They Eat Horses, Don't They?

by Piu Marie Eatwell

  Naturally, the forest of new private housing estates mushrooming all over France needed a network of new roads to connect their suburban home-owners with the cities in which they no longer wished to live, but to which they still needed access in order to work. With the loi Pasqua of 1998, the French government grandly promised that every citizen should find themselves within forty-five minutes of a motorway. That dream (or nightmare) is swiftly being realized. Soon, every large city – then medium-sized city – then village – had its unholy trinity of motorway, shopping complex and new concrete private housing estate on its outskirts. Today, France has more than 1,400 hypermarkets bigger than 2,500 square metres, over 8,000 supermarkets, and more than 30,000 roundabouts.15 (In fact, over half of the world’s roundabouts are to be found in France, which has more roundabouts than any other country in the world.) Twenty-six square metres of agricultural land are gobbled up by development in France every second.

  By 1998, the number of village and small-town grocery stores in France had declined to one-sixth of the number in 1966, the number of local butchers by two-thirds. One village in two no longer has any local shops.16 Meanwhile, as the village centre turns into a museum, the outskirts are turning into a vast shopping mall. At the entry to the average French village, you are as likely to encounter a forest of placards advertising the local Intermarché, McDonald’s or Décathlon, as you are a rustic stone bridge over a babbling brook.*

  * In this respect France perhaps resembles the United States more than the UK, which has largely evaded the horror of the edge-of-town roadside hoarding. Much of French suburbia, in fact, more closely resembles America than Britain, with features characteristic of the US suburban landscape – long strings of vast shopping malls housed in concrete bunkers, for example.

  Move on from the picturesque centre and you will be sure to be directed to the massive out-of-town shopping complex, or hangar. Take the example of the village in which I live, formerly a hamlet nestling on the outskirts of Paris. The past three years have seen the construction there of an estate of catalogue pavillons in the medieval village centre; an underpass on the main road at the village entrance; and a new, 30,000-square-metre shopping complex (to join the one that was already there), ironically called the Orchards (in memory of the fruit orchards it replaced).

  For most foreigners, the classic French home is a smart Parisian apartment or a rustic cottage: urban chic or rural picturesque. The reality is that it is neither. In France, 56 per cent of people live in a house. Many are maisons de catalogue, or pavillons in the suburbs. And indeed, this is not only the real, but also the dream, French home. According to a 2004 survey, only 10 per cent of French people questioned wanted to live in the centre of a large city, and a mere 16 per cent wanted to live in a village. The majority – 49 per cent – dreamed of living in the suburbs.17 In other words, the average French fantasy home is not a cottage surrounded by lavender fields in Provence, or a Haussmann-esque apartment on a chic Parisian boulevard, but rather… a two-up, two-down in a cul-de-sac. And the French countryside is beginning to reflect that dream: less and less like A Year in Provence and more and more like Neighbours.

  The increasingly suburban character of the French landscape is something that has not gone unnoticed by French commentators. It has been swooped on by environmentalists, who point out that the new, matchbox-like houses springing up all over the countryside have a carbon footprint bigger than King Kong, gobbling up acres of French farmland and guzzling vast amounts of energy, not to mention the exhaust fumes generated by two sets of family cars shuttling back and forth to Paris twice a day. But by and large, the French intelligentsia has tended to treat the suburban landscape as invisible (which, given that most of them live in central Paris, it effectively is). There is no poet of the French Metroland – no Buddha of Suburbia to chart an escape from the prison of the pavillon to the city, no John Betjeman to mourn the misty elm trees that once clustered around shopping complexes like the mammoth commercial park in the western suburbs of Paris (which someone with a black sense of humour called Plaisir). Nor is there a French version of films and TV dramas such as American Beauty, Desperate Housewives or Weeds to reveal the true goings-on behind the twitching net curtains of the suburbs.*

  * This chapter is about ‘village suburbia’, that is suburbia as it is commonly understood in the UK and USA, as the sprawl of mainly private housing around the outskirts of a city, town or village. This, in French, is called périurbanisme. The other type of ‘suburbia’ in France is the banlieue or cité, consisting of vast housing estates built on the edges of the cities, to house the poor and immigrants. These would be known as ‘inner-city’ areas in the UK, and much has been written about them in all areas of French media and the arts (in contrast to the suburbia of the private housing estate). The cités are not the subject of this chapter, or indeed of this book, as they demand special consideration worthy of a book on its own.

