The Arts Tunnel--Jardin Tuilleries, Paris

 

Several years ago, Paris closed a tunnel for cars that is more than a mile long on the north bank of the Seine. The tunnel runs between Pont Neuf and Jardin Tuilleries. The city government opened the tunnel 21 July of this year to bicycle and pedestrian traffic. 

Before the tunnel opened artists were given forty-meter long stretches of concrete wall four meters high to paint--whatever. Street artists were also given forty-meter wall sections for their art. 

The result is hundreds of strange and beautiful and vivid works of art lining walls. My late afternoon walk through the tunnel was noisier than I expected because nearly all of the bicycles going though the tunnel were commuters on electric bikes. I counted five pedal bikes in a half hour.  Bikes were also far more numerous than pedestrians. 

Jardin Tuilerries  entrance at the west end of the tunnel

The ends of the tunnel are beautiful parts of the Paris landscape. Musee D'Orsay is on the south side of river opposite the Jardin Tuilleries entrance. Ile de Cite and Pont Neuf are at the east end of the tunnel. 

Pont Neuf at the east end of the tunnel

 

Visiting the Castles of Saint Louis (a tarnished saint) East and West of Paris

 

The tower of Chateau de Vincennes

Today I was in small cities with large castles east and west of Paris.  Ten kilometers to the east is Chateau de Vincennes. Twenty kilometers to the west of the City of Light  is Chateau de Saint-Germain-en-Laye.  

 

Chateau de Saint-Germain-en-Laye 

Each of these castles was built or expanded during the life time of King Louis IX in the 13th Century.   

Saint Louis, King Louis IX, of France

Le Chateau de Vincennes covers several acres of walled grounds. A beautiful church is at the center of of the rectangular walled area opposite the main tower. 

The castle grounds include the palace of Anne of Austria who was Queen of France from 1615 to 1643.  She was married to Louis XIII. Her name is known to people who know little of France and its rulers because she is part of story of The Three Musketeers (Les Trois Mousquetaires) by Alexandre Dumas.  

Another resident of the castle, although not happy to be there, was the Maquis de Sade. He was imprisoned in the tower for seven years from 1777 to 1784. He would spend the rest of his life in various prisons and insane asylums until his death in 1814.

After visiting Vincennes, I went across Paris to the west end of the RER A train line to Saint-Germain-en-Laye.  I wanted to walk to the far end of the royal garden next to the castle where there is a circle of trees. 

Two views of the circle of trees

A corner of the royal garden

Two views of the 2-km walkway above the Seine

The view back to Paris from the wall on the east side of the royal garden

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Back to Saint Louis. He is the only French monarch to be made a saint. Louis IX ruled from 1226-70. Along with the Christian character of his reign, he robbed and persecuted Jews after he decided usury was wrong--the Jews suffering for a sin he permitted, then changed his mind about. He set up a show trial called the Disputation of Paris in which four rabbis defended the Talmud. They lost. Louis IX caused 24 wagonloads of Jewish holy books and other writings to be burned in Paris in 1242. This was long before printing, so all of the books were hand copied.  

Louis IX continued his persecution of Jews throughout his life. He is certainly not unique, or even unusual, as a king persecuting Jews, but sainthood makes him a persecutor and burner of holy books with a halo.

And speaking of sainthood, the beatification of Pope Pius XII is still on hold after the Vatican opened his archives in 2020. The complicity of Pius XII with the Nazis and his refusal to condemn the Holocaust during the entirety of World War II, make put him in the top ranks of Jew Haters. This book makes the evil of Pius XII very clear,

Conferences are Soooooo Much Better in Person. Zoom and Hybrid are a Different Event.

La Maison de la Chimie, Paris

At the beginning of June, I went to a Science and Diplomacy conference hosted by La Maison de la Chimie, Paris. I have written about the conference and some of the people I met there. 

In addition to listening to some fascinating presentations, the conference itself was like a demonstration of what is lost when conferences are on line or hybrid.  I may sound like a kid talking about his favorite parts of school, but it is really true that, for me, the best parts of the two-day conference were the lunches, the dinner, the coffee breaks, and the hallway.  

