Caught between revolutionary bravado and Prussian bombs...Le Temps des Cerises cut short in the "contrée" of Courtomer
| Saturday, January 30, 2021
Dear Friend,
It’s a very cold morning at the Chateau de Courtomer. We were outside taking a look at the progress of the colza – once known in the English-speaking world as rape and now, more politely, canola. Planted in August, it is coming along nicely…and in a few months, it will be covered with yellow blossoms that ripen into oil-rich seeds. So goes the world of nature, from sunny beginnings to fruition, with a long cold stretch along the way.
I came into the library, ready to stretch my hands to the leaping flames in the chimney. The pale afternoon sun streamed through the tall windows of the library, coming to rest on a pile of historical society bulletins from the last century.
“Do you want to hear a song, Maman?” asked Maria, as she ran through a few chords on our grand piano in the salon. The door between the two rooms was ajar, letting the music waft through.
Our daughter is a chanteuse. It is a challenging occupation in these days of virus-imposed curfews. In France, we must be home by 6 o’clock at night. Maria nevertheless follows the discipline of her art, practicing every day and seeking a new audience out in the virtual world.
“Would you like to hear Le Temps des Cerises?” she suggested, giving me a sly look.
Ah, the “season of cherries”…How cheering to think of cherry blossoms and spring, as outside the wind rattles the dry leaves on the majestic oaks! Of course, that’s not the only reason Maria suggested this popular tune.
Le Temps des Cerises was a hit in the Belle Epoque of the 1860s. It is still part of the French national repertoire. As well as being a paean to love, Le Temps des Cerises served as a hymn to the memory of the revolutionary Paris Commune.
Le Temps des Cerises sings of the all-too-short season of the cherry harvest, the brief and beautiful moment in early summer when cherries cover the trees like dangling earrings. The Commune flourished, as briefly as a ripening cherry, during the disastrous war of 1870…a war and attempted revolution which spread into our part of Normandy 150 years ago and which came to an end on January 28, 1871 after a final battle in the contrée, the region, that surrounds Chateau de Courtomer.
The French seem to reserve tender feelings for revolution, as if it were a love affair snuffed out prematurely...or ripe cherries falling like “gouttes de sang,” as the song goes, drops of blood, to the ground.
“Well, Mother,” said Maria’s brother Henry, looking up from his book. “You can feel tenderly towards a failed revolution. It’s the ones that survive you have to watch out for.”
I picked up an old Bulletin from the stack…to dip into the final installment of Monsieur Henri Beaudouin’s eye-witness account of the War of 1870, as it swept over our département of the Orne. Not only were the Prussians marching towards us, said Beaudouin, but the new revolutionary government of France was in full flower.
“Et alors, the revolutionary government sent to the département of the Orne a new prefect. André Dubost was 26, a former journalist. He had fled the siege of Paris in a hot-air balloon, with the rest of the government…”
The new government's leaders escaped the siege of Paris in hot-air balloons, not without risk! Here a Prussian soldier takes aim.
Almost as soon as Dubost was sworn in, it became clear that Alençon, the capital city of the Orne, was in the path of two colliding armies. The French were attempting to get through to save Paris. The Prussians intended to rout them. Sentries were posted on all the major roads, including that running through the main street of our village of Courtomer. The excitable and enthusiastic prefect published a stirring proclamation:
“Citizens! A great man has said: adversity is our mother; prosperity merely our step-mother! The day is not far, I swear to you, when the mother will give birth! There is no right against that which is right! One day, the Prussians will find out!”
Dubost ordered the bridges surrounding Alencon to be destroyed once the Prussian army had entered the city. The staid population of Alençon exchanged horrified looks. This would entrap not only the Prussian army but the citizens of Alençon.
“We were as patriotic as anyone, and for the sake of honor, we were willing to make some efforts. But hand-to-hand street fighting with the Prussian army?”
The Battle of Le Mans, January 10-12, 1871, devastated the city. This defeat effectively ended French military resistance to the Prussians. The scene was a chilling reminder of the danger Alençon would face just a few days later.
