By Walter Agnew Moore II
29 April 2002, Amiens, France.

PART ONE: The Drum Beats

Boom...
Boom...
ba-Boom, ba-Boom,
BaROOM BOOM BOOM

The crowd gets quiet, the front of the procession is starting to move.

My God, there are flags everywhere.

Red ones. Green ones. White ones. Big blue-green-orange-and-red ones. French tricolors with writing printed on them the same way Napoleon's regiments used to do. Whipping, snapping, clapping in the wind.

There are all kinds of flags, from all kinds of groups. There are at least 5,000 of us starting to move through the streets of Amiens, all together protesting Mr. Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front.

I used to complain that French politics were boring, and it was true: technocrats all cozied up together, fiddling with tenths of percentages on this or that. Never any big issues, never any depth.

My, how Le Pen changed all that.

The chant starts, to the rhythm of the drum:

"F comme fasciste!"
"N comme nazi!"
"à bas, à bas"
"Le Front National!"

which is pretty close to the English:

"F like fascist!"
"N like nazi!"
"down with, down with"
"The National Front!"

Who is this Le Pen guy? A one-eyed paratrooper. A gifted speaker. He is a xenophobe who wants to turn back the clock to maybe 1912. Is he racist? Well, I wouldn't say he'd feel at home in the KKK... because not even the KKK say the kind of things Le Pen says these days.

Camps. The guy said he'd round up foreigners in France and put them in camps. Camps— that's the word he used.

So by a fluke of the French electoral system that makes everything that happened in Florida look sane, Le Pen has ended up running second behind Jacques Chirac in the presidential elections.

But he can't win, can he?

Almost certainly not. However, to imagine what effect this has had on the average person's self-esteem here, think of how the people of some civilized town like, say, Boston, would feel if they got world-wide attention for having a Nazi as their second-running mayoral candidate.

They'd be sick. And they are. My friend Jeff, dart champion of the town, couldn't hit a bull's eye 3 days after the first round of elections. My office-mate Dominique was obsessively listening to the radio and reading newspapers. Both her parents were Polish.

Camps.

I was always intellectually opposed to Le Pen. But it was when I was talking to my students that I first got really enraged with this guy. Mad at him on a gut level. It is as if he had spit in the face of the kids I teach. No, most of them aren't the children of recent immigrants, but he spit on them all the same, by even implying that they would accept him.

And what of the immigrants? What about my student from Senegal? Is he supposed to go to a camp? My girls with Egyptian and Turkish names? What about my other office mate with an Arabic name who has been working herself sick on her dissertation? Is she supposed to worry about this as well? She doesn't need this.

Ah, maybe these people aren't technically immigrants. Maybe they were born here. Maybe it's just their parents that Le Pen hates.

The National Front uses Joan of Arc as their patron saint. In their parades they have a fake virgin in fake armor clip-clopping on a horse in front of their foot-soldiers.

If Joan were really around, she'd skull Le Pen with a spiked mace.

So I read about kids in Paris fighting with the cops right after this first started. Cops... The French police did a hell of a lot of dirty work for the Nazis during the occupation.

Then the night before the planned demonstration, I run into the guys from my rugby team in a bar. They are grim. In fact, Peter is almost doubled over, queasy-looking as he explains how it made him feel. He is usually grinning, a happy guy with leprechaun sideburns. Not this night.

"God, Walter, what do I say? I am ashamed. I am ashamed of my country. My country was always the France of the Rights of Man, Liberty, Equality... We really believed in those things here."

Fabrice steps in: "We'll meet at the demonstration. We'll all march together. Walter, you'll come with us?"

"Hell yeah. Bust Nazi heads."

"Yeah, you know, there may be trouble—"

"—Fair enough. Words are great, but it was tanks and bombers that broke the Nazis the first time."

Fabien doesn't want to march. He thinks it will play into Le Pen's hands if there is trouble. No one agrees with him. I am talking to Guillaume and Fabrice:

"You know, if you take this anti-immigrant policy to its logical conclusion, nobody has a right to be in France except for the direct descendants of Cro-Magnon wooly-mammoth hunters... even the Gauls just got here, if you look at it from the long view."

They chuckle and shake their heads. I squint, stab my finger at big Guillaume, and snarl "Sale celte..."

He cracks up.

PART TWO: The Manif

A demonstration in France is called a "manifestation", or more conversationally, a "manif" (ma-NEEF).

Now, for reasons including but not limited to me losing my backpack, running into a 25-year-old woman who thought (rightfully) that 41-year-olds are sexy and (wrongfully) that she could down two bottles of wine, and Fabrice getting the time of the manif wrong, well, I almost didn't make it to the manif.

But here I am, walking up a side-street towards the Cirque, I can hear drums and chants in the distance, and I get stalled on the narrow sidewalk behind a mother doing that side-to-side hobble-walk with her toddler daughter. There are cars to my left, garbage cans to my right, for a minute I cannot get around them, so I listen as they talk.

"Mama, I thought we were going to the manif."

"We are going to the manif, sweetie, it's up by the Cirque."

"Oh...Will there be lots of people at the manif, mama?"

"I think so, honey."

"I hope so. I don't like that bad man."

France: Where the three-year-olds have more political awareness than American university students.

I round the corner, and in front of the domed Cirque is a tight rectangle of several thousand people waiting to start. I find my guys without much trouble.

We are with the Teachers' Union. A remarkable number of amateur rugby players are high-school teachers by day. The frustration has to find an outlet.

Guillaume gets hold of a giant Teacher's Union flag. The rest of us band around him. It looks like the "Night Watch" with modern clothing. A man says something about Americans, and Fred, our coach, says "Hey, we have our very own American right here with us!" The other man grins and nods to me as he takes his flag over to another group.

We will be in the rear of the march.

