On July 31, 2026, as an extension of a trip through Lorraine, I drove up to Manderen-Ritzing to visit the Château de Malbrouck, a fifteenth-century fortress planted on its rocky spur in the heart of the Three Borders country. I came for the stone, the wall-walks, and the oak framing, with no idea that the castle was hosting an exhibition devoted to Georges Méliès this season, mounted with the Cinémathèque française. A fine surprise for anyone with a long-standing interest in the pioneer of the trick shot: magic lanterns, phenakistiscope discs, hand-cranked cameras, and the plans of the Montreuil glass studio tell the story of a moving image built first from mechanics and stubborn tinkering. A visit recounted, a reflection on what Méliès still has to say about illusion in the age of generated images, and a good place to eat a short walk from the site.
After the U4 blast furnace at Uckange, one hour of driving to the northeast takes you from industrial wasteland to forest canopy. At Orscholz, the Saarschleife treetop walk unrolls 1,250 meters of timber walkway through beech, oak, and Douglas fir, up to a 42-meter tower overlooking the most spectacular river bend in Germany. Not a single step from the parking lot to the top, a maximum grade of 6 percent, and a privately run structure maintained without a euro from local taxpayers. A visit, a note on the photography, Siegfried Line remnants a few hundred meters away, and everything you need to plan your own trip.
On the way back from a few days on the Nürburgring’s Nordschleife, I stopped in the Fensch valley to visit the U4 blast furnace at Uckange, the sole survivor of six installations at an ironworks that went cold in December 1991, and the only blast furnace in France open to visitors. Thirty acres of industrial wasteland, a 270-foot chimney, a cast house frozen exactly as it stood on the evening of the last tap: the place owes its survival to former workers who fought for ten years to get it listed as a historic monument. Between the Staehler bucket, the production board ruled in chalk, and the union posters from 1991, you grasp what 1,200 people working around the clock actually produced. But a country that puts its blast furnaces behind glass has already answered the question of its industrial sovereignty, and the tour, fascinating as it is, looks a great deal like a very well lit death certificate.
When a carmaker discovers a defective part, it issues a recall notice. France has never done so for its intellectual products. Yet Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze supplied the mechanisms that American campuses assembled into an identitarian war machine, with no manual and no safeguards, while their authors looked on, flattered. Forty years later the product is coming back to us by the containerload, and indictments are no longer enough. Here is the recall notice, and the warranty work starts now.
