version achevée, sans notes, non relue, màj#4, 2018-04-17

Voici notre proposition de version anglaise pour notre article « L’abbé Andouche, préfet d’indiscipline?” paru in Le Bulletin du Comité Flamand de France, n°91-92, 2011, pp. 28-33.

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The General Assembly is undoubtedly the most pleasant and stimulating event on the agenda of the Comité Flamand de France. On that occasion the members of the honourable society can indulgingly enjoy local erudition.

They find it in the speeches, abundant with scholarly references to the immediate surroundings, and they meet it in the flesh, with the much-awaited orators and the circumstantial speakers.

What singles out the Comité Flamand de France is that, unlike other learned societies, it has gone far beyond the original framework of cameral work¹ since it started roaming around the Flemish countryside². In the late 19^th century, the prominent figures of the Comite Flamand de France decentralised their academic sessions, thitherto held in Dunkirk or Lille, to the chief towns of districts north of the Lys river and then to even smaller towns. Yet exceptional until the 1890s, preliminary illustrative visits in situ were systematically organised in the 1910s to examine some, or all, premises, or even chattels, of supposedly major interest. The recognition of the interest actually depended on whether the premises and chattels could be linked with the legitimate power (either of public authorities or of the Church).

In the 21^st century, like in the 20^th, such premises and chattels are still the main topics of the presentations. However I suggest we should explore a place that the annual congregation usually ignores, as we did with Christophe Delbecque’s presentation³, to discover an oddity whose remarkable properties I intend to describe here. The place left aside by the learned party is simply Berthen’s graveyard. It is now located yards away from the church so its name in Flemish has lost most of its suggestive power (“Kerkhof” means church yard).

Whoever has conducted field research in demography, sociolinguistics and ethnology knows at once why visiting a graveyard can turn out to be exciting. Anthroponyms offer useful clues to understand the movements of population (names in Flemish, Picard, Polish, French; Frenchified names, etc.). Funeral tablets give away subtle information on social bonds and occupational activities. The presence of monuments or specific areas (for Muslim graves, for instance) materialise social status and attributes.

A singular grave.

Lay visitors may easily conceive of the likely scientific stake of such a place, although they mostly fail to determine it after simply scanning the place. It is dubious whether they will ever be able to guess how controversial, if not seditious, an issue this singular grave inevitably (albeit unclearly) raises. This is the grave of a certain Jules Andouche who, according to the laconic epitaph, was Canon of the Notre-Dame-de-la-Treille Cathedral and the former dean of Bergues.

As canon of the Cathedral of the Lille diocese, more than as the dean of a Flemish country town, he was granted by the sponsors of the epitaph the title of “Master”, as was the use for a priest endowed with exemplary judgement and prone to enlightening comments⁴.

Under the line of tribute to the priest born in 1887 and deceased in 1948 are three nice letters carved into the stone forming the well-known Latin acronym  RIP⁵.

Above the line sits a styled banner crowned with a chalice from which a shining wafer emerges. The monogram IHS, the frequent Greek abbreviation for Jesus, is emblazoned on the Blessed Sacrament displayed for adoration. Such engraved headstones are visible upon the graves of some of his contemporary colleagues. They serve to remind of the sacramental function with which the defunct priests had once been entrusted when ordained.

Hardly visible is, to the right of the chalice, a coat of arms with a circumvented lion and also a bunch of grape, the necessary fruit used for the wine turned into the blood of Christ.

To the left, the eyes of the expert will discern a more complex coat of arms next to an ear of corn, the necessary cereal used for the bread turned into the body of Christ.

Interpretation is not impossible, though, especially if the visitors can decipher the words on the banner “Wees Vlaming dien God Vlaming schiep”. That, on the grave of a cleric, bits of common Latin can be found, along with some Greek, as the remnants of languages of both the learned and clergymen, will be no surprise to the visitors. Yet a whole sentence in Flemish running before the visitors’ eyes, like a political claim on a unfolded banner, will be much more of a wonder.

To a large extent Flemish, whatever Flemish it may be, still marks the landscapes, under the form of toponyms and hydronyms. Written Flemish is more scarcely found in public spaces.

