Letters

Neal Ascherson wonders, as did Charles de Gaulle, why Marshal Pétain did not cross the Mediterranean in November 1942 to resume the war against Germany with the British and the Americans (LRB, 26 December 2024). One significant reason was the British attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir in July 1940. On that occasion, the French showed reluctance to scuttle their ships as quickly as they would at Toulon and Churchill ordered the attack as a last resort to prevent the Germans from acquiring them.

This left much of France with the opinion that Britain, already unpopular for holding back aircraft during the French defeat, was no better than Germany. We may assume Pétain felt the same way, given that he broke off diplomatic relations with the UK five days later. With events moving so quickly at the end of 1942 and the start of the full German occupation of France, it seems unlikely there was time to heal such a serious breach even if Pétain had been willing to line up with Britain in North Africa.

Neal Ascherson notes that Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, a myth-busting documentary about the Occupation released in 1969, was ‘banned by shocked broadcasting authorities’. In fact, the ORTF – the national agency responsible for providing French broadcasting services at the time – had no involvement in its production and simply refused to buy rights to the film, which was co-financed by (and subsequently shown on) German and Swiss television. Simone Veil, then an ORTF board member, later recalled that one of the factors in the decision not to buy the film was that the price Ophuls was demanding was too high.

That said, political considerations were clearly uppermost. As Ophuls tells it, the ORTF’s director-general went to ask de Gaulle what he should do about the film, given the ‘unpalatable truths’ it laid bare. De Gaulle reportedly replied: ‘France does not need truths; France needs hope’ (‘La France n’a pas besoin de vérités; la France a besoin d’espoir’). The ORTF president, Arthur Conte, later echoed de Gaulle’s verdict, declaring that ‘the film destroys the myths the French still need.’ In 1971, when it was finally given a certificate for cinematic release, The Sorrow and the Pity opened at a small cinema in Paris’s Latin Quarter, and was then distributed more widely. It remained unseen on French television until 1981.

Neal Ascherson mentions in passing that Léon Blum was ‘the socialist who led the Popular Front government with the Communists in 1936’. The Communists supported the Popular Front government but were not part of it; there were no PCF ministers. The first time there were PCF ministers in national government in France was in 1944, reflecting the important role Communists had played in the Resistance.

As one of the original excavators of the Strichen stone circle I was pleased to see so much prominence given to it by Rosemary Hill (LRB, 26 December 2024). Strichen’s story is even more interesting than her brief account was able to reveal. These stone circles – peculiar to North-East Scotland – all feature a large ‘recumbent’ stone with two adjacent ‘flankers’ as part of a circle of stones diminishing in height as they move away from this focal point. The ‘recumbent’ stone (sometimes weighing as much as fifty tons) was always carefully positioned by its builders, using chockstones to create a horizontal upper surface. The hypothesis of the archaeologist Aubrey Burl was that the recumbent and flankers framed the southern horizon at the point where the Moon in its eighteen-year cycle described its lowest arc before starting to rise again. Burl’s interest in Strichen was that its recumbent/flanker assemblage was to the north of its circle, not the south, apparently invalidating the lunar hypothesis. If the whole monument had been tampered with then the hypothesis might have stood. However a postcard photograph from the 1920s shows the recumbent and flankers very precisely positioned, with chockstones – an unlikely detail for 18th-century landscapers seeking a ‘Druids’ Temple’ scene to concern themselves with.

The first season of excavation revealed that the existing circular bank to the south of the recumbent/flanker comprised imported soil with a lot of 18th-century debris. This was consistent with late 18th-century estate accounts recording payments to labourers for ‘hurling dung’ up to ‘the Druids’ Temple’. Remains of the prehistoric circular bank were discovered to the north of the recumbent, the two circles touching at that point. It wasn’t the stones that had been moved, but the circle! The recumbent/flankers had remained in situ until the final clearance of the circle in the late 1960s, so were only moved once. Burl was happy to have resolved the anomaly in his hypothesis and passed the direction of the excavation and reconstruction on to Philip Abramson and myself, assisted by local volunteers and an annual cohort of Americans under the auspices of Earthwatch.

In the following seasons we revealed further lunar associations. Both the prehistoric bank (in which the stones were set) and the stones themselves (the size and weight of which were roughly revealed by their sockets) waned and then waxed as one moved (monthly?) round the circle. Imported quartz had been freshly broken on one particular earthbound boulder (a hard stone known locally as ‘a blue bastard’), and then scattered, not all around the bank, but in a distinct crescent shape opposite the recumbent/flankers. The topsoil in the bank had been stripped in antiquity down to the yellowish subsoil. A yellow disc bordered by a bright white crescent would thus have been contained within the bank and stones. It was breathtaking to see, from within the restored circle, that the silhouette of the upper surface of the recumbent stone paralleled the profile of the horizon behind it, below which, on its decreasing arc, the Moon periodically threatened to disappear.

