The streets are alive - with the signs of history

Just up the street from us and to the left, there is a small road where we get our laundry done - it's election year, as even their window, filled with flat irons from when laundry was even harder work, cheekily reminds us (with models of Royale and Sarkozy):

But in 1794 a small, somewhat insignificant man walked in this road (which was then the road to VilleFranche), for nine months, leaving and returning to number 6 (then owned by a count). At that time this little man was already commandant of the French army of Italy.

This small road is now called "Rue Bonaparte" - which seems a rather meager tribute, and that small man went on to change France and to give the aristocratic Brits a fright - even the Duke of Wellington said of the battle of Waterloo:

"It has been a damned nice thing — the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life... By God! I don't think it would have done if I had not been there."

Creevey Papers, ch. x, p. 236

To be fair, he also said of Napoleon:

"I used to say of him [Napoleon] that his presence on the field made the difference of forty thousand men."

Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington, Stanhope, November 2, 1831

Arrogant Aristocrats

Personally I wish the French had won, then we would also have had the sensible metric system a lot earlier - AND better food ! More importantly we wouldn't have been ruled by ignorant and arrogant aristocrats for so long, e.g., Wellington, who later became Prime Minister, said of his own army:

"Ours is composed of the scum of the earth—the mere scum of the earth."

Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington, Stanhope, November 4, 1831

And of demands for the reform of Parliament he said:

"I am not only not prepared to bring forward any measure of this nature, but I will at once declare that, as far as I am concerned, as long as I hold any station in the Government of the country, I shall always feel it my duty to resist such measures when proposed by others."

Cited in "The House of Lords: A handbook for Liberal speakers, writers and workers" (Liberal Publication Department, 1910), p. 19.

When the Parliament was reformed, despite his bitter opposition, his response was:

"I never saw so many shocking bad hats in my life."

Sir William Fraser, Words on Wellington (1889), p. 12

This ex-general couldn't even appreciate at least the military potential of of the railways:

"Depend upon it, Sir, nothing will come of them!"

Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern (1991), p.993

The failure of British industry, it has been argued, was due in part to attitudes like this, fostered by the public school system and its usual scorn for anything to do with manual work or industry (see the quoation from the British Consul in Nice below).

"Eric Hobsbawm, who considers Public Schools in the context of Britain's rise and decline, treats them harshly and convincingly:

'The assimilation of the British business classes to the social pattern of the gentry and aristocracy had proceeded very rapidly from the mid nineteenth century, the period when so many of the so-called "public schools" were founded, or reformed by finally excluding the poor for whom they had originally been intended. In 1869 they were more or less set free from all government control and set about elaborating that actively anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, games-dominated Tory imperialism which was to remain characteristic of them. (It was not the Duke of Wellington but a late-Victorian myth which claimed that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, which did not exist in his time.)

Unfortunately, the public school formed the model of the new system of secondary education ... The British therefore entered the twentieth century and the age of modern science and technology as a spectacularly ill-educated people.'"

http://www.victorianweb.org/history/education/eh4.html

it would be more accurate to say that many of the battles of the First and Second World Wars were lost on the playing fields of Eton, Harrow, etc.

Encouraging engineering

In contrast the young Napoleon established the Ecole Polytechnique:

"After the chaos of the French Revolution, Napoleon decided he needed to start over. In 1794 he replaced Perronet's school with the École Polytechnique, and the game changed. The École Polytechnique hosted the greatest mathematicians and theoretical mechanicians of that age -- Biot, Arago, Fourier, all names that we engineers know very well.
...
What Napoleon gave technology could never have sprung from a craving for monuments [which he later developed]. The young, idealistic Napoleon laid a foundation for engineering education... He gave us the people who really do build our world."

http://www.uh.edu/engines/asmedall.htm (highly recommended)

Though in France too, old elitist attitudes led to an over-emphasis on theory, which still exists to some extent. But some Frenchmen fought that too as early as 1834, e.g. Francois Arago:

"Soon after, he wrote a second paper to defend himself. He titled it, On Machinery Considered in Relation to the Prosperity of the Working Classes. It says things most of us take for granted: Machines don't steal jobs, they create them. Machines make goods affordable to the poor. And so on.

