Remembrance Day in France

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month...

Today is Remembrance Day here in France (also in all British Commonwealth nations and Belgium, among others). They do a couple of very cool things to recognize this day, which was the day in 1918 that the Armistice for World War I went into effect,( "On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month"). Firstly, red poppies are handed out and worn to honor the dead of both W.W.I and W.W.II. The poppy tradition (so I read on Wikipedia, my first use of this site) comes from the poem "In Flanders Field" by John McCrae, Canadian. And people really wear them, people of all ages and appearances. I wish I had some shots of examples....

There's one other memorial gesture that I've noticed in the city, and I found it very moving. As you walk through the streets of Paris on any old day, you will come across many buildings adorned with some kind of modest commemorative plaque. I don't always stop to look, but I imagined the people and events they record are diverse: so-and-so lived here, this-and-that happened upstairs on this date, etc., etc. The plaques inevitably look like an afterthought, attached in our modern age to these old buildings at about street level, upon some unremarkable stretch of stone or stucco, with no attempt to integrate them gracefully into the facade. But when I've bothered to read one, they always seem to commemorate some French Resistance fighter who was killed on that spot during W.W. II; and if they don't, they instead honor some person or family deported by the Nazis from the building. I can't read much French, so I don't always know exactly how any given plaque reads, but I've had a vague awareness of these memorials for a long time, and have regarded them with some reverence.

So it was very touching to see all of these plaques suddenly adorned with bouquets of flowers come Remembrance Day. The bouquets came wrapped in cellophane with the words "Mairie de Paris" on them, which I believe means the city/mayoralty of Paris (for a long time I've believed this "Mairie," in its sassy shopping center script, to be a department store chain here in France--I didn't recognize its exuberence appearances on billboards and on maps as announcing the authority of the ancient city of Paris--I thought it was a place to shop). I took these pictures a few days after Remebrance Day, when the camera was fully charged again. This bouquet was still up Monday morning when I snapped it.