When you visit Paris, or any other of the major cities in France, you come away with the impression that the country is both very busy, and extremely well-populated. And I guess if all you do is take trains, or fly around the country, that idea stays firmly in place.
Go to the rural areas, however, and a whole different realisation takes hold. On a population density basis, France is actually one of the most vacant places in Europe.
It has half the number of people per square kilometre of either Germany or UK, and about 10% less than the average for the entire EU. The Paris metropolitan area alone accounts for 20% of the population of the entire country.
Strangely, though, for such an empty place, there seem to be villages about every 5km or so, no matter what rural road you happen to drive. So the lack of people translates, quite eerily, into thousands of little settlements, with a boulangerie (bread bakery), a tabac (a corner dairy), a place d’mairie (town square) … and hardly anyone on the streets.
It can seem as if a neutron bomb has struck. And it’s not just in the rural north. You find it in the hills to the east, in the wine-growing areas to the west, and in the gorges and river valleys to the south. Clearly the countryside was once the vibrant heart of France. But the mechanisation of agriculture after WWII changed everything.
This lack of population was especially noticeable when we drove south-west out of Paris, through the vast cropping land of the Paris Basin. France has wonderful motorways, but we opted for the scenery of the departmental roads, the ones that have been the routes of transportation for centuries before the advent of automobiles.
The journey was certainly longer, but hardly tiresome. In fact, I kept catching myself smiling as we cruised along in top gear, not another car in sight, with beautiful acreages of sunflowers, barley, and green, green maize stretching out on either side.
And just to keep from getting too bored, every 10 minutes or so there’d be another little village full of two and three storey houses, their shutters closed up, with the occasional “mature” inhabitant making their way along the narrow streets, or puttering bent over in a veggie patch.
Our destination was one such village, and strangely we were heading there to see a singer who has long been one of our favourites, even though we live on the other side of the world.
Many years ago, we had the great good fortunate to attend the WOMAD World Music and Dance festival in Adelaide, Australia, and hear a performance by Souad Massi, winner of the BBC World Music Award.
Her songs haunted us, and we avidly purchased her CDs whenever they came available. We always said that we’d travel anywhere (within reason, of course) if we had a chance to see her again.
So while in Paris I had a brainstorm. Maybe she was playing somewhere in Europe, and maybe we could fit attending one of her concerts into our plans.
A quick Google search revealed the startling fact that she was playing the very next week, and the venue was only a three-hour drive away. The website also seemed to say (and here I was sure my “vast knowledge” of the French language might be failing me) that the concert was free!
We didn’t know anything about the locality. It certainly wasn’t mentioned in our guidebooks, and it wasn’t even close to any of the famous French summer holiday destinations. No, Pleumartin looked to be just another rural village in the middle of a big farming district in central France. And so it turned out to be.
We arrived about 4pm, thinking we’d have to get there early to check the place out and find somewhere to set up our campervan. We needn’t have worried. The only activity seemed to be in the main square, a dusty parking lot surrounding a covered market, where a group of roadies were setting up a fairly small stage.
We decided to enquire at the town hall (the mairie), just opposite the square. No one there (or anywhere else in the village, for that matter) seemed to speak English, but they were both surprised and delighted that someone from Nouvelle Zélande had come for the show.
When we asked if there was somewhere to camp for the night, they showed us to the council staff carpark, set under a group of beautiful, leafy trees. No, of course we didn’t have to pay anything; it was gratis.
And so we waited, hanging around town, having a couple of beers and pizza in the one café that seemed to be open, as we watched the village slowly fill. It gave me a goodly amount of time to do a little research, armed with our mobile broadband connection and a French language translator on the smart phone.
It turned out Souad Massi’s performance was part of a music festival put on by the area’s regional government. The main purpose (apart from having a good time) appeared to be exposing “distressed” rural areas to new music.
Massi’s gig was about halfway through the series, and performances by the other acts were being given all summer in small venues throughout the region.
As the scheduled start-time approached, and for about a half hour more (in France, events don’t necessarily keep to schedule), we started to feel a bit apprehensive. It was obvious that Massi was going to have her work cut out for her.
