But although canine deposits are the French capital’s most infamous excretory output, they are not the only things causing a stink on the city’s streets. Paris’ formidable population of pigeons – unaffectionately dubbed rats volants (‘flying rats’) by the natives – come in for a good deal of invective, especially from those city-dwellers who have been foolish or drunk enough to park under a tree. Pigeons are a curse of many of the world’s great city spaces, from Trafalgar Square to the Piazza San Marco, but the pigeons of Paris are a particularly reviled breed. There are estimated to be some 80,000 of the birds in central Paris, or a pigeon for every 25 inhabitants.17 By far the most common is the variety known as pigeon biset, a scraggy grey fowl that haunts the city all year round, and which has grown fat on the crumbs of croque-messieurs thrown by tourists from park benches. But there is also the pinkish-brown variety known as pigeon ramier, which migrates in the winter and returns to the city in the spring, gorging on green shoots to produce a particularly vicious, acidic green guano that eats away at the edifices and monuments of the ancient city. Paris in the springtime, in fact, is not so much a time of romantic drizzle as of a precipitation of pigeon poo. The arches of the famous bridges of the Seine, the struts supporting the overground train stations, the pavements under the tree-lined boulevards… all have to be subjected regularly to the ritual ablutions of a high-pressure water jet to remove their peppery dressing.
In contrast to their ineffectiveness in the face of the crottes de chiens, however, the Parisian authorities seem to have cracked the problème des pigeons. Around the city, discreet pigeon houses are beginning to appear in major avian haunts. Graced with the rather crudely graphic name of pigeonniers contraceptifs (‘contraceptive pigeon lofts’), these bird shelters provide a measured dose of feed to their occupants, while at the same time limiting their reproductive output (birds are allowed one brood a year, and any additional eggs are discreetly shaken to prevent them hatching). Meanwhile, the battle to save Paris’ monuments from the ravages of acidic pigeon excreta grows ever more high-tech, the latest innovation being the installation of electromagnetic devices on statues which emit pulses insensible to the human visitor, but apparently highly repellent to pigeons.
Moving from flying rats to the scuttling variety, land rats are the city’s bronze medallists among its excretory pests. At a rough estimate, Paris plays host to some 6–8 million of these rodents. Every second, more than 9 kilos of rat droppings are released in the capital’s sewers, amounting to about 800 tonnes a day and 292,000 tonnes a year.18 The problem is particularly acute in the winter – when the rodents sneak up to apartment buildings seeking warmth – and in the summer, the traditional time for building work, when the creatures flee from the drilling and seek new haunts. It is estimated that 25 per cent of fires of unknown origin in Paris are due to vermin gnawing their way through electrical circuits. Given that rats have a phenomenal breeding capacity – they become fecund from the tender age of two months and drop three to four litters of six to twelve rat babies annually, resulting in the potential creation of 5,000 new squealers by just a single couple in a year19 – it is hardly surprising that the city conducts a yearly rat cull. The poor relation of the Rattus rattus – Mus musculus, the humble house mouse – is just as prevalent in the French capital, reaching even the top floors of Parisian apartment blocks, thanks to its greater climbing abilities. No spot is spared unwelcome visitations, however luxurious: a client propped at the bar of the celebrated Parisian hotel Le Crillon, host to many a world leader, is alleged recently to have spotted a mouse relaxing on the luxurious scarlet carpet, completely at ease. But the mouse, at least, has a slightly less nefarious image than its larger cousin: immortalized in countless French children’s folk tales and nursery rhymes, it also fulfils the role of the French equivalent of the tooth fairy.*
* French children leave milk teeth under their pillow in the expectation that they will magically be replaced by coins deposited not by a fairy, but a mouse. One of the most famous French children’s nursery rhymes, Une Souris verte, involves dipping a mouse in hot oil. Believed to date from the early eighteenth century, the meaning of this rhyme – as with so many nursery rhymes – is uncertain. It may originally have carried a political significance that has been obscured by time.
