In Europe

Villages hated each other for all perpetuity, and collectively they hated the nobility, the city and the state, for anything which came from that direction could only mean misfortune.
    Lamanère was just such a village. The hamlet consists of a handful of houses scattered along the sides of the valley. About 500 people lived here in the 1950s, today there are only thirty-six. I stay with friends. We go to visit the neighbours, Michel and Isabelle, a cheerful couple in their late forties. In their warm oak kitchen they tell the unswerving story of all little European villages: a local school, lively shops, all gone within twenty years. ‘There were two little espadrille factories here as well,’ Michel says. ‘When they closed down around 1970, the whole village just packed up and moved down into the valley, the young people leading the way.’
    ‘But we were poor, too,’ Isabelle says. ‘Toadstools, blueberries, we ate anything the earth gave us. And we tried to trap any animal that moved.’
    Michel: ‘Everyone went hungry from time to time. We smuggled pigs across the mountains. My mother made espadrilles, too, six francs for a dozen.’
    ‘And half of everything the land produced,’ Isabelle says, ‘went to the landowner. If you had two pigs, one was for M. Cassu. It was still that way in the 1960s. We worked like slaves.’
    ‘Goats go up the hill, girls go down’ was always the saying around here. To escape a life of servitude ‘up the hill’, thousands of nineteenth century French farm girls saw to it that they became pregnant, then leftfor the city to serve as wet nurses to the children of rich families. In some regions, like the Morvan, that even became a major source of local income after the first railways were built. Later, girls began working as maids, or ended up in a factory, which was better in any case than working in the stable. Masons from the Creuse, woodcutters from the Tarn, plumbers from the Livradois, all worked and lived together as fellow countrymen, in little communities, their only goal that of supporting the family farms back home. Yet, without meaning to, they fell under the city's sway. They grew accustomed to greater comfort, to better lighting, better pay and more favourable working hours. In the Creuse someone wrote: ‘The workers’ disobedience grows in proportion to their contact with the emigrants.’ It was not that there was suddenly so much reason for discontent, Eugene Weber wrote in
Peasants into Frenchmen
, his study of rural France at the turn of the last century, ‘it was that there had never before been any reason to hope for a change. What the homecoming worker taught his comrades first of all was that things were different elsewhere, and that change was not entirely impossible.’
    ‘All the parents in Lamanère,’ Isabelle says, ‘pushed their children to go to work for the post office, the customs department, the police or the army. The young people were simply chased out of this village. Becoming civil servants, moving to the valley, that was the only way to escape feudal life. After that came the city folk and the hippie farmers. They enjoyed life here for a while, invested nothing, then left again. The people who were born here, they still love the land, and the old trees. But money ruins everything.’
    I look out at the snowy peaks. The silence here is unbelievable: this exists only at Europe's outer reaches. At night you can hear the beat of an owl's wing. The starry sky makes you dizzy. It is as though all this has existed since time began, the endless forest, the village, the quiet breath of the land.
    I talk to another neighbour, Patrick Barrière. Like all farmers, he starts off with stories about his animals. ‘One of my calves died last week,’ he says. ‘I thought: here comes one of those hang-gliders. It was an eagle. It stood there beside that dead calf, it was the size of a big sheepdog. After that came the foxes and the lynxes: within three days, that calf was picked clean.’
    Then he talks about the land, says there is nothing eternal about it. ‘Oh, Monsieur, these woods never used to go on like this. In my father's day this valley was full of people, and every piece of land was put to use. It was a mixed landscape: woods, but also lots of pastureland and little fields. Not long ago there was a forest fire here. You saw all those old terraces reappear. Yes, the old folks worked their fingers to the bone. And for what? Poverty