Dr Johnson’s judgment that these monuments possessed neither ‘art nor power’ rested on a then pardonable ignorance, but perhaps also on a presumption of crudity, given their isolation and remoteness. Knowing what we do now about the care and precision devoted to their construction, it is less outrageous than it once would have been to suggest that the culture that produced them contributed a token stone to another complex megalithic monument, several hundred miles to the south.

Edmund Gordon writes about UFOs (LRB, 26 December 2024). Belief in flying saucers doesn’t normally have much consequence. But on at least one occasion it has had. In March 1979 Eric Gairy, the autocratic prime minister of Grenada, left the island to address the United Nations, not for the first time, on the UFO phenomenon and to plead further investigations. He also left instructions that while he was out of the country leading figures opposed to his rule should be imprisoned and possibly murdered. In response, these leaders staged an insurrection which was supported by the vast majority of the country, who happily chanted the slogan: ‘Freedom Come, Gairy Go, Gairy gone with UFO.’ Four and a half years of revolution followed led by the New Jewel Movement, ending only with the US invasion of October 1983.

Richard J. Williams seems to imply that Pasqual Maragall had a pro-independence agenda when he was the mayor of Barcelona in the 1990s (LRB, 5 December 2024). In fact that is the opposite of what Maragall stood for back then. CiU, the nationalist party in control of Catalonia’s regional government, would routinely depict Maragall and his socialist party as traitors who were seeking to dilute Catalan national identity. ‘Every park bench, every reconstituted square, almost every paving slab seemed to be an argument for independence,’ Williams writes, but in 1996 local newspapers were full of the ‘battle’ between Maragall and the nationalists over the city’s flag. The design favoured by the mayor did not include a complete Catalan flag, and this was viewed as a mutilation of the city’s identity.

Maragall, who has been afflicted with Alzheimer’s for the past fifteen years, never spoke in favour of Catalan statehood. He did become more sympathetic to Catalan nationalism when he became president of Catalonia in 2003, but always within the framework of the Spanish state. In general, Catalan nationalism was never an urban phenomenon. Williams writes that in Scotland ‘the SNP’s power base has traditionally been rural,’ and the same could be said of the CiU. Barcelona has only had one nationalist mayor since democracy was reinstated in the 1970s. This is viewed by many as one of the fatal flaws in the pro-independence drive that led to the botched referendum vote in 2017. Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia, but its politics are rarely in sync with the rest of the country.

The late Peter Campbell’s mention of the New Zealand Commercial Grower recalls the New Zealand Chinese Growers Monthly Journal, which covered issues of the day for New Zealand’s Chinese market gardeners (LRB, 26 December 2024). In the 1960s these growers were responsible for about 80 per cent of the country’s greenleaf vegetable crop. The monthly was published using a metric tonne of lead type, shipped at great expense from Hong Kong in 1952. A perennial money loser, it ceased publication in 1972. The tonne of type was rediscovered in a farm shed in Pukekohe in 2007, and is today housed with the Wai-te-ata Press at the Victoria University of Wellington.

Michael Wood writes about Raymond N. MacKenzie’s translation of Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education (LRB, 5 December 2024). I was surprised by some of MacKenzie’s choices, as illustrated in the passages Wood cites. Simple sentences are transformed into ponderous periphrases. In the passage ‘Beaucoup chantaient. On était gai. Il se versait des petits verres,’ for instance, ‘On était gai’ is rendered ‘The good cheer was contagious.’ Flaubert could have written that type of sentence in the original, something like ‘La bonne humeur était communicative.’ But he didn’t. Flaubert was a stylist, very attentive to the music of his sentences. ‘A good prose sentence must be like a good verse, unchanging, just as rhythmic, just as resonant,’ he wrote to Louise Colet. In writing ‘Beaucoup chantaient. On était gai. Il se versait des petits verres,’ he chose a classic form of prosody: two tetrasyllables (what’s more, rhymed) followed by an octosyllable, a progression which, for the French reader, is very satisfying. It is a pity that none of the translators quoted in the review made an attempt at recreating in English a similarly restrained and metrical equivalent.

Musab Younis calls Aimé Césaire ‘the only significant modernist figure to have a long and successful career as an elected official’ (LRB, 5 December 2024). His fellow advocate of négritude, Léopold Sédar Senghor, may not be at Césaire’s level as a poet, but can’t be ignored, and spent twenty years as president of Senegal.