Some religious buildings often offer its only asylum, on the wood panelling of the organ balcony of the church in Arneke, for example, or on the frame of the stations of the cross in other churches. One may read here and there an epitaph in Dutch on the grave of Belgians resting forever in France next to their French spouses or in geographically ambiguous villages such as Abeele, which lies astride the border.

Only under more exceptional circumstances can such exhortative words be read: “Let him be a Fleming whom God created a Fleming”. The message is clear and the messenger, illustrous. One need not be an authority on Flemish literature to credit the famous verse to Guido Gezelle, the celebrated poet from Bruges, who thereby claimed to phrase a divine injunction in the people’s language. Large numbers of Flemish nationalists had soon after taken the verse as a motto.

Thus this grave gains in significance and ceases to be anecdotal as it bears strange similarities with that of Father Jean-Marie Gantois, whose remains are kept in a family vault covered with a massive marble tablet reading the same verse. Some will vehemently argue that the honourable canon and the notorious curate can have hardly anything in common. The historians of the Flemish Movement in France has never mentioned Canon Andouche in their works. His name is even missing from the comprehensive Nieuwe Encyclopedie van de Vlaamse Beweging (a three-volume encyclopaedia). He was not cited as one of the members of the Vlaamsch Verbond van Frankrijk whose trial allowed the regional press to designate the « historian and traitor » Gantois and his friends for public condemnation.

Neither aloof nor unsupportive

Had Jules Andouche not played any significant role in the nationalist movement worth being mentioned in the academic literature, why would Gezelle’s verse have been inscribed on both his grave and Gantois’s ? The coincidence is far from being fortuitous, given that the verse is also visible on the grave of another priest, a native of Arneke buried in Ambleteuse, whose name is known neither to scientists nor to journalists.

René Schodduyn (1854-1937) is known to the French Flemish readership of the 1st part of the 20th century, less than is Gantois, but more than Andouche. Along with Father René Despicht, Father René Schodduyn wrote many an article in Flemish (under his name or using a nom de plume) in fields utterly different to those for which he had gained his reputation as a researcher in Ambleteuse Marine Laboratory.

Now it is time to leave the alleys sided with memorials and explore the limbo of paper-made memory, lest we should never understand why these three priests of three different generations were given the same equivocal sponsorship of Gezelle to the end of time.

The priest file kept in the Archives of the Lille Diocese contains summary information about the successive positions of Jules François Louis Joseph Andouche, born on June 3rd 1887 in Berthen and deceased on October 24th 1948 in Lille, ordained on June 10th 1911 for the Cambrai diocese. First appointed as a teacher in the Saint-Jacques Institute, then assistant curate at Notre-Dame in Armentières, he was appointed again in the Saint-Jacques Institute as discipline master, then he served as chaplain at the Zuydcoote sanatorium from September 1929 to March 11th 1934, when he was given the charge of the parish of Les Moëres where he stayed until he was called to serve in Rosendaële on October 30th 1938. After he had become the dean of Bergues on May 12th 1944, he was awarded the title of honorary canon on May 11th 1945 and that of titular canon on September 21st 1947.

His clerical career distinguishes Jules Andouche from other more humble priests, though it shows he was by no means on the margin of the presbyterium of Lille. At the bottom of his priest file there is the mention “Flemish”, which testifies that he was part of the group of priests apt to confess and preach in Flemish. The Church authorities of the bilingual diocese of Lille used to census practically their “human resources” according to their language skills. The file does not contain any press clipping, holographic texts, documents of any interest, nothing but the copy of an article. Simply entitled « Le Chanoine Andouche », the article was published in 1952 in the series « Flemish figures » of Notre Flandre.

The journal, which was created in the very year, was not intellectually unbiased, as it was officially edited by Jan Klaas and directly influenced by Jean-Marie Gantois. The article is no less unbiased, because it was written by a certain Lucien Bertram, which is one of Gantois pennames. Instead of a eulology, the text is rather an ideological digression on the Flemish language and soul based upon biographic items (around 35% of the body of the text) which Gantois used for his unchanged standpoints. Father Andouche is depicted by Gantois as the indispensable champion of linguistic irredentism, a French echo of West-Flemish linguistic particularism, which the leader of the Vlaamsch Verbond van Frankrijk soon enough assimilated with nationalistic resistance.

