The photo album lies open before me as I reflect on our chance meeting last July in the south of France. Fernand Henri Daubeze by name, he sits on a plastic chair on the terrace outside the Résidence Club of the 3rd Age where he lives in retirement. This residence is located in the city of Vichy, an old city famous for its history and its waters.
Fernand Daubeze embodies some of that history because he played a small but significant part in it. Now aged 92, he sits with dignity and the hint of a smile looking out toward me as I snap the picture which will serve as a memento of my short visit with him.
The Third Age Residence is the French version of assisted living, complete with a series of social and health services graduated according to personal need. M. Daubeze uses a cane but is mobile and seems able to provide much of his own care.
Unlike Vichy itself, Fernand is glad to share his own history. As a young man he entered the French army and served the short time until its defeat. Then he joined the Resistance, that movement which made life difficult for the occupying German army. Later he traveled south, crossed the Spanish border and became a member of the Free French forces in North Africa.
The climax of his military career came when he participated in the Allied invasion first of Sicily, then of the Italian mainland. He thus contributed to the Allied victory, which came after much heavy fighting.
In all of this combat, some of it difficult indeed, he escaped without injury so, given the hazards faced, his is an unusual longevity. Unlike many other war veterans, Fernand is glad to talk about his experiences, even using English at times to help his visitor.
He looks back upon his military career with pride; after all, he dared choose the path of most resistance. As for now and the future, he expresses his attitude succinctly: “J’attends” (I am waiting), he tells me, with a smile and a shrug.
This brief vignette of a brave man now in old age summons up a tumultuous history, the time of France’s humiliating defeat at the beginning of Word War II and its eventual rescue. As he leans on his cane, Fernand has much to ponder about the dramatic events of his own lifetime and his own part in them.
That he has retired to the city of Vichy bears a certain amount of irony. Vichy, after all, became the seat of the collaborationist government headed by Marshall Petain. During the years 1940 to 1944 the German occupiers had Petain carry out their policies, some of them horrifying. When it came to the deportation of French Jews to the death camps, the Vichy government not only did not resist but went even further than required in rounding up Jewish children.
When you visit Vichy today, there are no signs of that regime. Knowledgeable visitors will identify the former hotel that Petain seized as headquarters but information about this location is not easy to discover. Nor does one see any plaques on the opera house identifying it as the site where the Third Republic was legislated out of existence. The present-day French still feel too embarrassed about the Petain heritage to allow any evidence of it to surface.
Vichy wants no part of its historical association with the policies of national disgrace and complicity in crime. Instead the city is upbeat, bustling with business and looking toward further development of its new identity. The place specializes in its famous Vichy water that the French believe a sovereign remedy for rheumatism, arthritis, and other bodily ills.
The history which Fernand Daubeze embodies has many elements at odds with the mid 20th century history of this area. Presumably this discrepancy forms part of his meditations as he sits and waits.
Ultimately, I suppose, he can take pride that his actions helped Vichy break away from the Petain legacy and become what it is today. If it can lure retirees from various parts of France to come and retire there in peace and quiet, the city serves a good purpose.
I hope that my brief friend Fernand continues to flourish and enjoy the time of his nineties. To me he will continue to sum up an important epoch in European and world history with all of its horrors and eventual hope.
As he has done, Fernand can now sit down with former German soldiers, themselves become old men, and talk with them as fellow Europeans living in mutual peace and harmony. They have all come through a time of great struggle and in their old age can lay claim to some of its rewards.
Richard Griffin