At the entrance to the road which leads to our Dauphinois refuge, the little Calvary is now brand new, which honors Jean d’Ovidio, “Mort pour la France” on August 29, 1944, because of his participation in the Moirans group, in the maquis of Chartreuse. “Mort pour la France” is a legal expression in France and an honor awarded to people who died during a conflict, usually in service of the country.
Around us, numerous memorials bear witness to the violence of the time in the Vercors massif.
This area of the Dauphiné has in fact a long familiarity with resistance to oppression since 1349, when the “Treaty of Romans” was signed in the residence of the Dauphin, linking the province of Dauphiné to France.
It is from this ancient tradition that the protest movement born out of the injunction to vaccination (via the health pass) is claimed.
Like every Saturday, a few hundred of these new “resistance fighters” will beat the pavement in Valencia in a few days to denounce the dictatorship in which they live. Among them, some very good friends…
This is a sham!
Before becoming the scene of events that we know, the name of Vercors was taken as a pseudonym by Jean Bruller when, mobilized in the close village of Mours-Saint-Eusèbe, he joined the resistance.
In the fall of 1941, “Vercors” founded the Éditions de Minuit, an underground publishing house with Pierre de Lescure. There he published his short story Le Silence de la mer on February 20, 1942. He also participated in the National Writers Committee (CNE) and the Peace Movement.
He was part of the Commission for the purification of publishing, but resigned because of the unequal sanctions against writers, collaborators with Nazi regime, and against their publishers, who were never penalized. .
At the same time, he refused to participate in the establishment of a “black list” and referred the authors to the judgment of their conscience.
Not easy to be Vercors!
Fed up with fake news from Facebook and Twitter, our 2021 resistance fighters run little risk other than ending up in an intensive care bed, at the expense of national health insurance.
Their bitterness, their revolt, their feeling of not being heard come from far away. They are largely respectable.
But when it comes to vaccination, their selfishness, their individualism is an insult to the memory of their elders.
There it is!
Iconography : Calvary in memory of Jean d’Ovidio, resistance member of the Chartreuse maquis, Drôme, France (personal collection)
After working as an international banker for emerging countries, Laurent Lascols became global head of country risk / sovereign risk (from 2008 to 2013) then global director of public affairs (from 2014 to 2019) for Societe Generale. In 2021, he founded Aristote, an advisory firm and training organization dedicated to environmental economics, sustainable finance and impact finance.