  But all is not lost for the French village. A clutch of pioneering mayors have instigated imaginative schemes like Opération coeur de village (‘Operation Village Heart’), a system of subsidies designed to breathe new life into moribund village centres by renovating former schools, factories or shops, and converting old buildings into houses or flats, rather than just going for the easy (and lucrative) option of plonking a new development of maisons de catalogue on the outskirts. But such projects require flair, imagination, and – hardest of all – hard cash. And so the question remains. How do you ensure that the gîte in the ‘picturesque French village’, as touted on your travel agent’s website, really is located in the village of your holiday dreams? How can you know for sure that it nestles in the shadow of a a castle-crowned hilltop, and not downwind of a hypermarket hangar? Research is the answer. There are a number of organizations which certify that a village really does come off the set of films like Chocolat: for example, unofficial guides like Les Plus Beaux Villages de France, or official listings like Village de caractère. (Chocolat, incidentally, was shot in the village of Flavigny-sur-Ozerain, in Burgundy. Don’t expect to see the river there, though, as those scenes were shot in Wiltshire.) Or you could try out France’s favourite village, as chosen from a shortlist of twenty-two in 2012 by an audience of millions on national television: Saint-Cirq-Lapopie in the Lot, a tear-jerkingly beautiful cluster of amber stone houses huddled against a cliff in a stupendous valley (see here). To get an idea of numbers: Les Plus Beaux Villages de France certified 157 villages as making the ‘Beautiful’ grade in 2012. There are a total of 31,927 villages of under 2,000 inhabitants in France. Of course, classifications aren’t everything, and there are plenty of picturesque little places off the beaten track in France, just waiting to be discovered. Just remember that round the corner, also just waiting to be discovered, there will probably be an Auchan hypermarket or an El Rancho grill.

  Myth Evaluation: Partly true (with a lot of exceptions).

  FRENCH COUNTRY STYLE IS SO CHIC

  For two hundred thousand dollars, one can buy an ‘authentic’ French country home on Philadelphia’s Main Line.

  DEAN MACCANNELL, THE TOURIST: A NEW THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS, 1999

  For the middle-class Anglo-Saxon who dreams of owning a few acres of Lot-et-Garonne, the French farm or country house calls to mind an immediately recognizable style of interior decoration. Simple yet elegant, it speaks with the muted tones of bare walls (perhaps washed with lime or a thick layer of russet crépi,* weathered through years of buffeting by the Mistral); the quietly sophisticated greys or vert-de-gris of furniture handed down through generations, upholstered in faded toile de jouy;†the crisp simplicity of a red-checked tablecloth, mismatching yet harmonious cream tableware, or starched linen napkins. Above all, there will be an understated elegance: fine wine will be served in a plain carafe, a salad bursting with regional produce in a solid glass bowl, local charcuterie on a heavy, white oval platter. It is a look of rustic yet refined simplicity, bearing witness to an innate sense
of exquisite taste and quality that, undaunted, shines timelessly through the worldly weathering of the objects that give it expression.

  * Crépi: a roughcast traditional form of plaster rendering for French walls, often a fetching russet colour when mellowed by age.

  † Toile de jouy: a linen cloth in an off-white colour imprinted with complex and usually pastoral designs, originally developed in eighteenth-century France and now indelibly associated with French country interiors.

  But where does this image of ‘French country style’, as we think we know it, come from? Certainly, you would be hard-pressed to see it in real French farms or country houses, except for a handful of top-class gîtes and chambres d’hôtes (many owned by foreigners). The typical French gîte – though it may offer a fetching vista of tumbledown stone and French grey shutters on the exterior – will, inside, likely be a hideous riot of brightly tiled, 1970s-coloured walls and floors, IKEA furniture, frilly curtains, chicken wire, and/or linen tablecloths embroidered with hearts. Have the French never heard of Farrow & Ball? Is it possible that they are unaware of the potential of sisal matting? Are all those interiors magazines with mouthwatering pictures of tastefully renovated French country homes (usually owned by British people) lying? The answer is that they are – or at least in part.

