Right, so, reason number 9: The Patrimony.
The French are very proud of what they call “Le Patrimoine” and what we in the New World would call “a mountain of old rocks”.
Now, I don't mean this to sound disparaging. The fact of the matter is that those old stones are piled together in very interesting ways: castles, public buildings, churches, uh, castles, bridges, and, uh, castles.
Here in southern France, you can find more old castles than new buildings, and they are amply supplemented by old mansions, and even old private homes.
It seems that every Thomas, Richard, et Herold (Tom, Dick, and Harry to the rest of us) who had a “titre de noblesse” found it compulsory to build a castle, and everyone who came into wealth, be it by his or her wits or, most commonly, by inheritance, found it necessary to build a HUGE house of 50 rooms of which only 10 were lived in.
All of these wealthy people and nobles rapidly found they could not keep up the maintenance of their follies, so they gave them up to the state. This is how the French came to own so much patrimony.
Of course, the state—notably cities such as Paris—have found that said piles of rocks can be turned into gold by the machinery of tourism. The french quickly discovered that people who have much less patrimony in their own countries, or who have a different kind of patrimony, love to come here and take pictures of french patrimony. Witness the mobs of the latest “nouveaux riches” of the world, the Chinese, who come to take photos of everything that even hints at being old: buildings, paintings, people. It's as if they have forgotten they have their own pile of old stones, the Great Wall. Or maybe they have tired of taking pictures of that.
In our neck of the woods, we have oodles of patrimony, mainly of the graceless castle and huge mansion variety. My wife has dragged me to two notable examples of each: the Chateau d'Uturbie,
and the house (if you can call it that) where Edmond Rostand lived, he of Cyrano de Bergerac fame.
The first is an old castle owned by the same family since the 14th Century, according to the slick website of the place.
http://www.chateaudurtubie.fr/urtubie/
It has had to suffer the indignity of hundreds of tourist tramping through its wooden floors as well as it being decked out with a pool and other “fun facilities” so that people can stay there and say they have stayed in a castle rather than in an old run-down hotel. Most of these old places are turned into reception halls for weddings and for business men to pretend to have meetings but who are really there to get drunk and have a good time.
We visited the castle on a summer day and we tramped through it following the woman who is a descendant of the family but who does not live there. She is smart enough to live in Biarritz in a comfortable apartment with all the modern facilities.
The mansion where Edmond Rostand lived has also followed suit. Although he made a pile of money from the play that depicted the long-nosed cavalier, he did not make enough to allow his heirs to keep up the place.
We dutifully tramped through those wooden staircases and teak-wood floors, my wife wondering what it must have been like to live in such a marvelous house and I wondering how in the hell they had kept the place warm in winter—answer: they didn't. The house was eventually “donated” to the city and is kept up by (you guessed it) paid visits by tourist and renting it out as a hotel and meeting place.
France, like the rest of Europe, has days when it celebrates its Patrimony, but even as the Minister of Culture admits, it is a hard sale: “Patrimoine : le mot renvoie vers l'immobilité apparente, l'hiératisme des vieilles pierres.” (Patrimony: the word refers to the apparent immobility, the hieratic of old stones.) In other words, when they talk about patrimony, what comes to mind is old stones: my feeling exactly.
The problem is, Patrimony is a good thing but when there is too much of it, it can become a problem. The French government has been quietly dumping some of the old castles and buildings mainly by selling them off to hotel chains. There is just so many old buildings you can turn into governmental offices. Just think of the cost of putting in central heating! Not to mention building maintenance.
But, if castles and old mansions are a problem, so is the patrimony on the other end of the scale: private houses. Here in France, few new houses are built. Most people live in homes that are passed on from generation to generation. Refurbished and repurposed but they are still old and frail.
The house we live in, for example, is 150 years old. The wooden timbers that make up the roof structure were being eaten into sawdust by wood worms. The town has a department that helps you economically to care for such buildings. They subsidised the treatment and reflooring of the upper stage of the house. Across the street, the children of an old lady inherited their mother's house. Instead of knocking it down and building something new (which is what would have happened in the US or in Mexico), they have gutted the inside to modernize it, but have kept the shell of the house they remember living in as kids. There is something to be said for keeping the traces of tradition and the memory of what was, but one wonders if everything and everyone should do it.
Anyway, that sense of history and love of the traditional is one reason one comes to France. If you come here, be sure to take plenty of pictures because with this crisis who know how much longer things will be around.
