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Their countryside has been stripped of life. In Pictures Ltd./Corbis/Getty Images
At about two in the afternoon on 4 January 1960, a powerful Facel Vega two-door coupé appeared to waltz off a perfectly straight stretch of the Route Nationale 5 flanked on either side by parades of plane trees. The scene was Petit-Villeblevin, 100 kilometres southeast of Paris. Rebounding between trees, the opulent car was very badly smashed. Its driver, the publisher Michel Gallimard, died in hospital a few days later. His front-seat passenger, 46-year-old Nobel Prize winning novelist Albert Camus, was killed instantly. “I know nothing more stupid”, he had said not long before, “than to die in a car accident.”
Camus had accepted a lift from Lourmarin, the picturesque Provençal village where he had bought a house in 1958 and where his family had spent the New Year with Gallimard’s. His wife, Francine, and their twins returned to Paris by train from Avignon. Camus and the Gallimards took to the road with Floc, their Skye terrier. This was the era before autoroutes. The drive north through rural France was along the tree-lined Routes Nationales, with an overnight stop at the simple, Michelin-recommended Chapon Fin inn at Thoissey near Macon and lunch on the 4 January at the Hôtel de Paris et de la Poste, Sens, where the party ate boudin noir aux pommes de reinette and shared a bottle of Fleurie.
Gallimard was a highly experienced driver and, at Camus’s request, nursed the 200km/h Facel Vega at no great speed towards Paris. Quite what caused the fatal crash — possibly a mechanical failure — no one quite knew or knows. Ever since, the beautiful twin rows of trees that have so characterised and even defined great stretches of rural France, planted in a programme to improve trunk roads throughout the country from the late 1730s, have been accused of murdering motorists, motorcyclists and Nobel prize winners alike. Found guilty, they have been chopped down on a Reign of Terror scale. Where there had once been three million of these roadside sentinels, today there are fewer than 250,000.
Few politicians could be more pleased with this result than Jean Glavany, agriculture minister from 1998-2002 in Lionel Jospin’s “Plural Left” government. In 2001, the death of a young motorcyclist in Glavany’s Haute-Pyrénées constituency prompted biker gangs to attack 168 trees with chain saws. In the aftermath of the accident, Glavany said that roadside trees were to blame for 799 deaths in the previous year alone. “We must not hesitate”, he barked, “to cut down the trees when it is necessary.” Conservationists replied that the answer was not to accuse the trees, but to address the causes of the crashes: speeding, drink driving, mobile phone use, poorly timed overtaking and sheer fatigue.
Over the past fortnight, I drove much the same route as Camus and the Gallimards from close by Lourmarin before diverting north of Paris to Calais. For one who has cycled and driven along these roads over many years, the loss of the trees along the old Routes Nationales is devastating. Their disappearance is matched by the increasing hollowness of villages and small towns along the way: berets have long been ousted by logo-emblazoned baseball caps, burgers and pizzas are on offer at every turn, Gitanes dangling from lower lips are a thing of a Camus-distant past. While Lourmarin, like so many Provençal villages, is a tourist “destination” today, villages off the tourist beat are increasingly shopless, shuttered and all but silent for most of their deep-sleeping days. The Chapon Fin inn at Thoissey and the old Hôtel de Paris et de la Poste at Sens have vanished, too.
It’s not just that many former residents have upped sticks for hopefully more rewarding lives in French cities, but that so few people stop by them on road trips whether for coffee or lunch or to pick up baguettes, olives, ham, cheese and cherries because there is nowhere to do so. Nowhere to buy a baguette? Mon Dieu. Reason enough for rural protest. This sorry pattern is replicated through great swathes of France. True, rural depopulation is nothing new in this big country, but the extent of it today is alarming.
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SubscribeI doubt the expertise of someone who refers to Marine « La » Pen and « Jason » Bardella.
What beautiful English, so different from an increasing number of articles in UnHerd, consisting of ‘university speak’ drivel of the type you find in student essays. An unusual cause of the accidents were epileptic fits in those prone to fits caused by the regular flash of sunlight through the trees
The flashing of sunlight through trees. I am not an epileptic but it gives me a headache, breaks my concentration and could easily cause an accident if I did not hold a hand up to shield me from the flashing. It’s particularly dangerous in spring when the sunlight is bright and the trees are not yet clothed in leaves
Well known stroboscopic effect.
Beautiful but not precise enough to tell us the length of time that elapsed between the pair lentement dégusté that bottle of wine and the car crash. It might have been informative.
Apologies Geoff W
Written after long hot drive back home through France, and England.
But no excuse.
Names will be corrected.
Best wishes
JG
Too easy to criticise as a Peter Mayle derivative, but there is an important cultural issue at stake.
A couple of years we drove from Calais to SW France. We relied on Google maps and mainly stuck to the autoroutes, but every so often Google would decide that an hour through France Profond would be quicker and would take us off the highway and through silent ancient villages, empty agricultural landscapes, twisty roads through woodlands. It was beautiful, huge, and rather intimidating. Like a giant hidden world that tourists rarely see. There just didn’t seem to be many people around.