I really liked hearing Matthew Adamson talk about uranium mining as part of his presentation on Cold War weapons and resources.  During the break after his talk, we spoke about how resource maps influence industry, and how maps affect military strategy.

During lunch the next day, Adamson and I talked about his career path from grad student in Indiana and Paris, then professor in Budapest. Across from me was Fintan Hoey, a professor of history at Franklin University Switzerland. He is from Ireland, studies the modern of Japan particularly during the Cold War.  His best stories were about working in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland and learning the language of his region. 

I turned to my right at the same lunch and talked to Maritza Gomez about her presentation on an attempt by equatorial countries to claim their sovereign territory extended into space, at least as far as the orbits of geosynchronous satellites. She told me about her life in California, then studying in Germany and continuing her studies in Mexico.

Another hallway conversation was with John Krige. He spoke as part of the public panel on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the effects of Europe stopping all collaboration with Russian scientists just four days after the Russia started the war. Krige's presentation was clear and stark that the war will cause pain across Europe and the world. 

At the conference dinner I sat across from Nestor Herran, a professor of the history of science at The Sorbonne in Paris. We talked about his research in Cold War nuclear technology in Britain and elsewhere.  I told him I was a Cold War airman on a crew that did live-fire static test of Minuteman missiles and later a tank commander on the East-West German border, so had two different "ground-level" perspectives on the Cold War and the nuclear threat.  

After a while, Nestor said, "I am 50 years old and this is the first time I have had a long conversation with a career soldier."  We talked about how much the military is separate from the larger culture in countries with voluntary service and who serves in the military.  I could tell him I had not met a lot of historians of science in uniform.  

Apparently, I am very good at dinner because one of the conference organizers, Charlotte Abney Saloman, invited me to join her and her mom, who was visiting Paris, for dinner the evening the conference ended. 

I'm sure I will have to use Zoom in the future for book groups or other events where meeting in person is not possible.  But this conference showed me why people get together for conferences.  Zoom has no hallways, coffee breaks, or shared meals. 

                  

When a Plan (or a Bone) Breaks, My Mind is Alive with 'What's Next?"

Yesterday, I checked in for a flight from Paris to Rome, started my train trip to the airport, and got a message saying the flight was cancelled. "No further information is available at this time."  

I got off the train at the next stop and mapped a trip to Gare de Lyon the station where trains leave Paris toward the Alps and Italy.  I checked several possibilities, then made reservations for what I hope is the most reliable option.  

It's not that I want my plans to fall apart, but when it happens, I feel and odd kind of joy.  Once plans are made, travel is passive. Sit on the plane or train until the destination.  But when plans fall apart, I can go into action.  My mind races with possibilities.  I look at weather, news reports, and feel exhilarated when a new plan comes together.   In this case, staying in Paris would get me to Turin, Italy, by noon, and Rome by 8pm.  I got a cheap hotel near the train station and left Paris at 6:46am.  

Part of my happiness when I redo broken plans is experience. I have done this a lot, so I know what to expect. But I still have to deal with the situation as it is. It's like broken bones in that way. Each broken bone hurts like Hell, but by the 40th broken bone, I knew how the recovery would go and was excited about the surgery--it makes the healing process faster.  

Part of it is also something I looked for in all of my kids and in soldiers I was in charge of: How would they respond to injury? Two of my kids got angry when they got hurt. They wanted to get back in the game or the race.  The other four wanted to heal up and re-evaluate.  

I am now on a train to Turin. I got an email from Air France this morning offering me a different flight. It was a connecting flight through Luxembourg. With all the flight cancellations, that option would give me two more chances to have a flight not take off, and possibly be in Luxembourg looking for a way to get to Rome through Switzerland.  

Laundromats Have Tourists Again!

