They Eat Horses, Don't They?

by Piu Marie Eatwell

  The English emigrants to France in the early twentieth century were for the most part Francophile, middle-class, affluent and at least reasonably conversant with French language and culture. In the 1980s, however, a new type of visitor began to arrive from the shores of Albion. Spurred on by former advertising executive and sex-manual writer Peter Mayle’s hugely successful 1989 book, A Year in Provence, subsequent television series such as A Place in the Sun, and the new accessibility via discount airlines of what had previously been la France profonde, the new invaders came not on horses armed with swords, but rather on easyJet armed with cricket bats, Farrow & Ball paint, and jars of Marmite. Many knew not a word of French beyond bonjour and au revoir, nor did they feel they needed it: they were of course coming to France for the lifestyle, not the language, politics or culture. The peak of the influx was in the decade after easyJet’s foundation in 1995: the initial trickle of retired folk quickly became, in the early 2000s, a deluge of families seeking dirt-cheap dilapidated farmhouses or châteaux to convert, from which to run gîtes, keep goats, or even run an English chippy. It got to the point that in certain regions – such as the fabled Dordogne(shire) – the English population was beginning to compete with, or even exceed, the French.*

  * According to tax records, the highest proportion of British expats who arrived in France in the past five years live in Paris / Île de France; next comes the mild, western region of Poitou-Charentes; and then the Midi-Pyrénées and Aquitaine.

  In the Dordogne village of Eymet, for example, there is a local épicerie anglaise selling such nostalgic treats as Wagon Wheels, Angel Delight and Frank Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade (Thick Cut); the local pub offers curry and chilli con carne alongside the local salade de chèvre; and the summer afternoons are punctuated not by the clack of boules, but rather the gentle thud of cricket balls hitting turf and willow and the clink of glasses of Pimm’s.

  In all, there are estimated to be some 200,000 British expats living in France.7 But what about the other side of the coin – the French people living in Britain? Estimates on this count vary wildly, but figures from the French embassy in London suggest that there are as many as 300,000 Gauls living in Albion.8 Of these, two-thirds live in London (now said to be the sixth-largest French city), but there are Gallic enclaves in Scotland (the Scottish French Institute describes itself as ‘a little corner of France in the heart of Edinburgh’), East Anglia (there is now a regular French market in Norwich flogging everything from brioches to Corsican sausages), and Wales (the Madame Fromage cheese shop in Cardiff sells the best and stinkiest of French curds). In London, the exclusive area around the French Institute and Lycée Charles de Gaulle in South Kensington – including the street officially known as Bute Street, SW7 and unofficially as Frog Alley – is a place where the cafés sell more early-morning tartines than bacon and eggs, and earnest young men in turtlenecks discuss Sartre in the French bookshop. The number of French people living in Britain, in fact, has increased every year from 1991, jumping by over 10,000 in 2006 – the largest leap in two decades. England is now the preferred destination for French people in Europe, just as France is for the English.

  What lies behind this latest French mania for la vie anglaise? A study by the French newspaper Le Figaro in 2011 found that for the majority of French expats in England, the biggest attractions are the job opportunities, levels of pay, and individual freedom (on all of which counts England was rated far more highly than France).9 French expats in London can’t get over the fact that, in England, you can get a job as a bartender without a PhD in oenology; that you can set up a new company in a day for a few quid, as opposed to several weeks of complicated form-filling and hundreds of euros in accountants’ and lawyers’ fees; and that when you make a profit, two-thirds of it doesn’t end up being paid out in tax and employee charges. In France, businessmen who start their own thriving enterprises are regarded as vulgar upstarts, the object of envy and resentment; the brightest French students kill themselves to win a place as a civil servant or PDG* of a top French company, not a nouveau riche, self-employed wheeler-dealer.†

  * i.e. ‘President Director General’, the French equivalent of a CEO.

  † If George W. Bush really did once say that the French don’t have a word for entrepreneur, he was right in spirit, if not in the letter.

  The French are fond of sneering at the British tendency – of which the former Conservative premier Margaret Thatcher was an especially ardent proponent – of elevating the lower middle class and its aspirations to a national totem: the ‘nation of shopkeepers’, as Napoleon once famously dismissed it. But it gets ever harder for the French to curl the lip when the country’s brightest and best are voting with their feet, and opting for the nation of shopkeepers over the oligarchy of pen-pushers.

