Sad Lisa

February 2022

First, I would like to wish you all a very happy and prosperous 2022! There is a point at which we need to fill ourselves with optimism, regardless of what is happening around us.

Happy New Year!

I believe that many of us, and probably all of us, are thinking that the year 2022 has to be better than 2021, which, in some ways, was just as bad as 2020 for a great number of us.

French custom dictates that New Year’s wishes can be expressed until the end of January, so I have managed it a few hours before the deadline.

Sad Lisa
She hangs her head and cries on my shirt
She must be hurt very badly
Tell me what’s making you sad, Li? 
Open your door, don’t hide in the dark
You’re lost in the dark, you can trust me
’Cause you know that’s how it must be
Lisa Lisa, sad Lisa Lisa
Her eyes like windows, trickle in rain
Upon the pain getting deeper
Though my love wants to relieve her
She walks alone from wall to wall
Lost in her hall, she can’t hear me
Though I know she likes to be near me
Lisa Lisa, sad Lisa Lisa
She sits in a corner by the door
There must be more I can tell her
If she really wants me to help her
I’ll do what I can to show her the way
And maybe one day I will free her
Though I know no one can see her
Lisa Lisa, sad Lisa Lis

Tea for the Tillerman was the fourth studio album by singer-songwriter Cat Stevens (Yusuf), released in November 1970. “Sad Lisa” was the fourth song on side 1.

For days I searched for a title, not knowing what angle of life I wanted to share. These days, life feels like a roller coaster. Bad news keeps coming after good, and this is happening too often for a lot of people and destabilizing many. I increasingly hear about people who have been deeply disturbed by nearly two years of a never-ending pandemic that has changed everybody’s daily life. A great many have been hit hard and are really struggling to hang in there. Some have lost jobs, others have lost self-confidence, and some have sought psychiatric help. Many are going through what the lyrics of this song describe. Professionally and personally I know people who have been greatly affected.

So yes, we can be optimistic that the end of the pandemic, the end of several crises, will occur this year. We need to be optimistic to be at our best against adversity, and some of us can manage to do this. But let’s not forget the ones who have a hard time getting through the day and who need tiny rays of sunshine in their eyes.

REINSTATING JOSEPHINE BAKER’S AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP 
It is commonly noted that French troops fought on the American side during the War of Independence and that American troops helped liberate France during WWII. This illustrates the strong bond between the two countries. Many American towns and landmarks are named after the commanders of the French troops in the War of Independence, “Lafayette and Rochambeau.” These names are familiar to many but I am not sure everybody knows who they were and why streets and towns are named after them.

Wikipedia
Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette (6 September 1757 – 20 May 1834), known in the United States as Lafayette, was a French aristocrat and military officer who fought in the American Revolutionary War, commanding American troops in several battles, including the siege of Yorktown. After returning to France, he was a key figure in the French Revolution of 1789 and the July Revolution of 1830. He has been considered a national hero in both countries.

Wikipedia
Marshal Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau (1 July 1725 – 10 May 1807) was a French nobleman and general whose army played the decisive role in helping the United States defeat the British army at Yorktown in 1781 during the American Revolution. He was commander-in-chief of the French Expeditionary Force sent by France to help the American Continental Army fight against British forces.

Interestingly, in my day little time was devoted to them in French schools. I learned a lot more about how decisive their actions were once I lived in the USA.

I started to think about all this when Josephine Baker were inducted into the Panthéon on Tuesday, November 30th. Only a few exceptional French people get this honor. In a way, the monuments in Washington, DC named after American presidents serve a similar purpose. Hence it is interesting that this American-born French citizen, remarkable in so many ways, is so little known in the USA.

Wikipedia
Josephine Baker (born Freda Josephine McDonald, naturalized French Joséphine Baker; 3 June 1906 – 12 April 1975) was an American-born French entertainer, French Resistance agent and civil rights activist. Her career was centered primarily in Europe, mostly in her adopted France. She was the first black woman to star in a major motion picture, the 1927 silent film Siren of the Tropics, directed by Mario Nalpas and Henri Étiévant.

