“The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.”
17th Century French Philosopher, Voltaire
Cormeilles, Normandie, France
In France, I acquired impressions.
Impressions of Cormeilles, Normandie, France
There are three Cormeilles in France. Our Cormeilles, the one where we spent the month of May, is a thousand-year-old town of 1,150 people. Few in or out of France are aware of it. Some tourists happen upon it while taking a blue highway route to Paris. Locals hope they will stop and buy a chevre round, a strawberry tart, a necklace, a baguette, a plate of escargot, a crepe, or a beer, but they don’t let the possibility of a sale interrupt their desire for a balanced life.
For at least 250 years—since they began to take a census— Cormeilles has never been bigger or smaller. It is not a has-been or a will-be, but a stable, small, sub-sufficient town.
Its rhythm took getting used to. Time is measured in church bells. They ring every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day. On the hour, the bells toll to mark the time. They ring for a minute at 7 AM, Noon, and 7 PM. Have these bells been tolling since people worked 12-hour days and had no other way to tell time? Or perhaps these bells still tell people when to wake, pause for lunch, and quit working. I wake in the middle of the night. In Cormeilles, I lay in bed listening to the four bells tolling the hour, then the melodies announcing 4:15 and 4:30. With luck, I would be asleep when the 5 AM bells tolled.
From where the bells toll
Most stores are open from 9 AM to Noon. They close for lunch from 12-2:30. Restaurants are closed between 2:30 and 7 PM. Saturday nights are usually quiet. On Mondays, many things are closed. If you want an afternoon tea, you can get one at the bar in town. Restaurants never ask anyone to leave. People sit for hours, without laptops, talking. On my birthday, we tried to take a 180-minute lunch. We lasted two hours. It was uncomfortable. It would have been easier if we had imbibed.
The center of town—Place du Gaulle, is too small for the Paris-bound cars and trucks, farmers moving tractors from meadow to meadow, and young people on motorcycles that pass through. There is no stop sign or traffic light. People take turns! We wondered at the patience of our bus driver. Sometimes it took him ten minutes to exit the intersection.
For us, coming from a sheep farm in Wales, the town commerce was delightful. This is a world-renown cheese region. At the fromagerie, brebis—sheep cheese— was our favorite. The poissonerie in town provided fresh seafood, but we had to check their hours frequently. They took long lunch breaks and sometimes closed early. There was also a boucherie for the carnivores and two boulangeries with a full array of tarts and sweets in bold colors, but most people came for the baguettes, which they bought twice a day, to be eaten at the next meal.
I loved to watch people pick up their long loaves and carry them home. I wished we could have joined them. It looked so convivial. Dave’s gluten intolerance meant we did our best to keep the bread eating to a minimum. France was the hardest place for such a dietary restriction. Bread is life here. They just created a scratch-and-sniff stamp celebrating the baguette.
Friday was market day. We made friends with the organic farm distributor offering vegetables and fruits from France and Spain, including deep green artichokes with purple and yellow fringes the size of my head. Chickens at the market were sold whole, with heads and tails still on— chopped off after purchase. The seafood stall changed from week to week. One day, there are giant crabs on sale. Always there were snails, conch, and fish with eyes that stare as you wait for your fillet. For Dave’s birthday, we bought salmon. For mine, conch. One woman sold yogurt, fresh cottage cheese, and pots of cream. I only discovered the difference by buying each one.
There were three holidays while we were in Cormeilles. The first: May 8th, 1945, when Charles De Gaulle announced to the French people that the war with Nazi Germany was over, was celebrated for five days, with a carnival for kids, marching bands, and parades. One night at 10 PM, the band began to play. We rushed out and were not the only ones in our pajamas. The street was blocked off, and the crowd swayed to the music. They released confetti, and the streets were lined with tiny bits of bright paper for the rest of our visit.
The second was the Ascensio, a day off for personal picnics, and a Monday to sleep in. An art exhibit at the Presbytery (from where the bell tolls), opened that weekend. Mother’s Day was May 26. I was amazed at the lack of commercialism. We saw family picnics and a group of seniors leaving a building with roses in their hands. That was it.
The town center was busy, but we only needed to walk a block or two in any direction to peaceful quiet. Nine roads spoke out of town in different directions, all heading uphill, some immediately and steeply, others eventually and slowly. A quarter mile, or a ½ a mile at most, and we’d come to the town sign with a slash through it letting us know we had left Cormeilles. We spent most of our time in Cormeilles walking these nine spokes. We found a table at the mountain top, our go-to for a picnic lunch. In the evening, we took one of the roads that took longer to rise, passing meadows with views of our little town.
