Exactly 20 years ago (give or take a few days) like most French schoolchildren I was given a piggy bank to collect yellow coins (small change). It was a charity campaign called Opération Pièces Jaunes, to help hospitalised children, but my classmates & I were quite indifferent to the charity aspect because all we cared about was the fact that our teacher started giving us a candle in the shape of President Jacques Chirac every time we returned our little box filled with coins.
We were completely enraptured by those candles and the way the president’s face would start melting hideously if we let them burn long enough. Without any kind of deliberation among ourselves we turned it into a class-wide contest—it was obvious to everyone that the point of the Yellow Coins charity campaign was to win many little Chiracs and melt them to make the face of our president as freakishly deformed as possible. We exchanged them for pogs and marbles. We had recently learnt about the Plague in history class, with great relish, hence one lucky girl who managed to obtain a particularly monstrous half-melted face with a big wax bubble reminiscent of a bubo sold it way above the going rate, for 12 galaxy marbles—a fortune. (I was among the losers of this auction, and commented in my diary, with deep regret, “It’s just what it would look like if the President had the bubonic plague!”) Every day after school we went round town begging passersby for coins with something akin to mania in order to get more Chiracs to burn into ever ghastlier shapes. An old lady we ambushed in front of the church praised us warmly for our charitable spirit.
Eventually our teacher ran out of candles and this odd chapter of my childhood ended as abruptly as it had started. Our class was congratulated in front of the whole school for being by far the most ardently devoted to the cause (we got ~15kg of coins.) I wonder if the principal asked our teacher what her secret was to make us collect a truly astonishing amount of coins compared to the other classes, and how he reacted when she replied that she motivated us with busts of the President. One teacher gave a Carambar for a full box of coins, another believed that helping sick children should be incentive enough, but our teacher, an expert in child psychology, was alone in her conviction that the best way to go about this was to hand out human wax effigies for her students to burn.
This post is now one year old and my favourite thing about it is that no French person in the notes has ever seen a Chirac candle before, which strengthens my theory that my primary school teacher was making them herself, at home, as a hobby, and with this exact purpose in mind.
Believe it or not but a few months after I made this addition, the origin story of the Chirac candles was brought to light in the French press… In this interview from late 2021, our former President of the Constitutional Council was photographed in his study with a little Chirac candle on a shelf behind him! When asked about it he explained that a member of Chirac’s party made one or two thousand of these candles back in the day, and he (who was also Minister of the Interior and President of the National Assembly) has kept his Chirac candle in his study for the past 20+ years because he finds it hilarious.
Little does he know that a few dozens of these 2,000 candles ended up in the hands of a bunch of feral children somewhere in France who obsessed over them, disfigured them with diabolical glee and went into galaxy marble debt trying to buy the most grotesque Chiracs at auction.
I’m glad that at least one aspect of this mystery has been lifted. It’s still unclear how my teacher came to own so many of these limited-edition candles (I don’t think she was a fan of Chirac or a member of his party…), and of course the thought process that led her to connect the concepts of charity drive and letting kids burn the President in effigy will remain a mystery.
