La Mothe de Pineuilh

Hunting horn from Pineuilh, circa 1000 AD

In 975 AD, a French noble family began constructing a new home in the hills east of Bordeaux. They chose a site along a marshy tributary of the Monsabeau River. Digging a circular ditch about 30 meters (100 feet) across, they piled the mud on the interior to form a platform. There they lived for about 150 years. That a wealthy family chose to live on a little island in this marshy spot tells you all you need to know about the security situation at the time. This was close to the nadir of public order and government power in medieval France.

Ceramics from the site

A charter of 1077 records that some land in this vicinity was donated to the Abbey of Conques by a man called Falco de Barta, which may give us the name of this family.

Aerial view of the excavation

In 2002, the French government began building a new road through the valley. This road, as it happens, ran smack across the site, ultimately destroying the eastern third of the mound.

But before that happened, French archaeologists took a close look at this wonderful site. They discovered that around 1043 (these are all tree ring dates) the ditch was deepened and the height of the mound was greatly increased, forming a "motte" like those you may know from Norman England's motte and bailey castles. This had the effect of burying and thus preserving the earlier occupation of the site. A plan of the early phase is shown above. Notice the three bridges that cross the river to the mound, only one of which would have stood at any given time. The marshy ground around those bridges was full of artifacts, inlcuding objects of wood, horn, and leather preserved by the wet environment.

Detail of the mound area. Notice that there were only two buildings in this section of the mound: an outbuilding at the end of the bridge, possibly a guardhouse or stable, and a large timber hall. This noble French family lived mostly in one great wooden hall like Vikings would have.

Wooden bowl

Much less evidence survived of the later buildings, since they were built on top of the mound, which has eroded considerably since the site was abandoned. But the mound preserved the early period wonderfully, and the marshy ground preserved these wonderful artifacts.

One technical detail the archaeologists were able to work out was that the residents kept reusing wooden beams as they tore down some buildings and built new ones, so that any given structure of the later period might include beams from 975 was well as others that had been freshly cut.

Shoe

Chess pieces

Makes me wish I could teach early medieval history again, so I could share this with my students.

The French are Determined to Bankrupt Their Country over Pensions

With his government in shambles, Macron has agreed to postpone the raising of the retirement age from 62 to 64 until after the next presidential election. France's government debt is more than 3.4 trillion Euros, 113% of GDP, and they are running a huge deficit. The main item in the budget is what France calls "social protection," which is mainly for pensions, unemployment benefits, and subsidies to parents. Various calculations set this amount at between 23.3% and 30.6% of GDP. (Note: that's not a percentage of the budget, but a percentage of the whole economy.) Health care is also an issue, but the French have a pretty good system for controlling those costs. The real driver of the crisis is pensions.

Macron is the only politician in France who seems to care; his rivals on both the right and the left have promised huge increases in social protection spending. French pensions are also quite generous; there were claims last year that the wages of the median French retiree were higher than those of the median French worker.

How did we end up here? How did retirement at 62 become the hill on which millions of Frenchmen are prepared to die? Or at least to ruin their country?

I saw recently that a German commission found that the only way to keep their pension plan solvent is to gradually raise the retirement age to 73.

This seems to be one of the major unsolvable problems of our democratic age. Or really, the intersection of two problems: a refusal of people to pay taxes high enough to cover the benefits they think they deserve, and our ever lengthening lives.

Imaginary Architecture of the Revolutionary Age

Delightful essay by Hugh Aldersen-Williams on the unbuilt fantasies of French architecture in the revolutionary period, at Public Domain Review. Aldersen-Williams focuses on the work of Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, two dreamers who must have been very frustrated that the work they actually built fell so far short of what they imagined. Above, exterior and cross-section of Boullée’s famous design for Newton’s Cenotaph, 1784. This would have been enormous; those are mature trees growing on othe terraces.

Many architectus of the time were fascinated by spheres; here is Ledoux’s design for a public mausoleum, from his book L’architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des moeurs et de la législation, 1804.

