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Why do we cry at a funeral for someone we don’t know? Perhaps because, as is the case for Georges Marchais, it is a whole world that is being buried, and with it so many wasted lives and broken dreams, while militants sneer at those dreams in the bitter cold of that January morning in 1996. We also cry when we see half a century of film or literature being buried before our eyes, and then our sorrow takes on the colour of nostalgia. We cry to see a woman weep for the man she loved, Gérard Brach, the scriptwriter who never loved himself.
There are funerals that are not successes, but - shh! - no one can say so. It is a trait of the genre: in the columns of newspapers, obituaries are always more gentle than portraits of the living. There are funerals that never properly end, when the ashes are kept in a teapot, on Catherine Robbe-Grillet’s kitchen table. There are funerals where people stifle their anger as much as their tears, because it is so wrong, this ceremony with no President, no deputies, no ministers, when Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont, the man lying beneath the tricolour flag, liberated Paris. To think of all the honours bestowed at the Elysée Palace on people who have done nothing!
Often more cheerful than leaving parties (the new-style burials in these hard times), funerals can sometimes be as shocking as they were under the Ancien Régime: every week anonymous individuals are buried in the plot once kept for inhabitants of Thiais. Burials close the brackets on a century, the century of one of the last Corsican nabobs on a dying island, but they also sound out the values of years to come.

Ariane Chemin is a journalist. She has had two earlier books published by Stock, La promo Sciences Po 86 (2004) and Une famille au secret (2005).