Fall Term in Rennes
2001
Fall Term in Rennes
2001
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Welcome to the site
of Union College's Fall Term in Rennes, 2001. On this page,
you'll follow the itinerary of our exciting, stimulating,
and moving program, from our first days in Paris
through our stay in Rennes
to our numerous excursions.
Here, too, you'll see many of our faces as made our way
through France. On a companion page, you'll see that these
many bright faces found eloquent expression in words, both
French and English, in a response
to the questions "What was your best experience in France?"
and "What struck you the most during your stay?"
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from paris.org, Carolyn Daily O'Connor |
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Early in September,
nine Union students met in the MIJE youth hotel to begin the
adventure of a Fall Term in France. Other Union students
were blocked at various gateway airports back in United
States, a part of the daily dramas that were being acted out
in the wake of the attacks of September 11. As those of us
already in Paris were anxiously waiting to hear word of our
friends, colleagues, and family, we took advantage of the
cultural offerings of the City of Lights. Guided
tours of the Sainte
Chapelle,
the Pompidou
Center,
and the Musée
d'Orsay
showed us some of the architectural and
artistic wonders that form a part of the
daily environment of Parisians. These
'lieux de mémoire' are only three
of the many sites in the French capital
marked as the repositories of official
French History that the students enjoyed
exploring during our stay. One
of the many joys of the day was returning
to eat and sleep at the MIJE,
a site of many UNofficial French stories:
in their winding staircases, long
corridors, and inter-connecting rooms,
these seventeenth-century homes have
sheltered tens of generations of Parisians
creating their own private histories. Our
group of Union students no doubt
contributed some of their own stories ....
Hôtel
Fauconnier, from MIJE.com La
Sainte-Chapelle,from ParisDigest.org Le
Centre Pompidou, from
ParisDigest.org from
SmartWeb.fr
from
ville-rennes.fr
From the
capital of France, we went to the city of the
Parliament of Brittany, Rennes,
at the heart of another history at work in France,
that of its cultural and linguistic minorities.
Having already offered the bombarde to world music,
the dolmens predating those of Stonehenge to world
heritage, and Merlin, Lancelot, and Obelix to world
literature, Brittany would offer to us a home for
the upcoming term. images
from ville-rennes.fr
Hosted by the
Université
de Rennes-1,
our classes take place at a campus in the center of the
city. A series of language, civilization, and literature
courses occupy the students' days, and their evenings are
spent with their host families. As Rennes has a strong
student character, with over thirty thousand students for an
urban population of just over 200,000, our students have
enjoyed exploring other late-evening activities
....
Occasional
excursions have taken us outside of Rennes to continue our
exploration of the 'sites of memory' at work in France.
Fougères
An early excursion
took us to the chateau of Fougères,
a fortified castle meant to defend Brittany from its many
invaders. Our own invading forces of seventeen students (the
others had been able to join us by this time) were met not
with boiling water and burning arrows but with a guided
tour; yes, times have changed.
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Châteaux de la Loire
One long weekend of
visits into the sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and
eighteenth-century chateaux of the Loire valley offered
glimpses into life of official and unofficial
pre-Revolutionary France. While our tour guides showed the
official side, I was particularly pleased to see the
students look out for dark corners and secret passageways,
physical signs of all the unofficial stories we were not
getting but which have equally nourished what we have come
to call "modern France." On the program, the
chateaux of Cheverny,
Chambord,
Chenonceaux,
and Amboise.
From the Renaissance to the eighteenth century, from the
Royal to the Private, from the competition between Catherine
de Medici and Diane de Poitiers to the alliance between
France and Brittany, we saw the traces of it all ....
Mont Saint Michel
A recent excursion
took us to the Mont
Saint Michel,
which we had the unique opportunity to see at a very strong
high tide: the base of the Mount was completely surrounded
by water, and the normal entrance through the gates was
flooded. Our own secular pilgrimage to what the Medieval
Church deemed among the highest of holy places was not
daunted by the rising waters ....
Normandie
Perhaps the most
moving of our excursions took us to Normandy. A day on World
War II's landing beaches and in the American cemetery at
Omaha Beach led us all to reflect on the nature of war,
particularly at a time when we knew that our country was
currently engaged in violent and deadly battle only some 57
years later …. Some stories, it seems, are destined -
to our sheer anguish - to be repeated. Here you'll mostly
see smiles, however. We had learned to find strength,
support, and even joy in our contact with each other.
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A second day in Normandy took us to the town hall of Caen and to the Bayeux tapestry. In a former abbey that is now the seat of government for a secular France, we saw some of the paradoxes at work in modern France, where civil marriages may still be performed under images of the Church and next to electronic cars. And in Bayeux, we saw the tale told by an eight-centuries-old tapestry, recounting, alas, the scene of other battles, those of the conquest of England by Guillaume the Normand, which linked the fates of two major European forces and languages |
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from
hastings1066.com
