John J. Gaynard's Books

Loys Gaynard, Executioner of Bordeaux

2026-06-09T07:35:33.808-07:00

In the Bulletin of Regional History in the French Catholic daily newspaper Le Mémorial des Pyrenées––The Memorial of the Pyrenees dated October 13, 1913, an unnamed reviewer gave a short, appreciative account of a learned article by Pierre Harlé titled The Executioner of Bordeaux Before the Revolution.

In his article, Harlé mentioned that he had not been able to find a complete list of the people who had held the position of executioner in Bordeaux. There is a large gap between 1416 and 1525. The anonymous reviewer concluded his Le Mémorial review with the words, “Monsieur Harlé will allow me to point out to him, for a future edition of his work, an executioner from Bordeaux of whom he was not aware. This man is Loys Gaynard, master of the “high works” (or “capital duties” or “high justice”) of the City and town of Bordeaux, who on July 17, 1508, went to the border of Isle-Saint-Georges and Saint-Magne to whip a poor unfortunate peasant.”

Below is an excerpt from Harlé’s paper describing the social status of an executioner in Bordeaux:

“Among the towers situated along the walls of our city at the beginning of the 16^th century, there was, near the Toscanan Gate, a tower known as the Hangman’s or Executioner’s Tower. There, feared and shunned by all, lived a sinister man, cut off from society, the master of high works, that “gentleman who puts an end to all disputes.”

“Our ancestors’ contempt and revulsion for this position are well-known. Everyone avoided contact with the executioner and turned away from him when he passed. So that “he might be known to the public and prevented from mingling with the citizens”, he had to wear a special garment. A decree from the jurats (Aldermen) in 1536 required him, on pain of flogging, to wear “a red robe and a silver or brass scale attached to his robe.” A century later, this became “a blue cloak marked on both sides with a gallows and ladder made from yellow cloth,” fitting symbols if ever there were. The costs for this livery were covered by the city, which kept the executioner of high justice under its direct control.

“From the moment he assumed his role, the executioner faced the scorn that he would endure daily. According to custom, he began his public life by swearing an oath to carry out his office whenever lawfully required. However, this oath was not taken in the council chamber; a man like him was not deemed worthy of such admittance, nor would he likely have dared to appear there. Instead, a jurat, delegated by his colleagues, went to the outskirts of the Town Hall, and it was there, kneeling on the courtyard pavement, that the candidate took his oath. On May 28, 1760, as recorded in the Jurade Deliberations,“the executioner of high justice having passed away, the jurats appointed Jean Ferron, a native of Bayonne, to fill this function which he had requested, and M. Lalanne proceeded to the door of the small courtyard where Ferron stood. Following M. Lalanne’s order, Ferron raised his hand and took the oath as executioner of high justice, as per the required custom, and promised not to appear in public without his livery coat and not to leave the city without written permission from the jurats.”

“The executioner was shunned not only because of his duties but also partly due to his origins. Speaking of utility and propriety, Montaigne writes that they “employ... lost men for the executions of high justice.” The oldest texts we have encountered refer to the executioner with the title “king of harlots” or “king of rascals.” The term “harlot,” an old English word, referred to a disreputable woman. In old French, words such as “ribauds” and “ribaudes”, were also used to describe the abject populace living by disreputable means, who could be found in every era in the slums of large cities.

“In the Middle Ages, the executioner lived on the city’s outskirts near the Toscanan Gate. To monitor adequately those under his watch, he needed to live close to them. These “ribauds” or “scum,” as our ancestors called them, were considered mere “gallows bait,” destined sooner or later to become the victims of the executioner. The title of “king” bestowed upon the executioner, perhaps symbolised the fate awaiting this underworld of society. Does not the arm of justice wield a sword? And at the moment he delivers death, does the executioner not hold the full power of the society he serves? Thus, it was not too bold an image to regard as his subjects those he would later punish.

“The office of executioner was so undesirable that prisoners were often forced into the role in exchange for the pardoning of their own death sentence. The executioner’s assistants were recruited in the same way. In 1414, the jurats directed the sub-mayor to negotiate with the victim’s friends to get them to accept the murderer as the city’s executioner. Some years later, a prisoner named “Lauffort lo fornisqua” was appointed as the executioner, as was Bernard Robert in 1525. A ruling from the Parliament on December 9, 1550, issued at the request of a certain Mézard Chémier, commuted his sentence of life in the galleys to “serve for life as an assistant to the master of high works of this City of Bordeaux in executions assigned to him.” The Court added: “And should he contravene this order, he shall be hanged and strangled wherever he may be apprehended without further legal proceedings.”

To learn more about the Gaynards in France: Gaynard, Gainard, Gaignard, Guénard...

References:

“Bulletin d’histoire régionale : Le Bourreau de Bordeaux,” Le Mémorial des Pyrénées, October 20, 1913, Pau.

Pierre Harlé, “Le bourreau de Bordeaux avant la révolution,” Revue historique de Bordeaux et du département de la Gironde, année 1913, 24–35.

Michel de Montaigne was a French Renaissance philosopher and writer, born on February 28, 1533, at the Château de Montaigne near Bordeaux, France. He is best known for popularising the essay as a literary genre through his book “Essais.” He served as a counsellor and judge at the Parlement of Bordeaux from 1557 to 1570.

Savary de Mauléon: The Poitevin Warrior-Poet

2026-05-05T11:34:35.621-07:00

Savary de Mauléon, public domain

In the turbulent world of thirteenth-century Normandy, Poitou, France and England, where allegiances could shift as often, but less predictably, than the tides, and a warlord’s worth was measured as much by the elegance of his poetry as his skill with a sword, one figure stands out in my book: Savary de Mauléon. Troubadour, mercenary captain, seneschal of Poitou, and almost certainly the man who first brought the ancestors of the Gaynard family to England and Galway, his story is one of the most compelling threads running through the book Gaynard, Gainard, Gaignard, Guénard…, an investigation into a name that has endured in France and Ireland since medieval times.

Born around 1181 in Mauléon, in what is now the Deux-Sèvres département of western France, Savary was a great baron of Poitou with lordship over Mauléon, Talmond, and Benon. He first entered the history of England as an enemy of King John, who captured the young Savary at the siege of Mirebeau in 1202, where he had been besieging John's remarkable mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Intending to have him executed, John carted Savary in manacles all the way to Corfe Castle in Dorset. But de Mauléon was not a man to stay locked up for long. In a spectacular escape that reads like something from an Alexandre Dumas novel, he killed his four jailers with an axe, seized the castle, and held out against John's forces until the Archbishop of Canterbury negotiated his release. The result of his audacity? John decided that Savary would be more valuable to him alive than dead, and he took him into his own service.

From that moment, Savary became one of John's most trusted lieutenants. He was appointed Seneschal of Poitou in 1205, charged with the defence of Poitou and Gascony, and effectively acting as the king’s viceroy in the southwest of what is now France. When John’s rebel barons forced the Magna Carta on him in 1215, the First Barons’ War erupted and a weakened John asked Savary to recruit knights and soldiers of fortune from Flanders and the western provinces of France to reinforce the royal cause in England. Before being brought into England, many of these troops, men whom the English barons despised as foreign mercenaries, and many of whom even French historians of Savary described as the worst scoundrels in Western Europe, were kept in reserve in Ireland to avoid immediately inflaming baronial opinion. This manoeuvre placed Savary at the heart of English affairs at a pivotal moment. Before John died at Newark Castle in October 1216, before the end of the war, he named Savary as one of the thirteen executors of his will and a member of the council of regency for his nine-year-old son, King Henry III.

It was in the context of the First Barons’ War that Savary's path crossed repeatedly with that of the de Burgh family. Hubert de Burgh, Chief Justiciar of England and one of the most powerful men in the kingdom during Henry III's minority, had been a figure well known to Savary at the Court of King John. Hubert's nephew, Richard de Burgh, had been at the side of King John during the war against his barons. Some years after John’s death, Savary received from Henry III the wardship of the Isle of Wight and used his influence with the king to have his clerk, Johannes Gaignard, appointed to a church on the island in 1228.

Savary’s connections with the de Burghs, and his ancestral proximity to the ancient Gainardus family in Poitou, would, I argue in the book, have consequences reaching all the way to the west of Ireland. When Hubert’s nephew Richard de Burgh, who would become known to history as the Conqueror of Connacht, launched his campaign to take control of that province between 1235 and 1238, the evidence suggests that the first Adam Gaynard, the grandfather of the Adam Gaynard who built Carraigin Castle on the eastern shore of Lough Corrib, in 1300, was fighting alongside him, as part of the Anglo-Norman forces Richard had marshalled from all over Ireland.

But what makes Savary de Mauléon truly exceptional in an Anglo-Irish context is that he was not merely a warlord. He was also a troubadour, a practitioner of the Gay Saber, the “scientific knowledge” of poetic composition that flourished in the language and culture of Languedoc and the south of Aquitaine. A contemporary biography described him not only as uns dels plus valens homes del mon, “one of the most valiant men in the world,” but also a “lord of Courtoisie” and a grans amaires de trobadors, a great protector of troubadours. His surviving poems are of three types: debate poems, tensons and partimens, in which he sparred with leading poets of his day over the finer points of love and loyalty. One tenson turns on a deceptively simple question: if a lady gives one suitor a glance, squeezes the hand of a second, and secretly presses the foot of the third, which gesture reflects the truest love? Savary argues pragmatically for the secret contact with the foot: fin amistatz celada de lauzenjadors, which demonstrates “fine friendship giving no rise to gossip.”

That same pragmatism shaped his political verse. A surviving fragment from around 1211 reads apparently as a declaration of love but in fact hides a military dispatch: “I managed things so well that I have assembled Basques and Brabançons to do you honour. So beautiful is the reward, that we are five hundred ready… to execute your pleasure.” The term Brabançons was used at the time to refer to the sort of ruthless hired soldiers Savary recruited for John in England. The troubadour and the mercenary captain were, in Savary, one and the same man.

In 1228, King Henry III referred to him affectionately as his “much loved Savary” in the patent rolls, thus showing what a powerful patron Savary was for Johannes Gaignard, the man who may have been the first member of the entire Gaynard family to settle in the British Isles.

The evolution of a name, from when it was first recorded in a monastery in medieval Bavaria shortly before the birth of Charlemagne to its emergence as Gainardus in Anjou and Poitou, before becoming Gaynard in Connacht and some parts of western France, while remaining Gainard, Gaignard and Guénard across other French regions, is what the book Gaynard, Gainard, Gaignard, Guénard… is all about. Savary de Mauléon is one of the strongest hinges on one of the most important doors which swung open for me as I followed the trail of this ancestral name across nearly thirteen centuries and the archives of France, England, Ireland, Germany and even Slovenia.

My book titled Gaynard, Gainard, Gaignard, Guénard... The History of a Franco-Irish Name is available now from all major online and physical booksellers and in eBook format from Apple, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and many other electronic booksellers.

Jean Gainard: One of the Forgotten Righteous of Moissac

2026-04-14T08:05:00.000-07:00

The Children of Moissac

Below is a translation from the French version of Jean Gainard’s citation in his file at Yad Vashem (number 4162):

“Jean Gainard, a coal merchant, lived in Moissac, in the Tarn-et-Garonne region, with his wife and daughter. The Éclaireurs Israélites de France (Jewish Scouts of France) had established their national secretariat and a children’s home in Moissac. Jean Gainard, who supplied them with coal, got to know the staff and became friendly with them. In August 1942, when the French police began arresting and deporting Jews, the organisation founded a clandestine branch called La Sixième (The Sixth), whose goal was to save young Jews.

“The leader was Henri Wahl. Jean Gainard gave him his own identity card, ration card, baptismal certificate, and driver’s licence. Protected by these valuable documents, Henri Wahl travelled across France. He was able to search rural areas, and find many host families, as well as secular or Christian organisations that agreed to hide Jewish children and adolescents. Henri Wahl also established a network that smuggled people across the Swiss and Spanish borders and oversaw the production of forged documents; this network operated until the end of the Occupation. The lives of many Jews were saved thanks to Jean Gainard’s courageous act. Gainard knew that by giving his papers to Henri Wahl, he was putting himself and his children in danger; if he had been caught, he risked facing the same fate as the Jews he was trying to save. On May 1, 1989, Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, awarded Jean Gainard the title of Righteous Among the Nations.”^{^[i]}

In 1973, in an edition of the French Shoah History Review titled The Jewish Scouts of France in the War, an article by Roger Fichtenberg mentioned the contribution of Jean Gainard to “the Sixth,” a code name for the clandestine Jewish Scouts Resistance Network.^{^[ii]} The title of the article was La Sixième en zone sud – The Sixth in the southern zone.

“Our missions at that time consisted in addressing the most urgent needs with the greatest efficiency, but let’s admit it, without any real organisation. Our national leaders began to consider structures, which were gradually put in place.

· Henri Wahl took on the identity of a Moissac Resistance member: Jean Gainard.

· Ninon Haït, who had returned from the Gurs camp where she had done remarkable social work and facilitated escapes, took the name Nicole Harcourt. In early 1940, as World War II progressed, the French Government began using the Gurs Internment Camp to intern about 4,000 German Jewish refugees, who were considered “enemy aliens.” The camp also held French political dissidents, among them leftist leaders who opposed the war with Germany.

· Denise Lévy, arriving from Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, where she had worked tirelessly to place young people in the region, took on the identity of Denise Laurens.

“The three of them decided to leave Moissac, which had served as their home base, to settle in Lyon, so as not to endanger the children’s home with their clandestine activities.”

There are numerous appearances of Jean Gainard’s name with the Gaynard spelling. On the French Committee for Yad Vashem’s website, the name is spelt Gaynard.^{^[iii]} There are also reports of the ceremony on the City of Moissac website, ^{^[iv]} in the “Toute la culture––All the Culture” report on the inauguration,^{^[v]} and on the “Terres fraternelles – Brotherly Lands” website,^{^[vi]} where the spelling is Gaynard.

This shows how the spellings of Gainard and Gaynard are as interchangeable in the minds of people in the region between Moissac and Miramont-de-Guyenne, in France, as they were among some of the members of the Irish Gaynard/Gainard families who emigrated to the United States of America in the 1880s after the Forgotten Famine in the West of Ireland.

The names of the other eight Righteous Among the Nations of Moissac are Alice Boule, Alice Pelous, the couple Manuel and Anne-Marie Darracq and four nuns from the Order of the Holy Family: Sisters Henriette Ducom, Henriette Plagnat, Ernestine Vigne, and Augusta Souchon.

Beyond these eight names, and that of Jean Gainard, Moissac itself is often celebrated as a “Town of the Righteous.” This is due to the “conspiracy of silence” and the quiet complicity of the entire population, from the town’s mayor, his secretary and local policemen to the neighbours, who collectively ensured that not a single child from the Maison de Moissac was ever deported. It is a legacy of humanity that deserves to be fully remembered.

My recent book, titled Gaynard, Gainard,Gaignard, Guénard… traces the parallel histories of the Gainard/Gaynard family in Ireland and France, from before the time of Anglo-Norman knights in Ireland in 1235 and Robert Gaynard, the judge of Moissac in 1347, to modern times.

The eBook can be found on Apple Books or on Amazon Kindle at Gaynard, Gainard, Gaignard, Guénard…

Illustration: "The Children of Moissac" from the 2020 Exhibition of the same name.

[i]. Dossier n° 4162––Jean Gainard, “Comité français pour Yad Vashem”, accessed February 11, 2025, https://yadvashem-france.org/dossier/nom/4162/.