Perspectival view of  Ledoux’s design for the forge at Chaux, France, from the same book. Pyramids!

Boullée’s design for a coliseum, ca. 1781–1793. For these architects, decoration was the past, and the future was bold geometry.

More Ledoux, design for a bridge held up by stone classical ships.

And Ledoux's home for a "charpentier de la graduation," an expression beyond either my French, or Google's; master carpenter?

Mass Horse Sacrifice from the Gallic Wars

Doing routine work in advance of highway construction, in a place where they had no reason to expect anything very interesting, French archaeologists made a remarkable discovery: a series of nine mass animal burial pits. Of the first three excavated, two contained horses and the third held two dogs. Radiocarbon dates came out between 100 BC and 100 AD; the investigators have connected the burials to Caesar's conquest of Gaul, which took place in 58 to 51 BC.

The first pit, which contained ten horses. All of the animals are mature males, and all were carefully laid on their right sides, facing south. The were laid in the grave in sequence, first one row and then the other, which can be worked out from the overlaps.

Work at the site was ongoing when INRAP posted about it, and they say 28 more horses have already been found.

The pits are in Villedieu-sur-Indre, central France. The site is not far from a fortified town (oppidum) where a battle took place in this period; Caesar didn't mention it, but Roman sling bullets and other signs of fighting were found when the town was excavated. (This sites is known as "Caesar's Camp," but that was a mistake by 19th-century archaeologists.)

What is this about? The archaeologists considered an epidemic, but then why would all the animals be mature males? War casualties seems unlikely, because none of the animals have broken legs or other obvious wounds. (Horses break their legs easily and it happens a lot when then are wounded or knocked down in combat.) So the investigators surmise that this was a sacrifice.

We know that the ancient Gauls went in for horse sacrifice. Other pits similar to these have been found before, although none on the same scale. Above is an example from Orcet uncovered in 2002, also dating to the first century BC.

Other examples have been found in the Gergovian Plain, where the Gauls defeated the Romans in a major cavalry battle in 52 BC.

And here is a fascinating find, also from 2002, a pit containing eight horses and eight men found near the fortified town of Gondole in Auvergne. You might think that these men and horses died together but, again, there were no obvious wounds on the horse skeletons. Perhaps the horses were sacrificed to accompany fallen warriors to the afterlife? Or were both  the horses and the men sacrifices?

I find it wonderful to imagine these events. Facing the threat of Roman conquest, the Gaulish chieftains solemnly bring forward their most valuable horses as offerings to the gods. They lead the beasts past thousands of warriors standing in their battle lines, weapons drawn, perhaps chanting, perhaps in profound silence. Then, to the wild music of drums and horns, the throats of the noble animals are slashed and they crumple to the ground one after another. As the warriors sing and shout they are laid in the ground, a treasure dedicated to the Gods in hopes that with their aid the Romans could be driven from the land.

African French

Interesting article in the NY Times by Elian Peltier about how West Africans are changing French. Right now about 60 percent of the people who speak French daily are in Africa, along with 80 percent of the school children studying in French. African French is fascinating partly because most Africans don't grow up speaking it at home. They learn it in school, sometimes as the only language of instruction and sometimes alongside the local tongue. They use it as adults because most West Africans now live in cities where people from many different ethnic groups mingle. In a city like Kinshasa or Abidjan, the people in one company or government office might speak three different African languages, so they use French with each other.

What has happened over the past twenty years is that French has become the language of the booming urban youth culture. While the populations of Europe and Asia are graying, that of Africa is getting more youthful, and the cities are exploding. But people don't speak the "correct" French they learned in school. Instead they use a free-wheeling new tongue full of African words and made-up expressions. The leaders in creating and spreading the new dialects include rappers, comedians, and gangsters, the demimonde of the new cities.

To speak only French, “c’est zogo” — “it’s uncool,” said Marla, whose real name is Mariam Dosso, combining a French word with Ivorian slang. But playing with words and languages, she said, is “choco,” an abbreviation for chocolate meaning “sweet” or “stylish.” . . .