 

Amy, Lee, Jane and John

American tourists are back in laundromats in Europe

Five years ago, I started making trips across Europe and Israel with just a backpack. Carrying just a few pieces of clothing has many advantages, but it also meant weekly trips to laundromats.  I like doing laundry, but the laundromats turned out to be much more fun than I expected. 

Other tourists from all over the world use laundromats in big cities so I met some very interesting people while resupplying myself with clean clothes.  But COVID changed laundromats just as it changed so many other things.  This current trip I am on is my fifth trip to Europe since July of last year.  

Until last week, I did not see any tourists in laundromats from France to Poland. At the beginning of this trip, I washed clothes in Rome in an empty laundromat.  But last Thursday, I went to a laundromat near the Pantheon and met three sisters traveling together in France. Actually, there are four sisters, one was off doing something else.  

Amy, Lee and Jane are currently living in Chicago, DC and Detroit.  We talked for a while about where they had already been--the Louvre, Versailles, and many other Paris destinations. The next day they were going on a tour of the Normandy coast.  They have another week in Paris then back to America.  

A few minutes before the laundry was dry, Jane's husband John joined us.  He saw my armor tattoo. He had an uncle who was a tank commander in World War II.  

Next week I am staying in a monastic guest house which has its own washer-dryer so I won't need a laundromat.  

In the same laundromat in which I met Amy, Lee and Jane, I met a couple from Australia and a bike racer from California. That was in 2017. The story is here.   

My favorite laundromat story was from 2019 in Jerusalem. That is here. 

Matthew Adamson on Academic Career Paths and the Interplay of Maps and Reality

 

At a conference on the history of science and diplomacy in Paris, Matthew Adamson talked about the history of uranium exploration and mining in the nuclear age. He had a mercator map of the world with all known uranium deposits as part his presentation.  

At a break, we had a chance to talk about the interplay between resource maps and the people who use them.  As the maps become more detailed and more reliable, they exert influence on those who use them.  When I worked for a global chemical company, the map of actual and potential raw material became a big part of business growth meetings.  Each potential source of uranium can be a source of peaceful power or weapons.  Adamson's map has business, regulatory and threat dimensions. 

At lunch we talked about he came to be Director of Academic and Student Affairs at McDaniel College's campus in Budapest, Hungary, as well as External Researcher at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Budapest advising on the history and institutional context of use of radioisotopes.

Adamson studied French and French literature at James Madison University, graduating in 1996, then began a PhD program at Indiana University in the history and philosophy of science and technology. He completed the program in 2005. But in 2001 he had moved to France as part of his doctoral studies and met his future wife, who was from Budapest.  

She got a job in Budapest in 2005. Matthew followed and found a post at an McDaniel College Budapest and has been there ever since.  

I hope to see Matthew at a future conference, or possibly if my future travels take me through Budapest. 

The conference was organized by the Science History Institute at La Maison de la Chimie.

Where Does Politics End? On Earth? How Far Into Space?

Gloria Maritza Gomez Revuelta, 

a PhD candidate at El Colegio de Mexico

At the conference on science diplomacy since World War II, one fascinating presentation was on a group of equatorial countries who in 1976 decided to claim the territory directly above their countries in space. These countries in South America, Africa and Asia were among the many non-aligned states who did not take the side of either the western democracies or the communist world.  

Pointing to a mercator map with the countries proposing the pact highlighted, Gloria Maritza Gomez Revuelta, a PhD candidate at El Colegio de Mexico, said the United States and Russia were both launching satellites into geosynchronous orbits for communication and surveillance.  The satellites travelled in space at the same speed as the earth's orbit so they remained in position until they fell from orbit.  As this band of space filled with satellites, the countries with land underneath the satellites wanted to control the space above their land.

The pact never became reality. In the discussion after the talk, several people discussed the issue of what a country can claim as sovereign territory. Where does space begin? At the limits of the atmosphere? Higher?  Gomez Revuelta said Hannah Arendt said politics is part of life on earth. 

