## 27 Attraction to the past
When I think about my own life, as far as I can, I find a kind of attraction to the past. In my childhood, I have read a lot of books about history. It started with my mother's schoolbook, the way History was taught in the 50s and 60s. You can imagine what it was like when France was a colonial state, or when there was a civil war in Indochina or North Africa. The ancient names of countries or regions seem very exotic to me. And history books were still heavily influenced by the national narrative. Clovis, Charlemagne, heroes like Charles Martel, Roland or the great kings like Louis XIV, Emperor Napoleon... When I think about it, I understand why some politicians in France are sometimes stuck in this national narrative, so far from reality. But, that's another story (see LIveFromFrance, for example...)
My mother's history schoolbooks were not the only books on my bedside table. I had other and more recent history books. And I also had other books, such as novels by Alexandre Dumas (The Three Musketeers), Paul Féval, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Eugène Sue... Many of the stories twere set place between the 17th and the 19th centuries. So my imagination was very much influenced by all these books. I don't think I'm alone when I see many steampunk novels or comics. I loved cape and sword novels and movies. I loved films with Jean Marais or Jean-Paul Belmondo in that sort of thing. I also loved the Victorian era and all the books and movies in that kind of atmosphere. I also had a period of my life with a real passion for Napoleon, the period not the man. I played wargames...so it's easy to understand why. But I also thought about the civilians and soldiers who died in those wars. I tried to understand the strategies and development of strategies and tactics. After that, I became very interested in the US Civil
War. For me, it was a key to understanding the 1st World War, that killed my great-grandfather.
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But one of the books that impressed me in my childhood was a book about Marco Polo. It was a documentary book about Marco Polo's journey with lots of pictures of the cities he visited on his way to China. Pictures in the 80s, of course, so they were archaeological sites. I read novel about it and then I also read books about the yellow Expedition (or «cruise»), the Citroen expedition across Asia, in the 30s. It was a fascination for me and...for my grandfather who read about that, when he was 20 years old. I saw documentaries on TV and even the real cars of the expedition. It was a new kind of Marco Polo travel. Now it's so easy to get to Beijing with a plane...But I thought about all those stories when I visited the Forbidden City or the Great Wall. I was in the path of Marco Polo and Human History. I have also read the history of Vietnam, before visiting the country. So many of the street names and statues were not unknown by me. I have to know the origins of what I see.
It's the same with music, painting or cinema. I tried early on to learn about the beginnings of these arts. My first passion was painting, not to practice, but to know about the great painters, their masterpieces, their lives. It started with Dürer, Da Vinci and then Delacroix, Géricault, and of course the Impressionists because I lived in a «hot spot» of that period. So I fell in love with Turner's paintings and so many other artists. As for Cinema, I have read all the books I could find in my Library and tried to watch all the movies of the «Ciné Club» at midnight on TV. It was not easy at a time when there were few video clubs and no streaming services. But I watched a lot of French and US classic movies of the 20s, 30s, 40s, the old films from Italy, China, Germany, England, Japan and more recently India. But I didn't want to become a professional in painting, cinema or music. When I was young, I only had my father's and grandfather's records and not much money to buy new ones. But I had a media l
ibrary with lots of CDs to discover the great artists of rock music, hard-rock after that, and of course classical music, opera. And then came Napster, and other services to get music on the internet...So, when I hear some songs now what imitates old sounds from the 70s or 80s, I don't have the same opinion as a teenager of today. That's why I created a website about music in the 2000s, first based on the history of music. It has evolved and disappeared now but I kept part of it in my French blog.
World history has helped me a lot to understand geopolitics, my other passion. It's often what Politician lack in their decisions. For example, to understand the war in Kosovo in the late 90s, it was not just a question of territory, or religion but something more complex with the history of all the Balkans. It's the same with Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the Chinese politics today. My attraction to the past has always helped me to understand what is going on today.
But now, I'm working for the future. So, see you next year !
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