In Abidjan this year, people began to call a boyfriend “mon pain” — French for “my bread.” Improvisations soon proliferated: “pain choco” is a cute boyfriend. A sugary bread, a sweet one. A bread just out of the oven is a hot partner. At a church in Abidjan earlier this year, the congregation burst out laughing, several worshipers told me, when the priest preached that people should share their bread with their brethren.

French is thriving in African cities despite what is in many ways a turn against the old colonial power. Rebel military leaders in Mali and Burkina Faso and have stripped French of its official status and are trying to use only African languages in their communications. Several prominent intellectuals have sworn off writing and speaking French. Polls show that a majority of young Africans harbor a lot of resentment against France.

But the momentum of French is too strong for governments to do much about it. It spreads via social media, over the radio, on television, but especially it spreads from person to person in the markets and nightclubs of the cities. Some people Peltier spoke to said they had to use French beause it was the only way to keep West Africa from being dominated by English-speaking Nigeria with its thriving film industry. 

Some of this has even spread back to France, as slang words that originated in African cities appear in Paris and even in French dictionaries.

The world moves on, whether the old grouches at L'Académie française like it or not.

The Transformation of Le Plessis-Robinson

Le Plessis-Robinson is a suburb of Paris with about 30,000 inhabitants. The town has become a sort of parable of a possible alliance between conservative politics, aesthetics, neotraditional architecture, and urban renewal to create a better form of modern life. All of this fits together; the backers of Le Plessis-Robinson see public housing in concrete apartment blocks as a dehumanizing, oppressive, immiserating, destructive of real community and local identity, etc., and see beautification using forms drawn from local tradition as the path to a more human future.

An old village, Plessis-Robinson began to change in the 1920s when a couple of large "garden city" condominium complexes were built (above). 

Then, after World War II, a communist local government oversaw the construction of a whole bunch of concrete apartment blocks. By the 1980s the place was in terrible shape: 80 percent of the residents lived in public housing, and street-level shops had a 70 percent vacancy rate. Those concrete towers, some less than 25 years old, were in dismal shape. Crime was high. 

Then in 1989 a new mayor was elected, a neo-conservative named Philippe Pemezec. Asked to describe his plan for the town in one word, he said "beauty;" one of his fist acts was to order the planting of flowers around the center of the town.

Soon afterward he brought in architect François Spoerry, the inventor, leader, and possibly at that point the sole member of a movement he called l'architecture douce; soft architecture. Spoerry created a master plan for the town. The plan emphasized the building of new parks and a new central city, le Couer de Ville, which would be constructed in a neotraditional style which would reference older buildings in the Isle de France. 

The Couer de Ville measures 12 hectares, or 30 acres, and has a density of 69 people per acre, higher than the concrete blocks it replaced.

This was all financed via 1) public/private partnerships with developers, and 2) by allowing tenants in public housing the opportunity to buy their apartments, which could then be converted into housing in the newer buildings.

The design of the new town center draws on tricks widely used in the new urbanism, including resurrecting an old stream that had largely gone into culverts and turning it into a public park.

One point emphasized by Spoerry was eliminating what he considered ambiguous spaces; the lawns around the older apartment blocks were not really public spaces but they weren't private either, which he thought led to their abuse, since nobody was responsible for them. In the new design there is much public space, in the form of parks, but the rest is resolutely private.

Not everyone was happy with all of this, especially the converstion of public housing to privately owned condominiums and the involvement of private developers. But in a showdown election held in 1995, Pemezec defeated a communist candidate by more than 2 to 1, and rebuilding stormed ahead. 

The demolition of a group of college buildings from the 1950s created space for another new neighborhood, called Bois de Vallees.

