The Night of the Fourth of July

Looking up at the fireworks and the night sky, our friends explain the American Revolution

Wednesday, July 6, 2022

Short summer nights at Chateau de Courtomer, transats on the lawn

Chère amie, cher ami,

On the wide, soft expanse of the lawn, under the pale slipper of the waxing moon and the newly risen stars, the children run back and forth. 
 
Their slight figures are barely visible in the weak moonlight; they swing sparklers in hissing wheels and sputtering curves, illuminating a bare arm or the smooth skin of a face, eyes as wide as saucers, catching an upturned smile like that of a Greek mask. The oldest boy shouts, his voice breaking every now and then. He lopes behind the little ones, half protector, half werewolf. They scamper ahead with whirring little legs, their shrill cries of happy terror carrying through the cool night air.
 
Sitting in transats at the edge of the lawn, we are spectators at a nocturnal theatre. The jagged silhouette of trees that separate the precincts of the parc from the fields of wheat is the backdrop. And like bunched curtains, the vague and feathery shapes of les bosquets and the allée close off the scene on either side.
 
It's way past bedtimes. But the sun only set a few minutes after 10 o’clock. And this is Independence Day, the Fourth of July. We waited until dark to light our collection of feux d’artifice, our Catherine wheels and fountains, bombesand chandelles. And now we’ve promised the children half an hour more…and more.
 
Moving from the United States to France with young children, we held on to our American traditions as best we could. Thanksgiving had to be adjusted to school nights. It moved to the following Sunday. Hallowe’en fell away, replaced by La Toussaint. The familiar school holidays melded into traditional French long weekends, le pont de l’Ascension, les lundis de Pentecôte and Pâques, the 8 mai and the 11 novembre.
 
But the Fourth of July was, mostly, inviolate. If school isn’t completely over, then Independence Day falls at the end of the academic year, when les examens are done, les profs give no homework, and les élèves stare dreamily out the window. 
 
And unlike Thanksgiving, which the French view as quaint, and Hallowe’en, whose pagan origins many view askance, our Independence Day generates enthusiasm.  Even among those who refuse to celebrate Bastille Day, the beginning of the end of the Ancien Régime on July 14, 1789, our Declaration of Independence touches a chord.
 
There is a role for everyone. 
 
A déconstructioniste revels in the contradictions of the Founding Documents, peeling away the idealistic statements to reveal the oppressive patriarchy. The ardent gauchiste thrills to our Revolution as an example of violent, transformative change. 

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,"  our own Jefferson famously wrote in a letter to a friend. To be fair, Jefferson added that the proper remedy was to “set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them.”
 
Less excitable souls are eager to demonstrate the roots of our Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and our very Constitution in the writings of the great philosophes of the Age des Lumières: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire. To the positivistes, our Revolution proves that a republic founded on principles of law, liberty and democratic representation can survive and prosper.
 
And la Vielle France, that nostalgic alliance of the old noblesse and the grande bourgeoisie, remembers General de Lafayette and his cortège of aristocratic young officers. They recall the decisive role of the French command at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. They know that Louis XVI, the misunderstood but enlightened monarch, funded the American Revolution. They also remind us that Louis’s largesse resulted in the fiscal crisis that unexpectedly brought down a monarchy that had endured for 1,500 years.

It is a strange irony that many of those who so gallantly rallied to the cause of the young republic in America would later be guillotined as enemies of the revolutionary cause in France.

An American postage stamp celebrates our French allies. George Washington is flanked by the Admiral de Grasse to the right, and Rochambeau to the left.

“My ancestor saved you from the British,” said one of our friends to my cousin, as he poured him a glass of wine. He meant it as a conversational gambit. François-Joseph is a descendant of Admiral de Grasse, who won the Battle of the Chesapeake against the British navy. The Admiral’s children fled the French Revolution to the Caribbean, then the Haitian Revolution to South Carolina, before returning to France after Napoleon came to power.
 
“Insufferable!” exclaimed my cousin to me later. “I informed him that our New York regiments won the Battle of Saratoga, which made it easy for the French. But I’m not sure he understood.”
 
I’m not sure François-Joseph did, either. The details of the American Revolution are undoubtedly of less interest to him than his membership in the Order of the Cincinnati, founded to honor Revolutionary War officers and their descendants. Like the Daughters of the American Revolution, which has a French chapter, the organization enjoys profound respect in France. 
 