[ii]. Roger Fichtenberg, “La sixième en zone sud,” Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah no. 161 (1997): 54, accessed November 15, 2024, https://shs.cairn.info/revue-revue-d-histoire-de-la-shoah1-1997-3-page-54?lang=fr.

[iii]. Inauguration de l’esplanade des Justes parmi les Nations à Moissac,”Comité français pour Yad Vashem”, April 28, 2013, https://yadvashem-france.org/la-vie-du-comite/actualites/inauguration-de-lesplanade-des-justes-parmi-les-nations-a-moissac/.

[iv]. Inauguration de l’esplanade des Justes parmi les Nations," Ville de Moissac, accessed February 11, 2025, https://www.moissac.fr/actualites/patrimoine-et-tourisme/inauguartion-esplanade/.

[v]. “Moissac, ville des Justes remémorée,” Toute La Culture, accessed February 11, 2025, https://toutelaculture.com/actu/politique-culturelle/moissac-ville-des-justes-rememoree/.

[vi]. Terres Fraternelles, “Oser agir,” accessed February 4, 2026, https://terresfraternelles.fr/notre-exposition/oser-agir/.

The Fair-Haired Captain: Where the Name Gilboy Comes From

2026-04-11T11:25:00.000-07:00

While I was researching the French, Anglo-Norman and Irish archives for the origins of the Gaynard family name, I often came across other familiar names. However, I had to stay focused on my main objective, and I temporarily put the information about those other names to one side.

Now that my book has been published, under the title Gaynard, Gainard, Gaignard, Guegnard... I have had the time to go back to the first of those names, Gilboy. It is not only a name I have known since I spent part of my childhood in England in the same village as a Gilboy family, but which an uncle on my mother’s side married into and whose children befriended my own son and daughter when I brought them back to Mayo every year for a month or so when they were growing up.

When I came across the name Gilboie in an Anglo-Irish poem written in 1308, I immediately associated it with the Gilboy name I knew so well from the Barony of Erris.

The Poem

The Ruins of Carbury Castle

The poem is called Piers of Bermingham. It was written around 1308, in the English spoken at that time, and it survives today in a manuscript held in the British Library in London, the Harley Manuscript 913. I first read it in a bilingual collection, the early 14th-century English facing a modern English translation on the opposite page, in a book called Anglo-Irish Poems of the Middle Ages, published in 1995 by the Columba Press and prepared by the scholar Angela M. Lucas.

The poem is a rhyming obituary of Piers of Bermingham, Lord of Carbury in Kildare. A long portion of it refers to a notorious event in 1305 where Sir Piers invited the O’Connor chiefs to a feast at his castle in Carbury, only to have them massacred. In the annals of Clonmacnoise for 1305, the incident is described as follows, in an archaic English translation from 1627:

“Murtagh O'Connor of Offalie, Calvagh his brother, and thirteen of the best of their lynage were slaine by Syr Pierce Bermengham in the castle of Carrick-Idir-Ddalon [Carbury]...

After they were slaine, the said Syr Pierce sent their heads to Dublin, and it is said that one of the heads (the head of Murtagh) was carried to the Newgate, and there was prickt upon a pole, and that there was a great reward given to Syr Pierce for soe doing.”

The poem celebrates Piers of Bermingham for “hunting the hare” (i.e. the Irish) and “making orders” (a pun on the massacre), and it portrays him as a defender of the English colony.

Harley 913 Folio

In the Annals of Clonmacnoise for 1305, the focus is on the “treachery” of the invitation to Castle Carbury. The “Newgate” mentioned was one of the main gates of the city of Dublin, used as a prison and a place for public displays of “traitors’” remains. Sending the heads to Dublin wasn't just an act of cruelty; it was to claim a “bounty” from the English Dublin administration, for which even an Anglo-Norman lord like Piers had to provide physical evidence that a “felon” or “enemy of the King” had been killed. The “great reward” mentioned in the Annals refers to the £100 (a massive sum at the time) that the Dublin government paid Piers for the heads of the O'Connors.

As I describe in my book, Gaynard, Gainard, Gaignard, Guénard... the brutality of this bounty system was not reserved solely for the native Irish. At some time between Easter 1359 (21 April) and 11 February 1360, the Irish Exchequer bought an Adam Gaynard, referred to as a “traitor to the King” for the sum of £40, so that he could be put to death.

On the surface, the poem reads as a celebration of this crime. But Angela Lucas, in her introduction to “The Anglo-Irish Poems of the Middle Ages” calls it a satire. Not satire in the modern sense of mockery or comedy. Satire in the middle ages was more serious. It was an exposure of corruption and the abuse of power, especially when written by Franciscan friars who were profoundly concerned with the suffering of ordinary people at the hands of the powerful.

The style the poet uses is one of false praise. The more extravagantly he celebrates Piers for the massacre, the more clearly a knowing audience would have understood the moral horror of what was being described. To kill your guests at a feast was one of the gravest violations of the medieval code of hospitality. To call it a great achievement was, in this literary tradition, to condemn it.

The Name in the Poem

Near the end of the poem, the poet describes the Irish forces who came to oppose Bermingham at Tethmoy in County Offaly. There, among the kern, the native Irish foot-soldiers, was a captain named Gilboie.

O’Connor who was king,

Brought his kern of foot soldiers,

At the feast of the Holy Trinity,

When hoods had best be worn,

To Piers at Tethmoy.

The captain was called Gilboie.

Gilboie is the sound of Giolla Buidhe written down by an English-speaking scribe doing his best with an Irish name. In pure Irish, giolla means a lad or a youth, and buidhe refers almost certainly to fair or golden hair. The captain, a fair-haired youth, was the “maister” of O’Connor’s men against the Normans.

His name survived because the satirical structure of the poem needed it. Without the face of the fair-haired youth who led O’Connors troops into the trap there would be no human cost visible behind Piers's so-called achievement. The mention of Gilboie was not preserved by accident. He was built into the architecture of the poem's moral argument.

The Name Through the Centuries

Giolla Buidhe was not an unusual name in medieval Ireland. It belonged to a whole family of vivid, descriptive personal names that were common across several centuries and several provinces in Ireland: Giolla Dubh for the dark-haired; Giolla Ruadh for the red-haired.

The Annals of the Four Masters was a great 17th-century compilation of Irish history made at a time when it was feared that Irish culture would be destroyed by the English Tudor monarchs. It drew on much older sources. It records a Fermanagh nobleman of the Maguire family who was known to everyone as Giolla Buidhe, and who died at home in the year 1400. Gradually, as Irish names shifted over the centuries, Giolla Buidhe hardened into a hereditary surname: Ó Giolla Bhuidhe, the descendant of the fair-haired one; and this became the modern name, Gilboy.

The Gilboys of Erris

By the time of the 1901 census, the name had become very rare. Only 54 people in the whole of Ireland carried it, nearly all of them Catholic, and the great majority of them in the west. The core territory of the family was the Barony of Erris in County Mayo, an important part of which is made up of the long Mullet peninsula stretching out toward the horizon, remote enough that old names and old ways survived there long after they had disappeared elsewhere. My own name, Gaynard, is pronounced Gangyard in Erris, reminiscent of the French pronunciation of it from a thousand years ago. In South Mayo, around Hollymount and Roundfort, it is pronounced Gaignard, the way it was spelt in 1228 when the first person of the family arrived in the British Isles.

The genealogist John Grenham places the Gilboy family's origins further north, in Donegal, with a migration south into Connacht over the centuries. Whether the Kern captain of Tethmoy in 1308 is a direct ancestor of the Erris Gilboys cannot be said with certainty. Giolla Buidhe was a personal name used independently by many families before it became a single surname. But the captain is the earliest known bearer of the name in any written record, preserved by the poet who was writing in false praise of the man who treacherously massacred him.

The poet of Piers of Bermingham preserved the name Gilboie to ensure the human cost of the massacre at Carbury was visible. Captain Gilboie was built into the very architecture of the poem's moral argument. Seven centuries later, when I speak with friends like Mary Gaughan (née Gilboy), Anthony Gilboy, Sarah Gilboy and Máirín Ní Ghiollabhuidhe (Maureen Gilboy), the name in its traditional feminine form, I am struck by the fact that the name outlasted the powerful lord who sought to claim ‘victory’ through treachery. The fair-haired captain fell at Tethmoy, but his name and his people have remained.

A Note for Anyone Researching the Name

If you are a Gilboy tracing your family, these are the most useful starting points:

The full text of Piers of Bermingham is freely available through the CELT corpus at University College Cork: celt.ucc.ie
The Annals of Clonmacnoise in the 1627 translation are available through the Internet Archive and are fully searchable: https://archive.org/annalsclonmacnoise00mage
Civil records at IrishGenealogy.ie and parish records from Kilcommon, Kilmore, and Belmullet in the Barony of Erris are the core genealogical sources for the Mayo Gilboys.
John Grenham's database at johngrenham.com is a reliable online guide to the surname's distribution across Ireland.
Thomas Wright’s The History of Ireland; from the Earliest Period of the Irish Annals, to the Present Time. 7 vols. London: J.S. Virtue, 1854. https://archive.org/details/historyofireland00wriguoft/page/163/mode/2up.

Illustrations

The Ruins of Carbury Castle by Doug Bermingham, available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ruins_of_Carbury,_County_Kildare.jpg

British Library manuscript Harley 913 folio 3r, being the first 24 lines of the Middle English poem "The Land of Cokaygne", written in southeast Ireland (probably Waterford) circa 1330 by an unknown author. This is the unique manuscript copy of this poem.

Garin Gainard: An Angevin Knight at the Heart of the Crusades

2026-03-31T11:31:00.000-07:00

Adapted from the pages of my book Gaynard, Gainard, Gaignard, Guénard...Guénard… The History of a Franco-Irish Name.

The Crusader States in 1190

When we think of the Crusades, we think of kings, popes, and legendary battles. We rarely think of the individual knights who filled the witness lists of forgotten land deeds, who served princes in distant courts, and who, in all likelihood, died in the summer dust of a battlefield in the Holy Land, leaving no tomb and no direct descendants that history has been able to trace. Garinus Gainardus , known in modern French as Garin Gainard, was one such man. Yet the story that can be reconstructed from the scattered documentary traces he left behind is remarkable.

His name is found in the records of the Crusader States in five different spellings: Gainardus, Guegnart, Guengnart, Gainart, and Gahnardus. This profusion of variants is, in itself, an interesting linguistic adventure, connecting Garin to a name whose roots stretch back over a thousand years, to early medieval Bavaria. The Germanic name Gaganhard, meaning, roughly, "hard against enemies," was carried west by the Franks, latinised to Gaganhardus and then contracted to Gainardus, and it turns up in monastic charters from the Rhineland to Poitou over several centuries before a man bearing that name appears in Antioch in 1175. Today, the descendants of that same name are called Gaynard in Ireland and England, Gaignard in Louisiana, and Guénard in France, but that is a story for another blog post.

The World Garin Entered

The Principality of Antioch, where Garin first appears in the historical record, was one of the most turbulent corners of the medieval world. Founded after the First Crusade by Bohemond I, the Italo-Norman prince who took effective control of the city in 1098, it had been populated by Normans from France, Italy, and Sicily, as well as by adventurers and knights from across the Catholic Christian West. When Bohemond I was captured by the Danishmandid Turks in 1100, his nephew Tancred actively encouraged Normans and Poitevins from Italy, Sicily, and France to settle in northern Syria, recruiting mercenaries and allies even among local Turkish chieftains. The Principality that Garin Gainard entered in the 1170s was an outpost of Norman ambition and culture transplanted to the edge of the Islamic world.

By 1175, Antioch was ruled by Bohemond III, a prince whose reign was marked by chronic tension with the Pope of Rome, rebellions within his own court, and the ever-present military pressure of Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt and Syria, who was steadily consolidating power to the south.

First Appearance: Witness to Bohemond III

The earliest documentary trace of Garin Gainard dates to February 1175, when he appears as a witness in a grant made by Bohemond III to the Order of the Hospitallers of Saint John of Jerusalem. The grant concerned a place called Tricaria and its appurtenances, and it also included the transfer of a Syrian man named Bon Mossor and his children, as well as a Jewish man in Laodicea named Garinus, a sobering reminder of the institution of slavery that pervaded the Crusader States. The witness list accompanying the grant reads like a roll call of Antioch's governing elite: Guischard of Insula, William of Cavea (marshal), Pagan of Castelin, Simon of Burgundy (duke of Antioch) and, among them, Garinus Guegnart.

Two years later, in November 1177, Garin appears again, once more as a witness for Bohemond III, this time in a legal settlement involving the heirs of a local noble named Peter Gay. The dispute concerned vineyards and wasteland and was resolved with a payment of 1,000 bezants to the heirs. The fact that Garin witnessed both acts suggests he was a regular and trusted presence at the Prince's court.

A Third Witness List, and a Promotion

By February 1178, Garin was present at another significant act by Bohemond III, this time a transaction that served to consolidate the Prince's alliances. The frequency of his appearances on witness lists within the space of three years speaks to a man who had established himself as a figure of importance in Antioch , not at the very summit of power, but close enough to be called upon when important legal acts required the attestation of credible witnesses.

Exile to Lesser Armenia

In 1181, Garin Gainard's fortunes changed dramatically. Along with many other nobles of the Principality, he had revolted against Bohemond III, whom they perceived as having lost his reason. The contemporary chronicler William of Tyre wrote, Bohemond had put away his legitimate wife and taken his mistress as a second wife. More than once, he had been warned to leave the wicked state of adultery in which he was so openly living and to take back his legitimate wife. But the prince refused to listen. Consequently, as he obstinately persevered in his sin, he drew upon himself the just sentence of excommunication.”

William of Tyre described the situation with barely concealed disgust: "The prince, however, obstinately persisted in his shameless course and, in addition, entered upon a policy which was attended with great danger to the realm. He drove out of the city, and, in fact, from his entire domains, the best of his faithful nobles, men of great eminence, apparently for the sole reason that they were said to disapprove of his conduct."

Garin, among the exiled, found refuge with Prince Rupen of the Mountain in Cilicia, also named Lesser Armenia, a Christian kingdom with its own sophisticated court culture, which maintained close ties with the Crusader States. For a knight of Garin's standing, it offered both sanctuary and a base from which to rebuild.

Jerusalem: In the Company of Kings and Knights

In 1182, following his exile from Antioch, Garin Gainard, now recorded as Garinus Gahnardus, reappears as a witness in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, in a document recording a significant land transaction between Walter, Lord of Caesarea, and the Hospitallers. Walter sold a village called Galilee, in the territory of Caesarea, for 5,000 bezants, and gave a salt tower to the Hospital in addition. The witness list is extraordinary. It includes King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem himself, Baldwin of Ramla, his brother Balian of Ramla, the Archbishop of Tyre (William, who was also the King's Chancellor), the Archbishop of Caesarea, Guy Count of Jaffa and Ascalon, Aymery the Royal Constable, and Garinus Gahnardus.

To appear on a witness list alongside a king, two archbishops, and the most powerful nobles of the Kingdom of Jerusalem is no small thing. Whatever had brought about Garin's exile from Antioch, it had clearly not destroyed his reputation. He had moved from a provincial court on the northern edge of the Crusader world to the very centre of power in Jerusalem.

