smokingboot

We could hardly come to Paris without visiting France's mightiest shortarse (no, not Asterix) but first we went up the Eiffel Tower. The views are spectacular of course, but there's real steam punk magic in watching all those levers and coils move; they clunk and then they flow. Hurrah for Victorian over-engineering! Rivets, I tell you, we need more rivets!

Then we walked across the champs de Mars to L'Eglise des invalides, next to the Army museum. Here, once upon a time, the revolutionaries of Paris broke in and after fierce fighting, took 28,000 rifles and went on towards the city centre and a new destiny.

The army museum has a massive chunk dedicated to WWII. I found the propaganda aspects very interesting, if nightmarish: Evil Churchill, a corpulent smoke demon learing over the chaos of Dakar; A smart Vichy fisherman laughing at Churchill fishing with his little De Gaulle bait, behind him a big nosed individual with money bags. There were yellow cloth stars and books entitled, 'How to recognise a Jew'; Roosevelt depicted for a Japanese audience, a monster with hairy clutching hands and lower jaw fangs pointing upwards like some kind of human piranha; propaganda aimed at the US showing Hitler as a sneaky little man with a gun, but giving much more vehemence to the jap savage with his bloody knife looming over America; A French broom sweeping away swastikas and eagles and other symbols of the third reich: 'Away with this bosch rubbish!' A german broom sweeping away a weeping cockerel, and other French symbols and associations; 'Away with this frog rubbish!'

This stuff all belongs in a museum dedicated to propaganda and media manipulation, to teaching how stereotypes are used, how ideas are twisted to an end; I wonder if such a place exists?

And then; Boney's tomb.

This is just so vulgar. No really. Now, we passed the tomb his remains lay in while on St Helena, and this was sweet enough; why they couldn't leave him in it, bring the tomb to Paris, and tend his grave in the Eglise garden, with the tiny violets he is reputed to have loved, I can't understand. But no, no, in the middle of this gilded church, surrounded by mournful caryatids, lies this over sized chunky marble varnished thing which matches the church in neither style, nor colour, nor any aspect at all. I mean, I just don't get it. They stuffed his horse, they stuffed his dog, and they buried him in a roll-top desk. There's a fine line between love and madness...