By now, of course, the new engines really had become monsters. Four years after Arago's talk, Charles Dickens published Oliver Twist. Dickens woke the English public to the horrors of industrial slums. And a new wave of social reform had to begin.

But Arago celebrated the humanitarian impulse that drove people like James Watt in the first place. Watt really did create machines in the interests of the common people of whom he was one. And which of us would exchange our everyday lives today for the lives we lived before Watt - or before Arago."

http://www.uh.edu/engines/asmedall.htm

What - before the internet and Macs ? No thank you ! :-)

I was going to say that Britain owed its lead in the industrial revolution to practical British men (see the reference to James Watt above) like Isambard Kingdom Brunel - then I find that his father was born and educated in France and Isambard "was sent by his father to the College of Caen in Normandy, France when he was 14 years. He later went to the Henri Quatre school in Paris." !



http://web.ukonline.co.uk/b.gardner/brunel/kingbrun.html


Many French were and still are Anglophiles, so Wellington went too far when he said:

"We always have been, we are, and I hope that we always shall be, detested in France."

(All quotations from Welligton at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_Wellesley)

Nice becomes accessible to the masses

Brits were certainly welcomed back in Nice (which even then depended on tourists) after their long absence during the Napoleonic wars, and Brits were still welcomed when Nice later became French. When the railway finally came to Nice, many British aristocrats regretted that the lower orders were now able to enjoy it too. In 1884, J. C. Harris, the British Consul wrote:

"I do not want to say, thank God, that there are not still many respectable people in Nice; but it is also true that you see here [NB] quite a number of captains of industry, people of both sexes of more or less blemished reputation, people who affect titles to which they have no right, hiding their true, sad selves..."

Quoted in "High Season in Nice", Robert Kanigel (highly recommended), p. 128

Garibaldi and the Cassini dynasty

Rue Bonaparte leads to Place Garibaldi. Garibaldi was born in Nice, but is famous for his activities in Italy. The statue is about to be moved a few metres due to the new tramway - which Nice had decades ago, now expensively reintroduced for a more ecology-conscious age - the first trial run over a short section took place today !

"Garibaldi, Giuseppe (1807-1882) The foremost military figure and popular hero of the age of Italian unification known as the Risorgimento with Cavour and Mazzini he is deemed one of the makers of Modern Italy. Cavour is considered the "brain of unification," Mazzini the "soul," and Garibaldi the "sword." For his battles on behalf of freedom in Latin America, Italy, and later France, he has been dubbed the "Hero of Two Worlds." Born in Nice, when the city was controlled by France, to Domenico Garibaldi and Rosa Raimondi, his family was involved in the coastal trade. A sailor in the Mediterranean Sea, he was certified a merchant captain in 1832. During a journey to Taganrog in the Black Sea, he was initiated into the Italian national movement..."

http://www.ohiou.edu/~chastain/dh/gari.htm

From Place Garibaldi, the grander Rue Cassini leads to the Port. The name Cassini would be recognised by many around the world today, but for something named after him, rather than because they have any idea who the man was:

"Giovanni Domenico (or, in French, Jean Dominique) Cassini was born on June 8, 1625 in Perinaldo (near Nice, now France). He studied mathematics and astronomy at the Jesuits and became professor of astronomy at Bologna, as well as fortress builder, at age 25.
... [he] collaborated with Christiaan Huygens in many astronomical projects.

... He discovered Saturn's moons Iapetus (1671), Rhea (1672), Tethys (1684), and Dione (1684). In 1675, Cassini discovered that Saturn's rings are separated into two parts by a gap, which is now called Cassini Division in his honor; he (correctly) presumed that Saturn's rings were composed of myriads of small particles.
...
Cassini was the founder of a dynasty of four astronomers in Paris: His son Jaques Cassini (Cassini II, 1677-1756), his grandson César François Cassini (Cassini III, 1714-84) and his grand-grandson Jean Dominique Cassini (Cassini IV, 1748-1845) followed him as directors of the Paris Observatory. In 1711 Cassini got blind, and died on September 14, 1712 in Paris.

