(Did a slightly shorter
version of this for The Hindu)
Facing me is a
white wooden door with graffiti sprayed across it. As I pass through it and
walk down a flight of cemented stairs, the light fades and the temperature
drops sharply. My phone beeps that it has no signal.
I am several meters underground in a bunker
that was a German air raid shelter during World War II. And for a moment, the
world I know seems very distant.
Then lights flicker on, lighting up the
concrete- and metal-lined corridors of the Musée
Rochelais de la Dernière Guerre or the La Rochelle Museum of the Last War.
Almost simultaneously, Jean-Luc Labour’s vibrant voice fills the space, as he
starts talking about how he acquired the bunker in the early 1980s and turned
it into a museum that tells
the story of La Rochelle and France during World War II.
A beautiful town
of 80,000 on France’s Atlantic coast, about 450 kilometres South West of Paris,
La Rochelle was one of five German submarine bases in occupied-France during
the Second World War. During the War, the Germans constructed several air raid
shelters in the town, including one for the commander of the submarine base.
And it is this underground bunker, on a quiet street off La Rochelle’s main
market, that houses the museum. What makes the privately-owned museum special
is that it has been painstakingly put together by Labour, a history buff and former tourism
director of the town.
A good part of the museum’s motley
collection of guns, uniforms, clothes, photographs, flags, maps, documents and
other memorabilia has been acquired either in or from around La Rochelle. Opening a rather battered suitcase, Labour shows how its false
bottom concealed a wireless transmitter and weapons. The case belonged to a
British secret agent smuggled into France to help the French resistance
movement, he says.
Labour is such a smashing storyteller that
for a little over an hour I am transported to wartime France. I guess it also
helps that he allows me to handle several vintage guns including a Luger pistol
and a Schmeisser MP-41 sub-machine gun.
Equally adept time machines are the three
towers that stand watch over the entry to La Rochelle’s old port. Perhaps the
most recognised and photographed features of the town, the Saint Nicholas, ‘Chaine’
and ‘Lanterne’ towers once regulated entry into the town’s port and also served
as watch towers, military barracks, prisons and navigational aids. Today, they
are tourist magnets that offer visitors glimpses of La Rochelle’s past and also
its celebrated ‘rebel spirit’.
For being different is, it seems, a part of
La Rochelle’s DNA. By the middle of the 12th Century, the town was
granted a ‘Charter of commune’ by the Duke of Aquitaine, who ruled the area.
The charter allowed the town a degree of political and
economic freedom available to few of its contemporaries. It was, for instance,
allowed several tax and customs privileges including exemption from some taxes
levied by the Crown. And in 1199, La Rochelle firmly signalled its autonomy by
electing its first mayor, perhaps the first French town to do so.
Over the next
few centuries it flourished as an important port on the Atlantic, especially
for the trade in salt and wine. In keeping with its penchant for being
different, the town embraced the values of the Reformation — the movement for
reform that split Christianity in Western Europe into the Catholic and
Protestant churches. And by the middle of the 16th Century La
Rochelle was a Protestant stronghold in Catholic France.
However, the
town’s privileged existence came to a rather sorry end in the 17th Century after the
Great Siege of 1627-28. France, under Louis XIII and his Chief Minister
Cardinal Richelieu, brought La Rochelle firmly under royal control. The ‘rebel
town’ was forced to surrender and was stripped of the economic and political
privileges it enjoyed.
By the end of
the 17th Century though, La Rochelle bounced back, becoming the
nucleus of trade
between France, Africa and the West Indies and Canada in the ‘new world’. Much
of La Rochelle’s past lives on in some of its museums including the Orbigny
Bernon Museum, the Museum of the New World and the Museum of Protestant
History.
However, La Rochelle is not only about the
past, but also has its eyes firmly set on the present and the future. Not very
surprising for a town that celebrates its difference with the slogan ‘La
Rochelle, belle et rebelle’ translated as ‘La Rochelle, beautiful and
rebellious’. As Christophe
Marchais, Director, Office of Tourism, La Rochelle tells me: “La Rochelle is
not just a historic city, but also a very contemporary city.”
Among the more important of La Rochelle’s
relatively contemporary attractions is its International Film Festival. Though
not as well known as the one in Cannes, La Rochelle’s International Film
Festival is France’s second largest film event and is celebrating its 40th
edition this year, says Marchais. Other interesting events on the town’s
cultural calendar include the annual Francofolies music festival and two
smaller jazz festivals, besides theatre, documentary and dance festivals.
As a town whose fortunes have been shaped by
the sea, La Rochelle is big on water sports. Its marina, located in the Minimes
neighbourhood is so packed with yachts and boats that at times it seems I’m
trapped in a forest of masts. The marina is currently being expanded and will
soon be able to accommodate 4,500-plus pleasure craft, making it the biggest in
Europe, Marchais declares.
The best part of
the La Rochelle experience though, especially on a fine evening, is to do what
many of its residents do — head to the old port. As I stroll along the waterfront
and then linger over a drink at one of the many cafes that flank the old port,
it’s hard to escape the incessant clanking of halyards whipping against yacht
masts in the wind. An aural reminder, perhaps, that La Rochelle is still a bit
of a rebel.
(The pic used here is a low-res version of
one that appears with the piece in The Hindu)