  ‘French country style’, as we understand it, has very little to do with rural France.18 It is, essentially, an interior decorators’ invention. As early as the late eighteenth century, Louis XVI’s queen, Marie-Antoinette, amused herself in her fake rustic village near the Petit Trianon at Versailles, milking cows with monogrammed silver buckets, collecting eggs in ribboned baskets, and pretending not to notice the court functionaries dressed as peasants who swept the horseshit out the way as she approached. Real French peasant homes were rude and functional, using local materials as best they could. What we know as ‘French country style’ today draws its inspiration not from peasant homes, but rather from what became known in France as ‘French provincial style’ – the style developed by the affluent middle classes in the French provinces, in imitation of the grand interiors of the châteaux of the aristocracy. In essence, it was the style of Versailles – of Louis XIV, XV or XVI – scaled down, made more domestic and familiar.19 It was a look that spoke of a comfortable gentility, of links to the past. And for American visitors to Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was exactly what they were looking for.

  In the late nineteenth century, the American writer Edith Wharton – better known as a novelist than for her ideas about interior decoration – was one of the first to see in the country houses of England and France models of inspiration for the American middle-class home, already equipped with all the creature comforts but lacking a sense of history.20 Later, in the early twentieth century, the Manhattan socialite Elsie de Wolfe also spotted the potential of French décor and furnishings to lend American homes a touch of the past. A former actress, Elsie was probably the first woman to dye her hair blue, perform handstands at society gatherings, and cover eighteenth-century footstools in leopardskin prints (on first seeing the Panthéon, she is alleged to have said, ‘It’s beige – my colour!’). She was also almost certainly the world’s first interior designer. In her iconic 1913 book The House in Good Taste, Elsie described her various projects of house renovation – from a crumbling New York brownstone to her beloved house in Versailles.21 Inspired in particular by eighteenth-century French design as embodied by the château at Versailles, Elsie opened up the early twentieth-century American house from the gloomy, claustrophobic prison of Victoriana to the light, open, reflective and trellised spaces that inspired her in the Hall of Mirrors and the Orangerie. Heavy, dark furniture was replaced by light, painted pieces adorned with découpage and chinoiserie motifs, some inspired by Monet’s blue and yellow dining room at Giverny; silk, damask and velvet made way for light, airy chintzes, including of course the fabled toile de jouy. The House in Good Taste is brimming with photographs illustrating the homes of wealthy Manhattanites redecorated by Elsie, where Louis XIV, XV and XVI furniture sits happily next to ample, squishy contemporary sofas, abundant lighting, and all the best of modern conveniences: in short, a version of Versailles with scatter cushions.

  In this process of modernization and synthesis, ‘French country style’ was being manufactured in a similar way to ‘British country style’, the creation of another American, Nancy Lancaster.22 Like Elsie, Lancaster’s hugely popular renovations of British country mansions in the 1940s also created an essentially American marriage of artful clutter, tasteful memorabilia and allusions to a glorious heritage, with creature comforts that would have been unknown to the aristocratic incumbents of the icily draughty originals.*

  * The English country house as a national myth acquired totemic significance just as the country house itself as an institution was on the decline, around the time of the publication in 1945 of Evelyn Waugh’s classic portrayal of decaying aristocratic splendour, Brideshead Revisited. Over time the myth has been fed by a host of National Trust properties and such television series as the BBC adaptation of Brideshead, which inspired a generation of languid, floppy-haired men clutching teddy bears at Oxford. Nor has its appeal diminished, as witnessed by the worldwide success of the ITV drama Downton Abbey since 2010.

  Fabric designers in the 1950s and 1960s were quick to spot the potential of the country house dream factory: in France, Pierre Frey’s luxurious prints featuring sprays of flowers and assorted hounds were guaranteed to give any window the noble feel of a country château, as were the ‘country house’ fabrics produced in England by Liberty and Laura Ashley.