  Nor is Britain the only adoptive home for French expats. Whilst England is the top destination for French expats in Europe, the top world destination for France’s children in travelling shoes is Canada, in particular the French-speaking province of Québec. Over the last decade Québec has seen as explosion in French immigrants, now totalling over 110,000, and in the past thirty years French immigrants have come before those from Algeria, China and Morocco. The number of French people registered with the French embassy in Québec has doubled in the last ten years.10 The reasons for this influx are similar to those underlying the exodus to London – job opportunities, freedom to be oneself – without the linguistic challenge of life in London. But unlike the majority of French immigrants in England – who usually thrive in their host country once the language barrier has been overcome – a lot of French would-be settlers in Québec come back to the Motherland disgruntled. Why? Because of mistaken assumptions as to what Québec is, it appears. The average French emigrant dreams of a land of log cabins and sled-pulling huskies peopled by jolly provincial Frenchmen: in short, an acre of France in America. The reality – to their shock and chagrin – is to be faced with America in French. With a strongly individualistic ethic, a free-market economy, and cuisine that has developed far beyond its French roots and embraced much of its American heritage, the Québecquois turn out to be – frighteningly – Anglo-Saxon. Perhaps it is little wonder that, of the 3,000–4,000 French emigrants to Québec every year,11 18–20 per cent return home within five years.12

  Nor is it just the bright young things rich in ideas and poor in cash who are leaving France for pastures new. Just as in 1981 – after the election of the Socialist president François Mitterrand – there was a stealthy flow out of the richest arrondissements of central Paris, so in 2012–13, following the election of a new Socialist president with an aggressive tax agenda, there is once again a discreet packing of Louis Vuitton bags and a row of limousines snaking along dark roads to private aerodromes. French businessmen, celebrities (including the actor Gérard Depardieu) and industry bosses are quietly finding domiciles elsewhere, shifting assets, taking Swiss or Belgian nationality (or, in Depardieu’s case, Russian). The biggest storm was caused when the boss of the multinational luxury goods conglomerate LVMH,* Bernard Arnaud – the richest man in France – took Belgian nationality in 2012, allegedly to avoid paying the new wealth tax of 75 per cent for incomes over €1 million (a claim that he denied).

  * i.e. the group Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, proprietor of some of France’s most famous luxury brands, including Moët et Chandon, Louis Vuitton, Hennessy, Christian Dior and Veuve Clicquot.

  ‘Get lost, you rich jerk!’ (Casse-toi, riche con!), screamed the headline in the French left-wing daily Libération on Monday 10 September 2012, in an explosion of vulgar invective worthy of the Murdoch press in Britain.

  Now that there are as many pavement cafés and French bookshops in Paris-on-Thames as there are tea-shops and pubs in Dordogneshire, it seems that the Gauls have at long last taken sweet revenge on the invading Britons. Except that it seems they are booting out their brightest and best across the Channel, while becoming a retirement home for elderly Brits. H
ardly the fairest swap. But then, who do the French have to blame?

  Myth Evaluation: True, although more French people are fleeing Gaul these days than Britons leaving Blighty.

  THE BRITISH ARE THE CHAMPIONS OF GARDENING

  One channels Nature, one does not change it.

  VOLTAIRE (FRANÇOIS-MARIE AROUËT; 1694–1778), FRENCH WRITER

  They may have lost an empire and not won football’s World Cup for nearly fifty years, but there is one (hugely popular) area of human endeavour in which the British still pride themselves on being world champions – and that is gardening. In fact, gardening in Britain is a national obsession, whether one has a garden or not (perhaps especially if not), and an Englishman or Englishwoman is never so happy as when on his or her knees in a herbaceous border, doing unmentionable things in wellies with a pair of secateurs. The French, on the other hand (or so the Anglo-Saxon wisdom goes) consider it all a bit of a bore – gardens are for the peasantry, and with such jaw-dropping countryside, what need is there to bother getting grubby with a spade or fork? The average Parisian apartment dweller is perfectly content with a window box of geraniums, knowing those fields of lavender and olive groves are just a TGV trip away. To prove their supremacy on the horticultural front, the British generally point to the great tradition of English landscape gardening that began in the 1730s and subsequently became the model for aristocratic estate gardens and municipal parks throughout the world: from the majestic vistas of rolling hills, winding rivers and humpback bridges of the great early landscaped parks such as those at Stowe and Stourhead, to the later, more intimate, cottage-garden-inspired drifts of humbler blooms in the gardens designed by Gertrude Jekyll in the early twentieth century.

