They Eat Horses, Don't They?

by Piu Marie Eatwell

  † When the French do venture forth abroad, their tastes are (predictably) fairly conservative. The top European holiday destinations for French people outside France are Spain and Italy; and the top worldwide destinations are the French-speaking Maghreb along with, more adventurously, the USA.

  The general Gallic preference for holidaying in France – boosted by the reluctance of the French to speak English and the system of ‘holiday vouchers’ (generally only redeemable in France) is also good for the national economy. After all, when the French go on holiday, money simply moves from one part of France to another. When the British go on holiday, money flows out of the country.

  One of the consequences of all this is that holidays in France – in particular the long August vacation – are part of the deep metabolism of French life. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Paris during August, when – whilst the tourist Meccas are buzzing with activity – the real, indigenous life of the city lies slumbering like a somnolent beast, ready to lumber into action in the last few days of the month. The very words – la rentrée (‘the return’) – are enough to send shivers down the spine, and induce a febrile quickening of the pulse. The French rentrée is much, much more than the mere return of schoolchildren to their classes. It is the renewal of the whole of French society.*

  * Much more so than New Year, which in France tends to be a fairly low-key affair of a quiet family dinner, rather than an excuse to down vast amounts of alcohol and vomit on the pavement outside a nightclub.

  It is also a return to the obligations of the real world after August’s fling with freedom: like the middle-aged hero of the 1966 film Paris au mois d’août (‘Paris in August’), who indulges in a delicious summer fling with a nubile young model in a deserted Paris, whilst his wife and children are away on holiday on the coast – only to be given the wake-up call when the rentrée comes around.†

  † Paris au mois d’août starred the celebrated French actor/singer Charles Aznavour and, somewhat bizarrely, the British actress Susan Hampshire. The film is noteworthy for one of the most sexually intense yet restrained sex scenes in cinema, in which for a full five minutes one sees nothing but the left hand of Susan Hampshire moving dextrously over a bed sheet.

  While the ‘official’ French calendar year may begin in January, the ‘real’ year starts in September. It is now that the rentrée politique, when the political machinery of the state swings into action again, takes place, and the news finally turns its attention from silly-season interviews with Basque lambs to the serious issues affecting the country; there is the rentrée littéraire, when hundreds of new books appear on the bookshelves (no fewer than 646 in 2012); and there is even a rentrée médiatique, when the television channels present their new presenters and programmes to the public. No doubt because they are hoping that a good rest will have put everybody in a good mood, this is also often the time when the public transport authorities announce the latest hikes in ticket prices. This, naturally, produces a rash of protests and demonstrations, all of which are an assurance that the rentrée sociale is underway. Turning up at the office without a deep tan and a dozen holiday stories at this point is tantamount to social declassification. Of course, in many other countries of Europe – including the UK – it is customary to take all or some of August off. But only in France is this considered an absolutely necessary condition of human social existence, those who are unable to take flight becoming the object of heartfelt pity and commiseration. Likewise, while there is a muted ‘buzz’ of renewed activity in England in September, it is as nothing compared to the seismic upheaval of the rentrée in France.

  Recent signs, however, are that the classic French model of Homo touristicus may be very slowly changing. As France yields to a creeping individualism, the traditional pattern of ‘long’ family vacations taken at prescribed times, such as August, is slowly giving way to a ‘fractional’ pattern of more frequent, shorter holidays, as seen in the UK and the rest of Europe.7 France, it seems, is finally succumbing to the ‘weekend break’, booked online with a ‘hip hotel’. As a result, many traditional French holiday villages have had to scale down their operations (as in the case of Villages vacances familles, which privatized almost half its sites in 2006), or find pastures new (as with Club Med, which has reacted to a dwindling market share by going fiercely upmarket, driving its prices up and a lot of its old customers away). The colonies de vacances have also experienced a reduction in numbers of children since the 1980s, many working French parents opting nowadays to send children to stay with grandparents during the holidays, or attend the flourishing state-run holiday day centres. Nevertheless, in 2011 1.3 million French children still spent some time during the holidays at a colo, or holiday boarding-house.8 Campsites and mobile homes are still going strong as a budget holiday destination, although even here, one is more likely nowadays to find pilates and tennis as the listed activities, than dancing to the ‘Birdie Song’ or a contest for Miss Camping. As in Britain, the days of knobbly knees and glamorous granny contests are drawing to a close, replaced by karaoke evenings and all-night discos.