During her early career, Baker was among the most celebrated performers to headline the revues of the Folies Bergère in Paris. Her performance in the revue Un vent de folie in 1927 caused a sensation in the city. Her costume, consisting of only a short skirt of artificial bananas and a beaded necklace, became an iconic image and a symbol both of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties. …

She aided the French Resistance during World War II. After the war, she was awarded the Resistance Medal by the French Committee of National Liberation, the Croix de Guerre by the French military, and was named a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur by General Charles de Gaulle. Baker sang: “I have two loves, my country, and Paris.”

Some American groups in Paris have expressed interest in having Baker’s American citizenship reinstated; she lost it when she married a Frenchman. Such a move would make sense: The USA would recognize that this French heroine born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1906 and who moved to France as a young adult, also had a significant impact on strengthening the ties between the two countries. Sadly, it would also be about the Jim Crow era at the time, when she had to move to France to be able to have a career as a performer.

The metro stop Gaîté was renamed after her at the time of the Panthéon ceremony. There are streets, a swimming pool and other places named after her throughout France.

There will be those who think that Baker, after leaving the USA at the young age of 18 and spending her life and career in France, did not retain enough ties with the USA to be recognized this way. But I find it interesting that on February 6th, 2016, a transport station named for Rosa Parks was inaugurated, even though the civil rights activist never came to France or had any interaction with Paris.

Until 2011, the station was to be called Évangile, after the rue de l’Évangile and the wayside cross from which the street takes its name. The name Rosa Parks was first given to the nearby tram station in 2012. “We wanted at least 50% female names. There was a lot of debate, in particular with the RATP, which favors existing place names, but for Rosa Parks, there was a consensus: this is a must for a tram stop, it is a strong symbol,” recalled Annick Lepetit, Mayor Bertrand Delanoë’s deputy in charge of transport. People living in the nearby Curial-Cambrai social housing project were asked to vote on a list of ten names; their top choice was Bernard Tétu, a local doctor who died in 2003. But Rosa Parks ran a close second. “We then had the idea of changing the Évangile name to that of Rosa Parks, which gained a consensus and made sense,” said a spokesperson for François Dagnaud, mayor of the 19th arrondissement. The Syndicat des Transports d’Île-de-France, now called Île-de-France Mobilités, agreed. The name caught on and was also given to the Rosa-Parks/Macdonald neighborhood council and a community center opened in 2016.

I find all these juxtapositions interesting. I believe the Franco-American friendship still exists and can be seen in multiple ways.

ETHNIC NEIGHBORHOODS IN CITIES AND INTEGRATION
A reader recently wrote to me:
“Dear Jean, your newsletter was excellent. This quote stuck in my mind. I like your word “fascinate”, which could be written ‘I don’t understand how’” Americans can live in a foreign country, learn computer skills (to renew their Carte de Séjour Temporaire) yet not speak or try to speak French. It is beyond me and makes Americans look (in my book) not so good. I am here to experience France, to learn to communicate and to speak French. When I lived in NYC, Puerto Ricans (a very close-knit people) would live in NYC for 40 years and still not bother to try to speak English. I know this, not only by living in NYC but also from teaching English in Puerto Rico. Stubborn and scared. A great letter! Thank you.”

I professionally help foreigners with their French immigration issues. After all these years, I am familiar with the numerous reasons why foreigners settle in France. It can be a short-term assignment by an employer, which gives little motivation to do the hard work of getting deeply acquainted with the French lifestyle and culture. As I was an immigrant when I lived in the USA, I understand the trials, tribulations and hardships one goes through when starting a completely new life in another country. This reader talks about a different issue, which I would like to address.