"G.D. Cassini (or Cassini I) was multiply honored by the astronomical community, in some cases together with one of his descendants: Nasa/ESA's Cassini spacecraft to Saturn was named after him ..."

http://messier.obspm.fr/xtra/Bios/cassini.html

A new Napoleon ?

In Rue Cassini, which runs almost parallel with the smaller Rue Bonaparte, there is the local election headquarters of another small man, Sarkozy, who also wants to run France - ironically in a more Anglo-Saxon way:



It looks as if he might succeed - unfortunately. The slogan says: "Together everything becomes possible" - including developing the same increasing gap between rich and poor which we have seen over recent years in the US and UK:

Rich-poor gap grows in US and UK

"George Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% in society is just one example of this cosy alliance between our leaders and those who frankly, already avoid paying more tax than a patriot ought to.

Of course, this could only happen in the USA, right? Erhh, no. Actually the size of the gap between the richest and poorest 20% of society has been growing in the UK since the late 1970s almost mirroring the USA (graph below). If you wonder how much privatisation and financial deregulation have to do with this, look to Russia (right) where, since the population were ‘liberated’ from the shackles of communism in 1990, the rise in inequality has been acute."

http://www.ablemesh.co.uk/thoughtsgaprich&poor.html

Cf.: "Sir Peter Lampl, chairman of the Sutton Trust, said: 'These findings are truly shocking. The results show that social mobility in Britain is much lower than in other advanced countries and is declining - those from less privileged backgrounds are more likely to continue facing disadvantage into adulthood, and the affluent continue to benefit disproportionately from educational opportunities."

http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformationOffice/newsAndEvents/archives/2005/LSE_SuttonTrust_report.htm

Wellington would have approved. Meanwhile our new little Napoleon sees developments in the US and UK more favourably, and in the UK the Economist doesn't just report on him, it puts the case for him - as a new Napoleon:

" 'However, on a trip to Washington last year his declaration that he was proud to be a "friend of America" received a hostile response back home and he has restated his long-held opposition to the war in Iraq. But he is also desperate for new allies in the EU and his intentions to shake up France's sclerotic economy has led him to favour aspects of the "Anglo-Saxon" model, which many in France dread.' Guardian

OK, here we go. "desperate for new allies" seems to be the only authorised description of French (or German, for that matter) leaders in the UK press - even in the Guardian, it would seem.

"sclerotic" seems to be the only authorised description of the French economy - despite the fact that its growth per capita since 1994 is essentially identical to that in the UK."

Jerome a Paris

http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2007/1/30/162959/935

But the climate here in Nice encourages one to be positive, even if Sarkozybecomes President he isn't going to lead France into Napoleonic wars - Wellington also said: "Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won."

Dispatch from the field of Waterloo (June 1815)

The European century ?

Nor is Europe likely to tear itself and much else to pieces with engineers corrupted into the creators of weapons for mass slaughter as in the two world wars. Indeed Sarkozy is quite mistaken to look to the US as any kind of model; as Mark Leonard convincingly argues in his encouraging book:



Europe, he argues, offers a model other countries want to join, it doesn't try to impose a system on them by "Shock and Awe", it encourages them to become eligible for this successful club by reforming themselves first.

The two world wars and the absence of tourists brought Nice to its knees, now it can seem too popular again - like France in general. Sarkozy promises a "rupture" but he promises that it will be one that is "tranquille". The French have much that is worth holding on to as Royale emphasizes. The next time anybody suggests that France should be more like the UK - just point them to this story of two British friends of 40 years, who had heart attacks within a week of each other, one in the UK the other in France, George:

"My treatment has been excellent. I am sure that because there are no price constraints here in France, the doctors and specialists are always happy to go that one step further. If there is the slightest problem you are hospitalised because they don’t want to take any chances. The hospitals are very clean and I was only ever in a ward with one other person. The meals were superb – I always looked forward to eating them and because this is France, it often came with a small bottle of red wine!

http://www.frenchentree.com/fe-health/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=19319

The difference in treatment makes me feel very reassured to be here in Nice - it's just anecdotal, but it matches a lot of other anecdotes and the WHO survey of health systems in which France came first.

Time for a stroll down these very historic streets, in the warmth of the winter sun, and a cool beer on the beach.