  The pre-eminence of English landscape garden design in Europe from the mid-eighteenth century tends to obscure the fact that, in terms of gardening history, it is the French who were once the uncontested champions of gardening. At the turn of the seventeenth century in Europe, the only kind of garden to be seen dead in was the jardin à la française. The classical French garden had its roots in the Italian Renaissance gardens of the early sixteenth century, which, with their geometrical parterres,* fountains, mazes and statuary, were designed to evoke the harmony and balance that were key to this most optimistic and enlightened of eras.

  * An ornamental garden with paths, hedges and flowerbeds arranged in a geometrical pattern.

  French Renaissance gardens like those at Fontainebleau and the châteaux of the Loire Valley (such as Chenonceau and Villandry) featured intricate knots of cropped box hedges, coordinated floral displays, and rows of pollarded trees interspersed with fountains; the regimented order of the planting merely exemplified the triumph of the civilizing force of man over the natural world.

  The order and discipline of the classical French garden became, over the ensuing centuries, the pattern copied by noble estates throughout Europe. Greatest of all, naturally, was the garden of the Sun King himself: the vast network of tree-lined paths and fountains that made up the gardens of Versailles, constructed from the latter part of the seventeenth century onwards. Not that the Versailles gardens were, strictly speaking, Louis XIV’s own idea. In fact, he nicked the concept from a courtier. The unfortunate man in question was Nicolas Fouquet, Louis’ minister of finance. For many years, Fouquet had been busy embezzling state money to build the most spectacular estate the world had ever seen: Vaux-le-Vicomte, southeast of Paris. This was a massive baroque extravaganza of a palace and sumptuous gardens, designed by the celebrated master of French garden design, the landscape gardener and architect André Le Nôtre (incidentally requiring the purchase and demolition of three villages for its construction). Revealing hubris equal to Icarus himself, in 1661 Fouquet had the temerity to invite the Sun King to his spectacular new abode. The result was inevitable – a wing-clipping that landed him in jail for the rest of his life, his palace and gardens requisitioned by the king, and his head gardener poached to work on Louis’ new work-in-progress at Versailles.

  Everything is good when it leaves the hands of the creator… everything degenerates in Man’s hands.

  JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, FRANCO-SWISS PHILOSOPHER AND WRITER (1712–78), ÉMILE OR, ON EDUCATION, 1762

  With Fouquet languishing on permanent gardening leave, Le Nôtre was free to devote his green-fingered magic to the gardens of his horticultural competitor at Versailles. The result was the glorious, showy masterpiece that even to this day continues to delight and amaze millions of visitors every year. Le Nôtre brought the principles of classical French garden design – order, symmetry, the triumph of man over nature – to a dizzy apogee with a spectacular display of fountains, parterres, lakes and statuary, synthesized to form an anthem to the sun god Apollo (alias the Sun King) himself. Intimacy in this vast space came from the enclosed walls and secret chambers of the celebrated bosquets that harboured secluded benches and grottos, perfect places for romance, intrigue and secret assignations.*

  * Literally a ‘group of trees’, bosquet became the term used to define the rows and clusters of tall, clipped hedges and later trees that formed external alleyways and chambers in the gardens of Versailles and other classical French gardens of this period.

  The gardens of Versailles remained the playground of the French aristocracy for over a century, until the royal family was forced to return to Paris in the wake of the French Revolution of 1789. Then, just as the sun was setting on the Sun King’s legacy, so it set on his garden also. After the Revolution the gardens of Versailles fell into disrepair, the hedges unclipped and the grand pools requisitioned by local villagers to wash their linen. But in any event a new, rival gardening style had already begun to usurp the position of the French classical garden fifty years before the fall of the gardens of Versailles, from the 1730s onwards. This revolutionary style was quite different from the formal geometry of the classical French garden. It was based on rolling hills, clumps of trees, and winding rivers – a ‘landscape’ garden that strove both to imitate and perfect nature. The originator of this rival style was the architect William Kent, who had introduced tumbling ruins and picturesque Italianate landscapes to parks such as that at Stowe House (1730–8), to complement the Palladian architecture of the new mansions he was building. Kent’s legacy was developed and expanded by one Launcelot Brown, immortalized in history as ‘Capability Brown’ because of his habit of telling his wealthy clients that their gardens were ‘capable’ of improvement. Under the stern axe of Brown and his successors from the 1740s onwards, hundreds of acres of formal French-style gardens in England in the eighteenth century had already been guillotined in a green revolution every bit as shattering in its own way as the real one that took place fifty years later across the Channel. The sacrilegious wit and poet Richard Owen Cambridge even dared to whisper the hope that he would die before Brown, so as to get to heaven before it was ‘improved’.

