On History & Power
On the way to the first of two unannounced site visits outside of Paris, as we drove through the French countryside for the first time, Father Ed made a quick comment about the solar farms in southern France. The region has a high air quality and receives an incredible amount of sunlight, making it perfect for harnessing and converting solar power. As it turns out, people have been doing it there for hundreds and hundreds of years — through sunflower fields. The plants would soak up the energy and convert it to seeds and oil, which were used to cook, feed, fertilize, and fuel. A couple of hundreds of years of innovation and a few revolutions later, all that’s changed is the mechanism we’ve planted to collect the energy. For whatever reason, this side comment, this idea — of harnessing power to do work, of looking to our roots for inspiration and knowledge — stuck with me. In that spirit, a collection of thoughts on power, history, and DePaul:
- In the past four years at DePaul, I’ve shifted through a series of majors, departments, jobs, internships, student organizations, and roommates — each of which has brought new people in and out of my life in a social kaleidoscope that feels unique to a 24,000-person school. When our VHT cohort first met as a group, we began sharing about our experiences at DePaul — what brought us to student leadership, what drew us closer to the mission. Once we were on the ground in Paris, and we started exploring the city (read: hunting for dinner), I began to realize how lucky we’d gotten. Our cohort was filled with brilliant, funny, genuine people, willing to show up authentically, from completely different communities within DePaul — each of us with our own bonds and overlaps, questions and needs, hopes and goals. A group of us went to mass at Notre-Dame Sunday morning, and a completely different group of us went to explore late-night kabob on the Seine and dim cafes filled to the ceiling with tropical plants and wicker furniture. In between, as I had chances to spend time with everyone — over meals, long drives, and shared curiosities — I was struck by how contained my circles had become as college progressed. As proud as I am of how I’ve grown over the past four years, and the life I’ve built, there was a magic to my first year on campus, running into people from every organization, residence hall, and class. As I began dedicating more time to the jobs and organizations that resonated with me, some of that got lost. By far the most surprising, and the most rewarding, moments of this trip sparked that magic again. For all the training I’ve attended and organized on community building, this cohort has re-formed how I understand community at DePaul. More than anything, it’s a blessing to walk away from this experience in community with people I never would have met otherwise.
- James Baldwin, writing about the “American student colony” in “A Question of Identity” (published in Notes on a Native Son, 1954) says this:
“The American in Europe is everywhere confronted with the question of his identity, and this may be taken as the key to all the contradictions one encounters when attempting to discuss him…. Their rejection of the limitations of American society has not set them free to function in any other society, and their illusions, therefore, remain intact: they have yet to be corrupted by the notion that society is never anything less than a perfect labyrinth of limitations…. This little band of bohemians, as grimly singleminded as any evangelical sect, illustrate, by the very ferocity with which they disavow American attitudes, one of the most American of attributes, the inability to believe that time is real. It is this inability which makes them so romantic about the nature of society, and it is this inability which has led them into a total confusion about the nature of experience… But if this were all one found in the American student colony, one would hardly have the heart to discuss it. If the American found in Europe only confusion, it would obviously be infinitely wiser for him to remain home. Hidden, however, in the heard of the confusion he encounters here is that which he came so blindly seeking: the terms on which is related to his country, and to the world. This, which has so grandiose and general a ring, is, in fact, most personal — the American confusion seeming to be based on the very nearly unconscious assumption that it is possible to consider the person apart from all of the forces which have produced him. This assumption, however, is itself based on nothing less than our history, which is the history of the total, and willing, alienation of entire peoples from their forebears. What is overwhelmingly clear, it seems, to everyone but ourselves is that this history has created an entirely unprecedented people, with a unique and individual past. It is, indeed, this past which has trust upon us our present, so troubling role. It is the past lived on the American continent, as against that other past, irrecoverable now on the shores of Europe, which must sustain us in the present. The truth about the past is not that it is too brief, or too superficial, but only that we, having turned our faces so resolutely away from it, have never demanded from it what is has to give. It is this demand which the American student in Paris is forced, at length, to make, for he has otherwise no identity, no reason for being here, nothing to sustain him here.” - My dad’s side of the family can be traced back to Alsace-Lorraine, in the northeast of France, where we get the Gerard name. They left in 1848, immediately before the revolutions that would fell the July Monarchy, with the Icarians: a group of French utopian socialists who were following Étienne Cabet, a philosopher and writer, to America in the hopes of founding a socialist commune. Attempted land purchases bounced them up the Mississippi river until they finally settled in Nauvoo, Illinois, where they turned a twelve acre plot of land into a successful agricultural commune with three free schools, communal flour mills, saw mills, whiskey distillery, bilingual newspapers, a 39 piece orchestra, choir, theater, hospital, and the state’s largest library at the time. In a tiny old town, in rural Illinois, in 1855. Cabet, in an 1852 history of the colony of Icaria in the US, summarizes their beliefs as such:
I’ve known of this history since early high school, and find something new every time I return to it. Now, I see echoes of the Vincentian mission: Love. Justice. Mutual assistance. Education. Intelligence. Reason. Morality. I hear about the prosperity of Nauvoo and I think to Saint-Lazare, where the Congregation of the Mission’s grain stores were sacked, July 13, 1789, on the eve of the storming of the Bastille, by a mob gathering supplies in preparation for months of turmoil. No one in Paris was organizing their labor as efficiently as the Vincentians, which gave them some of the largest grain stores near the city. They benefited, too, from the favor of the King — going back to Vincent, who accessed power and funding by aligning himself with Anne of Austria and Louis XIV, amongst others. All of this has been to say: in the six years now that I’ve known about DePaul, I didn’t find a personal stake in the Vincentian mission until I began to understand it as an essential part of the history that has formed me — as a series of decisions, by a handful of people building communities and institutions in the 17th century, that spiraled down to me, age 18, packing up my bedroom in Maryland and coming to DePaul to try to build a life — right back in Illinois, where every-other generation of Gerards have returned since 1849.
