A CHARMING TALE OF COUNTRY FOLK

Anti-Semitism is a great French tradition.

Alasdair Palmer investigates a recent

outbreak, in unlikely surroundings

Chevillon THE TINY village of Chevillon (pop: 250) nestles comfortably on the northern edge of Burgundy, about an hour and a half from Paris. Surrounded by lush, rolling countryside, it is an ideal place for a holi- day home or for writing a book on French village life, of the kind Peter Mayle made so popular with A Year in Provence. Chevil- lon has an appropriately welcoming bar and restaurant, a shaded square, a small stone church, and a magnificent moated château dating from the 12th century.

There is only one problem with the vil- lage: its inhabitants. Chevillon is divided into two camps, each of which detests the other. In addition to offensive and vitriolic abuse, there have been lawsuits, anony- mous denunciations, and death threats. Neither party shows the least interest in reconciliation. The village is frozen in hatred. The way that hatred developed reveals much about some of the forces still shaping modern France.

The original cause of the rupture was trivial. It was the water level in the chiteau's moat. Five years ago, the impos- ing château of Chevillon was bought by Monsieur Serge Grimberg. Like an increasing number of the village's inhabi- tants, M. Grimberg lives and works in Paris. Unlike any of them, he is also immensely rich. The basis of his fortune is a pharmaceutical company. In addition to being a very successful capitalist, Grimberg happens to be Jewish as well. When lin juif bought the château, many of the locals were outraged. Joan of Arc herself had slept in that château. The older Chevillon- ais regarded it as a shrine to French national identity. Now the owner would not be a Frenchman, as one local put it to me, he'd be a Jew.

Despite their sentimental attachment to it, the Frenchmen of Chevillon hadn't bothered to look after 'their' château. It had been owned by a charity which used it to provide holidays for impoverished Parisian children, but years of neglect left it close to derelict. Grimberg regarded him- self as a Frenchman. He said he wanted to restore the château 'for the glory of France'. (Nonsense!' I was told. 'He's sim- ply after the tax breaks.') Grimberg had enough money to finance its restoration himself — it would cost him several million francs — and immediately after purchasing it started work on it. But it made no differ- ence. Nothing he could do would change the central fact: in the eyes of many Chevil- lonais, Serge Grimberg was simply not French. He therefore had no right to be in the château. M. Grimberg ignored the whispers of prejudice. Indeed, he proceeded to act in exactly the way the 18th-century aristocrat- ic owners of the château used to. He had his specially designed coat of arms placed over the gateway to the château, and everywhere inside it, including the château's chapel, where a plastic version was placed over the windows and made to look like stained glass. He had grandiose plans to decorate the grounds with a series . of statues of his ancestors and of the previ- ous owners, culminating in sculptures of his mother and of himself.

`Hideous. Totally, utterly hideous,' was how his plan was described to me by a Chevillonais. 'But for something really ugly, you should see his collection of pic- tures . . (I did. Most of them were.) The locals scoffed at Grimberg's con- cern that the château's walls would be damaged by the fall in the level of the moat. 'The moat has been empty for years in the past. The walls didn't suffer. They've stood six hundred years and they'll stand another six hundred. That Jew talks a lot of rubbish!' was how one member of the local council put it to me.

M. Grimberg — a silver-haired bachelor who devotes much of his time to looking after his mother — was aware he was not being welcomed with open arms by most of Chevillon. He suspected that either the spring which was the source of his chateau's water, or the channel through which it flowed, had been sabotaged. In order to find out the truth, he arranged for some frogmen to dive down and investi- gate the condition of the spring.

Julien Van Hooren, Chevillon's mayor, seethed with rage when he heard about it. Had monsieur forgotten that the chiteau's water supply had been confiscated by the commune in 1793 — a year in which a very large number of château-owners were guil- lotined?

M. Grimberg responded with an aristo- cratic hauteur which would not have dis- graced previous occupants of the château. He sued the mayor for nearly 2 million francs. That, he said, was going to be the cost of repairing the damage done to his walls by the fall in the water level of his moat.

Many of the local farmers were also suf- fering from a shortage of water. Some of them were known to be muttering that `our crops are damaged, and all the Jew cares about is his damn moat'. According to one ex-member of the village council, now one of Van Hooren's political oppo- nents, the mayor's condemnations of Grimberg were rather more intemperate than that. 'But then,' the same ex-council- lor explained, 'Van Hooren used to work for Jews.'

The mayor and the château were now in a state of open warfare with each other. Their spat split the village. On the night of 9 November 1992, most of Chevillon went off to Auxerre to demonstrate against Gatt. The following morning, Serge Grim- berg took his usual walk round his chateau, and discovered its walls had been horribly defaced. `Grimberg — on aura ta peau' was written in large letters, along with 'sale jutf and 'sale con'. There were also 25 Stars of David daubed across the walls.

Vichy is only a couple of hours' drive from Chevillon. In a region which shipped thousands of Jews off to concentration camps only 50 years ago, graffiti of that kind have an extremely disturbing reso- nance. A large number of Frenchmen were enthusiastic collaborators in the Holocaust, only too pleased to take over Jewish property and ship more than 75,000 Jews out of France and off to the camps. Every recent manifestation of anti- Semitism — from the desecration of the Jewish cemetery at Carpentras to Grim- berg's spray-painted walls — acts both to remind Frenchmen of their shameful past, and to ignite the fear that persecution will return.

Grimberg immediately suspected the mayor of some involvement. But M. Van Hooren had already reported the anti- Semitic inscriptions to the Gendarmes. The mayor, however, said nothing to Grimberg, either then or at anytime since. The two communicate only through their lawyers.

