Dear all,
It’s been quite the week. As I mentioned previously, I was planning that French Weird launch quietly and slowly. I wasn’t, then, prepared for my email inbox to be almost flooded by sign-up notifications. This is great to see, and not a little overwhelming. It’s heartening as a writer with a new project, as it means that there are more than a few readers who are interested in what I’m trying to do. It also means that that this newsletter has an audience, and that I’m writing for other people rather than only myself. I now have impetus, motivation and a certain amount of pressure, so I wanted to get this underway by sharing a slice of French religious Weird that I’ve been thinking about recently. It’s also been glorious this week to have received a few reader messages - by Tweet (@rwilliamsparis) and email - I’ve responded to these at the end of this post so please do keep them coming. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to keep French Weird going with at least one longish post, like this one, and one shorter post each week. Your responses will help give me the nudges, and perhaps the discipline, I need to get things moving. I know I said this post would be about Le Matin des magiciens by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier (1960), but that can wait for the moment.
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For a few months when I was around eleven or twelve years old, I was terrified that I was going to be stolen from my bedroom in a Welsh village by a Satanic cult. Writing those words thirty years later even gives me a little chill, my eyes dart to the window to make sure there’s no demonic face peering in. It wasn’t that I, or my family, knew any Satanists, at least none that self declared as such, but my fear - which led to more that a couple of sleepless nights was a symptom of the much-discussed Satanic Panic, fuelled by and played out in the British tabloid press in the 1980s and 1990s. I remember once, I think it was in the Sunday Mirror, seeing a small reproduction of the Baphomet, and I consequently convinced myself that a goat-headed entity and it’s followers were going to come looking for me for, of course, ritual sacrifice. I think my imagination had also been fulled by films such as Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), Dragnet (1987) and The ‘Burbs (1989). I’ll no doubt come back to all of this, but once I got over (but did I ever really?) my fear of Satanic murder, I inevitably drifted towards a perfectly predictable teenage interest in serial killers (hello Jeffrey Dahmer) and then, of course, to the heavy metal bands that make use of the Satanic razzmatazz as part of their aesthetic (Black Sabbath! Megadeth! Type O Negative!). I even remember buying a copy of Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible (1969) at a goth night in Manchester, but I don’t think I ever went as far as prowling Welsh villages looking for eleven-year old boys to abduct.
Given all of this, when someone screams Satan!, my ears prick up. I’ve spent probably more time than is healthy over the last few years enjoying the pseudo ritualistic drone-metal of Sunn O))), for example, and a got a little over-excited that Michel Houellebecq (I’ll inevitably come back to him in a later post) has an oddball Satanic subplot in his latest novel (Anéantir, published this week). My interest these days is probably more-or-less aesthetic, rather than ritualistic: why in these (post-?) Covid days, are images of ritual, transgression, blasphemy and Devilish behaviour, apparently, suddenly all around us again? (note to self, I need to write something about the marvellous 1909 bookstore in the onzième arrondissement, steeped as it is in, black magic and metal). It goes hand-in-hand, it seems, certainly in contemporary France with the ever more vocal and visible presence of what seems to be a religious, extreme Christian, political right wing. I’m feeling that this is a global, certainly US, phenomenon This is something that I’m sure French Weird needs to think about.
There’s a precise example of this as it pertains to France today. Just before the Christmas holidays, the marvellous Swedish singer-songwriter, organist (and sometime Sunn O))) collaborator) Anna Von Hausswolff completed a European tour to promote her latest album, All Thoughts Fly (2020). This album, unlike her previous records which make use of a full - heavy - band, is a solo instrumental work and sees her exploring the pipe organ. The pipe organ, of course, inevitably recalls church music (not least since this is where most of these instruments are found). The album is beautiful, meditative, haunting, unsetting, funereal and, of course, more that a little weird. There’s been a great deal written about how the pandemic months have taken their toll on recording artists who haven’t been able to make money from touring. The appropriate idea for Von Hausswolff’s tour, then, was that, rather than touring conventional venues, she’d be essentially touring some of the pipe organs - and the churches that house them - exploring and reinterpreting her album live in some gorgeously ecclesiastical settings. French dates were scheduled in December for Montpellier’s Église Les Saints François, Nantes’ Église St. Clément and the Église St. Eustache in Paris, after dates in Switzerland, Italy and Germany.
As far as I’m as aware, the Montpellier date passed without incident.Things got a little more tricky in Nantes as the gig at the Église St. Clément was apparently picketed by a group of protestors, reportedly affiliated to the Catholic Church, protesting against Von Hausswolff’s performance. According to media reports, the protestors were singing “Hail Mary”, preventing access to the sold-out concert and the decision was made to cancel the show. In particular, it seems the protestors had taken objection to the “satanic” nature of Von Hausswolff’s music. Attention and apparently the lobbying of the protestors too, then turned to the Église St. Eustache. The priest Yves Trocheris took the decision to cancel the performance for reasons of public safely. After a frenzy of activity, an alternative home was found for the gig, with the address being unveiled only to ticket holders, who were asked to keep it a secret at the Église Protestante Unie de l'Étoile, not far from the Champs-Elysées.
