Noted Without (Much) Comment

From the property-is-freedom file, and the obituary of Baron Guy de Rothschild at The New York Times:

After the fall of France in 1940, the pro-Nazi Vichy regime seized the family bank, which had been moved from Paris to the small southern town of La Bourboule in the Auvergne region. The next year, the baron slipped away to New York and then to London, where he joined General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces.

History repeated itself some 40 years later, when, in 1981, the newly elected Socialist-Communist coalition of President François Mitterrand nationalized the bank that the baron had reclaimed and built up again after World War II.

History often repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as socialist sanctimony.