It happened on 11 September
She founded the Jeannettes; she passed away in Fontainebleau
11 September 1877, in Épinal, at half past nine in the evening. Marie Diemer is born. She will begin by writing Alsatian folk tales.
That is not what she is best remembered for. The visiting nurses’ scheme in 1913, the School for Factory Superintendents in 1917: French social work owes much of its foundation to her. In 1923, together with Renée de Montmort, she founded the Guides de France. In 1927, she added a branch for the youngest girls, the Jeannettes.
All that remained was to create an imaginary world for them. The Cub Scouts have Kipling, his jungle, Akela and Mowgli – a whole menagerie of creatures to give things a name. For the youngest girls, Marie Diemer writes a blue forest, with its own animals and rituals. Those early Alsatian tales were not lost on everyone.
*The Book of the Blue Forest* was published in 1933. It is no longer available in bookshops, but it was reprinted in 1956, and then again in 1967, thirty-four years after its publication and nearly thirty years after the author’s death. Few children’s books stand the test of time quite like this.
She died in Fontainebleau on 3 June 1938. The Jeannettes were eleven years old.
Scotland holds another parliamentary election
11 September 1997. The Scots vote in favour in a referendum the establishment of a Parliament in Edinburgh. The previous one had ceased to sit in 1707, following the Act of Union.
74.3 % Yes On the first question: 63.5 %. On the second – the one granting the future Parliament the right to adjust the tax – turnout was 60.2 %.
Two hundred and ninety years of waiting, and another twenty months to go: the first session took place on 12 May 1999.
Every FridayA week a hundred years ago
Every Friday, we feature the issue that local residents were reading exactly one hundred years ago.
According to The Fontainebleau Bee, a weekly magazine founded in 1835.
Issue of Friday 10 September 1926
The town is losing its sub-prefecture
The newspaper The Fontainebleau Bee opens his act with some bad news: the town is losing its sub-prefecture. The decree is dated 10 September 1926. One hundred and six sub-prefectures were abolished in one fell swoop throughout France.
A week earlier, the town council had held an extraordinary meeting to vote on a motion calling for it to be retained. The mayor was absent. The minority deemed the move pointless. The motion was rejected, rewritten on the spot, and then passed in a form that no longer called for the Fontainebleau sub-prefecture to be retained, but merely that it should not be the only one abolished in the department. To save its own, Fontainebleau voted to abolish those of others.
The newspaper, for its part, states the real reason quite bluntly: «Fontainebleau is separated from Melun by just 16 kilometres and a 20-minute train journey.» Melun had, in fact, just overtaken Fontainebleau as the most populous commune in the department, 15,928 inhabitants compared with 15,560. Five years earlier, it was the other way round.
The borough of Fontainebleau will be re-established in 1988. Sixty-two years of waiting.
The tram leaves every ten minutes
On these very pages, life goes on. The electric tram leaves the station every ten minutes, with the last departure at twenty past midnight. It hasn’t always been so convenient: when it first came into service thirty years earlier, it didn’t go all the way down to the station and left passengers at the top of the hill, which the newspaper already considered a high price to pay.
More hunters than game
At the start of the hunting season, on Sunday 5 September, the Fontainebleau tax office recorded 212 partridges reported, compared with 511 the previous year, with 2,650 licences issued instead of 2,555. The newspaper concludes: « There are more hunters than there is game ».