I rode Greyhound buses across the entire country, starting in New York and going to Los Angeles CA, Spokane WA, Cheyenne WY, Birmingham AL, Indianapolis IN, Montpelier VT and back to New York before I lived for a few years in the USA. For historical reasons, ethnic neighborhoods are often found in large cities. I had a heartbreaking experience walking for an entire day, pretty much from dawn to dusk, all over southern Chicago in the summer of 1981. The walk took me through block after block of rundown African-American neighborhoods but also through Chinese and Italian areas, as was to be expected, as well as Spanish, Greek, Irish, Polish and Russian enclaves. The last was the one that surprised me the most, with signs written in Cyrillic. I could visualize the different waves of immigration coming to the USA. In those days being part of such a community helped with getting a place to live, a job, starting a new life. This was imperative; it was a matter of survival. With some imagination, after seeing pictures and stories of immigrants just off the boats at Ellis Island, I could visualize their lives decades ago, living and working in a new land.

France never used to have anything like this long tradition of ethnic neighborhoods. It was said, and for centuries it was true, that French cities, especially Paris, had neighborhoods defined by profession. One of the best known is the rue du Faubourg Saint Antoine, where artisans specialized in woodworking and producing furniture opened shops. That is why French people always used to say that ethnic neighborhoods could not and did not exist in France, until the evidence of such areas became glaringly visible. The first one started in the early 20th century, just north of the metro station Barbès, located in Paris’s 18th arrondissement. The adjoining neighborhood is now world famous for its North African identity. Algerians were the first to move there in the 1920s, on and around the rue de la Goutte d´Or, which is a couple of streets north of the Boulevard de la Chapelle. Gentrification has greatly diminished their presence.

There are two Chinatowns in Paris. The older one, in the 13th, was located historically between Porte de Choisy, Porte d’Ivry and Place d’Italie. It was begun by Vietnamese boat people who fled to their former colonial power, France, after the Vietnam War ended in 1975. Such migration peaked in 1978-79 but was still going on in the early 1990s.

It is difficult to determine whether the existence of concentrations of immigrants helps or deters their acceptance into the general population. In the USA, integration came about haphazardly in the work place, while France focused on encouraging assimilation through the education of schoolchildren, although both countries used both methods.

In France and the USA alike, as in many other countries, if surviving as an immigrant who has arrived with nothing necessitates staying in the ethnic community, nevertheless this strong connection with the other immigrants from the home country can considerably delay integration into the general population, especially because it makes it so difficult to learn the new language. My initial comment was never meant to describe such immigrants.

Furthermore – and to a certain extent I will contradict myself from one issue to the next – while all immigrants have a story, they do not always tell it fully. When they are sent by their employer, they leave their country for that reason. Another reason may be a romantic partner waiting for them. Or they may be leaving behind a traumatic life: perhaps in the USA they lived through a traumatic divorce or the death of a parent or other loved one. Does it really matter what made them come to France? Some manage to rebound as they create a new life. Some carry hidden emotional scars and do their best to get by and adapt to this new world.

I admit that the statement I made in the December issue might seem harsh and insensitive when seen from that angle. I was talking about how not speaking some French is a severe handicap for people living in France. It often has a compounding effect, not only making it harder on them and thus creating cultural misunderstandings, it also leads them to do the wrong things. But this is the life some have chosen, and the best thing is to be there, walking along with them. This is the part of their life that is deeply buried. We never know their entire story, even if we get a glimpse of what brought them to France. I feel privileged that several have confided in me.

BANKING IN FRANCE 
Another reader has this to say:
“I was interested to read that article in the Q&A section of your newsletter from the person who had a bank account closed. You hooked me up with Barclay’s in 2005, which later became Barclay’s France, then Milleis. I also got the 60-day closure of the account letter.

The entire process was a three-month disaster. They blocked my account and CB and would not return my calls.

Fortunately, I was able to open a new account at BNP Paribas and all is OK now I have gotten my balance back from Milleis.

It took two months from the first visit to receive a checkbook and a CB from BNP – they said the delay was because I was American.

All of my direct debits (SFR, EdF, Orange, AmEx, etc.) were rejected, and since I had no approved account from BNP I was making transfers from my US bank and paying extra fees. The long nightmare is now over.”