“Mes amis!” declaimed the prefect, “France has her eyes upon you. The battle will be hard; but count not our enemies! Fear not death!...I want only men who have made their final will and testament! Let not the enemy penetrate our city except upon your piled-up cadavers!
"Yes, I tell you: give your lives; all, to the last man, if it must be so, and France will be saved!”
The city fathers replied: “Might we see the orders from the general?”
Non! The orders were secret.
The work of mining the bridges and building barricades went on. Another brave soul went to Dubost to protest.
“Fut-moi le camp!” screamed the enraged prefect. “Je n’en fut pas mal de la ville. Que périsse Alencon! Qu’il n’en reste pas pierre sur pierre !"
“Out of my sight! Let Alençon perish! Let it fall, stone from stone!
“All I want is resistance, resistance to the last man! Go! Go and obey!”
Dubost was born a century too late. The first French Revolution with its draconian punishments for disobedience was no more. On the other hand, as the city fathers knew well, the Prussians exacted severe reprisals on civilians who engaged in hostilities. They shuddered as they recalled the grim fate of neighboring Saint Calais, sacked, pillaged, and burned, citizens bayonetted and thrown into the flames by the Prussian army.
“How these hardened Teutons would laugh in their mustaches at our feeble blockades and blown-up bridges! Would they engage in hand-to-hand combat in the streets of Alencon? Certainly not. This was not the Middle Ages! The Prussians would just bombard the city from a safe distance.
“And when we Alençonnais found enough of our women and children dead, our houses in ruins, and the city on fire, the Prussians would only have to wait until we opened the city gates ourselves – to spare what little would remain of life and pierre sur pierre.”
Fortified by these sobering reflections, the mayor and his municipal council passed a resolution in the small hours of the night. Monsieur le Préfet must certainly have misinterpreted his instructions, they decided. No one need obey his orders.
Alençon is almost indefensible. It sits in a basin. The next morning, Prussian canons installed on the surrounding heights began to bombard the town.
The Prefect, astride a small horse that had been captured from the Prussians, rode up and down haranguing the troops, purportedly chasing deserters back to their duty with cracks of his riding whip, and showing off part of an artillery shell that he said had fallen at his feet.
“See! What is there to fear!” he exclaimed.
By 9 o’clock that night, Dubost had fled the captured city, much of it on fire, with the remains of a company of guerrillas, the franc-tireurs led by Colonel Lipowski. The battle of Alençon was over, and so were French hopes that their last army could relieve the siege of Paris.
The mayor and the municipal council stayed behind to negotiate with the conquerors. The enemy, 15,000 strong, occupied the city, installing itself in private homes, and sending the mayor a list of demands for shirts, stockings, underwear, boots and trousers, as well as 60,000 pounds of bread, 120,000 pounds of flour, 20,000 pounds of pork, 300 steers -- with penalties for non-compliance to be paid up front in cash. The intrepid mayor managed to reduce the requisitions to more reasonable proportions. A few days later, the news came that Paris had opened its gates to the Prussian army. On January 28, 1871, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was officially at an end.
The mayor of Alençon, Edouard Lecointre, is still remembered in Alençon as the hero of the hour during the occupation of the city by the Prussian army in 1871.
Alençon’s troubles were not quite over, however. No sooner had the Prussian army departed than the Prefect returned to his post. The Prussians reacted swiftly. As the first threatening bombs hit the old stones of Alençon, the Prefect fled, this time for good.
« Mais il est bien court, le temps des cerises…»
sang Maria on the old Pleyel piano, on this cold and sunny morning a century and a half later.
« It is all too short, the season of cherries…»
And thus ends our account of how the War of 1870…and the revolution of the Paris Commune…finally ended on the Alençon plain in the contrée of Chateau de Courtomer.
A bientôt and "au temps des cerises" at Chateau de Courtomer,
P.S. We are happily taking reservations for this season and for 2022 and 2023. Please don't hesitate to call or write, as Heather and Béatrice will be glad to answer your questions about rentals of the Chateau, the Farmhouse and the Orangerie. And we'll be looking forward to harvesting cherries in the walled garden this June!