Another voice

Report from the Front

Auberon Waugh Languedoc In a mountain village once dedicated to the Catharin heresy, some sixty kilometres north of Perpignan, I am led blindfold into the presence of the Winegrowers' Resistance leader. Known only as Jacques le Corbeau, he is a stocky man with blue shadow on his fat red face, the butt of a yellow Gitane mais permanently stuck in the middle of his lower lip. In one corner of the room a youth With a Castro beard and baseball jockeycap stares through the arrow-slit of what was plainly once a Catharin stronghold, cradling an Armalite rifle in his skinny arms. In front of the fire, two young women, one of them quite attractive, squat on the ground, unpacking and assembling other automatic weapons with humourless concentration.

Le Corbeau has agreed to take me and an elderly Czech journalist on a tour of Languedoc-Roussillon, through the innumerable roadblocks manned by farmers With sporting guns and into the villages Where the men stand to arms while their women gather round the communal village washing basin, glancing up fearfully as our convoy passes bristling with guns from every window. We give a wide berth to Lezignan-les-Corbieres, where two regiMents of CRS, the Republic's dreaded riot troops, have been billeted in their black Plastic mackintoshes. They venture out only in company strength, descending on a Village out of the blue with elaborate apparatus which they use to gas the Villagers in their houses, one by one, like badgers.

It is growing dark as our convoy approaches the Smoking ruins of Montbredon, scene of bitter fighting three weeks ago which left two dead and many casualties—the first blood drawn in the Wine War which threatens to erupt any day into full-scale secession. Now the only thing that Moves in this once-flourishing village is a twelve-year-old girl on crutches. Fanette Bonnafous lost a leg when she was run over ,by a CRS char blindi Doctors are not hopeful that it will ever grow again. For the first time, I see a flash of emotion in le Corbeau's black, impenetrable eyes, frequently made all the more impenetrable by a revolting squint.

'En revanche, briderons Carcassonne,' he says simply. Carcassonne is a fortress City which bestrides the Aude and controls the main road to Narbonne.

`Quand?' I ask in my halting, pidgin French.

Le Corbeau turns one of his terrible, bloodshot eyes on me. He shrugs and, Pausing only to pluck a fat snail from a

vineleaf, pop it in his mouth and spit out the shell, he says: `Ce soir

Actually, the above report from the Front was composed on the aeroplane to Toulouse coming out. The morning before I left, I was telephoned by the Features Editor of a popular newspaper who had heard I was coming here—perhaps he read it in the Spectator—and wanted an article on the Wine War. Now that am here, it is obvious to anyone with experience of Fleet Street that what with Princess Margaret's marriage problems and the search for a new Prime Minister (not to mention the collapse of the European monetary exchange system) any reports on the situation in Languedoc will be spiked. Even if I had killed poor Fanette Bonnafous and left her young body like the traditional crumpled, broken doll lying in the village square, she would be unlikely to score more than a downcolumn mention on an inside page. So 1 send my composition to the Spectator instead. Waste not, want not.

In fact, the Wine War seems to have ended as quickly as it began. Two police inquiries are proceeding, one in Narbonne and the other in Carcassonne. They are questioning the owners of motor-cars whose numbers were taken by the CRS at the time of the fighting. The mairies of two wine-growing villages have issued a list of likely questions and recommended answers for the benefit of anyone called in to help the police with their inquiries:

'Did you hear the speeches?'

'From where I was, I heard nothing.' 'How did you know to go to Montredon ?'

was drawn by the crowd.'

'Did you see anyone carrying a gun ?'

'I saw nothing.'

'Did you hear the fusillade?'

'I recognised the tear-gas bombs.'

For the rest, the winegrowers seem to have returned to their seasonal occupation of consuming as much as they can of the 500 million gallon wine lake. The angriest noises one hears are about the Snowdon business, on which nobody can be impartial. Most of them seem to take Princess Margaret's side, and although they listen politely to me as 1 put the arguments from the other side, I do not feel that I am making many converts. Of course, they have no idea of the indignities and the humiliation involved in being an English male in 1976. There is no male chauvinism in agricultural France because there is no need for it. Both sexes have their roles by which they can be judged. Is Princess Margaret fertile, tidy about the house, a good cook ? I point out that Lord Snowdon, although small, works quite hard as a photographer, but they have only contempt for a man who can't keep his wife, especially a rich one.

Never trust a dwarf, was my father's advice, although he was a man of only moderate size. Or a man in a brown suit. I do not know what sort of suiting Lord Snowdon favours, but 1 confess I am becoming a little confused in my mind. From Languedoc, one's loyalties seem less clear-cut. But apart from the vexed question of the Snowdons, it is refreshing to find such a clear perception of Britain's problems. The French feel they have been there before us, and see us as heading inexorably for the sort of bust-up they experienced in May 1968, after which common sense will re-assert itself.

In England, of course, common sense means something entirely different. It means finding a middle ground between opposing demands for change. In France common sense means what exists; improvement means having more of it. 1 put the blame for all England's ills on the twin influences of primogeniture and the public schools, but my argument is too long and too boring to develop here, in a country where people still smile at each other, regardless of social class.

Perhaps a May 1968 is what we need in England. It is one of the few subjects which people seldom joke about in France, but it has had certain unmistakable effects on the public consciousness. It removed the chic from radicalism, and taught people which side they were on in all the vapid rhetoric about workers' power. But somehow I doubt whether the same resources of common sense exist in Britain. Our best hope, it seems to me, is that these occasional violent explosions in France will bring the franc down to wherever we have reached in our graceful slide, making it still possible for English writers of the middle class to come here on their holidays.