Last Known Appearance: With Balian of Ibelin

Between January and August 1185, Garin Gainard makes his final documented appearance. He is named as a witness in a charter from the Abbey of Our Holy Lady in the Valley of Jehosaphat, in a document concerning the recognition and distribution of lands in the territory of Aschar, near Nablus. The lord presiding over the act is Balian of Ibelin, one of the most formidable crusader commanders of his era, a man born in Jerusalem whose family had come from Norman Sicily. Balian's wife is referred to in the text as "my Lady Queen." She was Maria Komnene, the dowager Queen of Jerusalem. Garin witnesses the act alongside Johannes Lumbart, Hodo de Marne, and Raimundus Bobin.

The Siege of Jerusalem in 1099

Balian of Ibelin would go on to command the defence of Jerusalem itself against Saladin two years later, in 1187. The fact that Garin was associated with him in 1185 suggests not merely that he had survived his exile from Antioch with his status intact, but that he had attached himself to the most serious military leadership in the Kingdom.

The Battle of Hattin and After

After 1185, Garin Gainard vanishes from the historical record. No further mention of his name, in any of its five variant spellings, has been found in the documents of the Crusader States. It is considered probable, even likely, that he died at the Battle of Hattin Ton 4 July 1187, where Saladin's forces annihilated the army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in one of the most decisive engagements of the medieval period. The battle was a catastrophe: the True Cross was captured, the cream of the crusader knighthood was killed or enslaved, and Jerusalem fell to Saladin within months.

If Garin Gainard died at Hattin, he died in the company of the greatest and the worst that the Crusader world had to offer. Beside Balian of Ibelin and his peers, and against the most brilliantly organised military force the Crusader States had ever faced.

A Name That Travelled Further

Garin Gainard left no known descendants. But the name he bore, Gainardus, in its Latin form, had already taken root in ways he could not have anticipated. In England, a clerk named Johannes Gaignard was nominated to a parish in the Isle of Wight in 1228 by Savary de Mauléon, the powerful Poitevin nobleman who had served King John of England and who almost certainly had connections to Richard de Burgh, the future Conqueror of Connacht. It was through that chain of connections : from Anjou to Poitou, from Poitou to the English court; and from the English court to Ireland, that a knight named Adam Gaynard I arrived in County Galway before 1238.

Adam Gaynard I, and his son Adam Gaynard II, and his grandson Adam Gaynard III, who built Carraigin Castle on the eastern shore of Lough Corrib in 1300, were almost certainly descendants of the same Angevin world that had produced Garin Gainard. The chain of family and patronage that connected a Crusader knight in Jerusalem in 1185 to a castle overlooking Lough Corrib in Galway in 1300, and to small farmers on the Mullet Peninsula in Mayo in the nineteenth century, and to Louisiana census records stretching back to 1810, is the extraordinary arc that the name Gainardus traced across the centuries.

Garin himself left only witness lists behind. But in those lists, he signed beside kings.

This post draws on Chapter Three of Gaynard, Gainard, Gaignard, Guénard… — The History of a Franco-Irish Name, by John J. Gaynard (2026), enriched by material from Chapters One, Two, Four, and Six.

Illustrations:

Map of the Crusader States, 1190. Created by MapMaster, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA.

The Siege of Jerusalem: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b90632099

A Name as Old as Charlemagne

2026-03-28T12:59:00.000-07:00

The Emperor Charlemagne

Imagine the mother of an adult son in Bavaria, in the year 749 CE, doing what she must to ensure eternal life. The Western Roman Empire has been dead for nearly three centuries. The future Emperor Charlemagne is only a year old. The monastery at Mondsee, perched above its alpine lake east of Salzburg, is the centre of this woman’s family’s spiritual life.

She is making a gift of a whole village to the monks, with the formal consent of her son, and her name is recorded as Angiltrut. Her son’s name, in the Latin text, is Gaganhardus, the earliest written trace of the personal name that evolved into my family name of Gaynard. The village is given “with all its boundary and appurtenances, with farmsteads, dependants both unfree and free, holdings, slaves, fields, meadows, woods, waters and watercourses, and whatever seems to belong to that same villa, the whole and entire.”

Fourteen centuries separate that Bavarian bequest to a religious institution and a sunny morning on a hill in Tallagh on the Mullet Peninsula in Ireland in the 1950s, where my great-uncle Patsy told me, “The Gaynards haven’t always been small farmers in Mayo. Long ago, we were driven out of a castle down in Galway.” Between those two moments lies a story that runs through medieval Germany, Frankish France, the Crusader states of the Holy Land, the birth of the Plantagenets, the baronial wars of thirteenth-century England, and the Anglo-Norman conquest of Connacht: a story encoded in a surname whose origins were obscured after the Tudor conquest of Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which no reference book has ever fully traced.

That is what my book, Gaynard, Gainard, Gaignard, Guénard… The History of a Franco-Irish Name, attempts to do.

Hard Against the Foe

The original Germanic form of the name, Gaganhard, is made up of two parts: gagan, meaning “against” or “opposite,” and hard, meaning “strong, resolute, brave.” Put them together, and you get something like “unyielding,” or “hard against the foe,” the kind of warrior nickname that a Germanic family might have worn with pride for generations.

This is what the nineteenth-century Viennese scholar Dr Franz Stark called a Kosename: a personal name, a term of endearment, a badge of identity passed from parent to child before Christian names became common. Over centuries, as the Germanic Frankish tribes who conquered Rome’s western territories began speaking Latin and then Old French, the name changed shape. Gaganhardus contracted to Gainardus in the monasteries of the Rhineland. Gainardus became Guenniart, Gaignard, Gainard, and then Gaynard in later medieval France. At the time of the Plantagenet king Henry III, the “y” spelling arrived in Ireland, in the persons of two Anglo-Norman knights.

The first was Adam Gaynard in 1235–38. The second was William Gaynard in 1247, when a payment recorded in the English Exchequer to a household knight with this name crossed the Irish Sea and continued to be paid by the king in Ireland. The Gaynard name continued in France, with the variants Gueynard, Gaygnard, and Guénard emerging between 1400 and 1500.

The name has no English roots. The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names groups it with the English surname Gennard. This is a grouping that, I have argued, does not reflect the Bavarian and French history of the name.

A Name in the Monastic Archives of Europe

Ecclesiasticus (Fragment)

Once I understood the Gaganhard > Gaganhardus > Gainardus shape of the name, I began finding it in places where I had never before thought to look. Across these scattered entries, the pattern was reinforced.

In 749, a Gaganhardus appears in a monastery in Bavaria. In 804, a Gaginhardus appears, witnessing a land grant in Anjou, the region in present-day France that produced the Plantagenet dynasty. In 841, a Gaganhard served as a diplomatic envoy between the Count of Friuli and Emperor Lothar I, bearing letters between the most powerful men in Europe. In 923, a Gainardus, whose name is written three years later as Gaganhardus in the same monastery records, officiated as susceptor pauperum, the “Receiver of the Poor,” at the Abbey of Saint-Maximin in Trier.

That last entry illustrates something that was very important to my research: in the tenth century, the monks themselves knew that Gainardus and Gaganhardus were the same name. They cross-referenced the two spellings in the indexes of their charter books. We are not dealing with guesswork. We are dealing with a written medieval name captured in the act of changing.

By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the name had travelled west from the Rhineland into the heart of Angevin France—into Angers, Le Mans, and the coastal province of Poitou. In those years, members of the family appear in over fifty distinct monastic documents: as witnesses to land grants, as administrators of abbeys, and as a household knight and tutor to Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou, ancestor of the Plantagenet kings of England.

A Linguistic Time Capsule in County Mayo

Here is one of the details about how names can change and yet remain the same, taken directly from my own experience.

In County Mayo today, the oldest local families still pronounce my name “Gangyard,” a little like the naval term for a rope, “lanyard,” but with a hard, nasal “ng” sound in the middle. A teacher in Galway, when he first heard this pronunciation, once told my kinswoman Bridie Geraghty (née Gaynard) that she was pronouncing her own name incorrectly. The “correct” pronunciation, he said, was Gay-nard, which he may have assumed was the French form.

He was not quite right.

The “Gangyard” pronunciation almost certainly preserves a medieval French sound—the gna of spellings such as Guengnart or Gueignart, which appear in twelfth- and thirteenth-century documents from Anjou and the Crusader states. Modern pronunciation of the name Gaynard in France, however, is “Gaynar,” with a silent final “d.” When the Gaynards were transplanted from Galway to the remote Barony of Erris after the Cromwellian conquest in the 1650s, they seem to have carried the medieval French pronunciation with them. Isolated on the Mullet Peninsula, it has survived nearly unchanged. It is, as I think of it, a linguistic time capsule, a living fossil, preserving in the mouths of Mayo people a sound from the courts of the Counts of Anjou.

A Rare Name

According to the genealogy portal Forebears, in 2025 there were fewer than 200 people worldwide named Gaynard. Add its closest French variants—Gainard, Guénard, Gaignard—and the total is still under 3,000.

Although it is an uncommon name, it has survived a long journey: from an alpine monastery in eighth-century Bavaria, through the Frankish Empire, the abbey cloisters of Angers and Le Mans, the Plantagenet royal household, the battlefields of the First Barons’ War in England, the shores of Lough Corrib, and the windswept bogs and cliffs of the Mullet Peninsula.

The next post in this series will take us to the Crusader states: to a Gainardus who served alongside one of the greatest lords of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and who may have died at the Battle of Hattin on July 4, 1187, when Saladin destroyed the Crusader army and opened the road to Jerusalem and its fall.

Illustrations

The Emperor Charlemagne: Unknown 15th century, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Ecclesiasticus (Fragment) : A parchment fragment from an early Carolingian Bible, written in Mondsee, dated to between 800 and 820 CE (https://data.onb.ac.at/rep/1002AED7)

From Anglo-Norman Knights to Irish Volunteers

2026-03-18T04:37:12.457-07:00

Carraigin Castle

History in Ireland has often been taught in very black and white terms: 800 years of hostile British colonisation, the “Native Gael” versus the English “Gall,” the ancient chieftain versus the Anglo-Norman coloniser. However, the 1,300-year saga documented in my book on the history of a Franco-Irish name titled Gaynard, Gainard, Gaignard,Guénard... reveals a more complex reality.

In its Irish chapters, it demonstrates a profound historical irony where the descendants of Anglo-Norman knights who built a stone fortress, intended to secure English rule, at Carraigin, on the eastern shore of Lough Corrib, 700 years later took up arms as committed Irish nationalists in County Mayo to dismantle that same English rule.

My research has led me to the conclusion that instead of one 800-year period of hostile colonisation, the English presence in Ireland should be divided into two approximately 400-year periods, the first from 1169 to 1534, in which many of the incoming Normans assimilated easily into Irish culture and the second, from 1534 to 1921, when the Hiberno-Normans (the Gaelicized Anglo-Norman settlers) and the Native Irish suffered a serious assault on their very right to exist.

Beyond the Label of “Invader”

The Gaynard presence in Ireland is first attested in 1238 after Richard de Burgh’s “Conquest of Connacht.” Adam and William Gaynard, the first knights of the name who came as part of the Anglo-Norman feudal system were actually from Poitou and, although they had Plantagenet connections, were not from a prominent family. In coming briefly to England and then moving to Ireland it is true that they were looking for opportunity to better their condition. In 1300, Adam Gaynard III constructed Carraigin Castle on the shores of Lough Corrib, a classic hall-house designed as a secure and strategically placed vantage point for protecting his family and the lake.

Not only for Irish historians, but also for ordinary Irish people, this book challenges the perception that Anglo-Norman families would remain forever “foreigners.” From the very beginning, the “Gaelicization” of the Normans was not an external process but a biological one, as explained by G.W. Nichols in his groundbreaking book, Gaelic and Gaelicized Ireland in the Middle Ages. Intermarriage was common from the first generation; figures like Thomas fitz Maurice and Sir William Liath de Burgh were the sons of native Irish mothers. These children were often raised in a purely Gaelic milieu, comfortably inhabiting both worlds. As the book argues, the distinction between native and invader began to blur years before the first stone was laid at Carraigin. There is a hypothesis that the first Adam Gaynard in Connacht most probably acquired his initial property rights in the Barony of Clare in Galway through a deal with a local Erenagh, an administrator of church lands, which may have included marriage to the Erenagh’s daughter.

The “Degenerate English” and the Gaelic Resurgence

By the mid-14th century, the English administration in Connacht had effectively collapsed following the Bruce Invasion and the Black Death. Making the conscious decision to cut themselves off from the centre of English power in Dublin in 1347, the Burkes, the Gaynards’ overlords in the feudal system who had modified their family name from “de Burgh,” provoked a radical change in loyalties. Along with smaller families like the Gaynards, who had been their vassals, they abandoned Norman-French and Middle English for the Irish language, traded their doublets for heavy woollen mantles, adopted the distinctive Gaelic culan hairstyle—long at the back but shaved high at the front and they swapped English Common Law for traditional Irish Brehon Law.

In 1460, the Gaynards made a grant of land for the foundation of the Gaelic Franciscan Friary of Ross Errilly on the Black River not far from Carraigin Castle. Franciscans from Ross Errilly were involved in founding the friary at Donegal Abbey in 1474, where the famous chronicle known as the Annals of the Four Masters would later be compiled. This shift from being Anglo-Normans to Norman-Irish, or Hiberno-Normans, was so complete that the English administration in Dublin used the slur “degenerate English” to describe them. However, to the Gaynards, this was simply part of the continuing process of becoming “more Irish than the Irish,” which was necessary to preserve their existence in Connacht. Their name shifted phonetically, becoming the Irish Ó Gánaird, later found in Mayo.

Mayo

The turning point that totally fused the Hiberno-Norman Gaynards with the Native Irish was the shared trauma of the 17th century, beginning about eighty years into the second 400-year, very hostile, period of colonisation. Despite their previous centuries of royal service, the Gaynards were treated as “English rebels” because of their Catholic faith and collective ownership of their land. The legal machinery of the 1617 Commission for the Remedy of Defective Titles weaponized the family’s own ancient records against them to declare their ownership of Carraigin void.

Following the Cromwellian Conquest in the 1650s, they had to move from their ancestral lands in the Barony of Clare to Ballinrobe in Mayo or be forcibly transplanted to the bleak and isolated Mullet Peninsula in County Mayo. This displacement stripped them of their Anglo-Norman status and reduced them to impoverished tenant farmers. Living in “smoky cabins” they had had to erect on smallholdings and surviving through the Penal Laws and the Great Famine, the Gaynards’ Norman-Poitevin origins became a distant memory, preserved only through oral tradition and a unique “living fossil,” the “Gangyard” pronunciation of their name that hearkened back to French and Teutonic medieval spellings of it. Carraigin Castle was reduced to a ruin in 1720 by a new owner of Carraigin named George Staunton-Lynch II, showing that the second period of English rule eventually turned on the architecture of the first 400 years.

The 20th Century

The most striking evidence of this integrated Hiberno-Norman identity appeared during the struggle for Irish independence (1917–1921). In a remarkable historical reversal, the descendants of the men who had built an “English” castle in Galway shortly after the Conquest of Conquest were now the men fighting against the British colonisation of Ireland.

Six Gaynard men from the Barony of Erris, who had long before been considered part of the “Old English” Catholic gentry, served in the Irish Volunteers and the IRA. Men like Martin, John, and Richard Gaynard fought in the Belmullet, Corclough and Binghamstown companies against the British state. One ancestor had been a household knight to the English King Henry III, another had been one of the first sheriffs of Connacht; their descendants were now Republican soldiers fighting for a sovereign Irish state. In the Irish Census of 1911, there were only 51 Gaynard men, women and children in Ireland, all of them in Mayo. The number of Gaynard men in the War of Independence represents a significant proportion of the family’s adults of fighting age at the time, showing that their commitment to the Irish cause was central to their identity.

