June 6 and the Weeping Frenchman

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"The Weeping Frenchman” photograph was supposed to have been taken near Marseilles harbor, in 1940, as the French regimental flags, retrieved months earlier from the rout of a trampled Maginot Line, were paraded one last time through the streets of southern France, before defeated French forces retreated to Africa.

I know this photograph thanks to our youngest daughter; a budding historian who came home from school in tears a few years back. She was still a history undergrad in those days. A history professor had projected an image of L'homme qui pleure on a screen during class, trying to elicit student commentary on World War II. In order to “guide” the conversation (which turned out to be not a conversation to teach, but a smug demagogic post-colonialist preach, a festival of snickering, mockery, and France-bashing), the professor prefaced with “that’ll teach you crybaby! now you know what it means to be occupied and colonized.” Really, now! That is how we guide a conversation? teach? treat without the “arrogance of the present” events from times past? Is it okay for a historian to “love and respect” her areas of interest? or is denigration of one’s subject matter a sine qua non of the “balanced” historian’s toolkit? “It was hurtful,” kept repeating our daughter at home. She has French grandparents, aunts and uncles, and other family members and friends many of whom as children lived and died during that war. Some, although not crybabies, still to this day remember and cry retelling recollections of that war. So, yeah, it was hurtful, and insensitive, and imbecilic. It was mostly oozing of a seething self-righteous pedantic arrogance that rarely an undergrad would dare respond to or challenge. Our daughter didn't, although today she would have.

Well, today is June 6, 2024, and many still have not learned “what it means to be occupied and colonized,” because many of the righteous anti-colonialists are still too smug to realize they are themselves colonizers, offspring and descendants of colonizers, refusing to come to terms with their own ancestors’ colonialist past, oblivious to the fact that the abhorred institution of colonialism did not begin with France and the West, but that it did in fact end with France and the West—the very inventors of postmodernism, emancipation, abolitionism, human rights, anti-colonialism, and the vaunted post-colonial studies; a noble academic discipline of which our daughter’s elegant professor must have been a votary, dismissive of the fact that racism, slavery, religious supremacism, and colonialism are all institutions that were perfected in the Middle East, before traveling West, meeting their demise in the West, even as they continue to thrive to this day in the East.

But war is grim, and never an appropriate trigger for professorial schadenfreude. All war grim. June 6, 1944 was especially grim. For four years prior, France was “assaulted, shattered, martyred…” by war. But on August 25, 1944, France “was liberated,” to paraphrase Charles de Gaulle’s famous “Paris outragé, Paris brisé, Paris martyrisé, mais Paris libéré.” June 6 shall remain a reminder of the horror that is war; the horror of watching American boys getting mowed down on Normandy’s beaches; watching fearless Polish teenagers climbing the cliffs of Falaise under merciless Widerstandsnesters, engaging German soldiers with broken beer bottles as rifles and bayonets ran out or failed.

War is likewise grim for the toll it takes on civilian populations, because even on killing fields far removed from civilian conglomerations, civilians are always the main casualty. From 6 June to 19 August 1944, during the battle of Normandy, the beautiful towns of Lisieux, Argentan, Pont-l’Evêque, Caen lay in ruins. Over 20,000 French civilians were killed. Twenty thousand civilians in eight weeks’ time. Twenty thousand civilians—“crybabies” to the righteous post-colonialists—that few may care or dare mention, memorialize, or remember. You may call 20,000 dead civilians “genocide” in any other context, because it buys the virtue-signaling righteous indignant a good conscience. But 20,000 dead French civilians during the battle of Normandy are "crybabies." Yet lest we forget, war is grim, and ridding humanity of the totalitarian virus that keeps mutating, always comes with a high price tag. Weeping in times of war is not being a “crybaby.” It is being a "decent human being."

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