In Europe

actually quite arrogant. The real work, normal power, they thought that was beneath them.’
    Yet France would never be the same after 1968. The May Revolution had knocked de Gaulle's paternalistic regime off its pedestal. The general's power had always resided in his ability to mobilise all Frenchman against a common enemy: the Germans in 1940, the Algerian ultras in 1958. But, in the unclear situation of 1968, that no longer worked. There was no common enemy; the people in question were often the children of de Gaulle's own constituency. One had to apply tact and compromise, and that is where he failed. The criticism from the farmers and the merchants, his traditional supporters, grew rapidly throughout that summer and beyond. Finally de Gaulle tried to save his own skin one last time with an ‘all or nothing’ bid. He linked his political future to an insignificant referendum about regional relationships. On 27 April, 1969, his proposals were defeated by a tiny majority, and he drew his own conclusions. Under his successor Georges Pompidou, who was elected president in June, various reforms in the spirit of May 1968 were introduced anyway, now without furor.
    General de Gaulle was finally at liberty to meet with a political leader who he had always held in great – if unspoken – admiration: Francisco Franco. The two men dined together on several occasions, but it did not result in a lasting friendship. When push came to shove, the theatrical de Gaulle remained a democrat, albeit a formal and primitive one. He was not, like Churchill, a man of the substantive democracy, of the heated democratic debate, of the democratic compromise. He sought the people's mandate, then went on to regard that as a licence to act as he saw fit. In that way he prefigured later Southern European leaders like Silvio Berlusconi and José María Aznar. But whatever else he was, he was not a dictator who tried to bend the press and the courts to his own will.
    ‘The country could accept him on his own terms, in other words unconditionally, and without demanding from him a programme,’ his biographer Brian Crozier wrote. ‘Or else it could stew in its own juice. If it chose the latter he would, as he said on several occasions, return to his sorrow and his loneliness.’

Chapter FIFTY-FIVE
Lourdes
    MY BUS IS PARKED ALONG THE CREUSE, AND I EAT MY APPLE BESIDE the old building where the villagers of Chitray once did their laundry. The stones are warm in the October sun, a squirrel is knocking nuts from the trees, the river churns. The spring water continues to run into the basin, day after day, but the women who laughed and gossiped here for centuries are gone, they are forgotten and lie now in the churchyard, just like the women from the wash houses in all the other villages of France.
    One of my brothers lives close to here, in a dot on the map with about a hundred inhabitants. In 1900 there were 1,400 people living in that village, most of them in dire poverty. In the summer the men earned a little money working as masons in Paris, and when concrete was introduced and they could also work there throughout the winter, they took their wives and children with them. This was the first wave of rural families to move away. After the war, when the big factories in the cities began taking on thousands of workers, the second wave came. Today there are only retired people living in the village. ‘Every once in a while someone from Paris buys a house here,’ my brother says, ‘but after a couple of years most of them throw in the towel.’
    All over Europe I had seen the remains of that farming culture, the infrastructure that was still shaping the entire world at the start of the last century, and that had been wiped away a hundred years later: ruined farmhouses in Spain and Italy, abandoned wash houses in France, overgrown fields on the slopes of the Pyrenees, empty village hovels in Poland and Portugal and forgotten kitchen gardens in Vásárosbéc. In cities everywhere I had met former farmers and their children, adrift in the hugegrey blocks of flats in Bilbao, in the churches of Warsaw, in the refugee centres of Holland.
    In 1951, more than forty per cent of Italy's population lived from agriculture and fishing. By 1972 it was seventeen per cent. In Holland, one out of every five families lived on a farm in 1950; fifty years later it was one out of every fifty. In France in 1999, some 15,000 villages were in danger of vanishing