I sometimes think the real France — the one that people love — exists only in
the imagination. In reality, you can sometimes find glimpses of it, but even
those are harder to come by these days.
I suppose we all have a similar idea of what that “real” country is. It’s
something you find in the pages of Proust and Flaubert, in the paintings of
Millet and Monet, in the smell of the Métro and in the landscape of the
Auvergne. You can see it in the tight lips of the patronne of the hotel in
the town square with its flowered wallpaper, failed plumbing and rattling
china-lozenge door handles. It’s in the plane-flanked avenues of the routes
nationales; it’s in the family inns of Burgundian villages; it’s in the old
Michelin Red Guides with their crossed-out dog’s heads.
Modern technology came late to this sparsely populated country, and after 10
minutes down a D road you were back in a way of life that had disappeared
from England decades before. As close as Normandy and as recently as 1975,
you could effectively travel back to a pre-war, prelapsarian world, where
Jacques Tati was your postman. You were through the looking-glass all right,
in a world where even the village cafe cooked food better than you’d ever
tasted at home; but something about it seemed mysteriously insubstantial. It
had a dreamlike quality.
Critics of the country — and it has never lacked for them — will say that this
sense of otherworldliness is caused simply by the fact that France has, over
the centuries, failed to take sufficient interest in the lives and cultures
of other countries. Believing itself to have the greatest thinkers, soldiers
and scientists, as well as the most naturally blessed landscape in the
world, France developed a sense of profoundly contented self-reliance that
made it a world apart. “
Heureux comme Dieu en France”, they said: as happy as God in France. Therein
lay its glamour and its charm; therein, also, lay a danger.
If you look at France today, you see a troubled country. Most people feel
crushed between the Anglo-Saxons on one hand, with their free-marketeering,
awful films and foreign invasions; and, on the other, by the unstemmable
tide of North African/Arab immigration that has started setting fire to the
cities.
It is also fair to say that French literature and art is at such a low level
that even a professional francophile such as Edmund White, long a resident
of Paris, could claim in his recent book, The Flâneur, that France has only
one artist and no writers of note. And the cuisine, once the brightest
feather in the cockerel’s plumage, has, I think any objective traveller
would admit, been eclipsed by the cooking of California, Italy and New York.
So it is an unhappy period, certainly, though in my opinion it is only that: a
period, or phase, because one thing you learn from French history — from the
terrible carnage of Verdun, the humiliations of Sedan and Vichy — is that
this is a people of great resilience.
And one should not forget, either, the scale of what one might call the French
Project: what this country is trying to do is to preserve the sense of
itself as nothing less than the pre-eminent world civilisation. Such grands
projets will always have their wobbles.
The bases of France’s claim to pre-eminence remain heroically intact. First,
there is the land itself. From Cape Finistère to the Riviera, via the Alps,
the Dordogne and Provence... There is no more beautiful or more varied
landscape in the world. I remember once driving from Avignon to Sarlat
across the foothills of the Massif Central in late summer, and my companion
and I had to stop regularly to reassure one another that this was not a
dream. Then think of Proust’s train puffing to Balbec: another paradise of a
completely different, northerly, kind. It is unfair on the competition
because it is at least six countries in one.
Nor does the artistic legacy grow dim; if anything, it looks richer by the
year. I remember going to the Musée d’Orsay soon after it had opened in, I
think, 1987. One room after another gave visions of such talent, such
mastery, that you began to wonder if it were some sort of optical illusion.
Millet, Courbet, Degas, Cézanne... On and on... Hundreds and hundreds of
these serene works so deeply connected to the country that had produced
them. Afterwards, I sat outside on the quay, staring into the waters of the
Seine, and I had that feeling that people call “humbled” — by which I think
they really mean “proud”. To think that such genius had been concentrated in
one place over such a short period...
