Academic Palms

 

            As I have now written about eight hundred weekly posts, I have to forgive myself for forgetting most of them and, no doubt, inadvertently repeating subjects now and then.  Inadvertent but inevitable: I have nowhere near eight hundred ideas.  This week, however, I am fully aware of the repetitive element.  My subject must once again be the achievements of one of our children.  Katherine Fleming has been honored with yet another prestigious award by the Republic of France.  Thus it was that a week ago we found ourselves Ubered up the Turnpike through really beastly traffic to Manhattan.  Our destination was an event at the French consulate on upper Fifth Avenue to attend the award ceremony.

 

            There are all sorts of reasons to continue to admire French civilization, the chief of which is that it is so wonderfully civilized.  But teachers and scholars have a special reason for their appreciation.  At least since the days of Napoleon the French have been leaders in giving public recognition to outstanding men and women renowned in science, humanistic learning, and teaching prowess.  Among the honorific categories of French knighthood are the three grades of the “Ordre des Palmes Académiques,” the “palms” involved belonging to the realm of allegorical botany, sort of like the laurel leaves you see in pictures of Virgil, Dante, and Petrarch.  The three grades are chevalier (knight), officer (officier), and commander (commandeur). None of these awards is cultural chopped liver, but the highest, commander, is of course particularly prestigious, and this was the one with which Katy was being presented on this occasion.

The site of the ceremonial event was the Villa Albertine, a part of French consular properties on Fifth Avenue.  It is the home of a French cultural center and small library.  This historic building is an imposing mansion on the east side of Fifth Avenue just south of the Metropolitan Museum.  It was built by a captain of industry, William Payne Whitney, just at the beginning of the twentieth century.  The house he built is truly baronial, but I don’t hold that against him.  There is an important distinction to be made between barons and robber barons. I insist on a a fairly high level of genuine iniquity in my robber barons, and Mr. Whitney by no means qualified.  He was to be sure of the category of “Patrician, Filthy Rich,” but a number of our great ones of the Gilded Age combined opulence with civic consciousness and philanthropical zeal, and there were several noble Whitneys whose names are remembered for their cultural good works.  (Of course the founder of Whitney Museum of American Art had the maiden name of Vanderbilt.  So it goes, or at least used to go.)

 

            There were perhaps sixty people at the event, only a quarter of whom were blood relatives of the honoree.   Lots of what I think of as New York People.  It was presided over by Mons. Mohamed Bouabdallah, who holds the titles of Cultural Counselor of France in the United States and Director of the Villa Albertine.  If you try hard enough to imagine just how polished and suave somebody holding those ranks is likely to be—that is to say, a public-facing French diplomat housed in a Fifth Avenue mansion--that was Mons. Bouabdallah to a T.  Katy herself is a terrific performer, so that there was a subliminal sense of repartee just beneath the high seriousness of their dialogue.

 

            Though this was my first visit to the Albertine, I had seen Katy “perform” there one other time on video.  A year or so ago in that venue she had a recorded public conversation with Laurence des Cars, the head of the Louvre Museum in Paris.  The Louvre is perhaps the most famous art museum in the world.  The Getty may be the most opulent; so one learned from the conversation between their two directors a lot about the deeper challenges facing the international museum world.  Those challenges cannot be reduced to any single issue, but they all must involve the delicate negotiation between keeping artefacts safe and making them public.  That is the fundamental issue, but it seems to have an endless number of fascinating corollaries. 

 

            Of course our daughter had to make a little acceptance speech—like all of her formal communications elegant, witty, but also at heart substantial.  It was also very kind in its allusions to her parents, to whom she gave probably too much credit in the formation of her international cultural perspectives.  But we loved it; and it is true that her breadth of cultural range, her remarkable abilities in several foreign languages, and the catholicity of her intellectual sympathies do have their origins in part in her experiences in various of our sabbatical stays in England, France and in Italy.  I remember her so well as a very little girl living on a farm on the outskirts of L’Isle-sur-Sorgue in 1968, the year of the great French student rebellion and general strike.  There she was in her little red polka dot dress gobbling escargots and gabbling in peasants’ French.  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive….Sometimes I ponder in my mind the remarkable differences between the lives lived by my grandparents and those being lived by my grandchildren.  One might think that they represent not different generations but different species.  Yet the through-line is family, which remains for many of us the indispensable constellation of social cohesion in a vast galaxy of whirl and change.   

 

Whose Number Is Not Legion

 

This essay is a new venture for me, requiring a kind of provisional 

abrupt introductory paragraph that must serve as a foundation

for a structure to be erected upon it some hours hence--I hope by

about 3pm EST. That is to say, this post is to be continued. For

it involves matters that will not have happened until about then, 

or at least for which I have no hope of providing some 

photographic evidence of their having happened by then.  This

is as close to "live blogging" as Gladly Lerne is ever likely to 

come.  So with what I must hope is a sufficiently annoying air of

mystery, I leave you until later, or in this instance jusque' à 

plus tard....