Day and night, year in and year out, the machines of the Paris municipal authority whir and chug, disinfecting, disinfesting, sterilizing, scouring and scrubbing the arches, tunnels, sewers and squares of the city to expunge the unwanted waste products of the city’s wild and domestic fauna. Certain French commentators have seen in this constant battle with nature the aseptic, clinical character of the city space, the disciplining and reduction of the natural world to the garish hanging baskets of the garden city.20 Others – having just ruined another pair of stilettos by skidding in poo – might complain that the Parisian city space is not aseptic enough. Whatever the truth of the matter, it may be as well to observe some golden rules in Paris in the Springtime, that were unfortunately omitted from the famous Sinatra song. That is: always look at your feet, never loiter under a tree, and never leave the gruyère out on the table top.
Myth Evaluation: True. Paris is not only the European capital of canine excreta, but also a good contender for European capital of pigeon and rat excreta as well.
PART 9
LA FRANCE PROFONDE
MYTHS ABOUT THE FRENCH ON HOLIDAY
FRANCE SHUTS DOWN FOR AUGUST
Vacations: the drug of the masses.
LOUIS CALAFERTE, FRENCH WRITER (1928–94), CHOSES DITES, 1997
Anyone who has spent the summer in a French city, or in a town or village close to France’s principal urban centres, will know the feeling. The miserable hunt for a baguette or a newspaper in deserted streets lined with shuttered storefronts, the interminable signs with the bleak statement, fermeture pour congés annuels de 18 juillet de 18 août inclus, or suchlike. The experience is fundamentally depressing. But – and this is less apparent to the foreign summer tourist – while such towns and villages will be moribund shadows of their customary selves, their counterparts on the coast and in the mountains will be buzzing with frenetic activity. In fact, France does not so much shut down for August as migrate on a massive scale: a great, seething mass of humanity, snaking from the cities down the autoroutes and routes nationales in an annual quest for sun, sea and sand. Was it always thus?
Hard as it may be to believe, given the enthusiastic attachment of the French to their time off, holidays for the masses are a relatively recent phenomenon in France. Tourism as we know it was essentially invented by the British, with the eighteenth-century gentleman’s ‘grand tour’ – a stately progression through the cultural highlights of the Old Continent, accompanied by a pompous guidebook, and punctuated by seedy forays to assorted brothels along the way. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, little changed. Tourism remained the prerogative of the rich and leisured classes, labouring peasants, factory workers and servants having little time or energy available for sightseeing. It was not, in fact, until 1936 – with the coming to power of the Popular Front government, a coalition of left-wing parties led by the moderate Socialist Léon Blum that governed France just before the Second World War – that the first annual paid holidays were introduced for French workers by France’s first minister for tourism, Léo Lagrange.*
* His official ministerial title was ‘under-secretary for sport and the organization of leisure’.
For the first time, French workers were entitled to fifteen days’ paid holiday a year (this was extended over subsequent decades to end up with the present right to five weeks’ annual paid holiday, introduced by the Socialist premier Pierre Mauroy in 1982). This leave had to be taken during the ‘normal holiday period’ – that is, the school holidays, which at that time ran from mid-July to the beginning of October.1 But what were the working classes to do with all this newly available free time? Politicians, the Church, and other members of
the French establishment all agreed that workers should spend their leisure time usefully rather than merely idling or loafing. Accordingly, they set about organizing a structured holiday experience that would ensure that the factory worker was as industrious at developing his mind and spirit in his time off, as he was at carrying out his duties in the workplace. Vacations were a time to be spent practising healthy outdoor sports, with plenty of sun and fresh air to counteract the enervating effects of sunless days at the assembly line; a time for city workers to reconnect with rural family members in the provinces; most of all, they were a time to explore and rediscover the glorious patrimony of France, through the splendour of its scenery and ancient monuments. Tourism, as one newspaper declared, should ‘make a Frenchman love his native soil, which he either doesn’t know, or knows too little’.2
Holidays are meant for working people, but the lazy are the first to take them.