A Mosaic of Identity

The book’s chapters on the history of the Gaynard name in Ireland serve as a microcosm of modern Ireland’s identity: a complex assembly of seemingly-opposing cultures. The book demonstrates that the story of Ireland could have been very different if the old Norman-Irish settlers and the Native Irish had been peacefully allowed to become one people, in the same way as the Vikings and the native Franks of Normandy after 911 created a common culture without mutual persecution. Nevertheless, despite the disruptive actions of the Tudors after 1534, followed by Cromwell, and the introduction of the Penal Laws, the dispossessed Hiberno-Normans in Ireland managed to continue their co-existence with the Gaels. As witnessed in Ballinrobe and the Barony of Erris, they blended even further into Irish society both linguistically, culturally and politically.

When we hear the names Gaynard, Gainard or Gaignard today, we are not hearing the voice of a single lineage, but a “mosaic.” We hear the echoes of 8th-century Germanic warriors, 10^th-century French monks, 13th-century Anglo-Norman knights, 14^th-century “English traitors,”16th-century “degenerate” rebels, and 20th-century freedom fighters in both France and Ireland. It is also a reminder that the Irish nation was built not just by those who were always there, but by those who came and chose to stay, to integrate, assimilate and ultimately, to fight for the country they had reason to call their own.

In Ireland, the history of the Gaynards is one of adaptation, with the stone castle of 1300 and the IRA volunteer of 1921 as two sides of the same coin.

The Book Itself...

Can be ordered in hardcover and paperback through all booksellers. It is also available as an eBook through all major distributors such as Amazon (Kindle), Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble (Nook), Tolino... By clicking on the picture of the book cover above, you will be taken to the Kindle version.

If you have read the book and have suggestions for the next edition, or you wish to comment on this blog post, please leave me a message at the bottom of this page.

The History of a Franco-Irish Name

2026-03-10T07:32:00.000-07:00

This is how I present the electronic version of the book on Amazon Kindle.

Gaynard, Gainard, Gaignard, Guénard… : The History of a Franco-Irish Name traces the 1,300-year documented history of a non-royal yet sometimes influential lineage. Drawing on medieval and modern French, German, and Irish Anglo-Norman archives, it constructs a “landscape of occurrences” that follows the name’s many variants from their 8th-century Germanic origins to the present day across Europe and North America.

Grounded in onomastic scholarship, the study traces the name to the Germanic stem Kagin and the personal name Gaganhard (“hard against enemies”), first recorded at the Monastery of Mondsee in Bavaria in 749 CE. It follows the transition into the Latin Gainardus in France around 920 CE and the subsequent proliferation of French, English, and Irish forms.

A central focus of this book of reference is its contribution to Irish family history and the study of Anglo-Norman Ireland. It documents the arrival of the Gaynard family in Ireland in 1238 during the Conquest of Connacht and their nearly four-hundred-year tenure at Carraigin Castle in County Galway, built by the knight Adam Gaynard III around 1300. The narrative traces their evolution into Gaelicised landholding gentry and concludes with the upheaval of Cromwellian dispossession and forced transplantation to the Mullet Peninsula in County Mayo in the 1650s.

The work also offers a portrayal of members of the author’s family after the Great Famine in Mayo, documenting their survival as tenant farmers in the Barony of Erris, one of Ireland’s most severely affected regions. It identifies a distinctive linguistic survival: the Mayo pronunciation of Gaynard as “Gangyard,” preserving phonetic echoes of medieval French spellings such as Guengnart.

Within the broader scope of French genealogy and medieval European history, the “Gainardus Mosaic” reveals a diverse array of historical figures:

Crusader Knights: Garinus Gainardus, a nobleman active in 12th-century Antioch and Jerusalem.
Anglo-Norman Officials: Adam Gaynard, among the early Anglo-Norman sheriffs in the province of Connacht in Ireland.
Renaissance Publishers: Étienne Gueynard (Stephen Gaynard), a key figure in the rise of the Lyon printing industry, was responsible for more than 160 works under an innovative publishing policy.
Linguistic Scholars: Pierre Le Gaynard, a 17th-century grammarian associated with the French royal court who defended etymological orthography as an “archival voice” against phonetic reformers.
Resistance Figures: Jean Gainard, later recognised as “Righteous Among the Nations” for rescuing Jewish children during the Second World War.The study extends to North America, identifying Huguenot refugees in 17th-century New York, Catholic colonists in Louisiana, and 19th-century Irish emigrants seeking opportunity after the Great Hunger.

As a resource for genealogy, the book includes extensive reference tables, including United States Federal Census records (1810–1940) and Mayo birth, marriage, and death registers. It guides readers to major digital archives such as the French Filae, the French National Library’s Gallica, and the Virtual Treasury of Ireland, which works to reconstitute records lost in the 1922 Four Courts fire. Carefully documented and evidence-based, this study reconstructs a lineage from its early Germanic attestations to its 21st-century Irish, French and North American descendants.

Gaynard, Gainard, Gaignard, Guénard...

2026-02-12T03:01:00.000-08:00

Book sold at Lyon by Stephano Gueynard, 16th-century

For the past several years, this blog has been in hibernation, but it has now woken from that long winter. Before the prolonged slumber, it was dedicated to my fiction. For the next few months, it will be devoted to my history of a tightly-knit family of names sharing a common origin.

The book is titled: Gaynard, Gainard, Gaignard, Guénard… The History of a Franco-Irish Name

What began as a search for the origin of Adam Gaynard, an Anglo-Norman knight who participated in the Conquest of Connacht in Ireland in 1238, has over the past three years become something larger: an attempt to understand how the Germanic and Latin ancestors of Gaynard, Gainard, Gaignard, Guénard (and their many variants) moved through early medieval Europe to France, crossed into England and Ireland, and have survived there while continuing to thrive in France down to the present day and also moving to North America.

The book brings together:

- charter books and cartularies from medieval Germany and France

- documentary evidence from the Crusader States

- Anglo-Norman and Irish administrative records

- early modern printed works,

- historical information about individuals who have borne variants of the name, ranging from a tutor to the first Plantagenet in Anjou to Irish Volunteers in the War of Independence and heroes of the French Resistance against the Nazis.

I am currently at the proof-reading stage. There may still be small corrections to make (there always are with a work that draws on such a wide range of sources) but the structure of the book is now fixed.

This is not a family memoir, nor a speculative genealogy going back only a couple of hundred years. It is a historical study of a name going back over nearly 1,300 years, detailing how it appears in medieval French sources, how and why it changed spellings, how it entered the Anglo-Norman and Irish record, and how later historians and genealogists have sometimes misunderstood what they were seeing.

It is written for readers interested in European history, genealogy, and onomastics (the study of names). It is not only for those who bear one of these surnames, but also for readers who are interested in searching German and French medieval records or the English Patent Rolls for their ancestors.

When the book is published, I will post full details here, including where it can be obtained. In the meantime I will post articles giving an idea of what it contains. For now, I wanted simply to mark the moment: a long and invigorating period of research and writing drawing to a close, and a book finally on the verge of production.

Nobody I Know Makes Kesey's 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' Look Like a Comic Book

2019-03-02T11:35:00.003-08:00

Buy from Amazon.com

Here is the first review of Nobody I Know that was contributed to Amazon.com.

"When I first began reading 'Nobody I Know', I could not help but think of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' by Ken Kesey. Kesey's book about the state of psychiatric facilities and treatment in the early '60s became a major motion picture; the book was, and is still on lists of all time great books. There is still plenty of social commentary generated by readings of the text.

As I got further into 'Nobody I Know' I began to think that Gaynard made Kesey's book look like a comic book. Kesey was an orderly in a psychiatric facility before or while writing the book, so maybe he was just not exposed to the true treatment of the patients. Perhaps as an orderly, he primarily saw the interactions of the patients with the nursing staff (Nurse Ratched) and less so with the medical staff. Nevertheless, it is a classic for broaching the subject of the treatment of mental illness, but Gaynard deftly takes this to the next level.

In 'Nobody I Know' the interaction is focused on the psychiatrist O'Neill and one particular patient whose identity is not clear - he is referred to as Patient XYJ in O'Neill's publications, but there there is also lots of discussion between the two as to whether XYJ is the Christian or Moslem Jesus. O'Neill, for his part, keeps reverting back to his time with the CIA and his current agenda of exploiting XYJ for his personal and professional gain - the volumes of papers he has written about the case.

The book explores the relationship between O'Neill and XYJ and in particular, XYJ's identity - is he the Christian or Moslem Jesus, or Patsy Burke (who makes an appearance) or just XYJ? XYJ has an estate of some value that is managed by a daughter, for he does seem to have some skill as a sculptor which he also shows in the "Black House" (psych facility) by making 'paper pisse' artifacts by urinating on O'Neill's papers. All very extreme, and again, I think that Gaynard has skillfully pushed the boundary of the discussion of the treatment of the mentally ill way past what Kesey did in the early '60s.

There is an appropriate climax in 'Nobody I Know' of a confrontation between XYJ, other patients (the HRU) and O'Neill. The story plays out in the church on the Black House facility as you would expect, but you will have to read the book to see how it ends. Suffice it to say that Gaynard makes a clear statement about how the mentally ill are viewed, treated and are used, by society and the government.

Kesey's book was lauded for exposing the treatment of the mentally ill in the '60s. Gaynard takes this to a whole new level by exploring the depths of one particular doctor-patient relationship. You must read the book - and stay with it through the tough parts - to get to the ending where Gaynard makes an important statement about government treatment of the mentally ill. I hope this book receives the wide visibility it deserves."

A psychological thriller that leans heavily on Christian theology, religion, & contemporary political events to fashion a disturbing account of terrorism in today's society. The Clarion Review of Nobody I Know:

2019-02-11T14:08:00.002-08:00

Nobody I Know

The Foreword Clarion Review of Nobody I Know has just arrived. I am sincerely grateful to the reviewer, Jeremiah Rood, who has done a good job of understanding what I designed right from the outset to be a book that portrays religious fanaticism, while giving a clear theological underpinning, however tendentious you may find it, to every aspect of the book that is based on religion. Jeremiah has spent more time understanding and describing the Christian and Islamic content and implications of the plot than previous reviewers.

Here it is:

Raising good questions about the state of contemporary society, Nobody I Know is a compelling religious psychological thriller.

John J. Gaynard’s heady thriller Nobody I Know mines ideas about terrorism and the intellect to investigate the fragile nature of identity.

The book begins with a unnamed man struggling in a toilet stall. When he exits, he meets a woman who asks him to pray and who knows him as Jesus. The man’s identity forms the book’s central mystery, which takes place in the Black House, an institution created to treat and reform recovering Islamic terrorists in France. Danger lurks around the corners of the man’s mind, as something as ordinary as jiggling a bathroom door handle has the power to unearth connections best left buried and forgotten.

The book’s plot is a complicated and strange mix of religion and politics. The plot first involves the patient seeking to understand his world and to make some sense of the place he’s in, mining his visitors, the guards, and his faulty memory for clues. This makes for difficult reading. Even the facility’s lead doctor, O’Neil, comes to seem a little crazy; for him, there’s no ethical or moral limit that cannot be crossed to help his patients or meet his own greedy needs.

The story moves from a close character study to a broader exploration of religion, struggling to deal with religious extremists and asking what happens when ordinary people become trapped in their own worlds. It is violent, disturbing, and largely without hope.

The prose is tight and close, using its first-person narration to heighten the sensation of being trapped. This experience reflects the central unease of the protagonist. The novel strengthens this sensation with a focus on clear and disturbing images and phrases that often border on the grotesque. For example, the unknown man describes in terrible detail the smell of the prison guards who assault him, dissecting scents from their unwashed socks and dirty underwear to various body odors. Dialogue is often clunky, filled with complicated theories about psychology or religion that are used to explain a character’s action, and its frequent vulgarities are off-putting. These qualities may humanize the characters, but they do not engender much empathy.

The end effect is a book that is extremely unsettling. It reflects contemporary society but doesn’t point toward the hope of redemption. This bleakness comes to feel ironic given that each of the central characters, in their madness, eventually becomes an important Christian or Muslim figure, including Jesus, Judas, and the Antichrist, among others—roles designed to show how desperately the world needs the messages those figures represent.

Raising good questions, Nobody I Know is a psychological thriller that leans heavily on Christian theology, religion, and contemporary political events to fashion a disturbing account of terrorism in today’s society.

Reviewed by Jeremiah Rood February 11, 2019

JC, Charismatic Feel-Good Beach Boy, Romeo and Haphazard Worker of Miracles - A Review of Grant Leishman's The Second Coming

2019-01-31T08:49:00.003-08:00

The Second Coming

JC, alias Jose Christian Castillo, alias Jesus Christ, Son of God, is in Manila because he interceded with his father in heaven to spare the earth from destruction, that place his father had already sent him to more than two thousand years ago, but which an angry God now says is just as much of a cesspit as it ever was. Grudgingly, his father agreed to give him a second go, lasting no longer than a year, and decreed that his son’s destination should be the Philippines, one of the three reasons for choosing that country being the need to put paid to the money grubbing antics of a televangelist impostor pretending to be the Son of God.

On earth, JC is as charismatic as ever. He easily recruits seven disciples who work in the seedier sides of Manila nightlife. The guileless six men and one woman are easily overawed by the power of his words, even if his vision statement is long on vague promises about wanting to get them all into something good but short on the details of actual implementation. Before JC can lay out the plan his disciples are waiting for, he gets knocked unconscious in a traffic accident and forgets who he is. The disciples are around him when he comes back to himself in the hospital, and as eager as before to find out what he wants them to do. But it is only when the Archangel Michael comes to give JC a kick up the a..s to remind him that he has already used six months of his allotted time on earth that he remembers his mission. Michael orders him to take his troop of dew-eyed disciples to confront the impostor Adonis in Davao, where Adonis’s next step in adding to his ill-gotten millions will be another giant meeting.

This seems to be the first job of work JC has engaged in since the crucifixion. In Leishman’s novel he seems to have whiled away two thousand years in heaven as a couch potato. Heaven is a place he eventually describes as boring compared to life on earth. On earth his main personality trait seems to be inconsistency. At one moment he can perform worldwide miracles, such as making a cross appear in the sky, or transport himself instantaneously from one end of Manila to another and appear miraculously in a meeting. At another time it’s too difficult for him to get a clear picture of where one of his kidnapped disciples is in danger of death. He can save himself from dying, he can bring a child back to life, and yet he can’t avoid getting killed in a knife fight with terrorists. It is only the faith of his disciples that brings him back to life after the killing.

JC’s disciples provoke a commotion in the impostor’s crowd at the big meeting and the impostor manages to get himself shot and killed by his own security detail. JC kisses the edges of the man’s wound, which closes up and heals in front of the cameras filming the event live and transmitting it to the duped Filipino faithful wherever they are in the world. Adonis, the impostor comes back to life a reformed man. He regrets the error of his ways and he turns the keys of his religion and its hundreds of millions of dollars of assets over to JC and his disciples.

News of this miracle frightens the gerontocratic Catholic Cardinals in Manila. They use their network of influence to get JC charged with practicing medicine without a license, the proof being the way he had healed the impostor in front of the TV cameras. JC gets off the charge, and then decides to take on the Catholic Church itself. Everything his father has wished for just seems to fall into place without much further effort from JC, Catholics get over their schisms, even the two Koreas decide to bury the hatchet. In his two or three hour work days, JC has plenty of time to spend on the beautiful beaches of the Philippines, mooning over Ma, his only female disciple (his Mary Magdalene, a single mother and former cam-girl with a heart of gold), and get up to innocent boyish pursuits with his puckish male disciples.

