"Lorraine!" "film by:" "Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub from the novel Colette Baudoche by Maurice Barrès" "Music from Franz Joseph Haydn" "METZ AND SURROUNDINGS" "The German flow rose incessantly and threatened to submerge everything twenty four thousand in number (not counting the garrison), the immigrants dominated, electorally, the twenty thousand natives." "Colette's grandmother had seen the sorrows of the siege" "and the convulsions of that day, the 20th of October 1870, where was affixed the Proclamation of Bazaine to the army of the Rhine, while the French regiments signed proclamations demanding to fight," "and groups of workers and members of the bourgeoisie ran around the streets with flags under the ringing of all the bells." "One day, Colette and professor Asmus, to whom Mrs. Bourdache had rented two furnished rooms, ran into a turn in Austrasie in a passage where it was said that in the time of Henri I'Oiseleur" "Metz had succumbed to the German attraction." "You see, miss that you have been German once." "Signaled the professor with good natured malice, and he declared that he could not understand that reasonable people would obstinately waste their time against that which is done." "I don't know what we thought a thousand years ago, the people of Metz, but I know well that I can not be a German." "An ordinance, forbade the teaching of French in the schools of four villages." "Moyeuvre-Grande, Fontoy, Knutange and Audun-le-Tiche." "Such measures were frequent, and their effect was always the same:" "they pleased the immigrant at the same time as they made the natives indignant." "To the great scandal of his colleagues, Mr. Asmus sustained that to destroy the French language in Lorraine" "would be nothing less than to destroy knowledge" "Let's take, he said, a child who arrives at school..." "Your teachers refuse to teach him to read and write French," "They can not, however, make it so that German is his mother tongue" "There you have a someone ruined for life" "Where, then, is the benefit for us?" "I saw homework written in our language by young natives, they made no sense, were nothing more than a succession of inept words." "The ordinance was repealed." "Look at that road below, the road from Metz to Nancy." "We saw things, your grandfather and I, things we could hardly believe." "It was the end of September 1872, and we knew that those who did not leave by the First of October would become German." "All very much would have liked to leave, but leaving your country, your home, your land, your businesses, is sad and many could not do it." "Your father said that we must stay and soon we would be liberated." "That was the advice given by Monseigneur Dupont des Loges, and then V's family begged us to stay because of the castle and the lands." "When the last day came, a crowd of people decided all of a sudden." "A veritable contagion, an insanity." "In the stations, to buy a ticket, you had to stand in line for hours." "I know of shopkeepers who left their shops to simple young women." "Would you believe that in the Hospice of Gorze" "Octogenarians abandoned their beds!" "But the most resolved were the youth, even the fifteen year old boys. "Keep your land, they told their mothers and fathers;" "in France we will be peons"" "It was terrible for the country when they went across the prairies." "by the hundreds and hundreds." "And we foresaw well what would come, that the women, in the following years, would have to plow the fields." "We hiked, with your grandfather, from Gorze up to here, and we saw all these people who were going towards the west." "In the distance, the moving vehicles were bumper to bumper, the men droving by hand their horses, and the women sitting, with their children, amongst their belongings." "Those worse off, pushed their belongings along in hand carts." "From Metz to the border there was a traffic jam, like in the streets of Paris" "You couldn't have heard a song everyone was too sad, but, occasionally, we heard voices yelling:" ""Vive la France!"" "The gendarmes, nor any of the Germans dared say a thing;" "they watched in amazement as all of Lorraine left." "In the afternoon, the parade stopped;" "we unbridled the horses;" "kept vigil until the morning in our cars near the towns, in Dornot, in Corny, in Novéant." "We stopped, like everyone, to offer service to those poor people." "We asked them: "Where are you going?"" "Many knew only to answer: "To France..."" "And when your grandfather said:" ""How will you live?"" "The obstinately replied:" ""We don't want to die as Prussians."" "We cried to see them so during the night." "It was a pity, all those mattresses, the clothes, that furniture disordered and already ruined." "It seems arriving at Nancy they sat around the fountains, while they were quickly being built in the squares makeshift camps." "But their number grew so much that we feared a quarrel with the Germans, who still occupied Nancy," "and we headed quickly towards Vesoul several trains with young people..." "Now, to understand how many people left, know that in Metz, where we were fifty thousand, you wouldn't find more than thirty thousand after the first of October" "The 7th of September 1871, four months before the treaty of Frankfurt, the city," "still filled with its French population, but prostrated in the pain and appearing dead, rose up, in a single movement, at eight thirty in the morning" "At the gloomy chime of the cathedral, the forty thousand mass goers left for their places of worship," "some to sing in the cathedral the same as the dead, others to recite in the temple the canticle of the exile of Babylon, and others to the Synagogue for their psalms of mourning" "Afterwords, all the bells of the city ringing, they placed themselves in the place of arms, behind their priests and magistrates and they surrendered, to the shock of the Germans," "in Chambières, in front of the monument that the women of Metz offered to the French soldiers killed in the battles of the siege." ""Day of anger, day of tears..."" "Judge vengeful and just, grant me forgiveness... deliver us from the deep lake into which we've descended;" "deliver us from the mouth of the lion;" "that the Tartar doesn't absorb us;" "that we not fall in the night..."" "For a month, Colette asked herself:" ""After thirty five years, is it excusable to marry a German?"" "but today..." "Professor Asmus, I can not marry you." "I esteem you and consider you a friend;" "I appreciate the good you think of us." "Don't be offended with me." "French commentary by:" "In German by:" "Sound Mixing" "Image" "Camera Negative Laboratory" "Production"