The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Another country: 20 ways to know you are in ‘la France profonde’
Does ‘deep France’ – that timeless land of long lunches, boules and boulangeries – really exist? Anthony Peregrine sets out to find it
We may be hopeful that vaccines will give us a reliable route out of our Covid-19 nightmare. But worries will surely persist about social distancing. We need a destination where people are few, space is grand and disease discreet. Let me suggest la France profonde – or “deep France”.
Granted, it’s more an image – or a bunch of images – than one physical place. With a rose tint or two, la France profonde recalls how we think the world was when we were all much younger. Back in that ideal then, there were no iPhones, broken homes or hysterical 24-hour news channels. The main daily threats came from the elements, and woke was what happened when you stopped being asleep.
The idea of “deep France” is that you step back towards that past but with long French lunches, country wine and slow-moving peasant wisdom as supplements. The advantage these days is that returning to this past also comes with better plumbing, decent hygiene and satisfactory Wi-Fi (you think you want to dump the iPhone, but you don’t. How else will you Instagram the cassoulet?)
Irresistible is, I think, the word. But how can you be sure you have found it? Here we provide a 20-point guide to identifying la France profonde.
1
VILLAGE
In deepest France, a village will have a bar where metal chairs scrape on a tiled floor, aromas of stew and anis, and old fellows playing cards beneath photographs of the village soccer the team, circa 1974. Elsewhere, our village will have, at least, a baker’s and a pétanque pitch to keep the old blokes occupied when they are not playing cards. Vital, too, are small, very old women who wear black, sweep front doorsteps and remember a time when the village had 12 cafés, four bakeries and no foreigners.
2
FETE
In profound parts, fêtes are kick- out- the- jams events where normal restraint cedes to al fresco eating, moonlight drinking and dancing to the early hours. They have their specificities. Bulls surge through southern streets while in Varaigne in northern Dordogne on Nov 11, turkeys parade en masse, unaware of their limited life expectancy. Meanwhile, jazz festivals blossom in the smallest places (Wynton Marsalis all but lives in Marciac in the Gers), there is bed-racing in Mahalon, Brittany, and Force Basque competitions (like the Highland Games sans kilts and scotch, with berets, bellies and wine) in Basque country.
3
DENTISTRY
France may or may not have the best health service in the world, but rustic dental care is clearly hit and miss. The six fellows at the village bar will have 17 teeth between them. Go on. Count them.
4
CHURCH
Religion runs as a thick seam through French rural life. Churches may be bigger than the villages they serve, indicating that the afterlife was a peasant’s best bet. Many towns and villages also have their own saints. In Notre Dame, St Omer ( la France profonde, in spirit), St Erkembode has long helped kids with walking difficulties. His tomb still gets covered in small shoes left by worried or grateful parents. And, in the basilica in Annecy ( fringe profonde), lies St François de Sales, patron saint of journalists. Also of the deaf and dumb.
5
CONFUSION OF PRIVATE AND PUBLIC DOMAIN In remoter parts, ladies queue at the travelling grocer’s van in their dressing gowns and men emerge from barns to stare at passing cars, as if
The Square Of Liberty in SaintGuilhem-le-Désert is not a figment of the imagination they are trespassing. Public space is an extension of their kitchens, which is why villagers will get snippy if the police show up or you stop to ask if there is anywhere round here you can get a sandwich. (Answer: no.)
6
FOOD
La France profonde is out of reach of burgers and takeaway pizzas. It favours tripe and associated slithery bits. What did you expect? Peasants were poor. They sold the good cuts, kept the intestines and feet, and stuck them into dishes like défarde-de-crest, manouls, pieds-etpaquets and, most desperately, andouillette. A good time to visit country folk is in autumn, just after they have killed the family pig. They will be puzzled to hear that we don’t kill the family pig in Britain, then feed you pork and pâté to convince you to give it a go.
7
MUSEUMS OF SPECIALIST INTEREST
Villages like to display a cultural dimension, not with undiluted success. I harbour doubts about the Corkscrew Museum in Ménerbes, the Museum of Combs in Ezy-sur-Eure and any wine museum that is not in Bordeaux. That said, the Museum of Mechanical Music at Dollon, in the Sarthe département, has not only a fully automated Belgian disco band but also an automatic drum for armless veterans – it’s unmissable.
8
CHATEAUX
Left over from the histories of France and England: rural backwaters weren’t always backwaters. Many have hosted the heavy thump of proper history. They like to let you know. It’s a distinguishing feature. Chalus, near Limoges, is where Richard the Lionheart took a crossbow bolt to the shoulder on March 26 1199. His entrails are buried under what is left of the village château. Most of the rest of him was buried alongside his parents, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, in Fontevraud abbey, once the grandest in Christendom but now simply serene. There is evidence of French kings all over the place. Unnoticed, though, is Ainay-le-Viel, lost somewhere south of Bourges, where the family of Princesse Marie-Sol de la Tour-d’Auvergne have lived for 550 years.