For a part of the Flemish clergymen of the Cambrai diocese, linguistic irredentism actually consisted in keeping on (or sometimes starting) using Flemish as the only language for religious education and predication in the earliest stage of the Third Republic. The priests hostile to the French language were supported by the hierarchy, especially by Mgr Lobbedey, the archdeacon of Flanders, who would give them a substitutive salary when the French public authorities ceased to pay Flemish-speaking clerics.

But, contrary to some biased approach to the language dispute, linguistic irredentists aimed not so much at safeguarding the Flemish language in France, let alone the West Flemish language, as at maintaining a social order which traditionally benefited the Church and the local confessional elites. The movement was not intricately linked to the Vlaamse Beweging, but to the clerical forces of reactionaryism opposing the republicanisation of France. The linguistic irredentism soon faded out after the separation between Church and State and was extinct when the First World War required a national alliance. It was reactivated and radically transformed by Gantois in the 1920s.

The priests who got involved in the politically loyal irredentism were supported by a few Belgian priests committed to West-Flemish linguistic particularism. This support was offered when particularism had just been defeated by the advocates of Standard Dutch. Among the well-intentioned French local priests were Father Deblonde, Father Dehaese, Father Delanghe, Father Descamps, Father Duseigne, Father Hameaux, Father Plancke, as well as some brilliant priests such as Father Dehaene, Father Lemire and Canon Looten, all whom Gantois unduly presented as the heroes of a struggle for the Flemish identity and language. With those « indisciplined » priests Gantois also ranged Father Andouche who, so he had claimed in an autobiographic booklet, had allegedly exercised “the first Flemish influence on his mind”.

So Father Andouche, “an admirer and a strong supporter of the Flemish fatherland”, reportedly initiated Gantois when, as his (un)voluntary educator, he gave his student access to his “wonderful library comprising many books dedicated to Flanders, whose precious contents opened [Gantois’s] mind”. Through those books Gantois received “unforgettable lessons” and was “gratified with enthusiastic comments”.

In short, if one gives any credit to Gantois’s testimony of the maturation process of his double vocation of priest and Flemish activist, the discipline master of the St Jacques Institute lured the youngster into indiscipline towards the French centralist State devoted to the destruction of national identities. This surprising, if unsettling, hypothesis should be tested in the light of the historic facts I have established using the available data. I will focus on three interesting facts.

A regular participant of the French Flemish Congresses

First and foremost one should notice that Father Andouche regularly and persistently attended the French Flemish Congresses which took place every year from 1924 to 1944, except for a short interruption from 1939 to 1941. Those cultural events were conceived of as the Flemish version of the congresses of the Breton Bleun Brug, the Felibrige’s Sainte-Estelle and the Perigordian felibrées. They were designed to define and experiment with new forms of Flemish elitist sociability through staging “the play of lost nationalist memory” in which the elite from all social fields were invited to take part. Father Gantois indeed wanted to suppress the social boundaries within the supposedly same ethnic group and, to do so, he had set a “Flemish truce”.

Like the Perigordian bornat (i.e. a félibrée with an implicit ban of political talks), French Flemish Congresses facilitated fraternisation by proscribing the motives for sterile arguments among Flemings: “Politics does cross the threshold of our meetings”. According to Gantois, “only the French Flemish Congresses could provide the setting and the atmosphere required for this fraternisation” as they reduced participants to a state of nature. On the one hand, participants were expected to their own habitus (i.e. the dispositions developed by more or less antagonistic groups seeking a dominant position within their society) and to (re)gain an ethnic ethos (i.e. cluster of behabiours, attitudes and moral dispositions required for the cohesion and prosperity of a volksgemeenschap). On the other hand, as soon as the Congress was over, participants were expected to make the most of their positions in their own social fields to support the projects of the Vlaamsch Verbond Van Frankrijk and, more generally, develop Flemish culture. When not of social groups, participants were the representatives of organisations: cultural associations, nationalist movements, youth committees, etc. French Flemish Congresses were thought to connect people and bridge social fields.

