Emails for the period August – October 2020 have been posted.
If you detect a sense of rising unease, you may well be right. In the first email, dated 15 August 2020, you will find this comment with regard to the possibly unique position France found itself in: “Folk memory of the shameful slide into yellow star wearing is still quite potent. Some of the same arguments have been deployed regarding masks (and rapidly withdrawn).”
Re-reading this reminded me of the time I was working on a passage in The War and Alex Vere. Alex, newly arrived in occupied Paris, is trying to get his bearings in a city apparently unaffected by the ravages of war, yet, at the same time, profoundly changed.
Less reassuring were the new fingerposts: black metal brazenly concreted into the pavement. The closest redundantly pointed to the gates across the road, Gothic script, black on white, oddly alien. It seemed typography had secured an occupation more potent than any number of grey uniforms. He paused for a moment at the iron gates of the park. Twenty years ago a man sold ice cream here, little boys crowding round a painted box fixed to the front of his bicycle. A notice in German had been screwed to the metal bars: Jews Unwanted. The squeamish French translation underneath - Jews are Not Admitted Here - seemed somehow worse.
The reference is to Item 17 on the list placed at the head of the Diary page. It was issued following the application of the 9th Ordinance of the occupying authority “au sujet des Juifs”.
A recent paper by Toby Rogers (April 2023) has the intriguing title, “How Did the World’s Smartest People Fail So Miserably?” [https://brownstone.org/articles/how-did-worlds-smartest-people-fail-so-miserably/] He includes Noam Chomsky on his list. Of course, you may well claim that this is very much a leading question, but Rogers is willing to provide an answer, nonetheless:
It’s over, that phase of American history, when a bunch of people baptized in the values of the 1960s, could be expected to provide the intellectual framework necessary to move society forward. There is no recovery from what they did, they collaborated with the enemy when the fate of society was on the line. To use their favourite phrase — they became “constitutive of” the predatory system they once sought to critique. Our society is so corrupt that the term “intellectual” no longer has a coherent meaning.
Harsh words, but as this tranche of emails suggests, you could find reasons for disquiet even in 2020.
Readings of Oscar & Lucy await Orange France repairing damaged telephone lines.