Hollande Causes an Upset

It appears Président Hollande has grand plans for merging regions, such as Alsace with Lorraine (and Champagne-Ardennes too perhaps).

'Alsace has nothing in common with Lorraine!' My French husband Maxime cried when he heard. 'Hollande is trying to destroy our culture!'

This is all salt in a longstanding wound for Maxime: the rest of France seems not to understand Alsace very well, from what he says, and nothing is apt to drive him out of his tree so much as when French politicians lump Alsace together with Lorraine. 

'It's because the politicians don't know their history. They think the Germans occupied Alsace-Lorraine!' Maxime will shout (referring to the German occupation of 1870-1914). 'It was Alsace-Moselle that was occupied, not Lorraine!'

The first time Maxime shouted this, I rather cluelessly said, 'Isn’t Moselle in Germany?'

(And he still married me despite this!)

'Moselle is a département of Lorraine. But the rest of the Lorraine was not occupied,’ he explained.

To be honest, (which I luckily wasn’t), as an Australian, I was still coming to terms with the fact that Lorraine was a place and not just a quiche.You would think that the Moselle was a purely French river from the way Maxime spoke of it. I subsequently rushed to Wikipedia just to check that The Moselle River flows into Germany too. It does, of course, and many fine Rieslings are made there, but for the sake of domestic harmony we try not to mention this.

And what is worse about this whole merging of regions is that Maxime suspects Hollande of wanting to copy the Germans. Like many Alsatians, Maxime is rather sensitive about the German thing: the history of the Alsace is perhaps best summed up in the joke by the Alsatian cartoonist Tomi Ungerer:

Q. Why is Alsace like a toilet?

          

A. It’s always occupied.

The history of the region is often sad. Alsace was decimated during the thirty years war, and in 1870, it was the Prussians’ turn to invade. They didn’t quite see themselves as invading though. On entering Alsace, they assumed they would be welcomed as liberators by their 'German' brothers. The Alsatians unfortunately didn’t share this point of view:  the people of Alsace may not have been French for long (since Louis XIV or Napoleon’s time depending on the town), but they weren’t German either. They were Alsatian, having previously been largely independent as part of the loosely bound hotch potch that was the Holy Roman Empire. The Germans kept at it and forbade the speaking of French, and forced the Alsatians to fight as Germans in the wars. These soldiers were called the ‘malgré nous’, fighting the Allies ‘despite ourselves’, since it was made clear to them that their family back home would suffer if they did not comply.

So you can imagine how incensed Maxime gets when the French, even worse than lumping Alsace in with Lorraine, lump them in with Germany! 

The French misunderstanding of Alsace was illustrated to me by a Vietnamese lady we met when we were living in France, who told us how she’d come to Paris as a refugee. Trouble was, she didn’t warm to Paris. Being from the country, she wanted to seek out a more pastoral corner of France, and putting her finger randomly on a map of France, she hit Colmar, capital of Southern Alsace.

'Oh la la!'  the Parisians had cried, 'you can’t go there! They don’t speak French!'

'That’s OK,' she replied, 'neither do I!'

                                                                              

A couple of weeks later, she got off the train to find she had debunked a Parisian myth - the Alsatians all addressed her in French. Oops. 

Perhaps it's best not to ask Hollande what language he thinks they speak in Alsace while Maxime is in earshot - just in case!