Bonne fête, maman!

Today is Mother's Day. Eli gave Ally a bouquet of flowers from the market on the Place des Précheurs. Even better, he had decided to sleep until eight and was being pretty good all morning.

It's rainy today, so there is not much for him to do. Lately he's enjoyed dancing to music, lining things up to make a "guh-guh," and playing peekaboo with Uncle Christopher.

I know you are thinking that Mother's Day is the second Sunday in May, but that's not the case everywhere. In France, it's the last Sunday in May, unless that's Pentecost, which pushes Mother's Day to the first Sunday in June.



French Mother's Day, the Fête des Mères, has a fairly unique history, inasmuch as it was introduced by the Vichy Regime (the fascist collaborators who ruled France 1940-44) but has been preserved. Practically everything else Vichy did or stood for--you know, murdering Jews, sending French workers to Germany, and briefly fighting against the Allies--has been repudiated or denied. Vichy broadened an existing day honoring mothers of large families (itself rooted in recognition of the suffering of mothers who lost their sons and husbands in the First World War) into a holiday celebrating motherhood in generally. This fit in with the Vichy goal of reaffirming traditional gender roles, with women at home raising large families of future soldiers and workers. Vichy called the reordering of French society along traditional lines the National Revolution.

At some level, this is troubling even to committed antifascists such as myself. Could the Vichyites have been completely evil if they loved their mothers and encouraged everyone else to do so? Should Sting's Rule color our judgment of men who were traitors and collaborationists?



Vichy is gone and the National Revolution abandoned, but Mother's Day remains on the date and under the name Vichy adopted. Indeed, to the extent that the French government takes an interest in women, particularly women as mothers, it is working on the same problem the Vichy government did; however, the goals and methods of postwar French governments have been quite different. Rather than chasing women out of the workforce to force them into marriage and motherhood, as Vichy did, current policy is to make working marriage motherhood an appealing choice for French women. You get good support during pregnancy and childrearing, daycare, and guarantees that you can't lose your job or be knocked off your career path because you take maternity leave. Among Western European countries, France has both a high birth rate and high participation of women in the workforce.

I thought I would give you a translation of the wordy Vichy poster:

Mother's Day, 25 May 1941.

Your mother has done so much for you--THE MARSHAL [Vichy leader Philippe Pétain] asks you to thank her for it nicely.

GIVE HER FLOWERS that you have grown.
OR AN OBJECT made just for her.
DRAW HER A PICTURE as pretty as you can.
TRY HARD IN CLASS so you can show her good grades.
DON'T ARGUE with your brothers and sisters.
GO DO THE CHORES she asked you to do.
HELP AROUND THE HOUSE with a smile.
LEARN A PLEASANT RECITATION.

WORK--FAMILY--COUNTRY [Vichy motto around the fasces.]

You should certainly imagine that the seven children on the poster are meant to be the children of one mother. (The average at this time was about 2.5 children per French family.)