  Wherever they go or whatever they do, however, August remains for the French a bright beacon in the year, a train for which everybody waits with childlike, impatient hope and expectation. None of which helps the frustrated visitor who ventures out of central Paris to the residential arrondissements or ordinary towns and villages during the hallowed holiday month, only to find the place as deserted as a ghost town in a Western. The only solution, if one wants to be assured of one’s daily baguette in August, is to follow the French: switch off the mobile phone, take the car and a stash of musical entertainment for a long day’s queuing, point the GPS in the direction of the nearest stretch of coast, and hit the road.

  Myth Evaluation: False. France does not shut down for August, the French simply migrate from the cities to the coast.

  FRENCH BEACHES ARE POLLUTED

  Gusts of wind blow on the Breton coast, where the huge petrol tankers are to be dreaded.

  MICHEL COLUCCI (‘COLUCHE’), FRENCH COMEDIAN (1944–86)

  For years, the Anglo-Saxons have been casting aspersions on the standards of hygiene and environmental friendliness of southern European beaches. On the strands of Nice and Deauville, it is conceded, you may be guaranteed a hotspot in the sun and in a centre of stylishness, as opposed to the naff kitsch of a blustery weekend playing crazy golf on the pier at Brighton or Blackpool. But what about the dangers that the eye can’t see? What lies beneath the allure of the Côte d’Azur? Can you be sure that, on the far side of that picturesque and rocky headland, there isn’t an open drain or chemical factory pumping its contents into the sparkling sea? In short, Continental beaches may have the edge on their Anglo-Saxon counterparts in terms of chic; but the question of safety is a rather different matter…

  There is no doubt that French beach resorts have traditionally headed the Continental ranking in terms of their reputation as swinging centres of fashion. In the late nineteenth century, when the first seaside holiday spots were beginning to emerge from the spas and therapeutic bathing centres of the early 1800s, resorts such as Deauville in Normandy, the ‘queen of the Norman beaches’ and the ‘Parisian Riviera’, drew in the rich and fashionable set like a magnet with its fast train link from Paris, casino, racetrack, and then – from the 1920s onwards – chic shopping outlets such as Coco Chanel’s famous boutique retailing her iconic adaptation of the Breton/Norman striped fisherman’s shirt.*

  * For more on the transformation of the striped fisherman’s shirt into a fashion icon and subsequent symbol of Frenchness, see here.

  This was the rich and fashionable set satirized by Proust in À la recherche du temps perdu (‘Remembrance of Things Past’, 1913–27), epitomized by the snobbish and bourgeois Madame Verdurin, for whom the whole of Normandy is an ‘immense English park’, haunt of the despised fashionable Parisian holidaymaker flooding into the seaside towns of the Côte fleurie: Trouville, Deauville, Ca
bourg, and of course, the fictional Balbec, scene of part of the novel’s action. And then there was of course the Riviera proper, which had long been the winter watering-hole of Europe’s jetset, with the famous Promenade des Anglais at Nice standing testimony to the city’s early and well-heeled visitors from across the Channel.

  With the advent of the first paid holiday leave in 1936, however, the complexion of the French coastline was to be changed forever.*

  * For more on the introduction of paid holiday leave and tourism for the masses, see here.