I understand and respect your initial reflex, starting with disbelief that the decision is final and therefore thinking some explanation to the bank will fix the problem. It is quite common for banks to give no warning signals that the client can pick up. The exchange with the bank often drags on for days or even weeks before the client realizes the decision is definitive. Since the client does not know the reason for the decision, they are destabilized, which often further delays looking for another bank. Opening an account takes a long time, so in such situations there is a long wait between the closure of the old account and the moment the new one becomes fully operational. This reader’s experience underlines my advice: Do not wait or argue. It is essential to realize the bank’s decision is final. Contact other banks as soon as possible and get a new account opened without delaying. This may make it possible to have a smoother transition and avoid cancellation of services such as cell phone and internet because monthly payments are not wired when due, as this reader testified. There may also be fees or fines linked to the lack of payment.

AMERICAN NOTARIZATION IN FRANCE 
For a long time, the only way to get documents notarized by an American notary public was to go to those working at the US consulates in France. The one in Paris is expensive at $50 per notarization, and sometimes the schedule is such that the first available appointment is weeks away, while the need that expats have is often urgent. Lately, however, online notarization services have appeared, making the task much easier.

A French notaire is a completely different professional from a notary public, but some of them accept to notarize documents. The problem is that, increasingly, American entities asking for notarization do not recognize the French process of notarizing documents, even when they are in English.

Here is the website of one of the many online notary services: www.notarize.com.

THE LATEST ON FRENCH HEALTH REGULATIONS: FROM PASS SANITAIRE TO PASS VACCINAL 
I should have learned by now not to write about this. The policies stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic change from one week to the next. It takes me a long time to draft this column: I often start as much as three weeks before it is published. When I was writing this, the French Parliament was discussing whether apass vaccinal should replace the pass sanitaire (the answer was yes, in the end). The key difference is that under the new policy only fully vaccinated people (who may be required to have booster shots, depending on the dates of their prior inoculations) and the recently COVID-recovered are allowed access to a variety of public places.

CREATION OF SÉCURITÉ SOCIALE, THE FRENCH SOCIAL SAFETY NET 
All European countries have some form of universal public health care covering their nationals and foreigners. In light of the debates, discussions and talk shows broadcast in the USA and France, I believe it might be useful to talk about how France came by its system of universal health coverage, retirement and robust, far-reaching family subsidies.

France came out of World War II with Charles de Gaulle at the head of the two distinct factions who had fought the German occupation: the Communists and the Gaullists. De Gaulle put the country back on its feet. He named members of his own party as well as members of the Communist Party to his cabinet. In those days, the French Communist Party followed the Soviet Communist Party line. Thus in April 1946, the minister of Labor and Social Security, a communist named Ambroise Croizat, introduced his plan for a humanist utopia, which he called social security. As described in the program of the National Council of Resistance, it had three divisions, which still exist:Assurance maladie is the health coverage, Assurance vieillesse is retirement and the Caisse d’Allocations Familiales provides subsidies for families and the poor.

That was 76 years ago. French people are notorious for criticizing everything in France, and it is true that some aspects of the French social safety net are indeed inadequate for the 21st century. But the fact is, none of these programs has collapsed, and the local Caisses Primaires d’Assurance Maladie (CPAM) are handling a very challenging pandemic. I talked earlier about naming public places; it is important to note that many cities have named some streets, etc. after Ambroise Croizat. In Paris, Place Ambroise-Croizat is in the 14th arrondissement.

To learn more:
www.franceculture.fr/histoire/a-lorigine-de-la-securite-sociale .

MY BUSINESS HAS A NEW FACEBOOK PAGE
Over the holidays, my assistant, Sarah, took an interesting initiative and created a new Facebook page. It is a good move for her since she and I both moderate it. She can show off her expertise and her ability to give good advice and clearly explain solutions. She does this in French, leaving the queries in English to me.

Since I am already active in a few Facebook groups and my website is my main showcase, I did not feel I needed such a page. On the other hand, it will no doubt benefit her. I do not have the time to monitor this forum and so far, it has been fairly quiet. Sarah is still figuring out how to handle this new task, being quite busy herself. I am sure it will be a great space for exchanges and hope it will pick up soon.

You are welcome to join:
https://www.facebook.com/rattachement

Best regards,