In answer to critics of this project one can say: the population of the town has grown – it was 21,000 and declining when Pemezec became mayor, but is now 30,000 and rising – and grown more dense. Twenty percent of the new housing is public. The number of jobs has risen by 50 percent. Crime is down. Not a single person was forced out of public housing to make it happen. I haven't found out anything about how the people who took the deals to become owners of their public flats made out, and I know there was a lot of grumbling in England about rising interest rates and so on. But if there have been problems they haven't showed up in the public mood, which is much more positive than before, or in politics, since Pemezec was re-elected twice more by landslides.

And whatever you think of architecture like this (the cultural center), I think it beats more concrete blocks. In fact Plessis-Robinson has become a tourist center of sorts, people traveling hundreds of miles just to see this town's rebirth.

To me the political angle is actually the least interesting. I wrote here last summer about a new urban project in England that was entirely socialist, and I also thought that was great. To me what matters is: paying attention to what people want, which is overwhelmingly not concrete boxes; caring about beauty as a value it itself; being pragmatic about funding and planning; and thinking in the long term. We can make our world better if we put our minds to it, and we will reap the benefits of that in many ways.

Short article 1, short article 2, 13-minute video.

Today's Place to Daydream about: Saint-Malo

Saint-Malo is an ancient fortified town that sits on a rocky promontory at the mouth of the Rance River, where Britanny meets Normandy. There was a Gallic town here, known as the Romans as Reginca or Aletum, but most sources say that town was inland on a more level site. 

The first documented occupation of the modern town's site was a Roman fort, part of the coastal defenses known as the "Saxon Shore." The Notitia Dignitatum of circa 400 AD says the fort was under the command of the dux of the Tractus Armoricanus and Nervicanus, that is, the Shores of Brittany and Normandy.

In the later 400s much of northern Gaul rebelled against Roman authority, an event we call the revolt of the Bagaudae or Bacaudae. This was a recurring phenomena in Gaul, first noted in 286 AD; the word seems to mean "fighter" in some Gallic dialect. The Bagaudae seem mostly to have been peasants who were sick of paying taxes to governments that were not defending them very well, joined by bandits and other riffraff. Anyway by the mid 400s we hear that the Bagaudae controlled large areas of northern Gaul, including much of Britanny. Local historians in Saint-Malo maintain that their tradition of piratical, anti-authority stubbornness began in this period, and when Saint-Malo declared its independence from France in 1590 one of their spokesmen claimed that they were continuing the tradition of the Bagaudae.

One thing we know certainly happened in the later fifth and sixth centuries was the migration of large numbers of Britons to Britanny, enough that they changed the name of the region and imposed their language across much of it. I think we have to imagine, though, that this domination was never complete, and that there were always many speakers of late Latin/early French in Britanny. "Pure" Breton culture is a modern myth.

One of the themes of the chaotic period of the empire's collapse was that many people moved from convenient locations to better defended hilltops or islands (e.g., Venice). This seems to have happend at Saint-Malo, with the main settlement moving away from the convenient but exposed location along the riverbank to the rocky promontory. This town was presumably mostly Breton, since it took its name from a saint who had emigrated from Wales.

The town existed in some form or another through the Merovingian and Carolingian periods, but I haven't been able to learn much about it. In 1144 the local bishop, sick of getting repeatedly chased out of his house during the never-ending fighting between the Dukes of Normandy and Britanny and the King of France, moved from the mainland out to the rock of Saint-Malo. When he arrived he declared his new home a sanctuary city – yes, that is an ancient thing – that would not extradite criminals to their old homes. 

This, maintains local tradition, was how Saint-Malo got started as a center of piracy. But so far as I can understand this, based on very limited online sources, the French kings of that period raised their navy in the same way as the English. That is, they allowed certain towns the right to attack the king's enemies and extract tolls from passing vessels in return for supplying a certain number of ships when the king needed them. (In England these towns were called the Cinque Ports.) Saint-Malo was thus a center of what we would call privateering, or licensed piracy, and it is certainly true that privateering had a habit of shading over into the illegal version. These days we love pirates, and Saint-Malo brands itself the Corsair City.

