One day I would like to tell the story of the life of Jean-Pierre Ryffranck. He has just died in Sherbrooke. He was a worker coupled with an artisan, proud of his work. It’s not often that we talk about people who, like him, wear out their hands throughout their lives, with the sun in their eyes. However, their daily life, full of elementary tragedies, clearly reflects the jungle of our world.
His colleagues nicknamed him the iron man because, on the one hand, of his character and, on the other hand, of his particular aptitudes. As a machinist, he made metals bend to his will, just like the beings around him…
In the 1980s, on the sidelines of his work, he began manufacturing custom-made bicycles by hand, with infinite care. Its fine mechanics, carved from steel, were among the most beautiful racing machines produced in North America.
You have no idea how much time I was able to spend in his studio, in the enveloping velvet of Oscar Peterson’s jazz or Beethoven’s sonatas. I listened to him talk, while watching him adjust the tubes that he then worked on welding. He talked about history, politics, economic life. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent there, sitting on a wooden stool.
This Fleming arrived in Quebec in the post-war period. He had worked literally day and night, including weekends. Farm boy, gas station attendant, mechanic, machinist… Accustomed to the endless waltz of overtime, he worked 80 to 90 hours a week for poverty wages, with disregard for his health. Work, as they say, did not scare him.
His life had constantly been complicated by “restructurings”, “reshuffles”, “thanks”, “reorganizations”, these words which dress up with false elegance the violence to which workers like him are mercilessly subjected. After losing one last job at an advanced age, he decided to sell his bikes in order to pay his mortgage.
He never accepted the criticism that some made of him, like many other immigrants, of having had his children educated in English. Behind the poorly washed factory floors, he had been forced to work in English all his life. Why would he, who came from a time full of uncertainties, have made a bet other than English?
His mind was marked by the image of Flemish workers. When he was young, he saw them, on Sundays, getting on their bikes to go to work in the coal mines. Many traveled more than 100 km. The cycling champions of this era, true convicts of the road, had the same drawn features as them. They were from the same world. The bicycle is part, not only in China, of the popular history of work. He knew it.
When the Nazis invaded Belgium, the family home was requisitioned. The Ryffrancks fled to France, certain that Hitler’s troops would hit a wall there… A few weeks later, following the defeat of France, the family wandered the roads for a while before being able to return to Belgium. During these years of poverty, Jean-Pierre traveled the countryside by bike to bring back food.
His part of the country, he remembered, had been liberated from the Nazis by a Canadian regiment from Saint-Boniface. Almost every day after the liberation, he said, someone from the surrounding area set foot on a mine. Children died playing with grenades that were still primed. In a nearby canal, he had launched some himself. A faster way to fish…
He wanted to become a cyclist or, at a pinch, a football champion. His father opposed it. For this ultra-Catholic and conservative man, his son was a bad seed, a Bolshevik. Despite good grades at school, he was expelled precisely for this reason. He was an anarchist on the edges, he admitted years later, smirking.
To escape from a world that weighed on him, he was thinking of going to Australia or the Congo. It will be the army first, then Quebec. He was leaving from Bruges. He arrived at L’Épiphanie, at the time of Maurice Duplessis. The shock was great. He wanted to return to Belgium, but he didn’t have a penny. His father refused to help him. He thus remained stuck in the middle of a snowy world, in the heaviness of everyday life, without hope of paradise.
“The afterlife doesn’t exist!” What matters is the work we did and those we left behind, those we loved,” he told me on the eve of dying. He held my hands. He was worthy. “It was the Quebecers who taught me to stop hating, to love. »
In his workshop, among his bikes, he liked to stop for a moment to have a drink. In the absence of Belgian beer, he willingly fell back on a Scandinavian brand, in a sort of homage paid by his throat to these countries where health insurance, education for all and public services are rightly held in very high regard. . Ryffranck recalled that, in the Flemish countries, unions had existed since the Middle Ages. These unions before the letter had counted a lot in the preservation of this society. They had also fostered a spirit of defense of individual rights.
Jean-Pierre cursed the business unions as much as the employers. He knew that a society does not thrive on columns of figures lined up by small accounting minds. Reducing common life, as is still done, to considerations of reducing public spending, in the sole name of the health of the GDP and the stock market, had nothing to enchant him, especially when such social disgrace is carried out in a lyrical delirium, under the cover of a cheap national pride which butchers the workers.
Jean-Pierre Ryffranck has chosen to take time off from work. He was 93 years old. I liked it a lot.