I don’t want to risk testing your attention by getting too deep into the issues here, at least not in French Weird’s first week. But there are a number of parts that seem interesting to me and I wanted to flag (I’m sure you’ll find more, please do let me know). It was pretty interesting to me that the Catholic protestors got hung up on the supposed “satanic” dimension of Von Hausswolff’s music. As I mentioned on Twitter at the time, Von Hausswolff’s tour was designed as a respectful celebration of the instruments and architecture of some of Europe’s most impressive religious spaces. A tweeter took objection to this point of view, asking me
“why doesn't she go and sing her crap such as ‘I want to make love with the devil’ elsewhere than in a church? Have you no respect?”
There’s a clear refusal to really get to grips with the object of the tweeter’s criticism here as, as I’ve noted, this was an instrumental album and an instrumental organ tour. It seems as though the protestors took particular affront to some of Von Hausswolff’s earlier work, such as the song “Pills”, which the angry Tweeter apparently quoted above. The video for “Deathbed”, from an earlier album too, is perhaps a little on the racy side, if folky body horror is going to annoy or upset you you. Needless to say though, there’s a whole tradition of writers, artists and singers who have deployed a relatively straightforward technique called ‘metaphor’ that my irate tweeter didn’t apparently want to think about. Gigs in churches, even Catholic churches, in France are, of course, far from a new thing. I’ll probably have to write again about the time I saw Merzbow - whose music is eminently more unsettling than anything than anything Von Hausswolff has ever released - at the Église Saint-Merri in Paris, a church that has the distinction of having a Baphomet, no less, built into its archway.
I guess I’m left with the question, then, given the tradition of rock and even experimental performance in French churches (and lest we forget as this article points out, the sort-of-devilish Johnny Halliday was commemorated at the L'église de la Madeleine), why did the Catholic religious weird come out against the pseudo-metal experimental musical weird in 2020? It seems that the flames of protest were fanned online by Catholic websites and on forums such as Le Forum Catholique and Christianophobie. The answers seem to be located too in a resurgence of right-wing Catholic activism, awakened since the activism against the Hollande government’s “Mariage pour tous” legislation in 2013 and an emerging French version of the US and UK culture wars in advance of the 2021 presidential elections. Given the very visible presence of the extreme right, whose ideas resonate in some ways with certain strata of the Catholic movement in France, it looks like the clumsy anti-Von Hausswolff protests might not be the last such examples of their sort as the year advances.
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Please do let me know if you have any takes on what I’m terming the French “Satanic Panic”. I’m delighted that since I launched French Weird last week, I’ve had a couple of interesting questions posed from interested readers.
In speculating about what comprises French Weird:
Yes, absolutely. Great idea I think it might be healthy to have an instalment of French Weird exploring French responses to Covid, and there’s clearly something relevant in the approach of the strange doctor.
French music expert David McKenna, aka Rockfort was also in touch over Twitter.
Ana Leorne followed up:
These are both great points. La Femme are a band whose music I enjoy, but their weirdness of a much lower order, perhaps even more of a stance or an affectation, than the “genuine” article. But should we really police these things? I’m aware, too, that I really need to unpack my definitions but - as I said to Ana - Mark Fisher’s essay (mentioned last time) is great on precisely this.
Over email, Seb Emina writes,
“Enjoyed today’s post and your use of the verb ‘weirding’ makes me wonder if there should also be a concept of ‘reweirding’, a cultural equivalent to the fashionable ‘rewilding’“
I like this very much and I think reweirding France, or at least teasing out what weird remains needs to be part of the project.
Also over email, another Seb, this time, Law, writes,
“French cars could be an interesting subject too, R5, 2CV, Twingo, 205”.
This is possibly a great idea, although I don’t feel too qualified to be able to do it justice, not being very cars-y myself. There is, though, a bigger issue of French technological thinking that seems to feel a part of this. Let’s see where this goes.
Any ideas? Anything you’d like to see? Any French encounters with the weird we should be investigating? Anything odd going down at your local boulangerie?
There are a number of guides you can read that are supposed to help your Substack newsletter be more compelling. One of the suggestions seems to be that it’s a good idea to close with a picture of a dog, preferably your own. I don’t have dogs, I don’t much like dogs. Or cats, come to think about it. So, here’s a picture of a Galette des rois. French Weird on a plate.
Until very soon,
Russell