Day at the museum

One of my three must-dos for Paris was to revisit the Musée de l’Armée, the museum of French military history, to see what they did to mark the centenary of the First World War. I’d not been to it since the turn of the century, so it was time. (I don’t much care about the previous centuries of French military might; after a while, one suit of armor looks remarkably like all the rest in line, so…)

They had some very well-designed multimedia displays, but they really hadn’t done much to incorporate recent historiography. (There was a temporary exhibit, in another part of Les Invalides, on the continuation of World War I in the East, meaning the combat in Eastern Europe and the Middle East from 1918-1923, titled appropriately “À l’Est, Guerre sans Fin”—In the East, War without End. I whizzed through that, but it’s not my area of focus.) But not particularly illuminating.

But here are a few bits and bobs from my visit:

First of all, they concatenate both world wars into a single exhibit—fair enough—which they start in 1871:

  

In other words, they date the world wars of the 20^th Century from the defeat of the French by the Prussians in the war of 1870-71. Which, I suppose, is valid, from a nationalistic perspective. (If you go to the Imperial War Museum in London, you’ll discover that Britain and her Empire pretty much won both world wars with its stiff upper lip, and maybe a bit of assistance from, you know, everyone else. I haven’t been to any US military museum—if we even have any—but I well recall all the retrospectives on D-Day 50^th, 60^th and 70^th anniversaries that showed how Americans totally kicked German ass, and there were a few Brits, Canadians and French guys scattered about the beaches. We all have our historical lenses.)

The Franco-Prussian War ended with the humiliating defeat of French armies at Sedan, the capture of the French emperor, the ceding of Alsace and much of Lorraine to the Prussians, extraction of a ruinous indemnity and the declaration of the Second German Empire via the coronation of King Wilhelm of Prussia as Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany…in the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles.

That seriously bites. I don’t think it’s accidental at all that the post-WWI treaty that dismantled the Second Reich, took back Alsace and Lorraine, imposed ruinous reparations on Germany and placed guilt for causing the war squarely on Germany and her allies (among other humiliations) was concluded in that very same Galerie des Glaces. These things are like high school: they’re never over.

(The display notes the signing of the Armistice and effective surrender of the Germans in Marshal Foch’s railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne on 11 November 1918. It refrains, later on in the World War II part of the exhibition, from mentioning that Hitler dredged up that very car, hauled it to that very spot in Compiègne and forced the French to capitulate on 22 June 1940 in it.)

One thing I had not previously known about was that there was a Russian Expeditionary Force deployed along the Western Front, in Champagne.

Following the February 1917 revolution in Russia, as well as their participation in the catastrophic Nivelle offensive, the soldiers mutinied in France; the brigade was disbanded by the end of the year.

As I moved into the Second World War part of the exhibition, I came across film clips of some of the concentration and extermination camps as discovered by liberating Allied forces. The films were not new. But I thought this warning caught my eye:

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This is what PBS should display before docus that deal with difficult subjects and tell uncomfortable truths—they might be too much for you if you’re utterly pig-ignorant fuckwits.

Okay, I did not go to any other parts of Les Invalides, but I got a bit of a chuckle out of a few things I saw on the way to the exhibit I wanted to see.

First, this row of probably 17^th Century cannon:

Yawn, right? But here’s some detail:

That was pretty. But what caught my attention was this:

What do you suppose the royal porcupine is all about?

Also, the larger topiary in the background is actually the home of a rather robust rabbit, which I saw bolt across the lawn (too fast—despite his size—for me to get a shot):

And then there were these two ladies at the top of a staircase:

I have no idea who they were meant to be, but the one on the right looked like she’s checking Twitter on her mobile. I guess not:

I really am a culture vulture, non?