In Europe

and a little food and shelter, that was all.’
    Eugene Weber compared these farmers’ views of the world to the look in the eyes of terrified men in desperate circumstances. In their eyes the village was ‘a lifeboat struggling to stay afloat in heavy seas, its culture a combination of discipline and reassurance designed to keep its occupants alive. Insecurity was the rule, existence consistently marginal. Tradition, routine, vigorous adherence to the family and the community – and to their rules – alone made existence possible.’
    The big turnaround came to Lamanère in about 1940. While the rest of Europe's farmers were turning to mechanised agriculture, in these mountains there went on working with oxen and their own bare hands. There was no way they could compete. The farm children were driven into the factories like lambs to the slaughter. The
coup de grâce
came when the government offered them an attractive price to take over their land and turn it into forest. Within ten years, half the farms, gardens and orchards had disappeared. Today, backed by piles of European cash, a monotonous layer of ‘new nature’ is being laid across the land. Old oaks and chestnuts are being chopped down without mercy. Varieties of trees that have never grown here before are being planted, trees that grow quickly and efficiently. Patrick Barrière has almost no neighbours these days. That, too, is something about which these families knew nothing: loneliness.
    We drink another pastis, and talk turns to history. ‘I've always found bullets lying around the countryside here,’ Patrick says. ‘There were some goings-on around here, let me tell you! In winter 1939 a couple of hundred thousand Spaniards actually came across those mountains. They had lost the civil war and now they could choose: run or die. Over in Prats-de-Mollo it was just like Kosovo: they had to pay for everything, the farmers around here took those rich Catalans for everything theycould get. A loaf of bread cost one gold piece. Lodgings for the night cost a painting.’
    ‘I'm a grandchild of one of those refugees,’ Isabelle said.
    Patrick's grandfather saw it all first-hand when thousands of republicans crossed these mountains into France after the fall of Barcelona. The head of their diplomatic service, José Lopez Rey, talked later about how he had pocketed the key to the last republican ministry of foreign affairs – a village school on the border – and stumbled into France dizzy with scurvy. During his last six months in Barcelona, all he had had to eat was dry rice.
    Close to here, in Coustouges, at the top of an icy pass, the republican soldiers were forced to turn in their weapons. Some of the farm boys were still clutching a fistful of earth from their native villages, a handful of dirt as a souvenir. Others were singing. The French border guards upended their duffel bags on the dirt road, their last few possessions were swallowed up in the mud, photographs blew away across the slopes. A little further along were the freight wagons full of the Russian munitions, aircraft parts, artillery and other assistance the French had impounded. The republicans had made their stand alone in Europe.
    Now there is a little monument beside the asphalt, placed there on the fiftieth anniversary of the
Retirada
of February 1939. ‘Across this pass came 70,000 Spanish republicans. The hearts of one out of every two Spaniards froze.’ If you drive on, you see forests of cork oak and wheat fields with poppies, and after that the earth turns dry and red.
    Right-wing movements come from the countryside, left-wing movements from the cities, at least that's the idea. Farmers, and certainly large landowners, stand to profit from the preservation of property and the status quo, while workers have everything to gain from change and even, if need be, revolution. The social democrats and communists always focused on the urban proletariat, and did not know what to do with the farmer's problems – their theories did not seem to work in the countryside. The Bolsheviks solved the conflict between city and countryside by simply lumping the farmers together in a
kolkhoz
, by deporting or starving them. The rest of the left tended to leave this political terrain largely for what it was, and so to all intents and purposes left it to the ChristianDemocrats, the conservatives, the extreme right and the many farmers’ parties that arose after 1918.
    There were exceptions,