There are some set pieces that could be a pastiche of the UK Daily Mail’s obsession with UK royalty, such as the joint wedding arranged for JC and one of his male disciples on the island of Jolo. The wedding dresses and brides’ makeup are given the sort of glamorous, gushing treatment that paper devotes to the dress sense of Meghan Markle or her sister-in-law.

In this sort of sweet beach boy and girl atmosphere, even amid Jihadist terrorists, nothing can now stop JC from fulfilling his father’s instructions, or can it? I encourage you to read the book to find out.

Leishman’s writing in The Second Coming reminds me of one of my favorite comic and satirical writers, the Finn Arto Paasilinna. From me, that is high praise.

A Cynical, Farcical Look at Mental Health Issues Through the Prism of Religious Extremism : a review of 'Nobody I Know'

2019-01-28T08:08:00.002-08:00

The first review I received for my novel Nobody I Know was from the very generous New Zealand author Grant Leishman.

Purchase from Amazon.com

Here are some excerpts from it: "Nobody I Know by John J Gaynard is a cynical, farcical look at mental health issues through the prism of extremism and the eyes of Patient XYJ, who doesn’t remember who he is, or indeed why he has been for the past eight years in a psychiatric institution, colloquially known as the “Black House”. Like all the returning Jihadists whom former CIA interrogator and psychiatrist Dr O’Neill has treated in the past with unusual success, Patient XYJ is subjected to inhumane treatment, scorn and ridicule by O’Neill. He uses patients merely to progress his own ambitions and wealth rather than from any innate desire to heal or to reintegrate previously violent and disturbed patients back into society... I can honestly say that Nobody I Know is the most unusual, slightly disturbing, but eminently readable book I have been lucky enough to read in the past few years. Author John J Gaynard has reached into the depths of the human mind and provided a thought-provoking treatise on mental health, attitudes to mental health and, in general, the human condition. By using the absolute polar extreme of a mental institution run by a “mad doctor” along with a procession of “crazy” trustee patients, Gaynard has made readers focus on our attitudes not just to mental health, but life in general. Totally topical and up to date in its current world focus... At times the narrative is harrowing and difficult to stomach, but the message is loud and clear and, if nothing else, this focus on the behavior and excesses of both characters... presents two sides of the same coin for readers to consider. Who is the sane one here and who is the insane one? Because of the nature of the narrative, the characters are necessarily overdrawn to the point of caricature, but this is wonderfully well done by the author. I particularly liked the connections between the characters in the story and historical figures. This is a book that leaves you thinking and asking yourself questions long after you put it down and that is probably the highest praise I can give this author."

Michel Houellebecq's Phenomenology of Fellatio

2019-01-04T07:38:00.001-08:00

Sérotonine on Amazon

Jean Birnbaum is responsible for the literary section of Le Monde newspaper which appears as a supplement every Thursday. He has recently written two important books about the unhealthy relationship between French extreme left wing politics and radical Islam: La religion des faibles - The Religion of the Weak: what Jihadism tells us about ourselves, and Un silence réligieux - A Religious Silence: the Left faced with Jihadism. I read the Religion of the Weak a few weeks ago and I hope to post a review of it soon to this blog.

If I'm writing about Jean Birnbaum today it is because of a very striking comment he has made about Michel Houellebecq's novel Sérotonine (Serotonin, in English), which has just come out in France. He contributed his witty, unusual take on the way Houellebecq has written his new novel to the France Culture radio station.

Below are the main passages from it in English (my translation):

"I would like to mention the new book by Houellebecq. It is called Sérotonine... There is a possiblity we will be able to read this novel as it is meant to be read since, for the moment, its author has remained silent about it, and that is good. For once, Michel Houellebecq has not given in to this obsession with interviews which is one of the major pathologies of the contemporary press, which tends to reduce each text to a pure pretext, in order to question the author about this or that aspect of the news cycle. So far, therefore, Houellebecq has managed to let his novel live its life as a novel, without parasiting it with the (calculated) "provocations" and (controlled) "gaffes" that have so often biased the reception of other novels...

The Absence of Ideology

...with Sérotonine Houellebecq shows, more than ever, his amazing virtuosity, his ability to probe the various layers of language in which we dabble collectively; a book where he also demonstrates his technical superiority, his art of juggling with writing styles, between apocalyptic meditation and the saving power of irony, and this permanent oscillation prevents the text from closing in upon itself, on a form, or an idea. And as much as his previous book, Submission, yielded to the somewhat rigid delights of the novel of ideas, which could be seen as the wish to dominate his readers, to force their hands, Sérotonine gives back to them real freedom.

Phenomenology of Fellatio

This taking leave of ideology marks Houellebecq's full return to literature the liberating powers of which he celebrates. Far from the colorless and petty writing some criticize him for, this new novel radiates the ardent generosity of an author who sincerely understands and loves his readers.

The reading of this novel, moreover, encourages us to dwell on the very haunting passages in which Houellebecq insists on describing the "devotion" shown by a woman caressing a man (there is, in Houellebecq, a real phenomenology of fellatio), and we reflect that this is similar to the way he gives himself to us, the readers, as he "carries out his task with competence", takes care of us so well and for that deserves all of our "gratitude" and our "admiration".

I wonder how many writers consider, as they are writing their novels, that they are performing an act akin to fellatio on their readers? I recommend that this piece of literary criticism by Jean Birnbaum be immediately integrated into every creative writing class, at the place in the curriculum where the relationship between the author and his or her reader can best be discussed. All copyright for this article (and my partial translation of it) of course remains with Jean Birnbaum.

The Gilets jaunes : the man who saw them coming

2019-01-03T05:26:00.000-08:00

Over the month of December last year everybody in the world who had a television screen probably saw the French Yellow Vests demonstrating in the middle of Paris, their demonstrations often including violence against police officers, the burning of barricades along the Champs Elysées and outright desecration of national monuments (in addition to scrawling graffiti over the Arc de Triomphe, they are suspected of chopping off the heads of the three Marshals of France I mentioned in a previous post). Their discontent is still alive. Now, every traditional politician in France is wondering what they will do in 2019. Emmanuel Macron has made promises to raise low salaries through a variety of technocratic sleights of hand, and to eliminate some proposed taxes on gasoline. He is now faced with the challenge of delivering on those promises in the next three months. Failure to follow through will not be taken lying down by the Gilets jaunes movement, which at first refused all attempts to organize itself, but is now crystallizing around a few emerging figures, such as the truck driver Eric Drouet who was arrested last night on his way to an unauthorized demonstration he had organized near the Champs Elyées, and Jacline Mouraud, 'The Muse of November 17th', the date she posted to Youtube a video now considered as one of the founding acts of the Gilets jaunes movement.

During my time consulting to industry I realized that whenever something went wrong there was always a person in the company or the team who had known days or months in advance what it was. But that person was never listened to until people were forced to pay attention to him or her by the difficulty of the situation the company found itself in (if then, sometimes the person was never listened to and the company went bust). In 2014, Reuters published an interview with Christophe Guilluy, a French geographer, who had just brought out a book called "La France périphérique - Peripheral France", which described the environment from which the Giles jaunes movement has sprung. In that interview, Guilluy predicted that the Socialist Party would implode if it didn't start addressing the problems of peripheral France, but he hoped that the fact François Hollande, the French President of the time, was asking him for advice would lead to results. François Hollande ignored Guilluy's advice, and the Socialist Party did implode: in the 2017 presidential election in which Emmanuel Macron seemed to come from nowhere to win while the Socialist Party candidate Benoît Hamon only won 6.36 percent of the vote and was eliminated in the first round. The example of Macron and now the example of Drouet has led some political commentators in France to say the political parties, in the way they were traditionally understood, no longer exist and now it has become a country of political movements (I agree with them).

Below is an excerpt from the 2014 Reuters interview with Guilluy:

"Guilluy’s argument is simple, yet provocative: an ostensibly unified country is, in fact, split in two, between rich, globalized, culturally vibrant cities like Paris and Lyon, and a depressed “periphery” being left behind.

The latter, which he says covers most of the population, never caught up with big cities plugged into a global market for jobs and investment. Instead, the largely white, working class inhabitants — former mine and factory workers many of them — of small- and mid-sized towns, suburbs and rural areas have seen their jobs and livelihoods steadily eroded, to the point where they no longer share political ideas with their big city peers.

Guilluy argues the inhabitants of this “peripheral France” could be worse off than people living in the immigrant-heavy “banlieues” (city suburbs), that have loomed large in public debate, because they are more isolated from economic centers.

As a result of the split, Guilluy says most of the country has lost faith in the mainstream center-right and center-left political parties, which tend to concentrate on the big cities, and are turning toward the far-right National Front party

Guilluy’s analysis is catching on, and not just in France, where his book sold 13,000 copies in two weeks, nearly five times the average for a geography book, publisher Flammarion said.

The geographer has briefed advisers to President Francois Hollande and given talks to European ambassadors about his findings. Their response to his grim view of French society? “The split exists in our countries, too.”

Q: What do you describe as “peripheral France”?

Christophe Guilluy: Peripheral France encompasses 60 percent of the population. It’s small towns, suburbs and rural zones. It’s everything that is far from a globalized metropolis. It’s the vast, hidden, forgotten part of the country that lacks jobs, prospects, any sense of connection with the political class in Paris. For people who live in this part of France, there is no political party offering any sort of social or economic alternative truly adapted to their problems. The only party trying to speak to them is the National Front, and even they only capture a minority of their votes

Officials in peripheral France know they are facing gigantic social problems. They are looking for answers, for an economic model that could help their communities complement the globalized economies of the big metropolises. But so far, nobody has anything to offer them."

In October this year, shortly before the Yellow Vests began to congregate around road roundabouts in rural France to share their daily challenges and their analysis of the situation and began planning how to make themselves heard on the national stage, Guilluy brought out a new book "No Society: la fin de la classe moyenne occidentale", which translates as "No Society: the End of the Western Middle Class."

There is an interview with Christophe Guilluy in the December edition of the unnconventional French monthly Causeur: "Guilluy le prophète - Guilluy the Prophet". Here are the first two Q & As from that interview (in my translation, which sometimes adds a few to the original French to clarify the context):

Q. from Causeur: Since the beginning of the "yellow vests" movement, you can be seen everywhere. You are a kind of prophet: you invented peripheral France before the rise in the cost of diesel fuel brought it onto our radar screens.What do all these French people who wear the yellow vests have in common?

A. from Christophe Guilluy. Prophet? Let's just say that I've been saying for the past fifteen years that there's a sick bull (the middle class) in the china shop (the West) and yet everybody explains to me that there is no bull. The "yellow vests" do indeed correspond to the sociology and geography of 'Peripheral France' which has been my subject of research for years. Many types of workers, whether employees or lowly paid self-employed people have difficulty making ends meet. They live in difficult social conditions, they work in low-paid categories of employment. They inhabit the 'territories' (cities, towns, small and medium-sized enterprises, the countryside) that create the least number of jobs. These people who feel they have suffered a downgrade in modern society illustrate a movement rooted in a long term trend: the end of the middle class, of which they were the foundation.

Q. In addition to being economically fragile, do the "Gilets jaunes" show that France is a loser in the culture wars?

A. Absolutely. All along the spectrum, from the agricultural worker who has historically been on the right to the industrial worker who has traditionally been on the left, the "yellow vests" have realized that globalization no longer has a place for them. They drive diesel cars because they have been told to do so (as part of previous French governments drives to encourage purchase of French-manufactured diesel cars), but are called polluters by members of the elites living in big cities. There is a world that they feel considers itself above them, constantly reaffirming its cultural identity (the globalized city, organic food, successful coexistence...), but the "yellow vests" do not intend to submit to this economic and cultural model they feel excludes them... A populist leader could emerge as fast as Macron emerged."

Let us hope that Emmanuel Macron, who has often been described as disconnected from what is happening in the 'real' France, is now listening to a man like Guilluy.

Karl Ove Knausgaard and the Skull of Voltaire as a Child: reading one book review and understanding another

2019-01-02T07:59:00.001-08:00

I subscribe to a number of literary reviews so I often read six or seven reviews of the same book, especially when it is expected to sell as many copies as Karl Ove Knausgaard's latest novel, My Struggle: Book 6. The End, translated by Martin Aitken and Don Bartlett. The first review I read was by Fredric Jameson in the London Review of Books and its title 'Itemised' straightaway reminded me why I hadn't been able to finish the first volume of Knausgaard's struggle, the unrelenting itemization of the man's daily grind. I can take a lot of detail from some writers, but not from others, don't ask me why. I immediately admired the way Jameson had structured his critique around seven questions, and then wondered if it wasn't six or seven overlapping questions, four or five of which which could usefully be used to review any other end volume of a series of novels, including science fiction, crime, romance and young adult:

1 - Can I read this before reading the other five books in the series?

2 - Is this fiction or autobiography ?

3 - Is it anything like Proust ?

4 - Does anything happen in it ?

5 - Will I like it better if I start with this volume and go back and read the others afterwards, or should I start with them and work my way up to it, in which case by that time I may have started to get bored with it ?

6 - Does anything happen in these books (I surmised that Jameson was referring to the five previous novels in the series) ?

7 - Does anything happen in this novel ? (which reminded me of question 4)

Jameson's review was probably better than Knausgaard's book, although I didn't agree with his opinions about Knausgaard's use of dialog and there was one passage that flummoxed me until I read another review of the book. The stretch of dialog (or 'banter') Jameson picked out to show how Knausgaard's conversations in the book are "...often unobtrusively witty and entertaining... distinctive dialogue, interesting, (with) the characters talk(ing) with style but... not mannered," I found quite simply stodgy. Judge for yourselves, from my excerpt of the dialog excerpted in the review:

"You don't have to say everything that comes into your mind, you know. Kids do that. Adults can put their utterances through quality control first."

"I remember crying when I read about Julius Caesar. His death. I always did whenever I read biographies. Because of course they all die. Thomas Alva Edison. Henry Ford. Benjamin Franklin. Marie Curie. Florence Nightingale. Winston Churchill. Louis Armstrong. Theodore Roosevelt."

"You read Theodore Roosevelt's biography when you were a kid?"

"I did, yes. There was a series. About twenty of them, I suppose. One on each. Most were about Americans. A lot of presidents..."

And so on...

The passage in his review that flummoxed me (admittedly, it was late at night and I'd already been reading for twelve hours that day) reads as follows:

"...there is something rather different running through all this, which is a kind of thinking, even if one cannot quite call it a thought: it is the constant preoccupation with the pronouns, the ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘it’, a kind of ‘you’ … The ‘he’ and ‘she’ get absorbed in the narrative; on the abstract level Heidegger’s ‘das man’ fights it out with Levinas’s Other; the ‘I’ gets lost in ruminations about identity; the ‘we’ becomes the collectivity of Nazism: ‘an extreme reinforcement of the we, and the attendant weakening of the I’, a kind of banal philosophical psychologising which leads the author to rather sterile personal dead ends (‘Personally I have never felt myself to belong to any we’) and disquisitions on the permanence of death and war that become interesting only when one thinks of them as a matter of daily life and how one narrates that (the death of the father or the sordid, littered and messy rooms left after his death)."

I read that through five or six times, to see what it was about the 'I' and the 'we' that was struggling to get out of the Heidegger and Levinas book ends, and then I gave up. And then, I read a review of the book in the November paper edition of The Atlantic which made it all clear. The review was written by Ruth Franklin, and titled "Knausgaard Devours Himself". (It has now been given the less cannibalistic title "How 'My Struggle' Undid Knausgaard" on The Atlantic's website.)

