France salutes Maurice Druon, hero from another age

The Times Online ^ | April 15, 2009 | Charles Bremner

[Cincinna]

The words 'grand old man' and 'larger than life' are often overused but they apply to Maurice Druon, a writer, historian, war hero and defender-in-chief of the French language, who has died just short of his 91st birthday.

Druon's name does not mean much to the younger French generation, except perhaps as a bit of a reactionary and champion of linguistic purity at home and abroad. One of his last public acts was a quixotic campaign in 2007 to have the European Union adopt French as its supreme language in official documents.

But Druon is remembered by older people as a dashing man of action and letters and a patriot who packed more into his life than most can imagine. Le Figaro headlined its report today Un Seigneur des Lettres - A Lord of Letters. Druon's old-fashioned views infuriated the leftwing artistic world. As President Pompidou's Culture Minister after the 1968 uprising, he told theatre directors that they had to "choose between subsidies and petrol bombs."

Like many journalists, I knew Druon and found him charming, feisty and funny. Right up to this year he would come to the phone to chat about his pet causes. It was fascinating to hear his accounts -- sometimes in fluent old-fashioned English -- of working for General de Gaulle in London in the early 1940s.

He had fought the invading Germans in 1940 as a young cavalry officer before joining de Gaulle's Free French headquarters. In London he broadcast to the Resistance on the BBC's French service. He also penned, with his uncle, the words to the Chant des Partisans, the song that became the anthem for the internal Resistance against the Nazis and which lives on in the collective memory [listen to Yves Montand's version below]. It began "Friend, do you hear the crows' black flight over our plains?." This morning, Luc Chatel, the minister who acts as government spokesman said: "Like all French people, I get a kind of shiver when I hear the 'Chant des Partisans,''. Druon marked the second half of the 20th century, he marked the history of France."

Druon managed to win the Goncourt prize -- the top literary award -- at the age of 30 in 1948 and in the 1950s wrote a best-selling seven-volume romantic history called Les Rois Maudits. It was turned into a popular television series. He was elected the youngest member of the Académie Francaise -- the official guardian of the language -- in 1966 and went on to serve two decades as its "perpetual secretary", its boss.

He stuck to tradition and enjoyed provocation. In 1980, he deplored the election of the novelist Marguerite Yourcenar as the first woman in the 374-year-old Académie, imagining female members "knitting during meetings on the dictionary." He conducted a cheeky but vain campaign five years ago to block the election of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, a former President and would-be literary figure, to the Academy.

In late 2007, Druon led the charge when Time magazine published a notorious article that proclaimed French culture to be dead. His defence of French as a world language was good-natured. He was no narrow-minded nationalist. As an Anglophile, he was appreciated as a raconteur at British embassy dinners. "I love English," he said recently, "though I now call it 'Anglo- American' because we no longer speak British English due to globalization and America's economic power."

In his campaign to persuade Brussels to adopt French as its senior language, he argued that the tongue of Montesquieu was the supreme vehicle for civilised discourse. "Italian is the language of song, German is good for philosophy and English for poetry, French is best at precision, it has a rigour to it," he said.

President Sarkozy, whose liberties with the French language must have appalled Druon, paid tribute to him as "a great writer, a great resistant, a great political figure, a great wordsmith and a great spirit." Libération, the leftwing paper, paid him a typical back-handed compliment. "It's the death of an old reactionary who was, at heart, very respectable."

[fieldmarshaldj]

Sounded like a decent Frenchman and French patriot. Au revoir and RIP.

[Cincinna]

*** FRENCH POLITICS AND CULTURE PING LIST *** FREEPMAIL ME IF YOU WANT TO JOIN ***

Maurice Druon is one of my favorite writers. If you love historical fiction, beautifully written, and accurate down to the last detail, you will love LES ROIS MAUDIT or THE CURSED KINGS. The books are available in English.

One of my favorites is THE STRANGLED QUEEN, which takes place in the 13th century.

[GoodDay]

Strange coincidence.

His historical novel, “The She-Wolf of France” is on my shelf, at the top of my reading list.

[aimee5291]

Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâces, le Seigneur est avec vous; vous êtes bénie entre toutes les femmes, et Jésus le fruit de vos entrailles, est béni. Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu, priez pour nous pécheurs, maintenant, et à l’heure de notre mort

RIP Monsieur Druon

[nina0113]

I have both the book series and the DVDs of Les Rois Maudits, Druon’s masterwork. Someday I hope my French will be good enough to read them. I was disappointed to find that the DVDs don’t even have FRENCH subtitles.

[nina0113]

The books are available in English.

For upwards of $100 a volume at abebooks, yes. He's one of the authors I always keep an eye out for at used bookstores. I was fortunate enough to pick up most of Anne Golon's Angelique series in both French and English, so if I ever have the initiative to work my way through all of those, I'll be ready for Druon.

[Cincinna]

You are so lucky to have the books.

For some reason, they are very, very expensive, over $100 each at Amazon.

Hopefully, with Druon’s passing, they will be republished.

[nina0113]

I only have them in French, not English. I got a two-volume boxed hardbound set, containing all seven books, on ebay for $15 a couple of years ago. Get a search running, and they WILL appear.

[justiceseeker93]

“Les Rois Maudits” = “The Detestable Kings”(?) To which kings is he referring?

[Cincinna]

Thanks for the tip. It sounds like you really got lucky.

[Cincinna]

“les Rois Maudits” translates to “The Accursed Kings”

The books take place in the 14th century.

[nina0113]

The first of the accursed kings was Philippe (IV, I think, but I’m too lazy to look it up) who tortured and executed the Knights Templar to steal their treasure - when he burned Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master of the order at the stake, de Molay cursed him and the pope of the day (who had some level of complicity), saying he would see them before God within a year. The king and the pope did both die within the year, and that royal house died out in a couple of generations, with many tragedies on the way.

There’s a school of thought that the Freemasons were founded by British Templars who escaped the French roundup and executions, but it’s not proven. I don’t know if Dan Brown’s done a book on it yet, but if he hasn’t, he will.