Who has it in them to be a true heroine?
WHEN French philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle died last month while trying to rescue two youngsters who had got into difficulty swimming near St Tropez, the reaction in her native country was two-fold. Firstly, there was widespread admiration at the rare display of heroism by one of the country’s foremost public intellectuals, similar to that which greeted Donegal man Davitt Walsh who risked all to save the baby in last summer’s Buncrana Pier tragedy.
Secondly there was grateful acknowledgment for how, in death, Dufourmantelle came to personify her own philosophical ideals.
Over the course of her illustrious career, she carved her name as an advocate of risk-taking, writing of how a risk-free existence was only a half-life and of how ‘risking your life is one of the most beautiful expressions in our language’.
The manner of her leavetaking – dying of a heart attack while battling a strong current as lifeguards saved the children – proved she had the courage of her convictions. It placed her above clerics disgraced by sex abuse scandals; politicians who abandon high ideals for power and, increasingly, celebrities – the flawed champions of highminded principles who fail to practise what they preach.
BUT what perhaps made her death even more poignant was that the likelihood of Dufourmantelle ever having to put her money where her mouth was, so to speak, always quite remote. Among her chosen intelligentsia, throwing caution to the wind is not quite laced with the same level of potential disaster as in Paris’s notorious banlieues where violence and deprivation have the upper hand.
A cynic might say that in Dufourmantelle’s cosy, risk-free world, risk meant nothing more than following one’s heart out of a boring marriage and into the arms of a lover or hurling headlong into an existential crisis. Yet late last month circumstances tragically aligned to profoundly test her convictions and she met the challenge head on. Without hesitation she entered the water when she saw the red flag raised and within moments she was dead. She laid down her life for others and while, as a psychoanalyst, she might baulk at the biblical overtones, her actions remind us how, even in this chaotic time, life and ideas can still be aligned.
We are raised on superhero fantasies, on tales of valour and saving-the-day but until we are tested, none of us knows of what we are capable.
In moments of crisis or chaos, a normal human reaction is paralysis or snapping into action after someone else makes a move.
In the face of uncertainty sometimes inaction feels right.
Francesco Schettino the captain of the Costa Concordia cruise ship that sank in 2012 and left 32 drowned, abandoned his ship before many of his passengers and claimed duringhis trial that it was all a misunderstanding. As humans we are programmed for flight or fight and our first instinct may be to save our own skins even when, like Schettino, we are bound by maritime tradition or, as parents, bound by blood to our children,
The Swedish film Force Majeure shows the devastating psychological toll on a couple when the father abandons his wife and children in order to save himself during an avalanche in the Alps.
THE maker of the film researched couples who survived disasters such as shipwrecks, tsunamis and such, and found that a strikingly high percentage of them ended up in divorce. Was it the trauma that forced them apart or dismay and disappointment at their partners’ cowardice?
As we know to our cost, learned writing and thinking are no guarantee of honourable or courageous behaviour.
Anne Dufourmantelle could have simply looked away when she saw the children struggling or just screamed for help.
But even if her instinct was to flee, she still was able to make a deliberate choice to court danger in spite of her fear. How many of us could do the same?