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Michael Gove
Travel > News & Advice
Stephen Bayley: The impossible dream of French perfection
[67-France-AFP-Getty.jpg]
[67-France-AFP-Getty.jpg]
Something to Declare
Stephen Bayley
Saturday 24 August 2013
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A recent cartoon in The New Yorker showed a couple glumly facing each
other across a kitchen table and the caption read: “Exactly when did
all the things you love about me become all the things you hate about
me?� I am beginning to think that way about France. The idea of
France was always a dream. And in dreams begin responsibilities and, it
turns out, disappointments too.
A few days in Provence, in what the French so didactically declare
“one of the prettiest villages in France�, has finally taught me
that trying to recapture my Gallic dreamworld is like trying to embrace
fog. In this hilltop village, there is a fine collection of medieval
buildings and each one has been pitilessly molested by either the
tourist authorities or middle-brow junk art galleries.
I turned into a dark chapel for respite only to find it booming with
sub-adult HD video about an “experience� on offer. Oiky gap-year
French youths, escaping the imminent reality of real-world
unemployment, walked around officially dressed as troubadours (with
trainers).
Nearby was something impressive, the La Coste wine estate where Irish
entrepreneur Paddy “Claridge’s� McKillen has created a hugely
ambitious sculpture park. By the time it is finished, with the golf
course and hotel, it will be a World of Adventures with vines.
So we went on to Marseille, the 2013 European Capital of Culture, to
see the new MuCEM (the politically correct and wearyingly inclusive
Museum of the Civilisation of Europe and the Mediterranean), perhaps
France’s very last grand projet. Local architect Rudy Ricciotti says
he wants to “demuseumify museums�. Not, if you ask me, a felicitous
expression that promises calm and clarity. Still, if you want to find
an architectural demonstration of what France has become, visit the
Fort Saint-Jean complex on the Vieux-Port.
I kept on trying to translate “mink coat and no knickers� as we
sweated and jostled through vapid exhibits at MuCEM, trivialised by big
swinging architectural rhetoric. And if “culture� means vast queues
of listless tourists gazing at plasma screens, personally I want none
of it. At least there were no troubadours.
We stayed in Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse which has a number of
apartments available for brief stays. I am no doctrinaire opponent of
strict-observance Modernism, far from it, but here was another test of
French dream vs French reality.
The cheerful “vertical garden city� of the propaganda has a haunted
and sinister quality. Not sinister in the sense that a demandeur
d’emploi troubadour might knife you in a dark corridor, but more that
it is solid with a sense of failure. It strikes me as significant that
the Toulouse riots of 2005 began in a banlieue designed by pupils of Le
Corbusier. Fact: they don’t have riots in Le Panier, the crumbly
dense old quarter of Marseille.
I reflected on this as we left the city to meet friends for lunch in
Peter Mayle country near Ménerbes. Marseille is a difficult place not,
I think, at ease with itself. Sweaty and desolate in turns, sullen and
grumbly, despite the City of Culture wash ’n’ brush-up.
Then we hit the D99 between Saint-Rémy and Cavaillon with its lovely
arbres and the dream came rushing back.
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