For anyone going to France over the summer holidays, the heart still has reason to leap. There's the cheap beer, wine and cigarettes at Calais for the booze cruisers, of course, and beyond lies the world's favourite destination, with the British alone making 12m visits a year. Trains get better and faster, with double-decker TGVs eating up the 460 miles from Paris to Marseilles in three hours. Better, that is, provided they are not on strike. The roads are as superb as ever. The once awful accident rate has been slashed by the Raffarin campaign against speeding and drink driving. Drivers touring by car will notice fewer road hogs — and more police with radar guns and Breathalysers at the ready. Jean-Pierre Raffarin himself, however, has gone, brutally sacked as prime minister by Jacques Chirac last month.
Those with second homes in France — 500,000 British, and one French family in four — have reason to be smug. Country-home values went up by 14% last year, and in the past eight years the average rise has been 95%, with 150% in sun- (and snow-) drenched Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur.
That all is well in la France profonde, the country's rural heart, seems confirmed by rising land prices. The value of the average hectare has risen by almost one-third to €4,790 over the past decade. But life is no longer as satisfying or simple as it once was. Between the well-ordered plane trees, beneath the white curtain of crisp linen napery, something has gone wrong. There is something rotten in the state of France.
It shows in little things. Respect for the grandeur of the office made it rare for the French to slag off their president in front of a foreigner they did not know well. Chirac lost that protection with his humiliation in the May EU referendum. "Il est foutu," they say, unprompted. "He's done for." His choice of Dominique de Villepin to replace the luckless Raffarin draws the same bitter scorn: the courtiers as well as the emperor are seen to have no clothes. Small wonder.
The non vote in May was a savage rejection of the country's elite. The silver-maned, poetry-writing new leader is — like eight of his ministers — an unelected functionary who personifies it. He opened himself to ridicule from the off with Napoleonic references to his first 100 days in power. "Has the man not heard of Waterloo?" they growl in the bars.
Warning signs of crisis multiply. Even in small towns, men in their twenties hang about the streets during working hours, a faintly menacing presence and a sign that unemployment among the young has reached 25% and will not budge. On city outskirts, the groups of aimless youths are denser and the threat more palpable.
Discuss a future trip by public transport, and a fatalistic shrug and a murmured ". . . et les syndicats?" follows, a reference to "the unions" and their promise of "mass mobilisation" if anyone meddles with their working practices.
Chat with a small farmer at a market, and the complaints go beyond the weather and the price of diesel to a real sense of disillusion with the nature of life here. In 10 years, agricultural income has fallen by 20%. Our own idea of the French farm as a couple of fields, worked by an aproned maman and a Gauloise-smoking papa, is more fanciful than ever. The average farm is half as large again as it was a few years back. Beef and grain barons, their "farms" highly mechanised, dominate the industry, which trousers one-quarter of common-agricultural-policy money.
The paysans — a proud word meaning "countrymen" more than "peasant" — have seen their numbers plummet to 600,000; at the beginning of the 1990s they still mustered 1m. José Bové, an Asterix-moustached former student activist turned part-time goat's-cheese maker and self-proclaimed protector of paysans, vows to prevent any further decline. He first gained fame when he trashed a McDonald's restaurant. The wine makers of Languedoc have taken to the shotgun, crowbar and dynamite stick to protest that the dusky grapes ripening in the Midi sun will fetch as little as €1 a litre when they are made into wine. Snapping up Mouton Rothschild, Latour and Margot can mean burnt fingers. Values of the 2004 vintage are down 30% and even more for 2003. In the Bordelais and Gironde regions, there is talk of subsidies for distilling wine into pharmaceutical alcohol, and grubbing up the vineyards.
Land prices have stayed firm only because of development potential. They are high where the town French and foreigners want to be — the Haute Savoie, the Gironde, the British enclave of the Dordogne — and low where they don't, such as the Loire and Franche-Comté.
The resentment of "townies" is growing. The British are not flavour of the month with Bretons — nor, as we shall see, with Chirac — who protested at St-Brieuc on Brittany's Armor coast, where they buy one in three of the houses put on the market. The problem, though, is general to much of France. "The 'countryside' is becoming more and more a residential area," says André Thévenot, president of a federation of rural associations, "and tensions between agriculture, tourism and residential use are increasing."
Pollution of idyllic landscapes, by pesticides and people, is growing too. The famous oyster beds of the Arcachon basin were closed owing to suspected pollution. Some resorts, unhappy with the tough criteria needed for a pavillon bleu, a coveted blue flag that covers sanitation, rubbish treatment and beach as well as water quality, are going for an easier, water-only fanion bleu, or blue pennant, instead. And what about the other foundations of French life?
Country people always knew and trusted their neighbours, left their doors unlocked and their roadside fruit stalls unmanned but for an honesty box, until much more recently than in Britain. Crime was a mostly urban affair, at its worst in the drab, high-rise housing estates on the rim of the big cities, where jobless, alienated young blacks and Arabs, sauvageons or "little savages" to the law-abiding, fight each other and the police. Prisons are full, at 116% of capacity.