A block outside of Cormeilles
US Midwestern Impressions of the French rural/urban divide.
Cormeilles is a rural town in a country with an acute urban-rural divide. Dairy farmers and wheat growers who make all those fresh baguettes with camembert have been protesting higher costs, lower prices, and cheap imports, Paris and EU-imposed green regulations, and changes in products that come without assistance to growers. They have turned town signs upside-down to register their frustration. Suicides are rising, life expectancies are lowering.
Upside-down sign. Farm protest.
I remembered the farm crisis in Minnesota in the 1980s when agri-business took advantage of the recession to buy up ailing small farms. The farmers’ struggle coincided with the P-9 meat packer strike in Austin MN, a town surrounded by farm communities. David and I were in Austin for strike support the day farmers surrounded the Hormel meatpacking plant in defiance of the Minnesota National Guard, to support the workers and impede scabs from entering the plant. Some of the leaders of the farmer organization Groundswell came to the Central America Resource Center where I worked, and a few even traveled to Nicaragua and Guatemala and found solidarity with peasant communities across the imperial divide.
In 1986, Minnesota Farmers brought their tractors to St Paul. Likewise, in January of 2024, French farmers brought their tractors to Paris and dumped manure on the streets. The takeover by large-scale agribusiness is later in France than in the US Midwest or Spain and Italy, from whence much cheap produce comes.
Those protesting today span the ideological spectrum. Some French farmers are in unions, and they occasionally link with urban workers. They are also—like rural groups in the US—susceptible to the protectionist, xenophobic, and anti-green rhetoric of the far right. There is a larger lesson for those of us who support green policies. We need clean green deals that invest in workers and farmers and plan for long-term sustainability—things capitalism is notoriously bad at.There is one organization of small farmers who are against free trade while building solidarity across borders. They fight the incursion of extreme xenophobic politics among farmers and push for government subsidies for green practices
Nickel Mining and Sovereignty in Kanacky (French New Caledonia).
I was thinking about the regressive side of capitalist green deals while reading about the eruption of protests in French New Caledonia, and the ongoing independence struggle of the Kanak people. At the heart of Macron’s shenanigans to deny the Kanak people sovereignty in this island off the coast of New Zealand was his determination to exploit the island’s nickel mines at all costs, to put France ahead in the global electric car race. This French green deal is a rotten steal, leading to violence against the Indigenous people of Kanaky.
France in Africa, Africa in France.
In the back of the historic theater in Cormeilles is a veterans club for “Veterans of North African Wars”— Morocco, Tunisia, and Algiers in the 1950s and 60s. These were the wars of a dying empire, leading to independence in Morocco and Tunisia in 1956, and Algiers in 1962. I wondered what impression these men and their families had of the history of French imperialism. At one time or another, France colonized over a third of the African continent. The processes of imperial intervention and decolonization continue. During our time in Cormeilles, Nigeria rejected French military bases on its territory, following the 2023 rejections by Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger.
We spent an hour in Evreux, the County seat of L‘Eure, We took the train to Evreux and from there, caught a bus to Vernon. Most people in the Evreux boulangerie, where we had tea, and all the people on the bus, were of African descent. I looked up the demographics of Evreux. I was unable to find race statistics. In France, 5% of the population is Black: Afro-Caribbean-French or African-French. Africans and Arabs are the focus of anti-immigrant campaigns of the extreme right. Vichy antisemitism of the 1940s and Le-Pen Islamophobia come from the same rotten root, intertwined with anti-Black and anti-Arab racism, and intertwined with the hypocrisy of French imperialism in Africa.
Impressions of Paris, two months before the 2024 Summer Olympics
In Paris, at the Assemblée Nationale, neon replicas of classic statues held the accouterments of Olympic sports. Transportation and sanitation workers were demanding fair compensation for the extra work required to make the games run smoothly. We walked the Seine, enjoying the wide promenade divorced from cars, and the glorious Louvre that stretched for blocks. There were even clean, open public bathrooms— a godsend for David, who was reacting to something he ate. Police sirens marred the peace of our walk. We wondered if all that law enforcement activity was normal. We saw a line of paddy wagons go by – over a dozen— filled with people dressed alike. Boulevards in Paris were created to aid the Gendarme in chasing rebelling workers. That tradition continues.