  Every culture has an attitude towards nature. I think the French feel that you have to fit into nature and control it, but live along with it. You cannot violate it without paying for it. It is not necessarily hostile, but you have to be careful to keep nature civilized.

  LAURENCE WYLIE IN CONTEMPORARY FRENCH CULTURE AND SOCIETY, 1981

  The landscaped, ‘gardenless garden’ soon caught on in Europe as the latest fashion, not least because acres of rolling, sheep-cropped grass were a lot easier to maintain, in a war-torn and post-revolutionary continent where obedient peasants were in short supply, than the clipped box hedges of the classical French style. Not that the French ever admitted that it was the English who invented the new style. Even to this day, they tend to prefer to call the English landscape garden the jardin anglo-chinois (Anglo-Chinese garden). And strangely, recent research shows that they may have a point. Among the myriad influences that came together to culminate in the eighteenth-century landscape garden, there were the tales brought back by Jesuit priests from the court of the Chinese emperor, of magnificent gardens with stately pleasure domes i
nspired not by art but nature, where covered corridors linked sequences of pavilions with ‘viewing platforms’ cunningly set up so that the observer could witness the sound of the wind in the bamboo, rain on banana leaves, or a shaft of moonlight streaking the fins of a leaping goldfish. The philosophy of Chinese gardening essentially drew its inspiration from the natural world, of ‘art imitating nature’ rather than the other way round, as in classical French garden design. The explosion of interest in chinoiserie in the early eighteenth century could well have led the English to the appreciation, then subsequent imitation, of Chinese garden design; but they were never to admit it. The Whig politician Horace Walpole, along with his friend the poet Thomas Gray, were virulent about scurrilous French attempts to characterize the English gardening style as a copy of the Chinese. According to Walpole, the naturalistic English gardening style could only have come from the ‘opulence of a free country’. Richard Owen Cambridge also weighed in: ‘Whatever may have been reported, whether truly or falsely, of the Chinese gardens,’ he wrote sniffily, ‘it is certain that we are the first Europeans to have founded their taste.’13

  Whatever the truth of its origins, the English (sorry, Anglo-Chinese) garden was to replace Versailles as the new European norm, laying the parameters of landscape gardening and subsequently public parks in the centuries to come. It was to be the basis of many mid- and late-eighteenth-century French parks and gardens, such as Rousseau’s garden at Ermenonville, the Désert de Retz at Chambourcy in the Île de France, and the romantic Parc Monceau in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. The French, however, somehow never made ‘natural’ really look natural: even in the case of Parc Monceau and the fabulously fantastical ravines of the garden at the Désert de Retz, the panoramas of French landscape gardening are highly stylized, and there are a few too many of the ubiquitous follies or fabriques dotted about. (Parc Monceau alone boasts scaled-down versions of an Egyptian pyramid, Chinese fort, Dutch windmill and Corinthian columns.) Nevertheless, it is all too easy to forget that, while the naturalistic landscape park may have been originally an English (and/or Chinese) invention, the French did influence its later development. This is particularly true of the English landscape gardener Gertrude Jekyll, whose work with the architect Edwin Lutyens in the early twentieth century reduced the vast proportions of the old, Capability Brown-style parks to the more intimate, manageable proportions of a garden suited to the Edwardian home. It was Jekyll who replaced Brown’s giant vistas with intimate spaces (‘rooms’) clustered with cottage-garden roses, drifts of bulbs and herbaceous borders; it was she who introduced the now classic formulation of ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ colours for plantings; and she was in no little measure inspired by the works of Impressionist painter Claude Monet in the painterly strokes of her colour schemes. (Monet’s garden at Giverny, created in the 1890s, contains the water-lily pond made famous by his sequence of paintings that take it as their subject. The vivid colour-blocks of the plantings in Monet’s garden are reminiscent of the gardens of Gertrude Jekyll.)