Arendt opens her book The Human Condition by saying it was an event “second in importance to no other.”  Sputnik meant that human beings had taken a real step toward actualizing a long-wished-for goal: to escape the earth. In Arendt’s telling of the story, earth alienation is part and parcel of the all-too-human dream of freeing ourselves from our humanity. Sputnik’s launch thus signified not simply the lowering of humanity’s stature, but humanity's destruction of humanity itself. (from the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College)

The discussion continued raising serious issues, and also the issue of how far into space could an equatorial country claim territory? The solar system? The Milky Way?  The entire universe? 

The discussion continued at lunch about Hannah Arendt and space and the Cold War and world politics today.                                

Science Diplomacy Conference in Paris at La Maison de la Chimie

 

Maison de la Chimie, Paris

On June 13 and 14, I attended a conference on science and diplomacy in Paris at the Maison de la Chimie.  The two-day conference had been organized long before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24.  The title of the conference:

Diplomatic Studies of Science: The Interplay of Science, Technology, and International Affairs after the Second World War

Most of the conference was the unchanged from its planned format in 2020, but the public panel on the first evening was about how governments and international scientific organizations in most of the world acted within 48 hours to exclude Russian researchers from international collaboration.  

The six panelists had a variety of views about what could be done and could not be done now that Russia invaded a neighbor.  One of the panelists, Joachim Hornegger, a university president in Germany, can help Ukrainian students at his school, but not Russian students. He said many of the Russian students say they are against the war and do not want to return to Russia, but by law he cannot provide any assistance.

John Krige, a professor emeritus at Georgia Institute of Technology and author of ten books on science diplomacy, said Russia was completely in the wrong to invade Ukraine and even the issue of collaborating with individual scientists who say they are against the war is difficult: support for Putin among Russians in science and technology increased after Putin seized Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014.  Other Russians in science and technology emigrated after the seizure of Crimea.

The conference was part of an annual series since 1998 by the Science History Institute of Philadelphia called the Gordon Cain Conference.  I worked at the Institute from 2002-2015 so I attended several of the Cain conferences. Some of them were among the best history of science presentations I have ever heard. I am going to write separately about a few of these conferences. I will also write more about other participants I met and talks I heard at this year's conference.

In two weeks I hope to be in Warsaw, Poland, volunteering at the main train station to help feed the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  Since March I have been volunteering with #RazomforUkraine in New Jersey making combat first aid kits for the Ukrainian Army.  Going to this conference and hearing how sanctions affect research and policy around the world gave me another dimension of how the Russian invasion of Ukraine is causing suffering everywhere. 

Ukrainian in Paris Talks About Her Family

 

I walked around a corner onto Boulevard St. Germain and saw a sign saying that the little park behind the fence had been part of a refugee for Ukrainians since 1937.  The official name is Square Tarass Chevtchenko (see below) it is also called "L'angle" or "the corner." 

The sign on fence (above) says

The corner of Blvd. Saint-Germain and and rue des Saints-Peres is known by its proximite to the Greco-Catholic Ukrainian cathedral and Tarass Chevtchenko Square has become since the second half of the 20th Century a place of important ,meetings in the immigration of Ukrainians to France. Dispossessed of the rights, their identities, their land by foreign powers, the Ukrainians emigrated to France in dozens of thousands where their work has created and incontestable heritage of their social, cultural, economic and political history.

Inside the park, I talked to a woman with her son waiting to go into the Church next door.  She told me that she had moved to France more than a decade ago with her son. She was from Bucha. Two months ago she was able to get her mother to Paris, but her father is still in Bucha.  She is hoping to get her father out of Ukraine. I am not using her name because she wants to remain anonymous for the safety of her father.

Statue of Tarass Chevtchenko

Entrance of the Cathedral

-----------------

Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko (Ukrainian: Тарас Григорович Шевченко; 9 March 1814 – 10 March 1861), also known as Kobzar Taras, or simply Kobzar (a kobzar is a bard in Ukrainian culture), was a Ukrainian poet, writer, artist, public and political figure, folklorist and ethnographer. His literary heritage is regarded to be the foundation of modern Ukrainian literature and, to a large extent, the modern Ukrainian language though it is different from the language of his poems. Shevchenko is also known for his many masterpieces as a painter and an illustrator.