There was a section of resin chairs, off to one side, with “réservé” written on them, that slowly filled with the old and grey of the village. Many of the others attending appeared to be farmers, or local tradespeople, the sort you’d expect to find living in any rural centre like Pleumartin.
And worst of all for the performers, the whole crowd stayed at the back, as far away from the stage as they could manage without actually being in the street.
To be fair, there were also a few (how shall we say this), “differently dressed” people who obviously knew Massi’s music, and had come from much further away. And then, of course, there were the two of us, definitely the only English-speaking tourists in the mix.
Just before the performance, we went back to the van to get warmer clothes, and it was then that I saw something that really struck me. Right next to the parking lot, just opposite the front entrance of the town hall, was a war memorial.
Nothing strange about that, given the wars France has fought. You see memorials to the vast numbers of young men lost in WWI, the WWII resistance fighters, and Holocaust victims everywhere throughout the country.
This memorial was different, however. It was dedicated to French soldiers killed in the Algerian War (or Revolution, if you happen to be Algerian), which ended in 1962, and it was cleaned and polished as if it had just been erected the day before.
It was then that I realised what Souad Massi was going to do tonight would take more than a little bit of courage. But it was something she has no doubt gotten used to, being a successful singer in what is her adopted country.
For Massi’s story is almost as amazing as her music. She was born in Algeria, and grew up listening to western folk and rock music. Her brother became a rock musician in a popular Algerian band, and she discovered that she had both a love of guitar playing and singing, and a talent for writing songs.
As many young women do in other countries, she joined a local band. The band had some success, with her as lead singer. But then things began to go badly wrong.
Because she was a woman performing in public, young Muslim extremists showed up at the concerts and threw garbage at her when she sang. When that didn’t stop her, she received death threats, ones that eventually she took very seriously indeed.
So seriously, in fact, that she fled Algeria and went to live with her relatives in Paris. Then the story took a positive turn. She attended a forum on the plight of women in Algeria, and at a workshop she got up and sang a couple of songs, accompanying herself on a borrowed acoustic guitar.
That led to a gig performing at a festival, which in turn led to a management contract, and the rest is history: four albums, touring around the world, and that much-coveted BBC World Music Artist of the Year.
However, the most amazing thing about Souad Massi, as the crowd at Pleumartin was about to discover, is the fact that she sings almost all her songs in her native Algerian Arabic.
Whether in France or in most places overseas, virtually everyone she performs for can’t understand the lyrics. So it’s her music, the way it’s played, and her phenomenal voice (deep and soulful one minute, soft and high the next) that carries the day.
When she began her performance that night, you could actually feel the disquiet in the audience. All eyes were on her, listening intently to that voice, but no one registering the words.
There was no dancing to the music (except for a strange couple from Nouvelle Zélande right up front). And you could see people giving each other questioning looks.
But the band was good, and the music was captivating. You wouldn’t call it traditional. It was more modern than that. It sometimes sounded a bit folksy, but at other times it really rocked, with drums and bass, and a smiling older man playing what had to be an Algerian drum that he held on his knee.
By the third song, despite a slight drizzle that threatened to turn into a show-stopping downpour, she had them. The crowd began to sway, then move some more, then actually start to dance, as she and the band got into some full-on numbers.
And they applauded even more when she switched from electric to acoustic guitar, and took it down low with several soft ones. You didn’t need to know Arabic to get the gist of it. These were songs of longing, lost love, and a sadly remembered country she once called home.
Finally, she announced the last song (her introductions were the only French the audience heard the entire night), and when she finished the applause went on and on.
Two encores later, the band walked off stage, and she returned with just her acoustic guitar, looked up into the heavens, and sang her evocative remembrance of childhood, Raoui (you can listen below).
When you hear her voice in that song, you can’t help but feel something deep inside. And at Pleumartin that night, in the town with the polished memorial to French soldiers who tried and failed to keep Algeria part of a colonial empire, there wasn’t (as they say) a dry eye in the house.