The Other France: Life Among the Peasants

France. The word conjures up images of delicious wines, beautiful girls and elegant dinners for two at Maxime's. To the American, France means little more than a vacation in Paris, an excursion to Versailles, or perhaps a week loafing on the beaches of Nice.

There's more to France, however. There is, for instance, the vastly different world of the peasant, as I found out while living and working last summer on a small farm in southeast France. Life was very different there, and I learned a lot from the family I stayed with--Henri and Charlotte Vallet and their 23-year-old son Gilles.

The Vallets consider themselves peasants, and in a way they are. They begin work each day at 7:15 a.m. and continue until 8 p.m., breaking only for lunch. For six days each week they worked like that, and on the seventh day they rest--and a much-needed rest it is.

Not only are the hours long, but the work is almost always monotonous hand labor; and many times this summer I felt I had been transported back in time several centuries. We spent most of the time picking fruit: peaches, pears, and cherries. Each day, every day, we slowly wound our way among the trees, picking the fruits as quickly as we could, as time ticked by ever so slowly. The Vallets had only 30 acres, less than one-tenth the size of the average American farm, and so every last fruit had to be picked, and not a peach could be wasted.

Work was the same for everybody else in the little village, Moras En Valloire. Next to our peach orchard was a small tobacco field, where a father and son worked each day from early morning until late at night. From where we picked peaches we could see them, bent over like tumbled-down scarecrows, pulling the weeds out by hand as they slowly moved up and down the rows.

It was another family, however, the Garcias, who impressed me the most. They worked for the Vallets, although the father also had a factory job which began each morning at 5 a.m. After getting off at 1 p.m., he joined us in the fields until 8 p.m. He worked all day Saturdays, too, and he "rested" Sundays by fixing up his houses or by picking fruit for his family's table. He spent virtually all his waking hours working on one monotonous task after another.

The peasants in Moras En Valloire have little to look forward to but more work. The only respite from the toil comes with death--all the peasant's life he is little more than a tool, bobbing up and down the rows, pulling the weeds or picking the fruit. For me it was an adventure. albeit not always a very exciting one. For them it is the only life they have ever known--and the only life they will ever know.

But even in the dreariness of their lives the Garcias were cheerful. Garcia would laugh and smile, his beautiful wife would sing, and his children would play jokes on one another, their laughter defying the meagerness around them. Even when Vallet was openly contemptuous of them, taunting them because they owned no land, the Garcias ignored the insults and laughed among themselves. That they could be so cheerful with seemingly so little reason left an indelible impression on me.

In a sense, the peasant ethic of the villagers is an anachronism, a relic of the past which is out of step with the 20th century. Many of the villagers are reasonably well off, but they are so used to working that they can never take the time to enjoy their profits. The Vallets have a large bank account, but they are always too busy working to spend the money. The work ethic is so deeply ingrained within them that they simply can't bear to be idle, to work less than their full capacity.

Still, the 20th century is slowly creeping into Moras En Valloire, transforming the village. The peasants have kept their work ethic as a legacy from their ancestors, but many of them own modern conveniences very much at odds with their traditions. The Vallets, for example, own a TV, and while eating dinner we often watched detective shows (Kojak and Mannix were Vallet favorites). Two tractors stood outside the house, but the Vallets used them only when machinery could do the job better than a person; and that was rare.

The village is also losing its sense of history. As in most small French villages, history is everywhere in Moras En Valloire. Julius Caesar named the town when he and his army camped there one night in 58 B.C., and a huge manmade hill just above the town marks the burial site of an ancient Celtic hero. A large 11th century feudal castle had loomed over the village until Cardinal Richelieu ordered the castle destroyed in 1627, but its crumbling stone walls still linger.

Despite the history of the area, the villagers are quickly forgetting their heritage. When I asked town residents the date of the village church, each gave me a different answer, ranging from the 10th to the 18th centuries. After digging through some old records, I traced it back to the 12th century, but no one was interested. These days, only one-fourth of the church pews are filled for Sunday Mass, most by elderly men and women who come early to visit friends interred in the church cemetary.

Above the church, on the hill above Moras En Valloire, is the Madonna, a huge statue erected in 1854 to watch over and protect the village. She was once the pride of the town, but today the short path to her base is overgrown, and she rarely receives visitors these days. At one time she was lit up at night, but the lights were smashed a decade ago and nobody has taken the time to replace them.

Walking down to the village, one notices the ancient town fountain, partly hidden by the new power substation. Farther down the hill, one catches a glimpse of the 11th century door to the city as it gracefully arches across an unused alley. The tattered remains of some gaudy political posters stick to an old brick wall. Politics have divided the town, especially since a city council election last year which pitted the town's barrelmaker against a prominent pear farmer.

It is the young who are most responsible for the changes in Moras En Valloire. They retain the peasant work ethic, for that is too deeply rooted in their psyches to discard; but generally they tend to be impatient with tradition. Instead, they prefer the future with its glittering promise of a new and better life ahead.