Van Hooren's stand against Grimberg seems to have enhanced his popularity with the local electorate. He won in the spring of 1993 with an increased majority. The Gendarmes made absolutely no progress on identifying the individual behind the graffiti, which remained starkly visible on the chateau's walls, an ugly reminder of ugly sentiments. Surprisingly, the council did not offer to remove them. The mayor made no overtures of any kind to the château. In a newspaper interview, he said he condemned what had hap- pened, finding it 'distressing — as if a little of the ills of the suburbs had come to our countryside'. But he has conspicuously failed to express his regret to Grimberg in person.

For .his part, Serge Grimberg was adamant that he was not going to scrub off the offending graffiti until the perpetrator was charged. Of that there seemed no hope. It may seem strange that in such a 'If you ask me, it's asking for domestic violence!' small village no one should have the slight- est idea of who could be the culprit, but no one did. At any rate, no one was prepared to come forward. Nothing happened for a year. Then the Gendarmes received an anonymous letter denouncing Main Fourniere, a member of Van Hooren's council, as the man responsible for the writing on the wall. An expert graphologist compared Fourniere's writing with that on the chateau's walls. He concluded that Main Fourniere was responsible for writing `Grimberg — on aura ta peau', 'sale juif and 'sale con'.

On 29 November 1994, M. Fourniere was formally charged with the crime. In the December edition of the Municipal Bul- letin, he published an open letter protest- ing his innocence. He added — at the very end — that 'personally, I deplore the inscriptions on the walls of the château'.

Main Fourniere is a long-time supporter of Julien V.v.n Hooren. In a special closed session of the council, M. Van Hooren decided that the council should pay his legal expenses (including the hire of a sec- ond graphologist who, it was hoped, would swear that his writing was totally dissimilar to that of whoever had scrawled the graffi- ti). The council agreed unanimously. The local prefet, however, did not. He ruled it was unlawful for the council to intervene in a private dispute in that way.

It hardly mattered. The damage had been done. The council had been prepared to use Chevillon's money to back the man accused of spray-painting anti-Semitism. To Grimberg — Chevillon's largest taxpay- er — it was breathtakingly insulting.

When I visited Chevillon two weeks ago, no one wanted to talk about anything else except 'l'affaire Grimberg'. In the small and cosy Hotel Gniasse, Yves and Denise Lecomte were magnificent hosts. They were also happy to retell some of the sto- ries going round the village about Grim- berg. 'You know what they say that man's doing, don't you?' said Mme Lecomte, as she placed her delicious food in front of me. 'He's building a synagogue inside the château, from stones he's stolen from the local church.' He bankrupted his builder: he simply refused to pay him, you see,' added her husband. 'He's so mean, when he moved here, he brought with him even the bits of gravel which made up his drive in his old place!' M. and Mme Leconte are keen supporters of Mayor Van Hooren.

In the château, M. Grimberg offered me a glass of champagne and showed me the `synagogue' — a stone cellar full of paint- ings. He showed me the tower whose repair he had refused to pay for: covered in damp, it certainly looked like a botched job. 'The builder threatened to kill me,' M. Grim- berg added calmly. 'The case is now going through the courts. I've no doubt I shall win.'

Back in the Hotel Gniasse, I was intro- duced to Julien Van Hooren and three of his trusted councillors, including Main Fourniere. M. Van Hooren looks a little like Jack Nicholson, and shares some of his roguish charm. 'I'm not in the least anti- Semitic,' he told me as he sipped a glass of kir bourgogne. Grimberg simply isn't suited to life in a village like this. He doesn't care about anyone except himself.' He developed that theme at a great length. He then explained that he had been even more shocked and disturbed by the behaviour of some of the councillors. `A group of them switched sides. They betrayed me. They're trying to use the case for political advantage. They don't care about him. They are the real anti-Semites here. Grimberg doesn't know. But he'll find out.'

M. LeDoud is another councillor and close supporter of Van Hooren. Some time after the château's walls were defaced, he had a swastika daubed on his door. `And where is the outcry about that?' he asked me. History may explain why there has been none. In the village, local gossip has it that LeDove pere was a col- laborator in the second world war: he is alleged to have escaped being shot during the `purification' period after the Nazis were defeated only because he went into hiding for several months. LeDone fifs is a charming and friendly individual, a respected councillor and successful farmer. He suggested a novel theory about the writing on the château walls: `Perhaps Grimberg did it himself. After all, who has gained from it?' The answer to that ques- tion wasn't as obvious to me as it seemed to LeDone.

Alain Fourni6re, the chief suspect, was adamant he had no problems with Jews. But he wanted to know one thing: how had I come to hear about Taffaire Grimberg?' I told him that my editor, who was Jewish, had received a letter about it. `A Jewish editor?' replied Fourniere. Ah, ca explique tout!'

Julien Van Hooren and Serge Grimberg are both forceful characters. Their dispute over a trivial issue of local precedence should have ended three years ago. Instead, it has mushroomed until all the village has had to take sides. Even the local garagiste — a simple man struggling to cope with a tax investigation that has been going on since 1984 — has been dragged in. The mayor was paying his legal fees. Then he learnt that the mechanic supported Grimberg. The mayor stopped immediately. Grimberg has stepped in to pick up the bills.

There is no end in sight to the war in Chevillon. Favoured weapons continue to be abusive anonymous phone calls, hate- mail and threats, which both sides say they continue to receive. Positions are now so entrenched that reconciliation seems impossible. But that a clash of personali- ties of the kind inevitable in a small com- munity should have degenerated so quickly into racial hatred is an alarming reminder of how little it takes to resurrect France's traditional prejudice against Jews.