9
FOREST
If you’re in France, there’s a fair chance you are in a forest. Some 30 per cent of the country is wooded. You are in la forêt profonde if, come autumn, folk are fanning out through the trees toting baskets. They are mushroom-hunting, an activity as popular in France as adultery. As potentially dangerous too. French pharmacists are all qualified to advise on whether a fungus will kill you horribly.
10
ANIMALS
A key ingredient of la France profonde, whether they be wild boar charging through the forest (see above) or ransacking gardens, 350 sheep being driven down the lane in front of your camper van, or rare breed cows and pigs making a comeback. Rarest of all, perhaps, is the blackmarked Kintoa pig now once again found in enclosures on hillsides in Basque country. Its ears flop over its eyes and it bumps into things, which may explain its near extinction.
11
COMPOSTELA
Almost every village in deepest France is on a pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. Such villages are characterised by people walking through with gnarled sticks, serious boots and a scallop shell stitched about their person. They will talk about blisters, chafing and their spiritual quest, if you let them.
12
MEMORIALS
Rural France has a sub-plot of slaughter. Memorials and memories abound. In Languedoc, châteaux such as Montségur recall the 13th-century wipeout of Cathar heretics by king and Pope. Over in Provence, the hill-topping castle behind Mérindol bears a plaque evoking the 1545 religious cleansing of Vaudois, or early Protestants. Later, Calvinist Protestants fought the king in and around the Cévennes. The finest memorial of all is the Musée-du-Désert, which is located in the farming hamlet of Mialet. And then there are all those village memorials to people killed in the world wars. Profound French villages often have many victims with the same family name.
13
ART
The floppy-hat-and- easel brigade are inexorably drawn to French villages as dingoes are to a billabong. Some villages are renowned for this very reason. Crozant, for example. Monet led bearded fellows to this terrific riverside spot in the Creuse département. Earlier, realist landscape painters inspired by Constable – Millet, Théodore Rousseau – gathered at Barbizon, near Fontainebleau. Later, Gauguin was prominent among artists at Pont-Aven in Brittany. He was beaten up at least once by various local seamen, who were doubtless incensed by his portrayal of Breton women as chunky.
14
FOLK DANCING
At any point in la France p rofonde, you may be ambushed by folk wearing various breeches, bonnets and aprons, all twirling in slow motion to the sound of a squeeze-box substitute. Move on immediately, or you will find yourself tempted to wade in among them all with a carjack.
15
SPORT
Not long ago, among mountainous Auvergne zones, farmers could be found slapping paraffin-soaked rags on to the backsides of dogs, before setting them haring across the landscape. Surviving rural sports are of less specialist interest, however. Languedoc features bull-running and la balle au tambourin – luxurylength tennis pl aye d with tambourine-type things instead of rackets, if you are wondering. The Basque country plays pelota, Anjou plays boulede-fort (boules but with a bias, à-lacrown green bowls) and over in Cagnes-sur-Mer, they play boules with boules that are cuboid, for the village streets are steep. “Round boules would roll away,” one sportsman explained.
16
SHOPS
Expect a mini-market selling charcuterie, mousetraps and brands of tinned peas you will find nowhere else. The baker bakes his own bread and, in the cake section, offers tête-de-nègres and pets-de-nonne – respectively, Negroes’ heads (meringues in chocolate) and nuns’ farts (doughnuts). French pâtisserie hasn’t woken to woke. The weekly outdoor market will have much what you would expect (meat, vegtables, cheese) plus a rack of floral housecoats labelled “Modern Fashions”.
17
DISPUTES
Endemic to la France profonde. Rural idylls have rarely been idyllic. Farmers fall out over anything, but usually boundaries and inheritances. All this comes laced with memories of civil wars wrecking the countryside, epidemics, religious wars, wars against the English, and revolution. It was well summed up in tourism literature from Avallon, northern Burgundy: “Avallon was often burned, pillaged and its inhabitants slaughtered or decimated by outbreaks of plague. The Tourism Office wishes you a pleasant stay.”
18
HUNTERS
They will be blasting off as you walk the countryside in autumn and winter. Hunting is one of the earliest rights granted by the 1789 revolution. That said, it is a dying tradition – about a million hunters these days, 2.2 million in 1976 – but it is not dying as fast as the 15 people killed in hunting accidents every year. Or, of course, the wildlife.
19
FERAL CREATURES
That said, la France profonde’s wildlife can be challenging. Take Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron. He was dragged from the forest in the late 1790s. He was apparently about 12, and had been living feral for most of those years. This being the age of enlightenment, attempts were made to educate him but Victor never really got the hang of being human. He died at 40. A few decades earlier, the southern Massif Central was terrorised by the Bête du Gévaudan. Apparently a kingsize wolf, it carried off more than a hundred women and children.
20
POWERS
Deepest France is thick with myth and special powers. Relatively ordinary people – rebouteux, guérisseurs – will have the wherewithal to deal with (in my experience) burns and snakebites. Among the most famous healers was Nizier Philippe from Loisieux in the Alps. In the 19th-century, he healed “using the same force used by Christ for miracles.” The country also has some 2,000 “healing” fountains, many in the Landes department of Gascony. The village of Escource boasts three, handling complaints of the skin, the eye and the heart.
There were no iPhones, broken homes or hysterical 24-hour news channels