FRANCE IS FOR FOLK
Clive Aslet says the Paris agricultural show
proves that the French, unlike the British, rejoice in country living
THERE is no doubt about it, the French know how to put on a show. In this instance, I don't mean the Folies Bergere but the agricultural show that took place at Paris's equivalent of Earls Court last week (though, come to think of it, there may be a connection: aren't betgeres shepherdesses as well as wing chairs?) Imagine the Royal Show coming to central London. No, you can't, can you? But in Paris the Salon International de l'Agriculture gets three and a half times as many visitors as our premier agricultural event. The posters of an enormous, golden-haired bull, which appeared on the backs of many buses, would probably be banned by Ken Livingstone. As for the ones in the Porte de Versailles, which showed a slice of steak wrapped up for the supermarket, with the word 'Marguerite?' below it? Well. the French public is considerably more robust about what happens to its livestock than we are.
Anyone who has become used to the British mantra that farming is failing and rural life is in decline ought to see how they do it in France. One stand cheerfully displayed a selection of vicious-looking hunting knives, which would be under lock and key, if not illegal, in the United Kingdom (though, this being France, a number were combined with corkscrews, presumably so that you could crack open a bottle while gralloching your stag). Peep through a half-open door near the carriage horses, and you see a dozen or so men with Solzhenitsyn-style beards drinking red wine around a chequered tablecloth. This really did look like La France Profonde. To judge from their home-dyed hair, not to mention the singlemindedness with which they elbow you out of the way, a good number of visitors also come from the provinces: it is difficult to imagine that many residents of Paris would have much use for the day-old chicks that are on sale.
On the other hand, it is quite possible to picture some fancy breeds of fowl — with their pompoms, ruffs, feathery feet and, in the case of the dandified Leghorn cockerel, Mick Jaggerish gait — flapping around the boutiques of St-Germain. Artificial flowers, painted eggs, aromatic candles, garden benches, seed potatoes, ceramic fruit to put on the wall, violently coloured crystals in gigantic cocktail glasses in which to grow bulbs, a kind of Play-Doh (educatif et ludique) made out of organic maize — all rural France was vibrantly, festively, sometimes hideously there.
And yet at least 40 per cent of the visitors come from metropolitan Paris. This show does not exclusively cater to a narrow interest-group, made up of farmers and doubledyed countrymen. It celebrates, reinforces even, some of the myths that are shared by French men and women of whatever origin. There is the myth of the farmer as artisan. This year I never reached the dairy section, but from my last visit I remember a series of romantic black-and-white photographs, taken by the French equivalent of the Milk Marketing Board, on the theme of femmes et fermes.
We were shown women such as MarieNoelle in the Cotes d'Armor, who has 65 milking cows. A calf had 'just been born in the field without the least difficulty. It doesn't need to be trained to move into a box laid with fresh straw. Its mother's name is Venus.' Joelle in the Tarn-et-Garonne (20 cows) said, 'I am attached to my roots. I have never encountered anyone who would despise me because of my job. On the contrary, friends from Toulouse adore coming to the barns and getting on to a tractor.' Most of the economically indefensible units run by the women were said to make wonderful cheese.
While Londoners think that British farmers are out to poison them, the French want to believe in Marie-Noelle and Joelle. They help support the myth that their food is the best in the world. They are a living embodiment of the myth that France is a fortress against globalised culture, and remains a place of deep attachment to its regions.
Everyone wants to get in on the act. Lionel Jospin, the Prime Minister, was photographed holding a wriggly piglet. Of course he was. The President and the Prime Minister always come, along with a troop of Cabinet ministers. (When was the last time we saw Tony Blair at the Royal Show? He has never been.) At last year's Game Fair, one of my colleagues asked the boys and girls who were manning the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs's shiny new stand why Margaret Beckett had broken with all precedent and failed to attend. 'She is out meeting country people,' came the condescending reply. 'But surely,' he persevered, 'the best place to meet country people would be here.' We later discovered that she was on a caravanning holiday in France. She may have been meeting country people, but not British ones. In Pans, Defra's equivalent, the Ministry of Agriculture, had a stand next to the hunting section announcing itself to be `1.In ministere au service du cheval'. All I could do was gasp.
Naturally, the show reaches a climax in the food hall. 'The region gives its taste to France,' announced an organisation set up to do nothing but promote regionalism. There is some method in it. The Auvergnats have done particularly well in refining their definition of produce from the Auvergne, which now excludes everything that was not grown or made there. (Two fingers to the World Trade Organisation.) But who cares about a little local protectionism when people are having such a good time? It wasn't just the stands displaying oysters, pancakes, bread, cassoulet and lavender. It wasn't even the man cracking walnuts with a hammer in front of video pictures of him gathering the same walnuts from a tree. It was the music. There were brass bands playing traditional songs, and groups of accordion-squeezing, flamboyantly moustached men whistling them. Over by the Landes section, a band of young musicians was playing swing. In the Loire, they were folk-dancing in blue smocks.
I hurried off on an urgent mission to Agnes B, before having seen anything of Burgundy, which had a whole hall to itself this year. The truth is. I could have stayed a week. If! get too depressed by the government's vindictive Little Englander attitude towards hunting, I shall summon up hitherto unsuspected reserves of Europeanism and move to France. I used to think it was the rest of the EU that was mad. Now, as far as anything to do with the countryside is concerned, I rather think it is us.
Not that the day was an unalloyed success. As I went into the left-luggage lockers at the Gare du Nord, my jar of navarin of lamb fell off the conveyor belt of the X-ray machine and smashed. At Waterloo, anxious to get to the taxi queue without unnecessary delay, I stepped over a low rope that was designed to stop people cutting corners, and fell flat on my face. My confit de canard was reduced to a damp smell in a plastic bag. If I didn't still have a large, if dented, tin of pot au feu, and a couple of sausages, I might think that the whole experience in Paris was a dream.
Clive As/et is editor of Country Life.
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