“Ancestor worship!” snapped our friend James, visiting from the United States. Perhaps he was suffering from jet lag.
 
Ranehault, our neighbor, cocked her head.
 
“La civilisation!” she countered. “The memory of les défunts is a factor, essential, in social cohesion. Les ethnologues have shown this,” she added, firmly, with characteristic confidence in qualified experts. “Visit le quai Branly.”
 
The Musée du Quai Branly in Paris displays arts premiers, or what used to be called “les Arts primitifs.” It is part of the Louvre Museum in Paris. It is filled with artifacts from Africa, Oceania, Asia and the Americas that were used in rituals and as monuments to commemorate, placate, and harness the power of the departed.
 
“Revering the departed connects the living to the idées fondatrices, the foundational myth, that girds up the loins of society,” nodded our friend Virginie, visiting from Paris. 
 
“Undergirds, do you mean to say,” put in my cousin, looking uncomfortable. “Respect for history undergirds the founding ideals of the nation.”
 
“La vie sexuelle and the life of the mind, the carnal and the ideal, all entwine,” responded Virginie. She tossed back her long black hair and straightened her spectacles. She seemed eager to pursue the subject au fond. Virginie is a Lacannian psychoanalyst, a branch of psychology that in France has soared beyond dry clinical analysis.
 
“Let us put quotation marks around the word “revolution”,” said Monsieur, bringing the conversation back to the cerebral plane.

“Revolution is bloody. It is a radical transformation. But what we call the American Revolution is a mere episode in a long tradition of English jurisprudence, which upholds the private individual against arbitrary royal authority. 
 
“It is simply a continuation of England’s Magna Carta of 1215. The full name, you will recall, is Magna Carta Libertatum, which is Latin for “Great Charter of Freedoms.” 
 
“The Magna Carta was forced upon King John by the Norman barons of England,” he added with a modest downward glance. His own illustrious Norman ancestor, the comte de Tanquerville, left with William the Conqueror to become an English chancellor in 1067. 
 
“The barons also had a war to prove their point. That was the Baron’s War of 1215 to 1217, as you will recall.”
 
But the anglophile view, even with Norman undertones, is rare in our circles in France.
 
“Fichtre!” exclaimed our friends in a chorus. 
 
If they agree on little else, it is on the responsibility of les Américans for the Révolution française.
 
Ah well! 
 
Our own George Washington welcomed the progress of revolution in France with hope and a certain prescient trepidation:
 
“The revolution which has been effected in France is of so wonderful a nature that the mind can hardly recognise the fact. If it ends as our last accounts to August 1st predict, that nation will be the most powerful and happy in Europe.

"But I fear, though it has gone triumphantly through the first paroxysm, it is not the last it has to encounter before matters are finally settled. In a word, the revolution is of too great a magnitude to be effected in so short a space, and with the loss of so little blood.
…
"Great temperance, firmness, and foresight are necessary. To forbear running from one extreme to another is no easy matter, and should this be the case… rocks and shelves, not visible at present, may wreck the vessel and give a higher-toned despotism than the one which existed before."

George Washington.
New York
October 13, 1789
 
One of the children came limping over to his mother, sobbing. He had fallen down and his bruised knee required a maternal kiss.

“I didn’t push him!” Dorothée defended herself vigorously. “He was trying to take my sparkler!”

Wisely recognising that the facts will never be known, their mother opted for pacification.

“Venons, les enfants” she said, picking up little Charlie. “Time for bed.”

Sleepily, they trundled up the steps up the château. 

We stayed outside in companionable silence, meditating on revolution and the summer stars.

                 A bientôt au Chateau,

Elisabeth

"Vue d'un superbe feux d'artifice à Vienne" Made in France in the 18th century, this "vue d'optique" is made on transparent paper, to be illuminated from behind by a lantern. From the collection of Princeton University.

As always, Heather and Beatrice (info@chateaudecourtomer.com and +33 (0) 6 49 12 87 98) will be happy to help you reserve your holiday or special gathering at the Farmhouse or the Chateau. We still have a few openings for this year and are taking bookings through 2024. Please feel free to call or write us.