield to temptation after getting our picture with a pirate?
Our other destination, Oradour, was significantly less cheerful. The story behind the town is that on June 10, 1944, the retreating Nazis killed 642 members of the town (including 400 women and children who had sought refuge in a church--the Nazis firebombed the church and locked them in). Yeah. What is interesting but also rather morbid is that the town has been kept entirely as is, since that day. So it's a town-sized historical monument to the barbarity of war, and you can get a feel for what a good portion of France looked like in 1944-45.
My take on the existence of the city is ambivalent. On the one hand, it's super important to remember what happened and also to pass along such lessons to future generations. It's a stark reminder of the brutality of war and it's easy to understand why a country that suffered so much during the 20th century would be hesitant to join 21st century war campaigns. When you see places like Oradour, it's clear why the French didn't want to join Bush in Iraq. Same goes for the Germans, anyone who has experienced international war as a "home game" would think twice.
On the other hand, it's also a very carefully calibrated message about who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. It falls smack into the French Resistance myth, according to which everyone deep down was a resistor and only a handful actually collaborated. The nuances of Petainism were fairly thoroughly glossed over--and of course there was little mention of the fact that Petain himself was responsible for a good portion of the collaborationist policies. They did note that he himself coined the term (collaboration) but didn't go into just what the significance of that was. That all got lost in devastating lists of who was tortured and killed. Again, useful memories, but the framing leaves a lot of questions unasked.
There was also no mention whatsoever of recent scholarship on the war that calls for a third term, which Philippe Burin (a Swiss historian) calls "accommodation," according to which most people basically just did whatever they had to do to get by. They weren't actively collaborating nor were they resisting, they just did what they had to do to put food on the table. This idea doesn't fit into the narrative that the monument is seeking to tell, so it is evacuated entirely. Even the monument itself is called the "ville martyre" (Martyred city), which pretty clearly sets up a certain kind of discourse. Even the street signs miles away give directions to the "ville martyre," that's how thoroughly inscribed the town is in a specific kind of memory.
But to be less negative, the fact remains that the monument is a real place and real people suffered. And the generational gap isn't so huge yet, I'm sure most people living in that area still know someone who knew someone who lost a relative, or something like that. Probably nowhere near 6 degrees of separation, more like 2 or 3 at the most. The wound has got to still be open, there's no real way it couldn't be. So in the end it links up to current debates about what to do in places like Rwanda or South Africa or the Balkans--what kinds of trials and what kinds of truth and reconciliation committees there should be. Which is still an ongoing debate, and no one really has any answer. If anything, WWII is a worthwhile subject of study precisely for this reason, in terms of how to move on. I would have appreciated more of a discussion of this side of things regarding the monument, but I also would guess that that's asking too much, too soon. If nothing else, it's certainly thought-provoking and worthwhile to visit.
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