The eyes of the politicians are upon you
Amidst ancient Celts and the upcoming presidential election in France
When you take the train to Alsace from the French station in Basel, the landscape becomes broader as you leave the city. It’s as if wide arms are opening to embrace you. The hills and mountains of Switzerland that had been crushing your nose are now safely at a distance. You’re in a big country, again. The sky has lift and volume and loft, extending from the zenith above to the horizon all around. The Vosges Mountains are to your left, looming dreamily through the mist. They have a faint outline of grandeur. You feel like you could outstretch your hand to touch them. To the right—in another country, Germany—other peaks emerge—the Black Forest. The Rhine Valley is so wide that you can imagine that the sea is just beyond your field of vision, as if you were taking a train up the California coast.
Freshly ploughed fields, vineyards waiting to blossom, an azure line of sight—you feel well with all this. To an outsider it may be dull, unexciting. Everywhere you go in Alsace you encounter wholesomeness and sauerkraut, creamy soups and pots of stew, mellow wines and rich beers. If that is not your agenda, Alsace may not be the right place for you. I like it here.
What I love most of all about traveling by train in France—I know this will sound strange, but I can hear this voice now in my head—a recorded female voice—a breathy, airy voice—that precedes every announcement on the public-address system at every station in France, a voice singing “ba da DAH da” in a little one-bar ditty that is reminiscent of the first notes of an Enya song. I love that voice. After that melody, the woman gives the train announcement. I don’t care if she says my train is fifteen minutes late, or thirty minutes late, or even canceled, I will always love that voice. Upon arrival in Mulhouse, I sat in the station café to enjoy a coffee and to listen to her melody and her announcements about trains traveling near and far.
A Celtic landscape
But I didn’t linger too long. The sun beckoned on this bright winter morning. It took a few minutes to walk up the hill behind Mulhouse station. Once at the top of the hill (about a fifteen-minute walk), you are already out of town and in the woods. In fact, you are in Celtic country.
The Germanic people who encountered the Gauls (the Celts) said that they were giants. On this morning, I was headed for a tumulus, better said in English: a burial mound. In the local language of Alsace, the tumulus that I was about to visit is called Hünenhubel, or hill of the giants. This tumulus is in the communal forest of the village of Rixheim at an elevation of 350 meters. It is located along the ancient Roman military road that went from Bruebach to Rixheim and then on down to Ottmarsheim and the flatlands of the river valley to join the great Roman road of the Rhine.
This tumulus, with a diameter of thirty meters and a height of four meters, was officially discovered in 1858, though no doubt the local people knew of it for centuries, millennia even. “Discovered” means the burial mound was officially excavated. What they found in the first tomb was the skeleton of a warrior (appropriately large enough to warrant the “giant” moniker) accompanied by a broken iron sword, a large urn containing ashes and a small bowl filled with fat.
The second tomb contained a woman (also of large stature, apparently) adorned with a bronze pendant earring, two rings on the handles, the remains of a bronze belt and two bronze pins. She was accompanied by an urn and a micro-vase. The items that were excavated at the tumulus are on display at the Historical Museum of Mulhouse.
The entire Alsace region, along with nearby Germany and Switzerland, are full of Celtic sites, some of them built on what are called in German Kraftorte, or energy centers. The Celts had a good sense of where to build their towns and where to bury their dead.
A view of the Alps
I had a good sense, too, to continue my walk to take advantage of the sun. A ten-minute ramble through the beech forest brought me to a clearing that looked out not only across farmland, but much farther as well, out to the Jura Mountains, and beyond that, the Alps. Not surprisingly, this location was called on my map Vue des Alpes. There they were, one hundred and fifty miles away, the peaks of the mighty Alps.
After getting an eyeful, I walked on, entering the village of Bruebach along a road that, unfortunately, had too many frustrated Formula One drivers in their tiny little cars. The heart of the village, however, was deserted—except for a pair of eyes that stared at me from a political poster pasted to an ancient wall. The poster was a reminder that France is in the midst of a presidential political campaign.
Campaign time
Gleaming at me from the poster was Éric Zemmour, the bad boy of the far right who dares to say out loud what every upstanding Frenchman (and woman) is thinking about immigration. Zemmour, who has an Algerian Jewish background (his parents emigrated to France), goes even further, reaching deep into the French psyche and history to line up the new talking points of French conservative politics, while serving up an antidote for what ails France: whitewashing the crimes of the Vichy regime, while also promising to roll back anti-racism laws and France’s so called Memory Laws, which make it a crime to deny or minimize the Holocaust or other genocides.
Bruebach may be a receptive place for Zemmour’s message. In any case, I didn’t see posters for any other candidates. What I did see, however, was the nearby memorial to the soldiers and civilians of Bruebach who were killed in World War One and Two. You’ll find such a memorial in every French village, town, and city, often accompanied by the words “regrets éternels,” or eternal regrets, which sounds to me like a definition of hell.
Back to Zemmour, who worked many years as a journalist before plunging into politics. Here is a typical piece of his prose:
Immigration used to mean coming from abroad to give one’s children a French future. Today, immigrants come to France to continue living as they did in their country of origin.
Insidious takeover
His argument is that today’s immigrants are no better than nineteenth-century English colonialists in India, who never bothered to understand that they were no longer living in Dorset. Strange point to make, as it’s unlikely that today’s immigrants to France are going to take over the French government and impose their will upon an entire country and culture. Of course, for Zemmour and his ilk, current immigrants are worse. Their takeover of the country is much more insidious. How? In that by continuing to speak their language of birth and enjoying the culture they originally grew up in, they slowly erode French culture.
These were the thoughts that, unfortunately, Zemmour had placed in my head. Being an immigrant myself in Switzerland, living in a country whose language I have not mastered, I certainly didn’t feel like a colonialist. I felt like a survivor, grateful for the acceptance and welcome I have received. But it doesn’t mean I have to wipe out the mental and cultural existence of my youth.
Proof of the takeover on the train
The path through the fields, the bright sun, and the blue sky soon pushed Zemmour to a tiny corner of my mind. He became a speck. I kept him there, hoping that soon he would retreat to nothingness. I walked briskly through the countryside, and then headed down the steep hill to Mulhouse station, where the woman’s voice announced my train back to Basel, and I wished that maybe the train would be late or canceled so I could just sit there listening to her mellifluous voice for a while.
But the train was perfectly on time. When I boarded, Zemmour immediately jumped to the forefront not only of my thoughts again, but directly into my real-world life. There on the train were the modern-day colonialists he berates: two young women in headscarves, babies on their laps, their baby prams blocking the aisle. Sitting across the aisle from them were two teenagers (their younger brothers?), their phones blasting loud, awful music, a kind of muddled, melody-less rap in a language very incomprehensible to me. But they didn’t look menacing. And they didn’t look ready to take over the country. I guess Zemmour’s argument is that their very presence means the country has already been taken over—by stealth. But their eyes didn’t give away any deeper conspiracy. They didn’t even seem responsible for Covid. But, hey, who knows? That would be as valid as any other Covid conspiracy theory I’ve read. They looked like—dare I say it?—as I sat there dour and slightly pissed off like all the other passengers—they looked like they were, well—happy.
I pulled off my mask for a moment and gave a goofy smile to the babies, and they smiled back. I could see that the two mothers were also smiling under their masks. The two teenagers leaned over to see what was going on, thankfully turing down the music a tad. We didn’t have a common language, but we had a common heart and humanity. And it seemed like we all felt a sense of relief that we dared show it. Dour expressions all around me turned to warmth. Watch out, Zemmour! We’re ready to take over France from the French! With a smile.