I cannot find any authoritiative statement on when the walls of Saint-Malo were built, but tourist sites say vague things about the 12th century. Perhaps at the behest of their newly resident bishop? The wall was certainly rebuilt after a major fire in 1661, and then enlarged and modernized in the early 1700s. The town needed its defenses, too, since English sailors made a point of attacking it every time conflict between England and France gave them an excuse.

The cathedral was also built after the bishop's arrival, in a mix of Romanesque and Gothic styles. 

Given the narrow streets and tall houses of the city, it is hard to get a good view of the cathedral, but here is what I can find.

Lovely Gothic sculpture of the virgin.

The city's era of wealth began with the rise of Atlantic trade. The great merchant families of the town traced their lineages to the period, when ships sailed to Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. This means, of course, that Saint-Malo was much involved in the slave trade, and the trade in slave-grown sugar. But also the trade with Canada; Jacques Cartier was born there. (The undated map above was probably drawn in the early 1700s.)

In the 1500s the cities of Atlantic France went strongly Protestant, Saint-Malo among them. The Wars of Religion, I think, were the actual background to the city declaring itself independent in 1590, given that the Duke of Britanny was a staunch Catholic. The city certainly rejoined France in 1594 when the formerly Protestant Henry IV became king and issued the Edict of Nantes, guaranteeing the right of Protestants to worship freely. The source I found did not say anything about this, but in the 19th century some French historians speculated that the Bagaudae revolt of 286 was a Christian revolt, which makes me wonder if the antiquary who brought up the Bagaudae in the context of the 1590 Protestant secession already had that idea. It isn't true – about 286, I mean – but sometimes that doesn't matter.

Saint-Malo remained prosperous through the 17th and 18th centuries; I believe many standing buildings were constructed in the 1700s. In the 19th century the city began to shift to its current role as a focus of tourism.

Then came World War II. Saint-Malo was of course occupied by the Germans, and then heavily fortified as part of their Atlantic Wall. The stone walls of the citadel were reinforced with concrete, the beaches mined and covered with obstacles. In early August, 1944, the Allies finally broke out of their Normandy beachhead, in particular smashing German defenses to the south, opening the way for a rapid armored thrust around the left flake of the German 7th Army, toward Paris. While the main American force drove east, the 8th Corps turned west to occupy Brittany. Saint-Malo was right in their path. 

On August 5, the Americans cut off the city and called on its defenders to surrender. The German commander, Colonel Andreas von Aulock, responded that he "would defend St. Malo to the last man even if the last man had to be himself". The Americans shrugged, brought up their artillery, called in a few hundred heavy bombers, and proceded to give Colonel von Aulock what he asked for. 

In the course of the assault, the old walled city was "almost completely destroyed." Most accounts say the damage was done by Americans shells and bombs, but among the strange things one can find on the Internet is this account of the battle by a very Catholic, very nationalistic Frenchman, who says most of the damage was done by Germans firing incendiary shells, I suppose just out of malice.

At any event, by the time the Germans surrendered on August 17, the city was wrecked.

In 1948, the French government decided that Saint-Malo would be rebuilt as close to its pre-war form as could be managed. (Note the numbered stones above, for dismantling and reconstruction.) I have not been able to find out anything about this decision. It seems like something De Gaulle would have been into, but all the sources I have found say that the inhabitants insisted on this approach:

The Malouis did not wish to feel lost in their new city; they wanted the new city to resemble the old as much as possible. The layout of streets, with their angles and their turns, should be conserved, since they protected against winds; above all, Saint-Malo should not become a car park.

Some sources say the reconstruction was completed by 1960, but on the other hand the cathedral spire was not rebuilt until 1972.

The stained glass in the cathedral was all lost, but was replaced with lovely works by French artisans.

The careful rebuilding seems to have been a good investment, since the city regained its status as a tourist mecca and still maintains it, providing the money to keep this splendid relic of the mercantile age standing on its proud Atlantic rock.