Within the countryside and depictions of it, there are the buildings. I
suppose their appeal is more open to question than that of the landscape and
the art; but I have to admit that I have always loved those small northern
towns: the hôtel de ville with its black slate roof, the cobbled square,
narrow shuttered streets — all somehow suggestive of intrigue and
clandestine romance. Anyone can admire Versailles, the Sacré Coeur, or the
great Provençal farmhouses with their turquoise-blue shutters. But I think
if France is in your blood you really have to love those undistinguished
little northern towns best.
To be less fanciful: the planners have done an almost universally good job on
the main city centres. Try Rennes or Troyes or Limoges — places you wouldn’t
necessarily visit as a tourist — as well as the more famously protected
centres of Toulouse, Bordeaux and Paris. All are preserved without having
been pickled or themed or made twee. (If only the planners had been as
strict with the ribbon developments on the way in; and I fear there is
something about the Cartesian intellect that has yet to master the function
of the roundabout...)
Landscape, art and architecture... Clean bill of health. And the wine, of
course — though much more severely challenged than most Frenchmen will ever
know or dream — remains the world’s best. Some New World pinot noir is more
satisfying than a thin burgundy, but surely no cabernet has ever bettered
that produced by those elegantly curtained chateaux on the banks of the
Gironde estuary, a place of profoundly mysterious charms.
So what, as they say, is not to like? Granted, the restaurants are in
temporary eclipse, but even here I see signs of hope. A couple of years ago,
I was having dinner with three friends in a typically pompous
Michelin-starred place. There were no other diners, and the waiters began to
get the giggles. After a bit, we persuaded them that laughter was fine: they
could behave like real people, bring the food sensibly and have a chat and a
cigarette. It was wonderful; it felt like the beginning of the end for that
school of joyless pretension.
And in the village in the Lot where we have been for the past five summers
there are three good restaurants within 15 minutes: one smart, one middling
and one cafe where you can ring ahead and order lunch for 25, including 15
children, and it’s ready when you get there, with truffle or cep omelettes,
fried potatoes, green beans in garlic, green salad and carafes of rosé.
The other natural resource of France, of course, is its people. They can be
proud, they can be shy, they are almost always private and hard to get to
know, but I have never laughed as much or found greater friendship or
greater generosity of spirit than in France. This extends from official
ceremonies at Notre Dame in Paris to family gatherings in Brittany to dawn
bike rides down Mont Ventoux with the local football team.
I used to have a book called French Leave by Richard Binns, which was a
self-published, dotty, obsessive, but largely dependable guide to
half-hidden France. Binns knows his stuff and it would be great to have a
21st-century revision. Michelin is still a good gazetteer for town hotels
and garages, but, by its dogged promotion of 1970s oopsi-la cuisine, stands
charged with causing a potential new generation of chefs (to say nothing of
diners) to lose interest. The descriptions in Gault-Millau are attractive,
but too often turn out to be wishful thinking. Petit Futé: Best of France,
which I used over the New Year, appears to have been translated by the late
Sir Edward Heath.
So, in the absence, as far as I am aware, of good guidebooks, here are some
places worth visiting. Clermont-Ferrand and Vichy are fascinating.
Oradour-sur-Glane, near Limoges, where the Germans set fire to the
inhabitants in 1944. The Jura district in the east. Belle Isle, Vannes and
Auray, in Brittany. Saint Antonin, near Montauban. Beaugency, on the Loire.
Mercurey in Burgundy. Arras, near the battlefields of the first world war.
And here, to end with, are some answers to questions from readers. 1 If in
doubt, Côtes du Rhone. 2 Juliette Binoche or Sophie Marceau: either would be
an excellent choice. 3 Tenez la droite. 4 Reculer pour mieux
sauter is not an instruction for frying potatoes. 5 La morue aux
truffes at the Dome in Paris or Le tout agneau at the Hôtel
Terminus in Cahors. 6 Château Léoville Barton, but Château d’Angludet is
better value. 7 Les Enfants du Paradis. 8 Proust, obviously. 9 Cédez le
passage, plouc! 10 Bon voyage.