I sympathise with this article to a considerable degree. One of my best holidays was a drive around Italy and France a few years back, and I recall well the twin rows of trees either side of the roads: they create a beautiful effect as one drives through them, and can be quite spectacular from a distance too. I had no idea that they were popularly regarded as a menace and that so many of them had been deliberately destroyed. How tragic.
As to the rest of the article, there are one or two points where I disagree.
« If Paris and the Left wanted to derail its opponents, and if it had sufficient common sense and humanity, it would aim to bring work and life back to rural France. It would see people as more important than automatic machinery and superficial technological efficiency. »
This problem is actually not the sole fault of metropolitan technocracy as implied, it is a longer-running problem in France that has applied for almost 50 years: the near-impossibility of firing employees due to France’s onerous employment laws, with the consequence that the job creation rate is tiny, and business investment has instead for decades been targeted at automation as much as possible.
A common political attitude in France is that businesses exist primarily to provide jobs to people. This might look good on a placard at a demonstration, but it is obviously nonsense: a business exists for whatever reason its investors decide it exists, and anyone else’s opinion on the matter is irrelevant. It is investors, acting in accordance with the incentives resulting from France’s regulatory landscape, who set the pace of job creation in France, not Paris-based policymakers, who have no power to improve the situation without reforming French employment rights.
And we know what would happen if that was attempted.
Inevitably, superfluous jobs cost money, and either the customer pays higher prices, or higher taxes to finance the subsidy, or pay decreases, or the job disappears. It’s how people’s skill are deployed most efficiently (when not hindered by government policy). Even if the jobs were within the state sector, the financial mechanics would be the same, and we would be complaining about paying for the inefficiencies, or job losses.
Investors, by definition, look for a return on capital, even if it’s an unexciting 1% in a building society.
There’s also investing in skills: I can remember when school leavers gained skills useful in wealth creating jobs in the oil industries, car manufacturing, and even the nuclear industry but, in the future, in Britain at least, utilising those skills will likely require moving abroad.
Some things are best made by large organisations, like petrol, computer chips and cars, while other products can gain quality when made in smaller quantities, like many food products, including cheeses and beer. The moderately wealthy could spend their spare cash to improve their own lives. Just think of all the DIY we do, or attempt to do.
And why are we in this situation? It’s because the State skims off so much money as it’s circulating around the economy. If my neighbour and I did jobs for each other, we would likely send half of our income to the Treasury, what with Income Tax, VAT, National Insurance, etc.
One must not forget the huge changes in agriculture over the past 60 years – farm amalgamations, mechanisation (machines today are huge), and greatly reduced need for labour. Today there might be one farm where formerly there were ten (or more). Much as I regret this change, one cannot create a living museum in the countryside except at enormous cost. And who wants to live in a museum anyway? The young certainly don’t. But some rural areas still thrive as do some small towns. Try visiting Aunay sur Odon, obliterated in the war by the RAF, rebuilt in more thoughtful style than anything in the UK, and quite a thriving community with boulangeries, doctors, vets, small Supers, cafes etc, in fact, all local services, including, when I lived close by, a cottage hospital (though there were plans afoot when I left to close it down in the name of « rationalisation » a la the NHS)
I worked for a French manufacturer in the 1990s and was struck by the risk aversion. The idea that they might take on staff and tool up for a new product terrified them – the product might fail and you’d be stuck with a workforce with nothing to do.
Junior staff in Paris had to go after a year before they could acquire employment rights.
I live in a small village in SW France.
Up the road on the way into town is a row of 62 Plane trees. Only on one side of the road tho.
I hadn’t heard of that move to cut them down to improve road safety.
Went to the Petanque club July 13 meal …fireworks at midnight!
Over a hundred people, including members of the ‘old’ families .
Only three English people.
It was a brilliant evening.
Our area returned a Republican.
RN came second.
I just returned from walking 350 km across central France. I walked through many silent villages, seeing no people. But they were there, their cars parked in the driveway and one or two exterior window blinds rolled half-way up. Inside, sitting in the gloom, a deeply dispirited people. Similarly, although it was high summer, many herds of cows were still in their barns. Have the farmers simply lost the motivation to manage the cows in the open? Entering towns I saw the signs naming them fitted upside down, apparently by farmers expressing their anger.
This cannot turn out well.
I don’t know any people that are deeply dispirited……where did you get that from?
Some people are annoyed about the election results, but then, some aren’t.
It’s much the same as England.
The farmers are always angry.
While I sympathize with the plight of rural towns, lining roads with rows of large, closely spaced trees three feet from the edge of the pavement makes no sense from any point of view. I traveled roads like these while living in France in the 1970s and it was a terrifying experience, knowing that a single lapse of the driver’s attention could prove instantly fatal for everyone in the vehicle. Whatever else is done to bring life back to village and farm in rural France, a return to cars hurtling through tunnels of trees definitely shouldn’t be part of the plan.