        and it is now plus tard.  This is a story about two

 commanding figures, Napoleon Bonaparte and our daughter

 Katherine.  I realize that this may seem a conspicuous yoking

 of unequals of differing character, perhaps even a concordia

 discors like last week’s soiled fish.  But there are major

differences between them.  Our daughter , after all,  is a very 

nice person.  But it was the not-so-nice First Consul Napoleon 

who, two hundred and twenty years ago, established the

 Legion d’Honneur.  The French Revolution went a long way

 towards destroying hereditary aristocracy.  Along with

 titles of aristocratic rank were junked hundreds of

 religious and secular sodalities, fraternal organizations

 and orders of chivalry.  Many of these groups had been

 divided into hierarchical degrees of subgroups with more

 or less fancy titles.  Many had distinctive emblems,

ornaments, or features of dress that announced their wearers

 with varying degrees of iconographical exactitude.  In 

theory all this was swept away by the Revolution, one of 

the three bywords of which was Égalité--equality of social

station.  One title alone was thought sufficient for all:

Citoyen—citizen.  (For the Russians a century later it 

would be tovarishch—Comrade.)                 

Never mind that the egalitarianism might in reality be 

more linguistic than social.  The world of titular elitism

had been dealt a punishing blow.  And it might seem to

have created a “merit gap”.  Napoleon was at heart a 

soldier, and he believed that soldiers, though they fought 

nobly for their homelands, for their leaders, for their

religions, and for glory, by no means despised the 

“baubles” of military decorations.  Their miserly pay, 

when they got it, hardly made them what we would think 

of as mercenaries.  It was with this in mind that in1802,

 he devised the Legion of Honor to recognize conspicuous 

service to the French patria.  The recognition was not

 material, but of the highest prestige.  The Legion’s motto

 is “Honneur et Patrie"-“Honor and Homeland.”  At its 

origin Napoleon thought of such service as principally,

though not exclusively, military in nature.  The very

word Legion of course was a term borrowed from ancient 

Roman military history—a large fighting force (a minimum

of four thousand men) organized into a precise hierarchy 

of well-oiled functional parts.  The excellence recognized

among the new French Legioneers came in gradations or

degrees, as it had in the old church hierarchy and in the

burgeoning secular religion of the Free Masons.  Over 

time the concept of service to the French Republic was

largely directed to notable achievement or leadership in

many fields, culture, scholarship, industrial enterprise, etc.

It was also realized that there were throughout the world

men and women who, though not in fact French citizens

or perhaps even residents of France, were notable

contributors. People could and did honor the French

patrie from many foreign climes.  This was particularly

true, perhaps, of academic experts dealing with French

materials: French history, French culture, Francophone 

countries, and so forth.    

Two new electrifying knights
 

            By now you see where this is going.  A short while ago Christophe Kerrero, the Recteur de l’academie de Paris, inducted Dr. Katherine Elizabeth Fleming, historian and CEO of the Getty Foundation,  as a chavaliere.  Chevalier/e continues the title of distinguished military distinction in ancient Rome and the Christian Middle Ages.  The English word knight (from Old English cniht, “young man”) was a bit of an outlier.  The Latin word eques, like the French chevalier, the Spanish caballero, the German Ritter, etc., made clear this person’s essential source of fearful power.  As the French joke has it, the most important thing about a chevalier is the cheval (horse).  And indeed I would hate to be standing in an infantry line, sword in hand, facing ten or twelve 1400-pound war horses, each mounted by a steel-clad warrior with extended battle lance in “charge” position, headed my way at a canter that soon advanced to a gallop.

                                                       Claudine and Joan in the Grande Salle of the Sorbonne
 

            External evidences of the award—what Napoleon called the “baubles”--are a fancy medal for ceremonial occasions and a very discreet small red lapel bar for trips to the grocery store and things like that.  I now remember quoting Nina Berberova on the Kravchenko trial.  “To see with my own eyes how a former minister, or a world-known scientist, a Nobel Prize laureate or a Sorbonne Professor with the Legion of Honor in his lapel button hole, or a famous author would take the oath and under oath affirm that there never had been and were not any concentration camps in the USSR was one of the strongest impressions of my entire life.” Reports of Katy’s testimony are much more uplifting.

                                                        Pierre and Claudine Bloch: friends of seventy years
 

I have already reported on one of these filial laureations in January of 2001, also in Paris and also at the Sorbonne.  (I am now sort of embarrassed by the bragging in which I indulged, but should you have nothing better to do you can run a search under “What a Prize!”—an allusion to the prize-winner, actually--or follow the list back to January 27, 2010).  A large issue of my own this time is simply the unfortunate fact that I am in New Jersey, not Paris.  I didn’t think it was wise from the medical point of view to undertake another international trip so soon after the last one.  In case of my own possible temptation to revise this decision, the prize-winner herself stood ready to reaffirm it in emphatic form.  But all is very well.  Joan, accompanied by our eldest and very globe-trotting son Richard, are already ensconced in the elegant guest quarters of our very old friends Pierre and Claudine Bloch--next to the Luxembourg Gardens, a short walk from the site of the ceremony.  My erudite son-in-law Zvi, prohibited by his own professional obligations from attending the ceremony, has been keeping me company here.  So it's Hands Across the Water, and if all goes well with Richard’s plans to send me a couple of photos pronto, I shall achieve my first and probably only semi-live blog.  And I will say it again: What a prize!

                                                   

photo credits: Richard A. Fleming