  The most satisfactory of all chintzes is Toile de Jouy. The designs are interesting and well drawn, and very much more decorative than the designs one finds in ordinary silks and other materials.

  ELSIE DE WOLFE, AMERICAN ACTRESS AND INTERIOR DESIGNER (1865–1950), THE HOUSE IN GOOD TASTE, 1913

  The displacement of furniture, fittings and design motifs from their original homes – the châteaux and country houses of England and France – to locations as far flung as New York’s Upper East Side, created what were to become global ‘styles’ in the interior decorator’s portfolio. It is now completely possible to have ‘French country style’ in a villa in Palm Springs, or ‘British country house style’ in a tower block in Tokyo. When the (now half-empty) luxury archipelago, the Palm Island in Dubai, was created, the property developer’s catalogue included houses in a range of different ‘styles’, including ‘French style’. Nor are French or British ‘country house’ styles any longer the preserve of the wealthy. The interior designer Terence Conran, reminiscing about the sensational colours, scents and sounds of his first road trip to France in 1952, has said that this French experience was fundamental to his inspiration for the first Habitat collection.23 With Cath Kidston’s reinvention of British ‘vintage’ and Rachel Ashwell’s French-inspired ‘shabby chic’ (available to the mass market through the American retail giant Target), French and English ‘country style’ can be recreated as easily in a Manhattan loft as a semi-detached in Surbiton. French brands such as Comptoir de Famille and Jardin d’Ulysse make a fortune flogging painted furniture, frilly lampshades, chicken-wire larders, wrought-iron wall sconces, porcelain roosters, checked tablecloths, monogrammed tableware, toile de jouy cushions, and enamel coffee pots, to consumers the world over.

  Which brings us back to the tricky question of the possibly not-so-dreamy interior décor of that dreamy-looking gîte. It looks so very pretty from the outside. But what will the inside be like? Will it cut the moutarde for the English visitor? The answer is, it depends… on the preferred ‘world decorating style’ of the owners. They might be into ‘French country style’ (especially if they are not actually French). If so, and you strike lucky, you might get the tasteful version of this style – a few weathered and well-chosen items, carefully orchestrated to accord with a backdrop of the inevitable Farrow & Ball. If you’re unlucky, y
ou will get the tat that comes with the cheap version of the style – clashing floor and wall tiles in 1970s colours, an extravaganza of overwrought crystal chandeliers, chicken wire over every cupboard door, froufrou frilly lampshades, the obligatory porcelain rooster, clocks made of seashells and embroidered hearts and bows on everything in sight (this is most likely if the owner is French, in particular an elderly French couple letting out their holiday cottage). On the other hand, the owners will just as likely be into neither of these styles; they may be into boho eclectic, Japanese zen garden, African tribal sculpture, or just dirt-cheap IKEA and whatever junk wouldn’t fit into their own home. There’s just no way of telling. There is, however, a glimmer of hope on the horizon. After all, if you really want ‘French country style’, you don’t need to go to France any more. You are just as likely to find it in Paris (Texas) or Versailles (Florida).

  Myth Evaluation: Partly true.

  PART 10

  THE BEST OF ENEMIES

  MYTHS ABOUT THE ENTENTE CORDIALE

  THE FRENCH THINK BRITISH FOOD IS REVOLTING

  There is only one word to say when faced with English cuisine: pass!

  PAUL CLAUDEL, FRENCH POET (1868–1955)

  Has anybody a good word to say for British cooking? Historically, the answer has to be no. British cuisine has traditionally been one of the longest-running world jokes (to Britons as much as everybody else). The sharp-toothed Italian scholar Alberto Denti di Pirajno (1886–1968) remarked that the British, incapable of giving flavour to their cooking, relied on ketchups to give to their food what ‘the food does not have’, which explained the prevalence of bottled sauces and chutneys that ‘populate the tables of this unfortunate people’. In the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf lamented the ‘abomination’ that is British food, the boiling of cabbage, leathery meat, and viscous granular sauce that passes for ‘gravy’; and the American journalist Martha Harrison speculated that ‘what motivated the British to colonize so much of the world is that they were just looking for a decent meal’.