Here is the passage from Ruth Franklin's excellent review, that allowed me to understand what problems Knausgaard has had with the 'I' and the 'we' and the 'he' and the 'she'.

"His books, he writes, have “tried to transcend the social world by conveying the innermost thoughts and innermost feelings of my most private self, my own internal life, but also by describing the private sphere of my family as it exists behind the façade all families set up against the social world.” The social pressures, however, are too powerful to withstand:

I imagined I was going to write exactly what I thought and believed and felt, in other words to be honest, this is how it is, the truth of the I, but it turned out to be so incompatible with the truth of the we, or this is how it is meant to be, that it foundered after only a few short sentences.
The sentences may have flowed, but his work, he now concludes, has not only refused to abide by social norms but has fallen short of capturing the truth of the “I.” In violating prevailing standards of appropriate personal disclosure, “this novel has hurt everyone around me, it has hurt me, and in a few years, when they are old enough to read it, it will hurt my children,” he writes. “It has been an experiment,” he continues,

and it has failed because I have never even been close to saying what I really mean and describing what I have actually seen, but it is not valueless, at least not completely, for when describing the reality of an individual person, when attempting to be as honest as possible is considered immoral and scandalous, the force of the social dimension is visible and also the way it regulates and controls individuals.
By the end of the volume, after Linda has spent weeks in the hospital, he vows that he is finished with writing: “I will never do anything like this to her and our children again … I will revel in, truly revel in, the thought that I am no longer a writer.”"

In her review, Franklin goes into a level of example from the writing that Jameson does not, and persuaded me that perhaps the sixth volume in the series is worth reading. On the other hand, Jameson brings into his review out of the way nuggets of knowledge which show me why I read the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books: the craft of reviewing, and a whole cadre of great thinkers doing justice to works they may be only vaguely interested in. What made me laugh out loud when reading Jameson's review was his reminder of '...the story by Raymond Roussel of his discovery, in a dusty provincial museum, under glass, of the skull of Voltaire as a child.' and this has given me the desire to ferret out of my shelves any books of Raymond Roussel I may have absentmindedly kept since the eighties, when Michel Foucault helped to cement his place as a man to be reckoned with in French literature.

Consternation in Saint-Gaudens at the Decapitations of Three Marshals of France

2018-12-22T05:09:00.006-08:00

There is consternation in the southwestern French town of Saint-Gaudens. It started a couple of days ago and has nothing to do with the fact that I will be spending Christmas here.

The reason is the triple decapitation of the "Monument of the Three Marshals" on the Legion of Honor esplanade in the town. The statues of the WWI Marshals, Ferdinand Foch, Joseph Joffre and Joseph Galliéni were beheaded during the night of 20 December. Ferdinand Foch was born in the town of Valentine, not far from Saint-Gaudens,

Two heads were found at the foot of the monument, and the third in the road leading down to the train station. The Mayor of the town, Jean-Yves Duclos, is quoted in the regional newspaper La Dépêche du Midi: "It's appalling, they have attacked a symbol of the Republic, everyone is in shock."

The historic monument, was inaugurated in 1951 by Vincent Auriol, the then President of the Republic on the occasion of Marshal Foch's 100th birthday. The triple statues were commissioned by the towns of Valentine and Saint-Gaudens (Foch's old house in Valentine now houses the town's library).

Talking to some of the people drinking coffee in the bar that overlooks the monument this morning, I was told that before the present 1951 stone statues there had been other statues, made of bronze, which were stolen by the Germans in WWII to be melted down for their war effort. One of the older men said, "The Germans hated these guys because of the way they led France to victory in WWI, so I can understand why they destroyed the previous statues, quite apart from their stealing of the bronze, but what, in 2018 can be a reason for this sort of vandalism?"

Police officers of the Saint-Gaudens police station are leading the investigation, not only to find the perpetrators of this act but, most of important of all in the minds of the local people I talked to, to try to find out what motivated them.

The "Antediluvian" Model 1892 Revolver Used by the Islamic Terrorist at the Strasbourg Christmas Market in France

2018-12-17T08:29:00.001-08:00

The French authorities are still working to find out how Cherif Chekatt, whose act of terrorism was claimed by the the so-called Islamic State, was not stopped before he could kill five people (at the latest count: an Italian journalist, a Polish musician, a Thai tourist, an Afghan refugee who was remaking his life as an auto repairman and holding his child in his arms at the moment he was shot, and a Frenchman who was celebrating his retirement with his family) and seriously injure eleven others at the Strasbourg Christmas Market in France on Tuesday 11 December 2018. Given the elevated total of casualties I wrongfully assumed that the terrorist must have been using some type of sophisticated firearm, but that wasn't the case. The post below should be a warning to households that old firearms which they think are harmless should not be allowed to get into the wrong hands.

After Chekatt was killed during his last firefight on the evening of 11 December, he was found to be carrying the two arms he had used during the attack: a knife and a French model 1892 revolver with one bullet left in the chamber.

The French national Sunday newspaper; le Journal du dimanche, yesterday described how the killer operated in the market: "Chekatt showed cold determination. Undoubtedly aware of the weakness of his revolver at long range, he systematically targeted the neck or eye line of his victims, several of whom were also stabbed. An empty box of cartridges was found on his route, a sign that the terrorist, despite being engaged by the soldiers of Operation Sentinel, took the time to reload his firearm several times."

In an interview given to the France Inter radio station, Jean-Michel Fauvergue, a former head of the RAID, the elite tactical unit of the French National Police who is now a deputy in the French National Assembly said about the 1892 French army model, "We must not think that because a weapon is old it's no longer dangerous. The proof is that he killed people with it. Weapons from the last century, or even two centuries ago, were designed to kill and did indeed kill many people. An individual of this type, determined, radicalized, probably benefiting from complicity and who wants to go all the way is particularly dangerous."

He then pointed out that in the hands of a determined terrorist anything can be transformed into a weapon, "We have seen that with these terrorists who have killed people with vehicles."

An article on the LCI television channel news site gives some of the history of the fire arm:

"350,000 units of the 1892 model were manufactured by the Manufacture d'armes of Saint-Étienne, and it was the French Army's standard handgun until it was replaced by the MAS 1935 and MAC 1950 semi-automatic pistols. On a technical level, "it is of course outdated", a Parisian gunsmith confided to us... referring in particular to its "low-power ammunition". But, "It was a weapon that was widely used at the beginning of the First World War even though in 1914 it was already outdated. By that time the French Army had a much more modern weapon which is still in use today.

While the origin of the 8 mm pistol used by Cherif Chekatt is not yet known, the gunsmith pointed out that "It is still a weapon commonly found, or that families often forget that they possess. In some families it has been found in a night table drawer. Made of steel, it does not "wear out" and has therefore passed down through the generations. Unlike in the past, when it was possible to obtain it "over the counter", the handgun is now "classified as a category B weapon, and of course requires a license."

Here is how that side arm is described on Wikipedia:

The Model (or Modèle)1892 revolver (also known as the "Lebel revolver" and the "St. Etienne 8mm") is a French service revolver produced by Manufacture d'armes de Saint-as a replacement for the MAS 1873 revolver. It was the standard issue sidearm for officers in the French military during the First World War.

The Modèle 1892 revolver is a solid frame revolver with the cylinder on a separate frame swinging right for manual reloading. The Model 1892 was first fielded in 1893 and was prominent among French military officers during tbe First World War, and later the French police until the mid-1960s.

A mechanically tight and very well finished handgun, the Modèle 1892 fires 8mm rounds with a striking power equivalent to that of a .32 ACP round. It also features a smaller calibre than many other military revolvers of that time period, including the Webley revolver and its predecessor the MAS 1873 revolver.

The picture at the top of this post is from Wikipedia and is the Modèle 1892 revolver on display at the Liberty Memorial of the National World War I Museum and Memorial, Kansas City.

"Nobody I Know" - This novel is an unusual tale indeed

2018-12-15T09:37:00.000-08:00

After a period of six years, in which I often wondered if I would ever be able to produce another novel, I was pleased to announce that 'Nobody I Know' had been published. There weren't many reviews, but one that I particularly liked began, "Nobody I Know by John J. Gaynard is an unusual tale indeed. It opens with a man in a bathroom, who is dressed in strange clothes and a diaper! He has no idea why he is there and there are women banging on the door, eager to see him."

"The Franco-American psychiatrist Professor J. O’Neill is still proud of the work he did with a couple of Mormon colleagues developing enhanced interrogation techniques for the CIA in places like Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and black sites all over the world. But after publication of the U.S. Senate’s report into CIA torture he became a pariah among fellow psychologists in North America and had to move back to France. In exchange for his unorthodox methods of reintegrating into French society violent Jihadis returning from their terrorist activities in Syria and Iraq, the French deep state has given him total control of a rundown psychiatric institution in Paris. He continues to use the enhanced interrogation techniques developed for the CIA, reframing them for the French as a form of enhanced therapy. The psychiatric institution in Paris is now known as the Black House. In addition to the returning Jihadis, O’Neill experiments on patients with delusional disorders, focusing on how to prevent them from having a greater choice of behavioral patterns than are available to their psychiatrists.

This work of fiction recounts the brutal physical and mental battle between O'Neill and a man of no fixed identity."

The People's House by David Pepper: a review

2018-02-23T04:31:00.000-08:00

This novel is an intense, and intensely rewarding, political thriller written by an American politician. When I read the introduction, I saw, with some misgiving, that the author purposely set out to write a novel with a message. But that misgiving was dispelled by chapter two of the novel, and replaced itself with the tingle of excitement as I realized I had a real page turner in my hands that was going to teach me about a part of American life I know next to nothing about.

I settled back to read about true-to-life murder, sexual harassment, Russian and American thugs, and honest people who, unfortunately, often don't speak up until after the consequences of their silence have brought them more guilt than they can continue to carry.

The plot, and how the corruption is uncovered, resonate more today than they would have done before we learned so much about Russian meddling in the last U.S. presidential election. Pepper uses his knowledge of the American voting system to show how it can be sabotaged, at a fairly low cost, by any large corporation, never mind large country, wishing to get unwitting (but strongly partisan) politicians elected to serve its cause.

In his warts and all depiction of his journalist hero, Jack Sharpe, Pepper also shows us the challenges of working on a local American newspaper, and the power wielded by a journalist and his editors determined to protect democracy. With regard to gerrymandering, U.S. political parties who never want their politicians to even risk losing an election, have created a situation where a foreign entity doesn't need to concentrate its resources on even 50 percent of the States, or even 50 percent of the counties in a State, to ensure itself a favorable outcome, but I don't wish to spoil the enjoyment you'll get out of reading this book, which has an ending that would have delighted Machiavelli, so I'll end my review here.

Stéphane Rémond, French Sculptor of Metallic Lace

2018-02-10T03:20:00.001-08:00

In pride of place in the window of the café in Vétheuil, a village in a bend of the Seine, to the northwest of Paris, next to the tabac sign, are two pieces by Stéphane Rémond, the French sculptor who works out of a studio close by, in the village of Amenucourt, but can sometimes be found in the cafe, talking to the other artists who live in the village and mix happily with its inhabitants.

Two of Stéphane Rémond's sculptures will be exhibited at the 'Art Capital' 228th annual Exhibition of French Artists, to be held in Paris in the nave of the Grand Palais, from 14-18 February 2018. Other pieces will be shown in Rouen at the Salon des artists indépendants (Independent Artists' Salon) from 24 February to 3 March 2018. Stéphane who, when he is in Paris, is to be found in the working-class and immigrant 18th and 19th districts told me that it is going to be a new experience for him to see the Grand Palais, in the wealthy 8th district, a place his origins and his temperament would never have led him to without the need to display his sculpture and, as always, he is in two minds about whether he should display it to outside eyes at all, because the place in which it is most comfortable, is in his studio.

Here is Stéphane, in his own words, "I am of French gypsy origin, my first playgrounds were the scrap yards, these open air warehouses of scrap metal, I ran around among metallic carcasses, my world was a tough one, but it was also peopled by the love of these iron giants… That early experience of life gave me this passion for metal, the most ancestral and noble of materials. Carcasses solid and malleable, empty and fragile, capable of all sorts of mutations when in contact with water, so many sensations attached to them that I try to bring together in my pieces of metallic lace. I can't even contemplate sculpting in another way, what comes together in my hands shows me again and again that this is the only way I can work."

The man of the house at the café in Vétheuil is Jacques Landais, a noted artist in his own right. Visitors to the establishment he runs with his wife Alexandra admire his intricate India ink drawings, a few of which are displayed on the walls. When Jacques visited Stéphane Rémond's atelier for the first time he was astonished at the contrast between what he saw and felt and the mercurial personality of the man. When I asked Jacques to give me a few words about his reaction, he answered, "Surprised. I know Stéphane well. He’s an anarchist, the agony he puts himself through is not as well swept back under his cap as his long hair. The studio is very neat, very tidy, a complete contrast to the sculptor. When you talk to him he is whimsical and interesting and at the same time you can see the suffering. As much as the character of the Stéphane you see outside is that of a tortured soul, continually battling against his demons, the space in which he works is very structured, very tidy, there is nothing random in the workshop, he is in total control.

In that space, every one of sculptures is not only respected but admired by the man who made it. When you see them there, they seem extraordinarily enhanced by his very special world, the atmosphere he creates. There is music, always music in the background, from the magical period of French popular singing, singers like Brel, Aznavour, Ferré, Moustaki, French song, and candles on the flat surfaces and in all the nooks and crannies, to provide some of the sort of light he needs to work in, to give atmosphere, to inspire himself. He is totally impregnated with what he wants to do.

In that atelier you can see even better the earthly poet side to him, and the lyricism. The lyricism of the scrap yards and the suffering from having an absent father and then being taken into care. Yes, there is pain. He tortures himself about everything.

But the place he has created in which to do his work has nothing anarchic about it, it is very well organized, in total contrast to the image you get of him outside. Yes, there's that special side to him, even compared to a lot of the other sculptors and painters. Working sculptors are not known for their sartorial elegance or their reserve, but even among his peers he can sometimes seem quirky, a wacko.

When he is working, or looking for metal to work with, he doesn't just have with him the images of the carcasses in the scrap yards, he is also impregnated with the smells, the forms of metal standing alone, or side by side, supporting each other, fending each other away, heaped together It always comes back to the traveler's environment, making a living with what the world has cast off, the father always away, trying to make an orderly living from the disorder into which you were birthed.

He started sculpting very young, when he first associated one piece of metal with another, and then tried to figure out how to join them up. He's a rebel because he can't be anything else. He's always been against the tide. The materials he uses? He finds a lot of them in all types of breakage. There is a lot of recuperation, a saving of the soul of iron from scrap metal hell, and then he transforms it and associates it with another piece, the associations are very strong and the lace emerges in the associations, metallic lace, capturing the smells of breakage, used oil, the smell of clean metal, the tang of rust. Sometimes he dreams of living in a trailer, or a caravan, going back to that way of life, but he is at home in his studio.

He has a special contact, even a contract, with what he creates. At the back of his brain, he's a well wired character, tidy, there in the studio you can see the difference between the man with his sculptures, and the man you see outside, living through his agonies. When you're in the studio, admiring how well the works look together, they cry out, they scream, they speak for themselves."

At the end of those few words, I said to Jacques, "You too, Jacques, you make a sort of lace, with your very detailed India ink drawings." He replied, "Yes, he makes scrap metal lace, from the iron and steel and all he associates with it. There is balance in what he does. That's what brings us together."

