Dinner of Rabbit

July 27, 2015

     Michele makes a delicious rabbit stew, which is supplemented by a home-made pork pate Sandrine, a friend who stays with Michele from time to time, has brought from her parent's farm.  It is divine.  Also joining us for dinner is Jean-Noel, a young hydraulic engineer who works for a company that supplies water to farmers.  Jean-Noel is a Toulousain, but did his studies in Paris and is whip-smart.  He is the father of a four year old boy and a one year old girl, but during the week he travels throughout the Languedoc, so he does not get to see them during the week.

     He is well-aware of the controversy over the building of a dam in the Tarn, a project opposed by radical environmentalists and Greens that has been the site of skirmishes between them and the gendarmerie, the last of which led to the death of a young man.  I ask Jean-Noel whether he can make sense of the different claims of the two sides, and he obliges me:

     First off, the dam will be built.  The dam needs to be built because the farmers face the problem of having too much water in the winter and too little in the summer.  As a result, many both dam streams and sink wells in the resulting ponds to meet their water needs.  So far, there are several hundred of these in the region.  The problem if that continues is obvious.  

     Second, when the dam is built what it will permit is the regulation of the water such that the excess of the winter will be held in reserve for the summer.  "Yes", building the dam will change the flow of the river from its present direction, but not to do so will leave the farmers at the mercy of their own devices.  Those who oppose the dam want a return to a world that was slower and produced less, which is a utopian notion.

     Despite Jean-Noel's realism about the prospects for the dam, he remains committed to notions of solidarite: he helped a neighbor dig a trench so that he would be able to lay pipes for water to reach the neighbor's garden:

     The man was hauling water buckets the way they used to, with a board across his back and a bucket of water hanging from each end.  He's sturdy, but he's ten years older than I am, and he was exhausting himself doing that.  So I helped him, I told him what pipes to buy and then we hooked them together and put them in the ground.  And I was glad to do it.

     That's something that still exists in France.  It's a way of opposing the larger forces, getting a group of friends together and figuring out a way of solving a problem the system has laid in our laps.  It's social and it's communal.  On the other hand, opposing the dam in the Tarn out of a belief that each farmer can find his own way of getting water and everyone will find his way is to defend utopian autarchy, a belief in everyone's capacity to be self-reliant that is not born out by the facts, however romantic it seems.

     I do believe Jean-Noel has perfectly expressed the paradox of France: on the one hand it has the intellectual capital of its technocrats, a tiny percentage of the population, products of elite schools.   On the other, it has a population that sees itself hindered by and interfered with by these same technocrats, a population  that reverences the self-reliance of small farmers.  The dream of the average Frenchman is not to get rich, not to receive honors, but to beat the system and the elites who run it, preferably via some idea dreamed up in concert with his copains.

     It is the energy that goes into outsmarting the system and the zest with which the average Frenchman pursues that goal that make the French what they are.  Think about de Gaulle's famous remark about the difficulty of governing a country with 246 cheeses --cheeses are made by individual artisans but the basic product comes from the milk of sheep, cows or goats.  Only a country whose people see themselves as highly individual could produce so many varieties of the same product, and by logical extension, recipes for it.

     Ideas about how France should be governed are like cheeses: there are so many of them competing for pride of place it is almost impossible to assert that one is better than another.  Each Frenchman goes his own way to the extent the law and his ingenuity will allow.  The recent demonstrations of dissatisfaction by farmers from Caen and Strasbourg, which in the first case led them to block access by tourists to Mont Saint Miehel; and, in the second, to block German trucks from entering France near Strasbourg, are cases in point.  Restauranteurs at Mont Saint Michel lost several days' business while the trucks blocked access; those restaurants awaiting deliveries of German meat to serve their diners did not get it, which left them scrambling.   So there is solidarite, although one has to ask whether sometimes it does not get in its own way.

     (Incidentally, Tarbes is a redoubt of the French Communist Party.  I saw the party office as I was driving to Michele's and asked her about it.  She explained that the Pyrenees, being a poor region, was a party stronghold.)