ANNE BARRANTIN, DE VOUS À MOI, 1892
And thus began, in France, the golden age of tourism for the masses. In the summer of 1936 alone – the first year of congés payés – 600,000 of the newly issued billets populaires de congés annuels, or cut-price holiday train tickets for the working classes introduced by Léo Lagrange, were sold. The French philosopher Simone Weil, who witnessed the trainloads of those first-time holidaymakers, gave a touching description of their excitement in her notebooks:
‘I had never noticed, until that point, to what extent habitual travellers on the great express trains affected a blasé and indifferent demeanour. Those we were accompanying, on the other hand, made one think of a village wedding: they wept with joy, sang, and made such innocent comments as, “Here’s to life!”’3
Many more cut-price holiday train tickets were to be purchased in the decades to follow, ferrying their bearers to discount holiday villages and campsites run by organizations like the state-subsidized Villages vacances familles, or the newly-founded Club Med. Established in 1950 – fifteen years after Billy Butlin opened his first holiday camp at Skegness on the east coast of England – France’s famous club with the trident logo started its days in a whirl of hedonistic idealism. Originally a non-profit-making association, the first Club Med holiday resorts pooled resources, banned the use of the formal vous form of address, and traded in seashells rather than money.4 Previously élitist activities such as camping – originally invented as a British aristocratic pursuit allied with mountaineering – radically changed image to become the symbol of the French working-class holiday, with 20 per cent of people choosing family camping holidays by 1972. The mountains, too, were turned into new playgrounds, albeit for a more exclusive clientèle, with huge projects in the 1960s to create ski slopes and mountain resorts in the Northern Alps (Tignes, Val d’Isère, Les Trois Vallées and Les Arcs came into existence in this period). Film-makers such as Jacques Tati immortalized the uptight middle classes of those first holiday cohorts in his film Les Vacances de M. Hulot (‘M. Hulot’s Holiday’), unable to let go of their inhibitions in this strange, novel holiday mode. A very French institution – the colonies de vacances – also took off in the 1950s and 1960s, offering organized stays for children at full-boarding holiday camps in the regions. Initially designed for working-class children from cities to be exposed to fresh air and the countryside, these later spread to the middle classes, and exist to this day.*
* The first colonie de vacances, or residential holiday camp for children, was organized in Switzerland by a pastor, Hermann Bion, in 1876. The pastor arranged for 68 working-class Swiss children between the ages of 9 and 12 to be exposed to fresh air and country life, staying in the homes of peasants. The holidays were funded by donations from charitable bodies, trade unions and employers. The idea took off in Europe, the United States (where the ‘summer camp’ remains an institution of childhood), South America and Japan. In 1913 more than 100,000 French children stayed in a colonie de vacances, more than 420,000 in 1936, and more than a million in 1955. Their number declined from the 1980s onwards. Summer camps have never formed part of the childhood experience in the UK to the extent that they have in France and the United States.
Many French people have fond recollections of their childhood days in the colo, as epitomized by the jolly 1966 chanson of French crooner Pierre Perret, ‘Les jolies colonies de vacances’:
Les jolies colonies de vacances
Merci maman, merci papa
Tous les ans, je voudrais que ça r’commence
You kaïdi aïdi aïda.
(The happy holiday colonies!
Thank you mummy and daddy
Every year I should like to go again,
Hip-hip-hooray!)5
Not everybody joined in the joyful chorus of hi-di-hi, however. As honking hordes in Citroën 2CVs flooded roads such as the classic holiday Route nationale 7 in the summer (the main road leading from Paris to the Riviera, immortalized by the French crooner Charles Trenet), the rich quietly packed their bags and fled to pastures new. Meanwhile, the conservative French press railed against the new invasion of the proles, or ‘cloth-capped scoundrels’, in the traditional playgrounds of the rich. To take the pressure off hotspots such as the Côte d’Azur, the French government in the 1960s attempted to divert the crowds of sun-seekers to the adjacent coast of Languedoc-Roussillon, leading to the development of the massive concrete piles lining the coast at resorts like La Grande-Motte (see here).
