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EYE ON EUROPE |
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 The French missile cruiser COLBERT |
Tears and cheers as
Colbert leaves town
By MICHAEL JOHNSON
of TheColumnists.com
Hard to believe, but some of the happiest days of my life were spent during my service in the U.S. Coast Guard, based at Government Island near San Francisco. We used to practice piloting boats around and under the Bay Bridge. We took a three-week cruise to Mazatlan. It was great fun playing with the government’s toys.
I escaped the worst of the physical fitness ordeal by playing tuba in the post band. If I hadn’t already started a career as chief obit writer at The Hayward Daily Review, I would have been tempted to make a career of the Guard.
This maritime past made me especially sympathetic to the “Friends of the Colbert,” an action group that tried but failed to keep the distinguished old missile cruiser moored at Bordeaux as a maritime museum. But most of Bordeaux felt that the Colbert’s time had passed (she is 50 this year), and at the end of May she will be towed away to a ship graveyard on the west coast of France. From there, she becomes a donor, and her parts will be cut out and passed on one at a time to similar ships in the much-diminished French fleet.
The problem is the bobos. One of Europe’s
largest renovation projects is the cleanup of the grunge that
once encrusted Bordeaux’s moribund waterfront, and the bourgeois
bohemians (bobos, or French yuppies) wanted a new look. The Colbert
didn’t fit in.
Now as springtime approaches, the revamped waterfront is chic
again, alive with strollers, bicyclists, roller-bladers and couples
having very long lunches at the outdoor cafés along the
river. It has taken five years but the four-mile stretch has
been transformed to the tastes of the bobo element. The waterfront
is the border of their high-rent Chartons district of Bordeaux.
There will be cheers and tears, depending on your camp, when the ship disappears up the estuary toward the Atlantic Ocean.
Is the Colbert a worthy monument to the glory days of the French Navy or is it Bordeaux’s last remaining “eyesore--a rusting pile of junk,” in the harsh words of Mayor Alain Juppé? Ecologists have twice daubed “TOXIQUE” on the hull but the crew quickly painted it over.
Opinions differ, but I’m old-fashioned and would like her to stay put.
The Colbert is a proud ship with a prominent
past, still bristling with antennas and other communications
gear. She carried 16 guns and a crew of over 1,000 men and was
equipped to fire Exocet missiles when at her peak. While she
never fired a shot in anger (few modern French ships have) she
toured the world several times showing the tricolor.
A memorable voyage was a South American goodwill tour in the
1960s with President Charles de Gaulle living aboard during parts
of the trip. I handled all the copy from that visit on the AP’s
World Desk.
A retired merchant captain, Adrien Etcheverry, recalls De Gaulle’s presence as the highlight of his career. “Twice he assembled our crew and praised our professionalism. It was a marvelous, marvelous time,” he told me.
The Colbert has been witness to other moments of history. She accompanied De Gaulle to Canada in 1967 where he made his “Vive le Québec libre” speech, an episode still cited with pride in France today. Videos of the speech are regularly rerun on French television as a memory of the days when France mattered abroad.
Etcheverry is one of the officers of the “Friends of the Colbert Association” and feels betrayed as the bobos get their way. His association believes the Colbert was left to “agonize” in its death throes by being deprived of maintenance. “It is that neglect that we particularly regret.”
A rival association, “Couler le Colbert” (Sink the Colbert), believes the ship never belonged in Bordeaux in the first place because this was never a military port except when the Germans made good use of it as a huge submarine base. When they ran away, they scuttled about 200 ships in and around Bordeaux to block traffic. Even today some of the rusted bits protrude from the riverbanks.
More to the point, the ship does not fit in with the peaceful, tree-lined rejuvenated waterfront project. The association is preparing to celebrate the Colbert’s departure when high tide at the end of May will see it limp away.
The death of the Colbert can perhaps best be understood in the context of the modern French Navy, which periodically creates public spectacles as it downsizes.
Just last year the aircraft carrier Clemenceau, also headed for the naval graveyard, was denounced as insalubrious as it attempted to reach India to have its asbestos and other materials stripped out. Greenpeace led the opposition. “France thinks it can get away with dumping a warship containing hundreds of tonnes of toxic materials like asbestos, PCBs, lead and mercury in India,” Greenpeace said at the time. “We say that's illegal toxic dumping.” First the Suez Canal balked at letting it through, then a popular uproar in India resisted allowing it to dock. Finally President Jacque Chirac called it home to let French workers handle the toxic materials.
Etcheverry recalls the happier days of the navy, “when we were respected wherever we went.” Looking at the current state of the navy is like “comparing night and day”, he says. Indeed, the French Navy has been steadily shrunk since the end of the Cold War, as have other countries’ fleets.
Friends of the Colbert remain “stupefied” at what has happened to their beloved warship. As Etcheverry puts it: “Bordeaux people are amnesiac. They want to sweep away their past.”
©2007 by Michael Johnson. The photo was provided by the author. This column first posted March 26, 2007.
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