From Slow Food to new cinema, the French are embracing all things peasant, writes LARA MARLOWEin Paris
PEASANTS OF the world unite! It’s not the first time the idea has surfaced. Irish novelist and left-wing activist Peadar O’Donnell, for example, was active in the communist Peasant International movement in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Like O’Donnell, who died in 1986 aged 93, French author, photographer and activist Pierre Josse (64) started out as a union organiser with the communist CGT, as a printer in the 1970s.
O’Donnell joined the IRA; Josse was long a supporter of Irish republicanism.
O’Donnell went on a writing holiday in 1936 and ended up chronicling the Spanish civil war. Over the past 32 years, Josse, editor in chief of the non-conformist and highly successful Guide du Routard, has written 100 of the 150 travel books in the series.
Love of rural life inspired Josse to take hundreds of photographs of farmers in 40 countries, all black and white, which he has recently published in a book, Peasants Without Borders, with texts by his friend Bernard Pouchèle.
Josse shot the photographs over 20 years, but decided to publish the book now because, he says, “peasants are in fashion”.
In Paris, a trendy cinema on the Place Saint Michel is showing Herbe (“Grass”), a documentary about cattle farmers in Brittany who refuse to feed their livestock soya imported from Brazil.
The prestigious Fondation Cartier just held an exhibition of videos by Raymond Depardon, whose recent works centre on peasant life.
The Salon de l’Agriculture, France’s annual farmers’ fair, drew 670,000 visitors this winter – a 10 per cent increase on 2008.
Josse’s book is prefaced by Carlo Petrini, the Italian sociologist, journalist and food critic who founded the international Slow Food movement in 1989. The name was coined at the group’s first demonstration – against a McDonald’s fast-food outlet in Rome. Today, Slow Food has 100,000 members, including 2,000 in France. Josse is president of the Paris “convivium”.
In 2004, Petrini founded a sister organisation, Terra Madre, which attempts to organise farmers worldwide.
“There’s been a restructuring of rural life the past few years, because things went too far,” says Josse. “The nitrates [in chemical fertiliser] destroyed the ground water in Brittany. They cut down hedges to make big industrial farms, and the silt washed away. I’m optimistic, because there’s real awareness among young people that we have to finish with a certain form of productivism – of wanting to make the land work more than it can give.
“The global economic crisis shows peasants are right. At some point, you have to say stop.”
Josse says the militant ecologists he calls “Khmer verts” wear blinkers. “It’s not just about food; it’s about culture, language, a whole way of life.”
Slow Food competes with 400 French confréries gastronomiques (gastronomic brotherhoods), which defend causes as narrowly defined as pink Lautrec garlic or the gourmet speciality canard au sang. “At Slow Food, we defend everything. There are 20 products threatened with extinction in France. We saved the black pied pigs of Bigorre.”
It suddenly dawns on me that Josse’s crusade is basically about the pleasures of the table.
“Absolutely,” he laughs. “We’re joyous epicureans, people who like to eat and drink and don’t worry about cholesterol. When we have a tasting, it’s a fête. Our last one was 5½ hours of Salers and Limousin beef, married with Châteauneuf-du-Pape . . .”
Josse has studied peasant farmers the world over, from Vietnam to Burma, Egypt, Europe and North America.
“The first thing they all share is an extremely developed sense of community,” he says. “Old people don’t die alone. Widows are never abandoned. They have a profound sense of identity.”
Peasants maintain customs and traditions, Josse adds. “For the 32 years I’ve been travelling for the Routard, my most beautiful memories are peasant fêtes.”
For example, in l’Estive, a May festival in the Auvergnat village of Saint-Chély-d’Aubrac, cattle are decked with bells and coloured ribbons, wine flows and there are cooking contests, to celebrate the return of herds to mountain pastures for summer.
At the Salon de l’Agriculture, 4,000 people attended the beauty pageant for cattle which Josse organised. The salon has long been a staple of French political life, because the French share a folk memory of a time when the vast majority of the population earned a living from the land. (Today only 3 per cent of French people are farmers.)
Former president Jacques Chirac has attended every salon since 1972, slapping cows’ rumps and washing down foie gras, Roquefort, and all manner of sausage with wine. “Man lives with the land. We are all peasants!” he declared in 1999.
French president Nicolas Sarkozy cannot compete with his predecessor’s popularity among farmers. As Le Monde noted, Sarkozy is “our first president who grew outside the land, without the roots that were hitherto deemed essential”.
Sarkozy stayed barely two hours at the salon, and grimaced when he gingerly caressed a cow’s muzzle.