In the photograph on the left, you can see four of Jacques Landais's India ink drawings accompanying two of Stéphane Rémond's fine metallic lace smaller sculptures, at a recent joint exhibition they held in another small village nearby, in another bend of the Seine, Saint-Martin-la-Garenne).

Photo credits: All photographs in this blog post, of Stéphane's work and his studio, are by Jacques Landais ©2018

To learn more about Stéphane Rémond, take a look at the article The Metal Spinner in which Anne Ivers interviews Stéphane Rémond for the Thalo artist community website.

The Life and Crimes of Paddy the Brit, a Review of Gerard Cappa's New Novel 'Two Graves for the Bishop'

2017-06-27T10:24:00.000-07:00

Two Graves for the Bishop

At the beginning of Gerard Cappa's new novel, Two Graves for the Bishop, the third in the Maknazpy series, Irish-Polish-American Con Maknazpy is living a peaceful existence with his lady love, Yasmin, in Rio de Janeiro and has enough money stashed away to ensure his comfort for years to come. The physical and psychological injuries sustained in Turkey and Portugal, in the two previous novels have healed. The PTSD he suffered from after Iraq, and his ‘Ríastrad’, the terrifying Irish battle frenzy which made him more than an equal for fifteen or sixteen goons in an unfair fight, but unable to distinguish between friend or foe in a fair one, seem to have faded. Divorced, but happy to be rid of domestic duties and strife, he is relieved to know that his son is being brought up by his wife’s new consort, an old friend of his and a better father than he could ever be. As far as Con Maknazpy is concerned, the game of fighting other people’s wars is behind him.

But then Maknazpy arrives home to find Yasmin serving a drink to the man responsible for the sour deals that nearly got him killed in the previous two novels, the Ulster priest Artie McCooey. Con expresses his displeasure at seeing McCooey, but it takes more than an inhospitable welcome to shake off the six-foot seventy year old, especially when his reason for hunting out Con is to help a dear friend. Con is the only person in the world he says he can still count on.

The job McCooey has for Con is to prove the innocence of Monsignor Johannes Beikle, one of his old professors in Vienna, now a selfless Vatican banker who has spent years piling up donations to his pet charity, a children’s hospice in Rome. When disembarking from a flight from Vienna to the Eternal City, the banker was discovered to be in possession of five million euros in cash and as a result is facing a charge of money laundering. What upset him more than being found with the five million, and being accused of fraud, is that he has gotten himself implicated in a ‘dark bank’ scandal and been cheated out of another 25 million euros (about $30 million) which the mysterious philanthropist who had flown him into Rome on his private jet, had promised to deliver to him there.

Artie McCooey wants Maknazpy to find the mysterious philanthropist who cheated and framed his old teacher and persuade the man to go to Rome to clear the Vatican banker’s name. Against his gut feel, Con takes on the job for a fee of five million dollars, with one million dollars up front, but at the back of his mind there is the thought that if possible he will pocket the whole $30 million. As usually happens with McCooey, the simple mercenary job is a lot more torturous than promised. In addition to its complications, it alerts Con to the atavistic duty of settling an old blood score.

McCooey shows Maknazpy evidence that the mysterious philanthropist is Cameron Hamilton, also known as Paddy Hamilton or Paddy the Brit, a “Military Liaison officer in Belfast, back in the 80s and early 90s… the boy in the middle, the go-between for the Brits with the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) Special Branch and MI5 and the Loyalist Death Squads“.

Hamilton is responsible for the deaths of at least fifty Catholics, whom he fingered falsely as members of the IRA. And now he has been seen back in Ireland. Whenever Paddy the Brit flies into Belfast, Artie’s friends have noticed that he is driven to and picked up from Loughside, the second UK HQ for MI5, about five minutes from the airport. The building probably also houses some MI6 operatives. British Intelligence is not much interested in the IRA nowadays. It is using the facility mainly to track Eastern European communications. When Maknazpy says to McCooey that there is no need for him in this business, that there will be many people in Ireland prepared to turn Hamilton over, Artie McCooey replies, "That war is over, and we want it to stay that way! There are plenty of people over there entitled to seek retribution from Paddy Hamilton, but we don’t want him executed! That wouldn’t help the Peace Process and it wouldn’t help Monsignor Johannes. You’re a lone wolf, Con, that’s what we need. Just get in and out with no fuss."

"No fuss" is not a pair of words that rhymes with "Con Maknazpy". Artie McCooey has a fixed idea in mind about what Con can do for him in Ulster, but when Con learns that Hamilton was involved in the killing of the uncles of his late best friend, he also develops a flexible plan of his own, which becomes apparent as the novel progresses, and makes him more of a lone wolf than even the reader is expecting.

Maknazpy arrives in Belfast to find and kidnap Hamilton, and immediately goes off Artie McCooey’s radar. He will do a better job of staying alive by protecting himself than if he confides his safety to others. It is evident that people who don’t like him have been tipped off about his arrival. Black taxis wait at the end of the streets he walks through. A bomb, which may or may not have been meant to go off, is discovered planted in the filthy down market accommodation McCooey has provided for him in an unsavory part of the city.

As Con works out the details of his own plan, he has to contend with a bunch of competitors posing as allies, all of them with different scores to settle with Paddy the Brit Hamilton. Since his time getting innocent people killed by the loyalist death squads, Paddy has developed his encryption and shadow banking skills to the point where he can move money out of nearly any banking account in the world into one of his own, while purportedly working for British intelligence and, perhaps, the CIA. Con’s own relationship with the CIA is never made clear, but the reader is invited to speculate that he is still one of the agency’s trigger men, the sort of ‘expendable’ it is useful to have had around when it comes time to deny involvement in an assassination.

Throughout the novel, Con uses his competitors for Hamilton’s neck as unwitting allies. For example, the ex-IRA men under the command of a woman named Brigid, a victim of Hamilton’s in more ways than one, and some young IRA sympathizers are kept onside to provide Con with cars, men and safe houses as he tracks down his quarry, kidnaps him and then shepherds him through the process of unblocking virtual bank balances, some of the money to be sent to Con's account. But he knows that their ultimate aim is to snatch Paddy the Brit from him, and give him his comeuppance before he can get within praying distance of a plane to Rome.

Maknazpy’s foes cum allies are legion: firstly Artie McCooey himself, who needs to take Hamilton alive in order to whitewash his friend in the Vatican, but is the one who probably tipped off mysterious persons about Con’s presence in Belfast, and only comes up with $100 thousand of the million dollars down payment he promised; secondly the Russians, who are angry that Hamilton is throwing doubt on the integrity of the Western banking system, which, as opposed to the Russian banking system, needs to be kept ‘honest’ so that the money the Oligarchs have looted from their own people will be readily available from a pair of safe banker's hands (Cappa has done his homework on this, as on every other theme in the book--at times I thought I was reading a supplementary chapter to Bill Browder’s Red Notice, a forceful denunciation of Putin’s pillaging of Russia and his willingness to kill any lawyer who stands up to him); thirdly, the Americans, in the form of the CIA, who are now seeing sums of up to $200 million of Russian money laundered through the United States, not only in the form of election campaign contributions, and who know that Hamilton is a prime mover in this activity; fourthly, Brigid and the old IRA men who want to exact retribution on Paddy the Brit; fifthly the British intelligence services who know Hamilton is double dealing them and providing himself with an insurance policy by filming and taping the rape, torture and murder of young boys by British establishment figures, arms dealers and Russian-allied bankers who meet up in a pedophile orgy house (that reminds the reader of the infamous Kincora boys’ home); and, sixthly, Hamilton himself who continually feeds Maknazpy false information, for example that every one of the ex-IRA men or woman was an informer for the Brits, and tries to tempt him to let him go in exchange for ever vaster amounts of money that can be transferred to his bank accounts.

In the final chapter, Maknazpy learns that the CIA have decided that Hamilton has to be handed over to them, immediately. But Maknazpy tells them to wait a while. He has other plans.

******************

Mention of the Kincora boys’ home in the previous paragraph is an illustration of how Cappa’s new novel is, to a certain extent, a roman à clef. It contains some very shocking scenes indeed, but none of them can compete with the sheer horror of what went on during the "troubles". Anybody who has acquired a minimal knowledge of Belfast over the past forty years will understand how Cappa has put his composite characters together. While I was reading the novel I often felt the need to pull other books out of my shelves to confirm what the novel reminded me of, books such as Who Framed Colin Wallace by Paul Foot and Lethal Allies: British Collusion in Ireland by Anne Cadwallader.

Colin Wallace is an honest man, one of the finest soldiers of the 20^th century, but he was thrown out of the British army for refusing to take part in an MI5 dirty tricks campaign against English politicians, and for trying to stop horrific child abuse at the Kincora Boys’ Home. Anne Cadwallader’s book provides the highly detailed, and fact-checked, truth about how over 120 Catholics (whose sin in the eyes of the Loyalist killers was to not know their place, by becoming ‘upwardly mobile’) were killed by Loyalist death squads in the 1970s, helped by members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Ulster Defense Regiment.

Time after time Con Maknazpy realizes that he doesn’t need to be in a state of Ríastrad to be unable to distinguish a friend from a foe and vice versa. In fact, the leitmotif of this novel is 'friend or foe?'

Desk soldiers like Donald Rumsfeld worry about the unknown unknowns, but Con Maknazpy never puts an ounce of faith in even a known known. In Maknazpy’s world, only the very paranoid survive. In a style that is hyperactive stream of consciousness, threaded with actions that bring on immediate reactions and more actions and more doubts, he punches his way out of any unintended consequences that may result and then repeats his mistakes, believing that in the end he will always get to where he wants to be..

Once Maknazpy has Paddy the Brit in his possession, he needs to keep him alive, not turn him over for as long as possible, so that the man can do his work with pairs of encrypted passwords to set free the money lodged in dirty banks, some of which will finance Con's return to Yasmin's home comforts, but he has niggling doubts: is he getting tired of her, will he ever go back to Rio de Janeiro? Maknazpy assesses and reassesses his own situation and the situation in Belfast and in the small towns and the rooms over small pubs he travels through with Hamilton in tow, fighting off challenge after challenge.

This is a mechanical bull of a novel, whose every savage twist and turn needs to be respected, in which lackadaisical reading will result in the reader being bucked into oblivion. Cappa's preference is not for the pointillist pen. He uses a trowel-shaped painting knife to slap thick layers of horror, intrigue and doubt upon the page, contorting the distortions sprung into the heads of innocent people by the lives and crimes of people like Paddy the Brit, one of the perpetrators of collusion in Northern Ireland, still used by his MI5 masters in ways that Maknazpy can never quite figure out but which he is determined to bring to a stop.

There isn’t a superfluous word or sentence. The writing is tight, tight, tight. No empty spaces in which the motor of the mind can idle for a few minutes. Often very little air between the actions in which to draw a deep breath. But the reader will be amply rewarded for investing time in this fine book, especially if note is taken of each seed of evil Cappa sows in the first fifty or so pages. As in a good play, where everything you see in the first act must serve a purpose before the final curtain comes down, every seed planted on the first few pages results in an evil flower, the flower of collusion, the flower of Russian and other blood money playing hide and seek around the world, lying expectantly in the shadows of its virtual banks for the next transfer into the purchase of arms or the heat of war via a set of encrypted passwords. The pedophiles filmed by Hamilton in the orgy home are waiting for the next set of circuits of active and passive corruption to be activated, possibly those that will claim to ‘rebuild’ the bombed-out ancient middle eastern culture, cities and lives of Syria, which Maknazpy knows, because of his own shameful participation in the Iraq war, it will never be possible to resurrect.

Readers interested in the novels describing Con’s previous exploits, and how he first met McCooey and Yasmin, can check them out in the following reviews of Blood from a Shadow and Black Boat Dancing.

The French Intelligence Agencies, and Emmanuel Macron's new National Center for Combating Terrorism

2017-06-12T08:20:00.000-07:00

Fencing match between Monsieur de Saint-George
and the French transgender spy Mademoiselle La chevalière
d'Éon de Beaumont at Carlton House on 9 April 1787.
Engraving by Victor Marie Picot,
based on the original painting by Charles Jean Robineau.

France has six different intelligence agencies, one of which was established only this year. As evidenced by the Bataclan massacre in November 2015, or the Nice terrorist attack in July 2016, it has often been difficult for these agencies to decide what intelligence is critical, whether and how to share intelligence with other agencies, inside France and across international borders, or to evaluate if or when radicalized persons they have under surveillance will transform from sleepers into immediate threats.

That's why the new President of France, Emmanuel Macron, has just created a special task force, the National Center for Combating Terrorism (CNCT), located in the Elysée presidential palace, to coordinate the work of all six French intelligence services. The task force is headed up by Pierre de Bousquet de Florian, ex-head of the Directorate of Territorial Surveillance (the DST, which has since been absorbed into the DGSI--see below), who will have to make sure that the DGSI, DGSE, DRM, DRSD and other agencies share their intelligence more effectively, not engage in turf wars, or dismiss valuable information as worthless, or even (intentionally or unintentionally) sabotage each other’s efforts. Pierre Bousquet de Florian will report directly to Emmanuel Macron.

Yesterday's French Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche (lejdd.fr) provided a useful guide to the acronyms which the agencies go under, and explained the roles, responsibilities and stomping grounds of each organization.

The DGSI is the General Directorate for Internal Security. It was established in 2014 to replace the DCRI (the Central Directorate for Internal Intelligence) which itself was established only in 2008 through a merger of the former DST (the Directorate of Territorial Surveillance) and the RG (les renseignements généraux, the General Intelligence Directorate). Under the authority of the Minister of the Interior, the DGSI is tasked with classical counter-espionage work, surveillance of potential threats on French territory and combating terrorism. Its foreign equivalents are the American FBI, Britain's MI5, Israel's Shin Bet, Germany's BfV (The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), and Russia's FSB (the successor agency to the KGB)

The DGSE is the General Directorate for External Security, which succeeded the SDECE (the External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service) in 1982. Under the authority of the Minister of the Armed Services (whose title until May 2017 was the Minister of Defense) the DGSE is France's foreign intelligence agency. It works in a semi-clandestine fashion, but only on threats beyond the country's national borders. Its foreign counterparts are the American CIA, Britain's MI6, Israel's Mossad, Germany's BND (the Federal Intelligence Service), and Russia's foreign intelligence service the SVR RF.

The DRM is the Directorate for Military Intelligence, which was established in 1992 by the then Minister of Defense, Pierre Joxe, after the first Gulf War had starkly illustrated how much France depended on other countries to provide intelligence in the theater of foreign military operations.

The DRSD is the Directorate of Defense Intelligence and Security, which succeeded the DPSD (Directorate for Defense Protection and Security) in 2016. It is responsible for monitoring and protecting people and companies working in the national defense sector, and also its infrastructure and tools. It concentrates on detecting real and possible signs of radicalization among military or civilian personnel.

The DNRED is the National Directorate of Customs Intelligence and Investigations. Under the authority of the Minister of Finance, it is in charge of combating the different types of trafficking and fraud. Tracfin (which fights against national and international money laundering) is also attached to the French Ministry of Finance.

The BCRP is the Central Bureau of Prison Intelligence: established this year (2017) by the Ministry of Justice, to better prevent terrorist risk by more closely monitoring radicalization and proselytizing in prisons.

In 2016, the budget of the French intelligence community was in the order of 1.5 billion euros (a 7% increase since 2013), and it employed about 2,000 people.

The Franco-Irish policeman Timothy O'Mahony, the hero of my novel Green Blood is for France will need to be aware of how to navigate between the French intelligence agencies, in his next outing.