As they forsake their heritage, they seek a substitute culture from America. Blue jeans (preferably American-made, even at $40 a pair) grace the derriere of virtually every French tennager. Far more American university t-shirts are seen in French villages than in American towns. American TV shows, very popular in France, give French teenagers new ideas about how to act and what to think. One day as I walked down the village's main street, a 10-year-old boy flashed me the thumbs-up sign and groaned, "Ayyyyyyyyy," a perfect imitation of his new hero, "the Fonz." American culture has also intruded its way into the French language, producing French-accented words like week-end, hold-up, stop, gas-oil, and blue-jeans.

The village still retains a few bastions of tradition. A French village wedding, for example, is nothing to trifle with. It begins in the afternoon with a civil service, immediately followed by a church wedding. After that comes a huge dance party, held either inside or outside, with dancing, drinking, and laughter continuing all night long.

Everybody dances together, young and old alike, and every now and then the whole party forms a giant human chain which cavorts about before ending in a hopeless jumble of arms and legs. The music and dancing vary from French folk to American rock. Even my patron, M. Vallet, tried boogeying to the strains of Saturday Night Fever.

According to tradition, the newlyweds sneak away at midnight, but the dancing and partying continues unabated. Finally at about 7 a.m. all the young people pay a visit to the new home of the Bride and groom, bursting into their bedroom and making them drink a vile concoction of hot chocolate, champagne, wedding cake, and toilet paper, all neatly contained in a chamber pot.

Besides invading nuptial bedrooms, one source of village thrills is driving. For thrills, European driving beats roller coasters hands down. Driving full speed is the manly thing to do, and everyone delights in weaving their small cars around other small cars, usually at the most dangerous intersections. European drivers have discovered that three cars will just fit on a two-lane road, so they often pass even when another car is coming, knowing that they can probably still squeeze by. White-haired French grandmothers drive like American teenagers, and as for the French teenagers--their driving makes the Grand Prix look like a drivers' safety course.

This reckless tendency manifests itself in more mundane affairs, like farmwork. Not only did the Vallets let me drive the tractor on the road--reckless in itself--but they generally acted rather casually about farm safety. One day, for instance, we needed to refill the gas tank of a steaming-hot diesel engine. We were irrigating a cornfield and the engine had been continuously pumping for several hours. The engine was incredibly hot, so hot that I expected it to explode at any moment. Several hundred people had just recently been killed in a liquid propane truck explosion in Spain, and I vividly recalled the newspaper photos of bodies turned to charcoal. So when Gilles Vallet suggested refilling the fuel tank, I discreetly walked off to examine the corn at the other end of the field.

Nicholas, viens ici," he called; so with pounding heart and sweating hands, I joined him near the engine. To my horror he didn't even shut off the motor, much less allow it to cool off. Impatiently, he told me to hold the funnel as he poured the diesel into the tank. I did so with much trepidation, half-expecting the diesel to splash onto the red hot exhaust pipe six inches away, blowing up all to kingdom come at any moment. I really grew panicky when Gilles switched his lit cigarette from his right hand to his mouth. Even that I could live with until he leaned over to peer down into the tank to see if it was full. All I could see was that huge, red ash, growing longer by the moment, poised directly above the diesel, ready to fall. Just when I was sure the ash would drop into the tank, he stepped back and tossed the cigarette to the ground. He probably never knew why I was so shaken that afternoon. I could not, of course, have pointed the danger out to him. If I had, he would have shaken his head furiously to deny the charge, sending the sturdiest of ashes into the cauldron below.

Most of the summer was not nearly that interesting, however. Most of my time was spent picking fruit to the ever-so-slow ticking of my watch. The peasant lifestyle was very different from anything found in America, and especially different from life at Harvard. Intellectualism was worthless in Moras En Valloire--nothing counted except how quickly a person could pick the peaches. It was a hard life, one in which a person spent most of his waking hours working, with few diversions and only the simplest of pleasures.

Yet it is the memory of the Garcias that I recall most vividly. Although they will probably spend their entire lives only working for others at the most menial of tasks, never quite getting ahead, they are cheerful. At the end of their lives, all that they will have to look back on will be a life of toil and a lot of warmth and friendship. But in their own way, the Garcias taught me a lot that Harvard never could.

First, they taught me that life as a French peasant is just as honorable as life as a Wall Street banker. Second, with their cheerfulness and optimism, they taught me that happiness is more a product of a person's mind than of his circumstances.

This time of year, the peasants in Moras En Valloire are busy pruning the fruit trees. The Garcias are probably doing the same. If it is daylight now in France, the family is out in the fields, working hard, just as they did yesterday and just as they will do for all the tomorrows left in them. But while they work, the Garcias smile, laugh, and sing, defying their poverty and sharing with each other the joys of the simple life that is the lot of the peasant.