  The thirst of newly liberated factory workers for a space to lay a towel in the sun – however minuscule – led to the massive development of the French littoral along all three coasts – the Channel, Atlantic and Mediterranean – in the postwar years, with much of the Riviera and adjoining coast of Languedoc-Roussillon turning into wall-to-wall concrete. Take, for example, the resort of La Grande-Motte in Hérault, in the south of France. Attracting over 2 million visitors a year, this monument to 1970s kitsch boasts a ring of massive, pyramid-shaped tower blocks encircling the beach, with names like La Grande Pyramide, Le Temple du Soleil and Fiji. La Grande-Motte boasts a tradition of all-night beach parties of 3,000 ravers or more, giving Ibiza a run for its money. A place, therefore, to be avoided (unless Las-Vegas-sur-Mer happens to be your thing). Similarly, at the resort of Fos-sur-Mer in Bouches-du-Rhône, the site of a major port development west of Marseilles, the visitor can enjoy the competing local tourist attractions of a steelworks to the east, an oil refinery to the west, and a fleet of supertankers belching their way across the waves beyond the town’s substantial acres of sandy beach. And you will still have to fight for a place to put your parasol.

  Unsightly development is not the only problem facing French beaches. Environmental issues have been looming large in recent years, notably the threat posed by huge banks of slimy seaweed, known to the French as algues vertes, which now form a bilious green girdle around the shores of Brittany. Environmental campaigners had been harping on about the issue for ages, but the French press maintained its usual discretion on the subject until 2009, when a local vet riding on a Breton beach took a tumble as his horse mysteriously collapsed and died beneath him. Tests on the horse found that it had been asphyxiated by hydrogen sulphide (a poisonous gas that famously stinks of rotten eggs), produced as part of the decomposition process as the bright green seaweed rots on the beach.9 When, during the summer of 2011, a total of thirty-six wild boar and dozens of seabirds were found asphyxiated on Brittany's seaweed-covered beaches, even the French authorities couldn’t sweep the problem under the (bright green) carpet.

  What could have caused the emerald invader to attack this most picturesque part of the northern French coastline? Environmentalists pointed the finger at Brittany’s massive sheep, cattle and chicken farming industry. The problem, it was claimed, lay with the vast amount of nitrates from manure leaching into the sea on a daily basis, stimulating the uncontrolled growth of the green slime. France’s powerful farming lobby vehemently denied this. Faced with a panicked exodus of holidaymakers from Brittany, the government announced an action plan including the daily removal of seaweed from affected beaches (those beaches where seaweed could not be removed on a daily basis were to be closed), and ‘information’ campaigns assuring alarmed visitors that the seaweed, if removed before decomposition, posed no threat to bathers or beachcombers. Indeed, according to the touchy-feely description on the Breton Tourist Board’s website, the new ‘sea lettuce’ is not an invader but a ‘natural part of the Breton ecosystem’, so called because it resembles a ‘giant salad and is edible’. Not that it has featured thus far on many Breton restaurant menus.

  If the Breton beaches are tarred with oil slick this summer, at least our clogs will not be filled with sand.

  LAURENT RUQUIER, FRENCH JOURNALIST (b.1963), JE NE VAIS PAS ME GÊNER (2000)

  Nobody, not even the French, is describing the creature that has invaded the Mediterranean coastline since the early 2000s in touchy-feely terms, however. With their bell-like, eerily glowing purple bodies and trailing tentacles studded with bright red stinging cells, the number of jellyfish of the species known scientifically as Pelagia noctiluca (and popularly as ‘mauve stingers’) visiting the Riviera has exploded in recent years. Overfishing of their natural predators (tuna, sardines, mackerel and turtles) and global warming of the oceans have seen them grow plump and plentiful. A single bank of P. noctiluca, drifting by the seashore, has been known to stretch for over seven miles. Many a Mediterranean holidaymaker has fallen victim to these toxic invaders: in certain areas of the Côte d’Azur, there have been up to 500 emergency cases reported in a single day, and 70,000 people were stung in Spain in 2007. The authorities have been quick to point out that their stings aren’t as toxic as those of the notorious Portuguese man o’war; symptoms of those affected include light nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea, or at worst a touch of lymph-node swelling, abdominal pain, numbness, tingling, and/or muscle spasms. But it’s still not what you came on holiday for.