Sylvie's Story: "It is hard to imagine that a man wrote this book."

2017-01-02T10:02:00.000-08:00

Buy Sylvie's Story from Amazon

This is my own short synopsis of my novella Sylvie's Story:

"Sylvie is on the run from the men of the Congolese dictator who killed her father and raped her mother. The only way she can survive in Pointe Noire is by selling herself under a false name to oil company men she attracts in nightclubs, discotheques and bars. She knows that if she can leave the country she has the education and good looks to make a success of herself and earn enough money to get her mother and sisters out of the Congo before they are discovered by the Cobras. However the Dictator's men control all the borders They will do everything possible to stop and kill her before she can leave the country. One night she is picked up by a wealthy Frenchman who offers her a job in France and who takes care of all of the paperwork. The first few months of her new life as a highly-paid escort working mainly for the French arms industry and its clients are too good to be true. When she meets a politician who used to know her father she thinks he will help her, but he puts her in a situation as bad as how she was treated by the Cobras."

Although I read Patricia Bergman's review of my novella Sylvie's Story on Amazon and Goodreads shortly after the book came out, when I later came across it on eBay on a very cold day in Paris, it warmed the cockles of my heart. When you read it I hope you will understand why her comment about the empathy I showed towards women gave me the the confidence to create other powerful female characters in my latest novel: Nobody I Know. Thank you, Patricia!

Patricia Bergman's review: "Abuse of Power"

"I won this book through a Goodreads giveaway.

It is hard to imagine that a man wrote this book. The empathy shown toward the women and particularly Sylvie is interesting.

As a woman, this book made me mad. Politicians and wealthy men who enjoy the company of beautiful women for the sole purpose of kinky sex has been with us for centuries. This story discusses the women. It is exceptionally well done and delivers the message loud and clear."

Another Amazon review for the book reads:

More than a Prequel!

"Sylvie's Story is the prequel to, and replays the events that immediately precede the dramatic opening of, Gaynard's 'Green Blood is for France', the political thriller featuring Irish detective Timothy O'Mahony. The blurb for Green Blood is for France reads "The near-naked, mutilated body of a young black woman is washed up on a remote beach in the west of Ireland. The search to find her killer takes Timothy O'Mahony far from his existence as a Garda sergeant in Bangor Erris (in Mayo, in the west of Ireland) into the corruption and machinations surrounding the election campaigns for the next President of France.

With his prime suspects in the inner circle of Laurent Delahaye, the main opposition contender for the Presidency and womanising one-time leader of the Social Democratic party, O'Mahony finds that even senior French judges and policemen cannot always be relied upon to be impartial when a case may have political implications.

That young black woman was Sylvie Youlou and, by telling her story, Gaynard transforms her from the victim object of O'Mahony's case to the determined woman with the inner strength to survive the appalling circumstances visited upon her. Whether it was the sweaty voracious moundeles from the petro-chemical industries preying on the impoverished young women of Pointe Noire in Congo-Brazzaville, or the equally voracious predators of the French power elite, Sylvie endured their physical and mental torture, inspired by her self-imposed duty to save her mother and sisters with the money she could earn from her abusers.

Her life was not supposed to take that hideous turn; the daughter of a career diplomat from the Republic of Congo, Sylvie was educated and traveled widely through France and Belgium. Political upheaval in Congo resulted in her father's murder and the rape and torture of Sylvie and her mother, and a bleak future as a fugitive from the new ruling Dictatorship. Sylvie's Story is one of fortitude and resilience, on her part, and the de-humanising corruption of power and abuse on the other. Gaynard lets the moundeles speak for themselves the American and European oil and business executives riding high on their expense accounts to feast on the poverty-stricken young women of the Pointe Noir night clubs. Without lecturing or labouring the point, Gaynard also leaves the reader in no doubt as to how these circumstances are permitted to thrive. Just as the individual business-execs abuse the impoverished young women, European and American corporations do very well, thank you, from the status quo in Congo and other unstable African regions; raw materials, oil, minerals, diamonds, gold - all plundered by the western corporations who have replaced, but not changed, the power relationships nurtured by the old colonial powers.

As Sylvie escapes from Pointe Noir to the salons of French sophistication and refinement she allows herself to see an end to her hell, perhaps a job in the UN or UNICEF. She discovers the abuse of power and corruption is every bit as pernicious in the thick-carpeted corridors of French influence as it was in Congo-Brazzaville.

Sylvie's Story, this episode, ends upon a luxury yacht off Ireland's wild Co Mayo coast. To find out the rest, the reader will want to follow Timothy Mahony as he tracks the truth (in Green Blood is for France ) through the obscure machinations of French procedure and institutional inertia.

My strong advice is to read both books, although I can't decide in which order would be best. In the natural course of things, a reader may expect the prequel to lay the ground for the main course, and that may be so, but I must admit that I found the more substantive novel (Green Blood is for France) to be enhanced by this opportunity to revisit the Sylvie character after the main action was addressed, as if the intervening time has allowed the Sylvie character space to mature. Of course, we know things won't end well for her but in Sylvie's Story John J Gaynard has exposed the collective cruelty of her abusers (and the society that condones, or even demands,this abuse) by contrasting their savagery with her humanity, dignity and cultured nobility. I read this as Sylvie's revenge, and it levers an extra, and welcome, dimension to O'Mahony's following quest in 'Green Blood is for France' - so read them both, in whatever sequence you like, but read them both!"

This post was updated January 5th, 2019

French Strangeness

2016-05-27T10:43:00.001-07:00

This is an update of an article I put on the web a few years ago about Philippe d'Iribarne's book L'étrangeté française ("French Strangeness"). At a time when French gas stations and nuclear power plants are once again being blocked by the CGT trade union, reacting very negatively to a new attempt to reform French labor laws I feel it is a useful time to post it again.

In an interview with the French Le Monde newspaper on April 21, 2006 Philippe d'Iribarne gave an aperçu of the differences between France and the other major European countries, which he addresses in his new book. The interview will be resumed in the next few paragraphs. His book has has less to do with the way that French people are "strange" in themselves than which core values distinguish them from other Europeans. D'Iribarne basically says that the overwhelming majority of the members of the French political class are still living with ideas that were relevant for the 1950s and 1960s, when the economy was industrializing and recovering from the Second World War, but which are now out of date and holding back political progress and national reform. In those years, economic progress was nourished by opening the country up to competition and that was what constituted the engine that modernized French society.

However 1950s and 1960s solutions are no longer good for the beginning of the 21st century. The 1980s and the 1990s have seen economic modernization accompanied by growing precariousness in employment and this, in its turn, has brought about a feeling of insecurity among many French people. In spite of these changes, the political parties which have swapped responsibility for government back and forth over the past twenty-five years continue to act as if the promises they make, which could have been kept in the 1950s, can still be kept in the 2100s. The failure to respect those promises has led to growing disillusionment with the political establishment and this has been evidenced in the recent riots: in November 2005 when poor children of mainly immigrant parents rioted in the suburbs of the major French cities, and in April 2006 when more privileged children closed down their universities and demonstrated against what they saw not as the introduction of a more flexible labor contract, but as a lack of disrespect towards young people in a country which suffers from 9-10% structural unemployment, year in and year out. France has one specific difficulty in adapting to the modern world, the tension between the respect it accords to the idea of “liberté” (individual freedom) and the respect it also attaches to the privilege of “rank”. Everybody in France needs to be equal with everybody else, yet a majority of people of all walks of life have the desire to see themselves recognized by some form of “rank” or official status, whether as a graduate of a “Grande Ecole” (one of the specialized engineering schools set up shortly after the French Revolution that began in 1789), or that of being a postman with a job for life or working for the French national railway system, again with a job for life.

This tension between freedom and rank is now exacerbated by the onslaught of globalization, of free trade and the free market, concepts which are anathema to most of the French political elite (but not to most French managers in the private sector of the economy). In a free market economy, value is not attached to a person’s rank and, in France, when rank disappears and people are evaluated based on their level of competence or contribution this is perceived as a way of putting a monetary value on people, akin to slavery.

At this point of the interview, d’Iribarne presented a variety of potent ideas about what it means to be a citizen in three major European countries and that showed how France is very different.

D'Iribarne's notions of what it means to be a citizen are, by and large, consciously unknown to Europeans themselves, but the prepared eye can see them being acted out unconsciously every time political representatives of the major nations in the European Community come together to make decisions, or not to make them. They are rooted deeply in national histories. The different, ingrained understandings of what it means to be a “free man” or a “free woman” in Europe have a very strong influence on the types of relationships that exist in the workplace. The idea of what it means to be a “free wo/man” also conditions what types of constraints, duties or obligations are freely accepted by the workers of each country and which types are deemed as impinging to a greater or smaller extent on personal freedom.

In the British Isles and most of the countries that underwent large changes as a result of the Protestant Reformation, a citizen is a free person who can negotiate the extent to which he or she will participate in the common endeavor or in tasks that will benefit the whole country, in other words to opt-in or to opt-out. This is also true for Ireland (a mainly Catholic country, but which was heavily influenced by Norman-English colonization between approximately 1200 CE and today). This idea of citizenship can be seen in the 17th century work of John Locke.[2] The sort of relationship between employer and employee, in this type of citizenship which has become known in France and Germany, in a somewhat disparaging way, as “Anglo-Saxon”, is that of a commercial contract similar to what exists between a supplier (the employee) and the buyer (the client company).

In Germany, the commonly accepted view of a responsible citizen is of a person who participates sincerely in the work of a community as it decides collectively on the future of everybody affected by the community’s decisions. This idea of citizenship can be seen in the work of Immanuel Kant, the German 18th Century CE philosopher.[3]

In France , a free citizen is one who is given all the respect due to his rank in society. This notion of rank, especially as it pertains to what is “noble” and what is “vile” is described in the works of Montesquieu[4], the French 18th Century CE philosopher, who had a great influence on the writing of the American Constitution. Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, the French revolutionary is quoted by d’Iribarne as giving a good idea of what is meant by this present-day idea of the ideal form of citizenship[5]. In France , the idea of a commercial contract between supplier (employee) and buyer (the company) is strongly resisted and provokes such outbursts as “I am not here to be bought and sold. I have rights”. So the company has to provide the employee with a large number of rights commensurate with his or her rank, some of which are written down but many of which are implicit and contained in the “psychological contract” (also known in France as the “Invisible Contract”). Every corporation in France, whether it be an alumni association or a trades union has its own ideas of what is "noble" and what is "vile". Good French managers know how to manage a whole variety of invisible contracts, not just those underpinned by explicit, written contracts or by appeals to national pride.

In France , the clash between the old and the new has created an impasse. France still sees itself as the Guardian of a set of universal principles that would better manage the whole world than the shotgun practices of American Universalism. The American and British ways of handling the economy, although they have brought about low rates of unemployment are seen in France only from the negative aspect of having created lots of low-paying, vile, McDonald's or Wal-Mart type jobs that not only confer no "rank" but also carry none of the health, retirement and unemployment benefits to which every Frenchman is entitled by birth.

Yet, in 2016, France has still to address its unemployment issue. Where to turn for models of countries that have already succeeded in bringing down unemployment? The Scandinavian countries? But even there there is a clash with the "French model". The Danish, Protestant way of bringing down unemployment and external debt, is seen to lack respect for "rights". The Danes have invested massively in protecting people who are temporarily unemployed, and the unemployment rate in Denmark is very low, but the Danish authorities require that people getting unemployment benefits should accept jobs that do not correspond to their initial or ongoing skill-set. This is deemed impracticable in a French context where an unemployed French person considers it ignoble to be asked to do a job beneath his rank in society.

D’Iribarne's explanations help us to understand how a French company such as Arcelor, which was the subject of a successful hostile take-over bid by Mittal Steel in 2006, had to manage change when it consolidated and closed factories in the 1990s and at the beginning of the 21st century CE in France . It had to help its workers move into jobs perceived as being less “noble” than that of steelmaker. This had to be done by convincing the steelmakers, through very intense and diplomatic negotiations, that it was “dignified” to accept change.

One of the most prestigious engineering schools in France is the Ecole des Mines, the “Mines Engineering School”. While France was opening up new coal mines, the elite Geologists were those who studied ore deposits many hundreds of meters underground. The members of this elite called those geologists who worked on or near the surface, for example those who would help a supermarket company to clean up polluted, dirty soil before a new car park was built, the “superficials”. When the last coal mines closed in France at the end of the 1990s, the “nobility” among the geologists found it difficult to accept change and see their rank and status fall beneath those of the “superficial” jobs they had considered beneath them and they also had to be convinced that there was no loss of dignity in working so close to the surface.

Therefore, a manager who wishes to be successful in France must be aware of this strangeness and the need to balance freedom, equality and rank with the French person's opinion of his or her entitlements. This is made even more difficult by the fact that even the French have a lot of problems in accepting themselves as they are, torn between the love of their own version of universal, natural laws which frantically attempt to guarantee equality, freedom and state protection for all in a way that does not openly contradict their yearning for the "Strong leader", fixed roles in society and a pecking order based on old-school hierarchy. D’Iribarne says that his countrymen live in a society that continuously mouths words to satisfy the high-sounding principles, but in which actions opposing those principles are put in place every minute of every day to satisfy the need for practicality. He says that the only way to get out of this situation is for French people to stop denying it and to accept reality, but this will need them to take on a much more subtle understanding of their own society. As in every other country that is trying to reconcile a proud history with present-day challenges, there will always be a need for good managers in France.

References :

[1] D’Iribarne, P. (2006), “L’Etrangeté française”, Le Seuil publishing house, Paris.  The title of this book can be translated as « The French Strangeness ».
[2]John Locke (b. 1632, d. 1704)  was a British philosopher, Oxford academic and medical researcher, whose association with Anthony Ashley Cooper (later the First Earl of Shaftesbury) led him to become successively a government official charged with collecting information about trade and colonies, economic writer, opposition political activist, and finally a revolutionary whose cause ultimately triumphed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Much of Locke's work is characterized by opposition to authoritarianism. This opposition is both on the level of the individual person and on the level of institutions such as government and church. For the individual, Locke wants each of us to use reason to search after truth rather than simply accept the opinion of authorities or be subject to superstition.  Source: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/
[3]Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804), German philosopher, considered by many the most influential thinker of modern times. Life. Born in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad in Russia ).   Kant was an advocate of constitutional republicanism. He opposed democracy, believing that majority rule posed a threat to individual liberty. He says, "Democracy is necessarily despotism, as it establishes an executive power contrary to the general will; all being able to decide against one whose opinion may differ, the will of all is therefore not that of all: which is contradictory and opposite to liberty." (Perpetual Peace, II, 1795).  Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant#Political_philosophy

[4] Quotes from Montesquieu “Distant as heaven is from the earth, so is the true spirit of equality from that of extreme equality...”

"In a true state of nature, indeed, all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of laws." Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, Bk. VIII, Ch. 3. Source :http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/montesquieu/montesquieu.html

[5] Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph, 1748–1836, French revolutionary and statesman. He was a clergyman before the Revolution and was known as Abbé Sieyès. His pamphlet Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? [What is the third estate?] (1789), attacking noble and clerical privileges, was popular throughout France , and he was elected deputy from the third estate to the States-General of 1789. He advocated the formation of the national assembly, and participated in the writing of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the constitution of 1791 (see French Revolution). He made his chief contributions in 1789–91 with the theory of national sovereignty and representation, and the distinction between active and passive citizens, which restricted the vote to men of property. Source : http://www.bartleby.com/65/si/Sieyes-E.html