I am infuriated with certain employees who make sure that they never schedule their depressions at the same time as their vacations.
PHILIPPE BOUVARD, FRENCH JOURNALIST AND HUMORIST (b.1929)
The question remains whether the French still up sticks every August and queue on the motorways leading to the same, overcrowded hotspots on the coast in traditional fashion, even in the days of low-cost airlines and cheap foreign package holidays. The answer is, yes, they do. In fact, in many ways, things have not greatly changed since the 1950s. The French still consider a holiday to be a fundamental necessity of life: indeed, the right of everybody to at least one annual holiday is now enshrined by French law, as a ‘cultural right’.*
* i.e. La Loi sur l’exclusion de Juillet 1998.
Two-thirds of the French population goes on at least one annual holiday a year; not to do so is considered the sign of the most humiliating social exclusion. France is still today the world champion of so-called ‘social tourism’, or state-assisted holidays, and one of the main objectives of the ministry of tourism is to ensure that as many people as possible realize their right to an annual vacation. Thus the French state indirectly subsidizes (through tax breaks) literally millions of euros of ‘holiday vouchers’ given by employers to their employees, and there are hundreds of bursaries and subsidies available to assist those unable to pay to get away. Low-cost, state-subsidized holiday camps and villages still exist, and dozens of charities make it their mission to help the children of poor families or broken homes get away for a break every summer. A standard advertisement for such a charity will typically feature a group of children returning to school in September and eagerly talking about their summer holiday, with one forlorn child standing outside the group, excluded from the conversation. Moreover, everybody does tend to desert the city for the coast at about the same time. Hence, every August, the inevitable journées rouges (‘red days’), when the arteries of the French road network will be clogged with queues of vehicles sporting Paris number plates, bound for the Riviera or Brittany.†
† These days the cars are more likely to be Toyotas than the now-defunct Citroën 2CV. And the celebrated holiday road, Route nationale 7 – France’s version of Route 66 – has now been broken up. This has not, however, stopped enthusiastic owners of vintage Citroën 2CVs, VW Beetles and Fiat 500s from nostalgically re-creating the holiday traffic jams of their youth in vintage car rallies on the old route.
In many ways, the original purposes of the French holiday at its inception – to cement family relations, to build a love of la patrie – still endure, alb
eit subconsciously, to this day. A surprising 57 per cent of French people take their holiday in France, the majority in non-commercial accommodation (i.e. with family, friends, or in a second home).6 One of the consequences of France remaining a relatively rural country until well into the twentieth century is that many French people – both middle- and working-class – still have relatives and houses in the regions, with which they connect during holiday times. It is also a venerable French tradition across all classes to buy a ‘family home’ in the country, for use of all extended family members during vacations.*
* It is a pleasantly refreshing fact that in France, people of all classes take similar types of holidays, albeit on a varying scale of comfort and luxury. Thus, working-class as well as bourgeois French people are equally likely to go skiing, own a family holiday home, or stay in a holiday village. Middle-class folk are perhaps less likely to go camping and more likely to risk leaving the embrace of the beloved patrie by venturing abroad.
Being walled up for a month every summer with the mother-in-law, stepbrother-in-law, and several second cousins twice removed, in a flock-wallpapered suburb of an obscure French town, would probably be an average Anglo-Saxon person’s nightmare, but it is par for the course in France. Conversely, the more traditional French person would probably be bewildered at the idea of voluntarily undergoing the experience of an easyJet flight, to spend a ‘weekend break’ in a foreign country. Yet the budget airline and the package foreign holiday, generally booked online, are gradually taking off in France, especially among the younger generation. This trend has been boosted by aggressive expansion of budget airlines in French territory, in particular Ryanair, which is starting to undercut the supremacy of the previously unassailable Air France.†
They Eat Horses, Don't They? Page 25