  Global warming, together with effluent from pig manure, have transformed part of the Breton coast into a reservoir for seaweed.

  JEAN-MARIE GUSTAVE LE CLÉZIO, FRENCH-MAURITIAN WRITER (b.1940) JOURNAL DE L’AN 1

  In recent years, however, the advent of a new European directive on bathing water quality – which all European countries are required to implement by 2015 – has caused a certain amount of panic. As a consequence, many coastal resorts in France have begun to clean up their act. According to the European Environment Agency’s annual report on bathing water quality for 2011, French beaches scored below the European average in terms of water quality, with just 60.8 per cent of French resorts tested having excellent water (the European norm was 77.1 per cent). The European country with the cleanest bathing water was Cyprus, and the country with the dirtiest was the Netherlands. The United Kingdom came near the top of the league in 2011, with 82.8 per cent of bathing water deemed ‘excellent’. (However, heavy rainfall in the non-summer of 2012, which washed a lot of pollution from towns and cities into the sea, together with tougher reporting requirements, meant that British standards of bathing water cleanliness plummeted 20 per cent in 2012.)10

  The question, therefore, remains. How can you tell, before you book a holiday on that idyllic stretch of coastline, that you really will be basking in the glow of the Provençal sun and not in that of an oil refinery? That you will be bathing in the azure of a crystal sea and not the nitrates discharged by an industrial silo into the Merditerranean? The answer is to do your homework. There are a number of classification systems that rank beaches according to cleanliness and access to decent sanitation facilities – such as the Blue Flag international scheme (although, given that Fos-sur-Mer and La Grande-Motte both have blue flags, one wonders about the criteria for awarding them). There is also a rather useful European Environment Agency website in collaboration with Google Earth, which will give a water quality rating for most resorts in Europe. Or – if you really want to avoid bathing in the waste products of the industrial world – you could always head for a far-flung resort such as Bora-Bora in French Polynesia, or the French island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean (although, in the latter case, you might well be attacked by sharks instead). If it’s ‘eye pollution’ that you are most concerned about, you could stick with one of the beaches regularly featured in the top ten most beautiful in France by various polls – such as that of the travel agency TripAdvisor in 2012 (picturesque Porto-Vecchio in Corsica came out top in this vote, followed by the rather more sprawling Biarritz).*

  * TripAdvisor Travellers’ Choice Awards, 2012. The complete list, in descending order, was: Porto-Vecchio, Biarritz, Calvi, Cassis, Juan-les-Pins, Antibes, Cannes, Nice, Saint-Malo, and Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.

  In any event, you can console yourself that, whatever the quality of the water, state of pollution, or sleaziness of a French beach, it will come nowhere near the squalor, say, of beaches in Thail
and. Nor will you have to compete for the choicest sunspots with cows (as in Goa), or with teeming masses of humanity (as on the beaches of China, the most overcrowded in the world). Moreover, in an early evening off-season, it is still possible to drive along the French coast and find spots of breathtaking beauty – such as the rugged coast of Finistère, or the vast sand dunes of Arcachon in the Gironde – where the primitive power of the landscape defies even the most assiduous attempts at desecration. Or, as Proust’s narrator Marcel describes the wild Norman coast of his imagination:

  ‘You still feel there beneath your feet… (and even though hotels are now being superimposed upon it, without power, however, to modify that oldest ossature of the earth), you feel there that you are actually at the land’s end of France, of Europe, of the Old World. And it is the ultimate encampment of the fishermen, the heirs of all the fishermen who have lived since the world’s beginning, facing the everlasting kingdom of the sea-fogs and shadows of the night.’

  Myth Evaluation: Partially true.

  FRENCH BEACHES ARE PACKED WITH TOPLESS WOMEN

  All youth ends on the glorious beach, at the edge of the water, there where women appear to be finally free, there where they are so beautiful that they no longer need the lies of our dreams.

  LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE, FRENCH WRITER (1894–1961), VOYAGE AU BOUT DE LA NUIT, 1932