He was a fellow of the Imperial Academy of Arts. Though he had never been the member of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, in 1847 Shevchenko was politically convicted for explicitly promoting the independence of Ukraine, writing poems in the Ukrainian language, and ridiculing members of the Russian Imperial House. Contrary to the members of the society who did not understand that their activity led to the idea of the independent Ukraine, according to the secret police, he was the champion of independence.

Maison Fournaise, My Favorite Restaurant in Paris is a Victim of COVID

 

Last month when I visited Paris, I took the suburban train to Chatou to visit a restaurant that had closed in March of 2020 and never reopened.  That restaurant is Maison Fournaise. It is located on an island in the Seine northwest of Paris on a narrow island called Ile des impressionistes. There is a small impressionist art museum on the island that is still open, but Maison Fournaise closed after being in business from 1857 to 1906 as a restaurant and boat rental business, then reopened in 1990 closing again in 2020.

In its first life, Maison Fournaise drinking spot for artists who would become some of the most famous French impressionists. Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted "The Boating Party" on the porch at Maison Fournaise.  The scene became the business card and symbol of the restaurant.  

Inside the restaurant are several sketches on the walls, carefully covered in lucite.  The sketches were caricatures done by Henri Matisse.  The owner told me that Matisse drank too much and was in love with one of the bar maids. He would come to the bar, flirt with the bar maid, and drink too much.  When he drank more than he could pay for, he paid his bar tab with sketches of prominent customers.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted "The Boating Party" 

on the porch at Maison Fournaise. 

I first learned about the restaurant in the late 1990s from a colleague, Alain Mathurin, who showed me several restaurants where I could host business meetings and even impress French guests. Twice I rented the same porch for a business meeting. At each event one of the French guests said they had lived in Paris all their lives and never heard of Maison Fournaise.

When I visited recently the porch that was the scene of "The Boating Party" was stripped of furniture. Some volunteers are preserving the building and hoping the restaurant has a third life. 

Even on a cold, gray day in February, the area is lovely.  The next island to the south, around the bend of the Seine, is the setting for one of Guy de Maupassant's sad love stories.  

On a summer evening with a late sunset, on the porch, watching barges and pleasure boats slip silently past, there could hardly be a better place in the world for dinner.  I hope the restaurant somehow returns. It is a victim of COVID and a loss mourned by many, including me. 

Posts about traveling in France and neighboring countries in February 2022:

My favorite restaurant is a victim of COVID.

The Museum of the Great War.

The Waterloo Battlefield.

The Red Baron Memorial.

Chartres Cathedral.

High Performance Cars in a garage in Versailles.

Talking about Fathers and Careers at lunch.

Cars in a Corner of Underground Garage Near Versailles

 

1970 Ford Mustang Mach I 351 with original paint in a Paris Garage

A few days ago I drove from Paris to Le Mans to visit the museum and track of the annual 24-hour race.  On the way back I stopped at Chartres Cathedral then got a hotel near Versailles.  In the far corner of the second lower level of the underground garage was a 1970 Ford Mustang Mach I with original paint and a Florida license plate.  

It was a delightful surprise to see a vintage American Muscle Car in a French parking garage.  Of the forty cars, trucks and motorcycles I owned during my 52 years of driving, Ford Muscle Cars were some of the best.  I owned a 1969 Torino Cobra, 428CID, Hurst shifter, Holley carburetor and functional ram air. Then I owned a 1972 Mustang Cobra Jet, 351 with a Carter Thermoquad.  Seeing that Mustang after visiting Le Mans was a real moment of nostalgia. 

Also along the back wall of the garage was an Aston Martin DB9 under a cover (marked with Aston Martin and DB9).  

Between the Mach I and the DB9 was a Peugeot RCZ, a lightweight (1404kg) powerful (250hp) little two-seat French missile.

In the far corner of the garage was a mid-1990s Jaguar XJ convertible.  