Father Andouche contributed to the French Flemish Congresses both by attending and animating them. He was present at the first Congresses (from 1924 to 1928) and at least at one congress in the early 1930s (1932) and at another on the mid-1930s (1936), these last two being held during the radicalisation process of the movement. For want of reliable sources one can only conjecture he might have attended the Congresses during the Occupation, although such attendance is unlikely since the Congresses took place in Lille, far from the heart of rural Flanders, which was deterrent enough. In the early 1920s, he even served as a facilitator for the organisation of the congresses in the Saint-Jacques Institute in the very premises where he was a discipline master and, incidentally, some of the participants had achieved their secondary education.

Father Andouche also animated the French Flemish Congresses. First, he initially assumed the spiritual responsibility of some congresses. He indeed guided the retreat in the Mont-des-Cats monastery which was coupled with the founding meeting of the Union of Flemish Study Circles (whose organisational avatar is the Vlaamsch Verbond van Frankrijk). Besides he presided over the church service of the 1927 Congress. Such facts ought to be carefully considered for the determination of the role which Father Andouche allegedly played in the making of Gantois’s double vocational object, namely that of Flemish activist priest (cf. infra). What is more, Father Andouche addressed the attendance of three Congresses (1925, 1932, 1936). He spoke twice about Flemish theatre (1932, 1936) and once about the reasons why people should like Flemish (1936). Finally, he directed the Flemish Theatre Company of Les Moëres who played in Flemish during the recreational part of the 1936 Congress in Warhem.

Company director

The fact is that Father Andouche did for sure contribute significantly to the “revival of Flemish theatre” of the inter-war period.  The revival actually consisted in a particular form of the Action catholique in the context of euphemised nationalism. The only identified companies were made up of youngsters and directed by “revivalist” priests who espoused the enthusiasm and the generous (apostolic) ideas of Gantois’s movement, such as Father Andouche, Father Plancke and Father Lagatie.

Attending the events of the VVF, those priests took charge of the direction of theatre companies the way they would have of any church youth group like the Jeunesse Agricole Catholique [Catholic Agricultural Youth]. They did not adapt plays by Corneille or French and Latin playwrights into Flemish, as had the members of the long gone Chambers of Rhetoric, but they instead adapted contemporary Dutch plays into vernacular Flemish and produced playlets in the local form of West Flemish.

The plays, whether adaptations or creations, were written by clergymen, too, in particular by Father Ryckelynck and Brother Romain Dumolin alias Vandemeule (whose religious name was Brother Ephrem-Norbert of the Christian Schools). Moral issues were tackled in comedies, while religious and history topics were dealt with in tragedies, which suggests that the dramatic initiatives were not so much prompted on the grounds of Flemish regionalism as on those of Christian activism: the actors were young Catholics and the public, the parish. Some 60 performances can be identified as being directly or indirectly linked to the French Flemish Congresses. They were aimed at a large audience without any specific cultural capital and presented as a minimalist offer to sensitise a maximal number of people. As the lexical, syntactic and phonological norms used for the performances were those used in the town of the performance, Flemish theatre could not lead to the creation and development of a Dutch (or West Flemish) Bühnensprache in French Flanders.

As for the Flemish Dramatic Company of Les Moëres, it was created by Father Andouche when he was appointed in the parish (1934). He directed De Vrederechter, staged on April 14^th 1935, Dr Trekbeen, performed in February 1936, and Bij Tandmeester Vergriete, played on October 10^th and 17^th 1936. He also directed Dr Trekbeen en De Notaeris van Onseghem on the occasion of the French Flemish Congress in Warhem on August 2^nd 1936.

To put in a nutshell, Father Andouche did volunteer to pursue, by his own means, in an indisputably public way, the goal of preserving Flemish culture through the preservation of the Flemish language which he had previously set and whose development he had monitored in the action, first, of some people interested in Flemish culture and, then, of a circle of initiated young clerics.

A supporter

Although he played neither a first role nor an enduring role in Flemish nationalism, Father Andouche long acted behind the scene for the benefit of the Vlaamsch Verbond van Frankrijk to which he offered his support in at least 3 different ways, depending on its needs and on the context.

First of all, before Gantois’s movement had been created, he gave the main leaders his educational support. Along with Canon Gars and Father Cremon, he is one of the few priests who more or less formally taught Flemish in the minor seminary of Hazebrouck. As a caring bibliophile, he also let young Gantois visit his library and lend books from his Flemish collection.

Secondly, after the movement had outreached the small world of clerics and enrolled lays, Father Andouche monitored the circulation of the movement’s review and feedbacked the reaction of the readership around him.

