Aero: Piper Lambert-Vail – France 2018 – History and Culture

Posted by LEAF Architect on Friday, September 14, 2018 · Leave a Comment

Aero: Piper Lambert-Vail – France 2018 – History and Culture

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Piper Lambert-Vail

Before going to France, I hadn’t known very much about the history or culture outside of what I learned in French class or from my synthesis projects. I had a small understanding of their cuisine and fashion history but I never had the opportunity to fully immerse myself like we did while we were there. The moment we stepped onto the street in Paris, I knew that it was going to be refreshingly different than the cities I’d been to in the US.

In both Paris and Vitre, I noticed that there were way more memorials and statues in public dedicated to the World Wars and to other important moments in their history, both good and bad. This, for me, is very different than what we have in America. We don’t really like to talk about our history unless it’s a victory so most of our museums are dedicated to wars that we won or people we deem heroes. In Paris, there was a public museum that was dedicated to the Jews during WWII who were held there before they were taken to different concentration camps. This was huge to me because I would never see this anywhere in America. There are museums that show our mistakes and harsh history, like the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C. and the Legacy museum which only opened this month, but these places are few and far in between. It is rare to see a public museum dedicated to the massacre of indigenous people or the Japanese internment camps in places that are largely populated.

All around France, it was evident that culture was very important to them. Each region showed pride in who they are, beyond being French. In Vitre, people were proud to be both French and Breton. There were Bretagne flags everywhere, beyond just gift shops, and each host student I talked to, and my host family, all talked about galettes saucisses like it was gold. They were so incredibly proud of what their home offered cuisine-wise. It reminded me of how people here are proud of Dinosaur BBQ or the Garbage Plate, something unique to the area and that is iconic.

Although France is known for being very Catholic, and there are churches and cathedrals everywhere, it is also extremely secular. My host family never mentioned religion, we didn’t go to church, and it didn’t seem like many other host students were either. Knowing what I do about the different regions of France that identify more with Catholicism and the pilgrimage routes, I thought it would be more apparent in other places. Paris was more secular than Vitré, but it was also more accepting. With the ban on face covering, including veils and burqas, it was interesting to see the amount of headscarves, headdresses, and wraps. One thing that I found particularly interesting was when in Paris, I wore my headwrap when it was cold and I had left my beanie at the hotel and no one said a word about it. But in Vitré, I wore my headwrap on the day we were going to Rennes and Madame Kruger said that I would have to take it off. It made me think about the possible differences in religious acceptance in the short distance between Rennes and Paris and how that is similar to places in the US. I know that I am okay to wear my headwrap in places like Seattle and Canandaigua because in Seattle there is more religious acceptance and in Canandaigua people don’t really see it as religious because there’s no exposure. But if I were to wear it in a place that is more Islamophobic or ignorant, I could be putting myself in danger.

Piper Lambert-Vail
Study Abroad – France 2018 @ FLCC

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