One of the oddities of the 1970 Mach I was louvres on the back window. By 1972 Ford dispensed with the sun-blocking slats, I wished they had not. My Mustang CJ had a back window so near horizontal that it was useless whenever the sun shined on it.  

Posts about traveling in France and neighboring countries in February 2022:

My favorite restaurant is a victim of COVID.

The Museum of the Great War.

The Waterloo Battlefield.

The Red Baron Memorial.

Chartres Cathedral.

High Performance Cars in a garage in Versailles.

Talking about Fathers and Careers at lunch.

50th Anniversary of My First Enlistment is This Month

 

Twas the night before Basic, and I drank way too much. 

I have no photos from my Air Force enlistment.

Fifty years ago today I arrived at Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio. I was hung over with shoulder-length hair and at the beginning of an on-again off-again relationship with the United States military that would finally end 44 years later in May 2016.  The story of that first haircut is here. 

Since my first of my four different service branches was the Air Force, basic training was mostly marching and learning military culture.  We had one afternoon on the rifle range, one hike, and one meal outdoors--at picnic tables.  In the nearly three years of my Air Force enlistment I never saw C-Rations let alone tasted them.  Decades later I did a comparison of C-Rations and the current MRE meals that got 100,000+ views on YouTube. Here is the video.

When I left my home in Stoneham, Massachusetts, the Beatles were still together, Elvis was still alive, the Vietnam War was still raging, the Cold War was heating up, the draft was in its last full year, the Muscle Car boom of the 1960s was nearly over, and Donny Osmond had two songs in the top ten singles of 1971.  

Speaking of music, while my shoulder-length hair was shorn from my head in the Air Force barber shop, Merle Haggard's "Okie From Muskogee" played in the background. The only country songs I heard up to that point in my life were some Johnny Cash breakthrough hits that ended up on Top 40 radio, like "A Boy Named Sue." In one of the ironies of military life, Fort Sill, Oklahoma, was the place I trained to deploy to Iraq 37 years later in 2009. In one of the many coincidences of dates in my life, my basic training and pre-deployment training both began on February 1. 

In 1972, phones had wires and were often attached to walls. Every Sunday at basic training we lined up at phone booths to call home.  Cameras had film. Barracks had liars.  Extravagant liars.  My basic training flight was forty men either 18 or 19 years old, from more than twenty states across the nation, living in one big room.  Before lights out, we would shine our shoes in groups and talk.  Some conversations were about training or life in the barracks, or the food we ate, but when the subject was home, the lies swelled to the size of a Goodyear Blimp.  I wrote about those lies and how Facebook killed the barracks liar.  

When we marched we sang songs about killing the enemy, Viet Cong mostly, occasionally a Russian, we sang about our nearly infinite appetites for sex and alcohol, and we sang about Jody--the guy who was back home sleeping with our wife/girlfriend, driving our car, emptying our meager bank account, and in its best country version, alienating the affections of a favorite hunting dog.  

At my last military training school in 2013, we were not allowed to sing any of those songs.  All five military services were in our marching formations, and none of them were allowed to sing any marching song that could be considered sexist. And even though we were in two active wars, we could not sing about an enemy. Jody was off limits.  I wrote about the change in the songs for the New York Times At War blog.

The world in which I enlisted is gone.  I am writing this in a cafe in Paris on a computer with more processing power than the computers that put a man on the moon in 1969.  The flight from home to basic training fifty years ago was the first time I had been west of Cleveland or south of Pennsylvania.  It was my first flight on an airplane.  Earlier this month, my flight to Paris was the beginning of what may be my seventieth trip to another continent either on business, pleasure or a military mission.   

I have a love/hate relationship with the military. Three times, I got out, and said I was done: in 1974, 1979 and 1985.  Three times, I re-enlisted: in 1975, 1982 and 2007.  I finally left the Army National Guard in 2016.  Now I am far too old to change my mind again.  And I am happy with that.  I spent some of the best years of my life in the military, but even if I were not too old, I am happy to let the men and women born in this century defend the country.