"Hey Guillaume, if the skinheads show up, don't whack them with that flag-pole..."

He whips it around in front of him.

"...that's right...*stab* them with it like a bayonet."

Fred is yelling at us: "Tighten up, tighten up, we don't want to lose anybody!"
And then, on a sunny, windy day, we began a 2-hour stroll around town.

PART THREE: People and Things I Saw or Noticed at the Manif

I saw Zarah, little Zarah, with her hair let down. I joked that we were headed towards My Goodness Irish Pub, and she said "Not this time buddy".

I saw Andi from Austria, spending his vacation in Amiens. He was studying law here last semester, now he has a job back home. "I saw the TV, and I was shocked. I don't see how people can do something so stupid. In Austria now it is bad too, people admit they vote for Haider now just like he is a normal candidate."

I saw Cristophe come out of Pub Geronimo to watch us go by, blinking in the sun. We wave.

I heard angels singing. Except they were ladies from the Communist Party, who do not officially believe in angels.

I saw a sign I liked: "Your numbers are Arabic. Your letters are Roman. Your Jesus was a Jew. And you don't like your neighbor because he is foreign."

I saw a couple of North African kids come roaring by on a little scooter. The one on the back had two flags side by side, the Algerian flag and the French flag. "That was a nice touch," said Fred.

I saw the Welsh leaning out of their 5th floor apartment. I yelled up at them. Ben and Chris yelled back down at me. Ben snapped my picture. Jean-Eude was walking next to me and said: "You just blew your chances to ever become President of the U.S.."

I ran into a photo store and bought a disposable camera. I ran back out and went up and down the procession snapping scenes, trying to avoid too many direct shots of peoples' faces; in the Selma march in the 60's it was the cops taking pictures of the marchers so they could prosecute later, and I didn't want the people to think that was what I was doing in case the French cops do the same thing.

Turns out they do.

I want to leave you with an image of a little girl riding on her daddy's shoulders. Long wavy light brown hair. Goofy round little kid glasses. Grinning like she's about to get an ice-cream cone. Rocking maniacally, tossing her head around and shouting out the marching chants, shaking her little fists, working herself into a frenzy.

PART FOUR: What I Did Not See At the Manif

Anything remotely resembling support for the National Front.

Punked

Out.

PART FIVE: After the Manif

We get to the end of the route, the chants get quicker, and the rain comes down. As fine a place to stop as any.

We head towards the Cafe Leffe, and the sun comes back out.

PAM! PAM! PAMPAMPAM!

The explosions come from the left. Fred doesn't flinch, so I don't either. I look over to the left, towards the Town Hall.

It is a woman in a wedding dress running out. Men in dark suits are following her. Someone is throwing fire-crackers.

PAM! American firecrackers sound like a small-caliber rifle. French fireworks sound like a 9mm pistol.

We brush raindrops off the plastic seats outside and order drinks. The wind kicks up. Audrey huddles up against me. She is a little woman of the sassy variety, attractive, and dark, so she looks more Greek than French. She is a nice one to go about manifesting with.

We move inside with our drinks and end up in the basement dining room. I had no idea it even existed. I start making air-raid siren noises as I look at the old stone walls, and Guillaume plays along, making muffled "poompoompoompoom" and "crump" sounds.

"I bet this basement is lots older than the rest of the building."

The waiter is rude. I know this because all the French people I am with comment "Damn, he's rude!"

We are discussing the manif, and Le Pen's policies. I chime in how I am angry at how he insults good people who happen to be immigrants.

Audrey says, "It's even worse for people like me, who don't even have a country to go back to."

"What do you mean?"

"I am a Gypsy."

I hope she didn't see me jump. I did. I am scared of Gypsies. I don't even know any. Or I didn't. I just didn't like them because they are the ones who rob you and pickpocket you, and all that stuff that never happened to me but I've heard people say it.

As fine a time as any to get over it.

Audrey is being harassed by Guillaume and Fred to take off her sunglasses now that we are inside. Then, in the manner of 14-year-olds, they are teasing her about her regular glasses. She laughs and hides behind me.

"Walter— they are persecuting me! Defend me!"

PART SIX: Food

A good manif will work you up a hunger. About half of us walk over to La Ferme, a restaurant specializing in cheese dishes.

"La Ferme" literally means "the farm", but it is also slang for "shut up".

We order aperitifs. Wine for Fred. Ricard for Guillaume. Kir for Fabrice. I forget what Corinne got, but it was red. I order "Dubonnet" off the menu.

"Ah! You know Dubonnet, Walter? That's *cool*..."

Actually, I don't know it. I just saw a poster for it on a wall once. The wall was in a photo. A black and white photo of a ruined French town with tanks driving past.

Dubonnet is "cooked wine", near as I can translate. Served room temperature. It's OK.

They bring us peanuts. They bring us a plate of smoked sausage.

Then we get our food. Guillaume and I split a "Fondue Vercingetorix," which is a pot of melted cheese over a burner, and more pieces of smoked sausage and hard brown bread. You stab the bread and sausage onto spits and dip them in the cheese. The cheese gets better and better as it cooks. Corinne and Fred had the goat-cheese fondue and got bowls of potatoes as well, which we stole from liberally.

Lemon sorbet floating in vodka.

And so I am thinking, I have to write up what this day felt like. I want people to know about it. It was a good day. But they are going to ask me why I was there. I can't even vote in this country.

Well, I am not French. Neither are all the thousands of guys lying in neat rows not far from here. I have walked down their rows. Without looking for them, I saw family names everywhere. Does that make this my country too?

There was a man who got kicked out of France a long time ago. He had the wrong religion. Am I proud to be coming back here for him?

There are four decent people with me at this table who have treated me as a friend.

And that is why you do it.

Fred raises his glass, and we stop to listen.