Only in France are car and countryside brought into perfect harmony
FRANK JOHNSON
FNear St Remy-de-Provence.
leeing the yearly Notting Hill Carnival, and the four-yearly Conservative leadership election, many of us have sought the protection of a neutral country. Still, I do not agree that the leadership election should be moved to a safer venue. It is precisely its taking place in the Conservative party that gives it so much colour and fun. It is part of minority culture: the smallest street party in Europe. On the whole, however, I would rather be here than there.
A lot of Britons are certainly here. Mr Peter Mayle's monument is all around us. Two shopfronts in the single-street village nearest us, deep in the Luberon, bear the evocative old French shop sign 'Estate Agents'. The prices asked give the lie to the British belief that anywhere in rural France we can buy a whole château for the price of a terrace house in Hartlepool. Two estate agents, plying their ancient peasant craft in English, compared with one butcher and one epicene! There seems to be more money in property than in charcuterie.
Cars with British number-plates loom around narrow corners. It was the sight of them, and of plenty of French cars doing the same, that started me on a train of thought. The roads in this part of rural France are unusually crowded; almost as crowded as those in the Cotswolds, near Burford. That makes this the most unusual part of rural France. The cars have something to do with this time of the year. But apparently the roads are comparatively crowded in this part of France at all times of the year. The area has more cities close to one another than any other part of the country: Avignon, Nimes, Arles, Orange. All have sights to be seen.
But elsewhere French cities are not close to one another at all. They stand alone, surrounded by a vast countryside under a vast sky. France is twice as big as Britain, but with the same-sized population. The motorist can therefore travel on French roads — other than on motorways — for mile after mile without seeing another vehicle. Environmentalists draw a conclusion: that it only goes to show how beautiful the world would be without the motor car. I draw the opposite conclusion. France was made for the motor car. It is the motorist's paradise: perhaps the only one left in Europe. It is the country which proves what the internal combustion engine can do for the liberation of mankind. Yet British drivers do not realise it. They shoot down here straight from Calais on the motorways, boasting of how they took only a day, or drive through the night, sustaining themselves with a double espresso every couple of hours at the service stations, and with shots of Red Bull. But, God, French roads are crowded! Even crowded in the middle of the night. D'you remember that jam around Poitiers at 5 am?
But they are so wrong. Edith Wharton begins her book A Motor Flight Through France (1908) with the sentence: 'The motor car has restored the romance to travel.' The paragraph proceeds:
Freeing us from all the compulsions and contacts of the railway, the bondage to fixed hours and the beaten track, the approach to each town through the area of ugliness and desolation created by the railway itself, it has given us back the wonder, the adventure and the novelty which enlivened the way of our posting grandparents. Above all these recovered pleasures must be ranked the delight of taking a town unawares, stealing on it by back ways and unchronicled paths, and surprising in it some intimate aspect of past time, some silhouette hidden for half a century or more by the ugly mask of railway embankments, and the iron bulk of a huge station. Then the villages that we missed and yearned for from the windows of the train — the unseen villages have been given back to us! — and nowhere could the importance of the recovery have been more delightfully exemplified than on a May afternoon in the Pas-deCalais, as we climbed the long ascent beyond Boulogne on the road to Arras.
Note how Edith Wharton here reverses what has become today's orthodoxy in polite society: cars antisocial and bad, railways social and good. But, it may be objected, what Miss Wharton wrote in 1908 cannot apply now. Now the railway has liberated us from the congestion of the car.
Not in France it hasn't. Everything she wrote in that rolling paragraph in 1908 is true of France in 2001. But in 2001 the motor car in France liberates us, not only from 'the compulsions and contacts of the railway' but also from the compulsions and contacts of the motorway. In the only three other European countries in which I have much travelled — Britain, Italy and Germany — it is more or less impossible to drive any great distance other than on motorways. Britain and Italy are long, thin countries with comparable populations, so there is simply not the space for long, winding roads other than motorways. Germany has the space, but 20 million more people. Off the motorways, it has the long, winding roads but also the people with which to congest them. Only in France are car and countryside brought into perfect harmony. This is one of her many contributions to civilisation; the only one that is unsung, even by herself.
To approach a great city on a motorway is almost as depressing as Miss Wharton found approaching a great city on a railway. The relentless, demanding concrete, with its hectoring signs and instructions, gives the impression that the great city exists for the motorway, not the motorway for it. There is also something depressing and homogenising about the knowledge that every renowned place in Europe — and perhaps by now almost the whole world — is somewhere an exit on a motorway. The motorway creates a world of always travelling, never arriving; but, unlike in the proverb, not travelling hopefully.
There is another joy for the English motorist off the motorway in rural France, especially in the centre. We can drive through an idealised England. So much of it — profoundly green, criss-crossed by stream, wood and hedge — is the England of our myth and dream. It is like driving through a progression of Constables. This England is still to be found in England — in, say, Shropshire and Herefordshire — but there is now more of this England in France. That is all very well, the English may reply, but what about French drivers? Aren't they the worst in Europe? Probably. But my point is that, on the roads I go on, there aren't any. As I write, it is almost time for us to get into the car and come home. Uniquely among Britons down here, we shall not head for the motorway. We shall come home to England through that other England that is also France. We shall take two, perhaps three days, to reach that unavoidable motorway in Kent. Driving in France this summer, as always, has restored my love of both France and the car.
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