We wanted to walk to the Eiffel Tower. We walked till we could walk no farther, and we were not there yet. We stopped at the next outdoor café and ordered tea, renting a place to sit. At the end of the block, a crowd was gathered, and photographers were snapping. A couple in wedding outfits and sneakers walked back and forth while the cameras clicked. We each took turns getting up and walking to the end of the block to see what the fuss was all about. There, in full view, was the most famous French celebrity of all,
We had already walked ten miles, so we found the bus stop, but we took the wrong bus, and then a light rail to its final subway stop, through parts of the city that tourists don’t usually see—massive working-class apartment buildings on the outskirts, and the decidedly uncharming financial district.
Our Paris apartment was a closet. It had a bed that came down from the ceiling, filling the entire space. We were too tired to need anything else. Dave was sick and grateful for the bathroom. Unlike the people living in tents on the Seine, we had everything we needed.
Vernon and Giverny, the pays of French Impressionists.
Siene River, Vernon, France
Our place in Vernon was far enough from Monet’s garden to be affordable, but close enough that a long walk would get us there. The owners were artists. Compared to our tiny room, clumsily decorated in Cormeilles, the apartment was a spacious beauty. On the table were four miniature macaroons, almost too pretty to eat, so we consumed them slowly and mindfully..
We had a full day to walk the eight miles to Monet’s garden, and back. We noted the play of light on the water, the wildflowers changing color with each move of cloud and sun. Even cows in the meadow changed their spots with the movement of clouds. Half a mile from Monet’s home, the walking and biking paths diverged. We were in cool woods. The splendor of trees was a stark contrast when the path met the road and a complex of parking lots and stressed tourists— more Americans than we had encountered in eight months.
At the door to Monet’s Garden, we turned around, stopping only for lunch, to get our dose of English eavesdropping. A man from New Jersey was newly divorced. His parents had been married for 50 years. “Never once did I hear them argue.” The man loved the French espresso. His French friend said that he drinks ten cups a day. The New Jersey fellow looked up espresso machines and French coffee on Amazon, determined to begin a new life.
We left the café and turned away from Monet’s Garden. Immediately, we were alone, pausing to sniff and snap photos of every flower in the gardens and meadows along the way. It was a glorious day for the senses, with just a taste of crowds.
All day I was thinking, ignorantly, that impressionism was a lie, because all of the natural world before us looked like impressionist paintings. Then I read up. The impressionists were realists, striving to capture the outdoors as it appeared where color is ever-changing, where lines blur, where two shapes become one.
Post-Impressions of Paris.
I also read about the Post-impressionists. They combined what they saw and what was inside. Perhaps post-impressionists are the real truth-tellers. None of us sees the world the same way. We are all gathering impressions through a prism of our past. The goal is to be as honest about that as we can.
On our second trip to Paris, I recorded by post-impressions. Angry and mean is how city impressed me the second time around. Cops roamed the streets, sirens blaring. A street building cleaner, preparing for the Olympics, sprayed as we walked by lodging chemicals into our lungs. We walked with our packs from Saint Lazare to the Gare du Nord, where we had a hotel room. After depositing our luggage, we had energy to do one thing. I wanted to go see the Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration. France, like the United States, was becoming consumed by nativism, and I wanted to visit a place raising interference.
We got on the subway going the wrong direction. There, a Black man, waif-like and smelling strongly, pushed for a coin by pressing himself against people and coughing into their faces. He lingered over David. When we realized we had gone the wrong way, I did not have the energy to reverse course and try the subway again. I was angry at myself for directing us onto the wrong subway, and distressed by the man who shared his dis-ease with us. We went to a café, then walked back to our hotel. That night, looking out at the Paris skyline of endless apartments, I thought about this man, probably an immigrant with a story of how France treats people from outside its borders who don’t have bank accounts or white skin. How ironic that his presence interrupted our trip to a museum that probably would have sanitized our exposure to his experience.
My Paris impressions were not all angry and mean. We found the avenue honoring Dulcie September, an African National Congress member, who spent time as a political prisoner in South Africa. In France, she organized international support against apartheid. In 1988, she was assassinated in Paris. Two years later, South African apartheid fell. In 1998, people in Paris recognized her life with a park and an avenue. Standing on Dulcie September Avenue, I prayed that the day would come soon when Israeli apartheid falls, and Palestinian activists get their statues and plaques.
In the evening, an arc-en-ciel as big as Paris made sure my last post-impression of France was a prism of color.