He assumably made Le Lion de Flandre known to the patients of the Zuydcoote sanatorium where he was a chaplain from 1929 to 1934 and where he contributed to “develop series of regionalist conferences which the patients and medical staff much appreciated”. The conferences were probably modelled after Georges Lotthé’s public talks of 1928. Such “propaganda” must have been noticeable enough as it was suggested during the Occupation that patients read the review.

Thirdly, Father Andouche most likely gave financial support to the movement. I have strong evidence of his subscription to the monthly Le Lion de Flandre during the Occupation. He had also previously subscribed to the humble paper De Vlaemsche Stemme in Vrankryk at the onset of the movement.  I then conjecture that Father Andouche regularly read the publications of the Vlaamsch Verbond van Frankrijk. In the bargain he was very likely to offer financial support every once in a while, as he did when he responded to the subscription Gantois had to launch to cover the a posteriori post costs of the Contemporary Flemish Art Exhibition of 1943. The exhibition, which attracted some 12.000 people, was organised by the Flemish Art Company under the artistic direction of Felix Del Marle, and yet the company was an ad hoc organisation set up by the Vlaamsch Verbond van Frankrijk.

Conclusion

What can be inferred from the above facts? The most admissible conclusion, or the least disputable one, eventually concerns not so much Father Andouche as Father Gantois, a “catalyst of friendly feelings” to use the expression I coined in a subsection of my doctoral dissertation.

Indeed Father Andouche, whose figure I have conjured up and outlined in this article, gives further evidence, if need be, of how far-reaching Gantois’s movement was. It did not boil down to a core group of forty or so loonies or dangerous radicals. It rather appealed to a wide range of people before, during and after the Second World War, among whom some honourable sympathisers were either the dupes or the devotees of Gantois’s cause.

In my classification of the causes of sympathy towards Gantois or of interest in his action, I suggested that, along with “regionalism”, “ideological affinities” and “quest for meaning”, “family tradition” could account for the support of so many different people. I defined five types of “family tradition” and Father Andouche epitomises that of “clerical transmission of favourable disposition towards Flemish culture”. It consists in subscribing partly or completely to Gantois’s theses and supporting formally or informally all or some of his initiatives after the clerical sympathiser had been exposed, during his training or his childhood, to the specific discourse aimed at illustrating and defending the characteristics of Flemish culture. For lack of sufficient evidence, it is not for me to decide whether the then disciple master led the future cleric into indiscipline. But I can at least notice that Father Andouche never really disowned his former student, nor did he ever disavow what Father Gantois had done of his legacy.

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Notes

1. For further information on learned societies and their sociability, cf. Jean-Pierre Chaline’s Sociabilité et érudition (Paris, CTHS, 1998) and Elites et sociabilité en France (Paris, Perrin, 2003), as well as the contributions of Sociabilité, pouvoirs et société (Rouen, Presses Universitaires de Rouen, 1987) edited by lead author François Thélamon. [↩]
2. Ch.-P. Ghillebaert, 2014, «Itinérances érudites dans la campagne flamande », Etudes rurales, n°113, pp. 79-94.[The original note referred to the oral presentation, yet unpublished when this article was released. For this translation I preferred referring to the published version of the presentation] [↩]
3. The presentation about « Landscape transition and traces in Houtland » which Christophe Delbecque gave this year is likely to be a landmark in the history of the General Assemblies of the Comité Flamand de France as it addressed an issue that had long been neglected, if ever tackled. [Additional note to the original note : Cf. Ch. Delbecque, 2011, « Transition paysagère et vestiges de l’Houtland : l’exemple de Berthen », Bulletin du Comité Flamand de France, n°91-92, pp. 3-5. Christophe Delbecque did give other presentations on landscapes in General Assemblies in 2013, in 2016 and in 2018]. [↩]
4. It would be of some interest to determine under what circumstances, and especially when and where, the title was added to epitaphs in order to know whether the attribution turned out to be intentionally anachronic [↩]
5. I could not hope for any better opportunity of reporting, with some due reservation on the score of the subsquent irreverence, what mischievous Flemish speakers claim the abbrevation RIP stands for: Recht In ‘n Pit (« Right Into the Pit »). [↩]

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