Today is Fête de la Victoire 1945. Which basically means that it is a national holiday celebrating the end of World War II.

We technically have this holiday in the US too, but nobody knows about it and no one cares, which is really too bad. I think that is another part of the acultural mentality of America– or perhaps the overcultured mentality of France. It’s odd, though, that France has SO MUCH history and still puts such an emphasis on this holiday, and we (the US) as a country have a comparatively short list of important events, but we don’t focus on this one at all. I don’t know if they celebrate this holiday in England the way they do here; I am quite sure they don’t in Germany or Italy, but in France it’s huge. We have Memorial Day, I suppose that’s the closest we come in the US to this kind of thing, but I didn’t know what Memorial Day was in memory OF until, oh, high school. And even then, no one does anything about it– it’s just a day for sales. Here, everything closes for the Fête de Victoire 1945, and even the 11-year-old I tutor knows what it commemorates. If nothing else, this says it all: in the très Catholic nation that is France (way over 90% of the population here claims Catholicism), the Fête de Victoire overrides whatever saint’s day is today. On every calendar in France, the saint of each day is written– in Medieval times there were feasts for the important ones, now it’s just nice to know the day of the person you were named for. But on May 8, the calendar has no saint, just the celebration of victory.

I took a 20th century French history class last semester, and one of the biggest things we talked about through it all was the fact that France, during World War II, was not so much a poor captive nation as it was a nation with a government that thought the Germans were going to win the war and thus decided to side with them while the getting was good, in hopes that after the war they would be considered part of the winning team. That was the oddest part about the course– I’ve taken European history classes in the US and they are always fairly neutral, or at least told from the point of view of whoever was under the oppressor’s thumb. The class here, though, was all about how the French had failed, over and over– failed at the Dreyfus affair, failed at World War I, and most especially failed with regard to Vichy France. In the US, World War II history classes unfailingly teach that the French were this noble people who were just unfortunate enough to have to be neighbors with Germany, and thus got stuck getting invaded and conquered after having fought the good fight. Here they taught us that the French government (headed at the time by Pétain, the DeGaulle of World War I who lost all credibility after his involvement in World War II) saw that Germany was winning, that America refused to be involved, and that Britain couldn’t help, decided that Germany, thus, would win, and that if they switched sides and gave in to Germany, they would be considered among the winners at the end of the war. (The class I took even excused the US for not being involved: "they had to take care of the economic crisis in their own country.") The French people, for the most part, were still thoroughly opposed to the whole idea of complying with the Germans, but it’s a subtly important distinction between choosing surrender and being conquered.

Anyway, Madame always talks about how during the Occupation (for which she was slightly younger than me), the German soldiers were a subject of complete terror. They would be on every corner, in the Metro stations, and even after they had been there for years of Occupation, Madame never became used to them, never ceased to be afraid of them. They never really did anything bad, she says, but they always had their guns and sometimes they would hoot and catcall or just make general nuisances of themselves, stopping the eighteen-year-old Madame on her way to buy groceries because, obviously, she was extremely suspicious.
But when the Americans arrived (and on this one I feel for the British– the Americans weren’t the ONLY ones that liberated France, but for some reason no one, even the French, remembers anyone else), they were so friendly– Madame has said before how much better behaved they were than the German soldiers (pretty impressive, considering once they made it here an awful lot of them had been marching for weeks), how polite, and how friendly. After the Liberation, there was still a curfew for awhile, just so things didn’t turn to anarchy in the streets, I guess, but she always says that even with regard to that, the Americans were always all about helping the French, while the Germans were only concerned with getting people in trouble.
I’ve been told about American GI’s who walked through Paris immediately after the Liberation throwing candy and bubble gum to the kids on the street who had never had it before. And though those things are so small, instances like that, perhaps, are what makes the old people love us. When I asked Madame if there would be any special celebration for today’s holiday, she said that "even if there were, my dear, nothing could compare to that wonderful day in 1945."

It’s just like out of a movie, her recollections of the time: she had never had Coca-cola until after the war, but one day she walked past an American soldier who was just cracking open a glass bottle of Coke, and, seeing her curious look, he told her what it was and gave her the bottle. According to her, she had also never had a cigarette (in a country where the butter ration by the end of the war was 25 grams a month, tobacco was a luxury no one had. 25 grams, by the way, is about the size of a large walnut.), but the young American soldiers ("who were all so handsome, you know!") would share theirs willingly. Madame doesn’t smoke now, but probably, like everyone else back in the day, she did then. I don’t really know.

"What was it like, having to use ration cards?" I asked, the whole concept completely boggling my mind.
"Oh, it was a terrible hassle– my father used to have to wait in line for hours, and by the time he got to the front of the line they’d be out of sugar and flour and meat, so what were we supposed to do?"
I shook my head in awe, and she continued: "You know, I was very young then... but I remember all I wanted from 1941 onward was just a banana. I thought I would die without ever tasting another banana in all my life; I longed for the day the rations would be over and I would just be able to eat a piece of fruit, but especially a banana..." she trailed off.

"It’s funny," she added a moment later, "how you can get so focused on one thing, you know? We hardly had any meat, we only had bread and no butter, and no cheese ever. Our whole diet was just crazy, and all I could think of was a banana."

And I thought, "how lucky am I that the closest thing I can relate to this is my madly desperate search for a can of Dr. Pepper on the continent of Europe?"

Madame’s parents had always been terribly strict– she was the baby of the family, so when she would go out with French friends, her parents always said, "What boys will be going? Who are his parents? Is he a good boy?" and things like that, but if she was going out with the Americans, her parents "practically pushed me out the door," never caring who the boy was because if he was American, he had to be good.

The day of the Liberation, she says, was an unbelievable party– the only thing I can think of to liken it to would be the turn of the Millenium in Times Square. The Champs Elysees here is the biggest road in Paris, and it was packed so full of people that no one could move. Madame says the Germans were still trying to enforce the curfew, still trying to convince everyone that the onset of the Americans was a myth, but no one listened anymore. You know the picture of the American sailor kissing the girl in the street in New York that became so famous in the US? Apparently the streets here were like that– Madame said "everyone was hugging and kissing everyone else, it didn’t matter who they were, and we were all crying and screaming and waving American flags and the tricolor, everyone singing the Marseillaise and so, so excited to have our home back."

How cool is that? I love this place with its sense of history and the value it places on things like that...
~B