merci pour le poulet frites

I came home from my journée de "Formation Civique" bursting with a lot of trivial information that I am certain will prove useful at parties, and other tidbits of French history and defense budget break-downs that I will stow away like gilded canons, to be whipped out at the slightest hint of anti-Americanism. To wit :

"La France reste un pays machiste." - Ah bon? Well, yes, according to our fast-talking formateur. Despite spurts of equality laws trickling out since the pre-Napoleonic age, it would appear that there still exist some salary discrepancies between the men and lady folk.

"L'Occitan n'est pas une langue régionale." Ah BON? Tell that to my Toulousain husband who can recite any street name's Occitan equivalent within a 3 mile radius of Capitole! Or the directors of Le Mirail's Occitan Studies program! Or the folks in the deep south Pyrénées region who proudly consider themselves bilingual French/Occitan speakers! (Fascist!!)

"Ce n'est pas une infraction qui t'empêchera d'avoir la nationalité française, Madame!" This, after a student asked if her dubious driving record abroad would have a negative effect upon her application for Frenchification.

Aside from exploring the French civil and penal codes and the types of behaviors that will get you personally familiar with the subject, I met some lovely people, from far-off places: la Guyane, l'Algérie, le Wisconsin. As we commiserated over bistrot fare (paid for by funding from the non-defense budget) I listened to my co-étrangères opinions on the utility of the obligatory civics lesson. One young woman felt that the mediator was wrong to discuss the role of Christianity in forming France's past and present cultural identity. She seemed sincerely shocked that the formateur would bring up animism, Jesus, Clovis, and the Edit de Nantes so unabashedly. I felt a twinge of polemic-paranoia creep into my discourse as I suggested that knowledge of a country's religious history is fundamental to understanding its politics.

La laïcité is such a thorny, gray, labyrinthian issue; knee-jerk censorship of any religious reference in a public arena seems hypocritical at best, fanatical at worst. I recognize that I speak as a citizen of a country founded by ostracized Christian fundamentalists (plus ça change...), where practicing and discussing and living one's religion in public (to an extent, yes) was and remains priority number one. Unlike our Euro counterparts, the United States have yet to submit to papal rule or endure government-supported pogroms. And yet I studied at an institution whose Mission was founded and overseen by one of the Catholic Church's most revered sadistic tyrants and spent a greater portion of my childhood years walking, running and cruising past another monument to religious faith gone mortally awry.

On the other hand, for my elementary school's Spring Fair I got to dance around a May pole as a ripe maiden of 7 years, honoring my ancient Druid roots in a gesture whose phallic symbolism was comically lost on me and my peers. I'd really wanted to do the Portuguese Chicken Dance, but by the time I got to Mrs. Ackerman's 3rd grade class, she had traded her saudade fetish for Celtic orgies.

Erin Go Braugh!