The sheer physical diversity of France would be hard to exhaust
in a lifetime of visits. The landscapes range from the fretted
coasts of Brittany to the limestone hills of Provence, the canyons
of the Pyrenees and the half-moon bays of Corsica, from the lushly
wooded valleys of the Dordogne to the glaciated peaks of the Alps.
Each region looks and feels different, has its own style of
architecture, its characteristic food and often its own patois or
dialect. Though the French word pays is the term for a whole
country, local people frequently refer to their own immediate
vicinity as mon pays - my country - and to a person from
another town as a foreigner. This strong sense of regional
identity, often expressed in the form of active separatist
movements, as in Brittany and Corsica, has persisted over centuries
in the teeth o centralized administrative control from Paris.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the French
countryside is the sense of space. There are huge tracts of
woodland and undeveloped land without a house in sight.
Industrialization came relatively late, and the country remains
very rural. Away from the main urban centres, hundreds of towns and
villages have changed only slowly and organically, their old houses
and streets intact, as much a part of the natural landscape as the
rivers, hills and fields.
The nation's legacy of history and culture is so widely
dispersed across the land that even if you were to confine your
traveling to one particular region you would still have a powerful
sense of the past without having to seek out major sights. With its
wealth of local detail, France is an ideal country for dawdling;
there is always something to catch the eye and gratify the senses,
whether you are meandering down a lane, picnicking by a slow, green
river, or sipping Pernod in a village café. There is also endless
scope for all kinds of outdoor activities, from walking,
canoeing and cycling to the more expensive pleasures of skiing and
sailing.
If you need more than urban stimuli to activate the pleasure
buds - clubs, shops, fashion, movies, music, hanging out with the
beautiful and famous - then the great cities provide them in
abundance. Paris, of course, is an outstanding cultural centre,
with its stunting contemporary buildings and atmospheric back
streets, its art and its ethnic diversity. And the great provincial
cities like Lille and Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Marseille and Nice
vie with the capital and each other, like the city-states of old,
for prestige in the arts, ascendancy in sport and innovation in
urban transport.
For a thousand years and more, France has been at the cutting
edge of European development, and the legacy of this wealth,
energy and experience is everywhere evident in the astonishing
variety of things to see: from the Gothic cathedrals of the north
to the Romanesque churches of the centre and west, the châteaux of
the Loire, the Roman monuments of the south, the ruined castles of
the English and the Cathars and the Dordogne's prehistoric
cave-paintings. If not all the legacy is so tangible - the
literature, music and ideas of the 1789 Revolution, for example -
much has been recuperated and illustrated in museums and galleries
across the nation, from colonial history to fishing techniques,
aeroplane design to textiles, migrant shepherds to manicure,
battlefields and coalmines.
Many of the museums are models of clarity and modern
design. Among those that the French do best are museums devoted to
local arts, crafts and customs like the Musée National des Arts et
Traditions Populaires in Paris and the Musée Dauphinois in
Grenoble. But inevitably first place must go to the fabulous
collections of fine art, many of which are in Paris, for the
simple reason that the city has nurtured so many of the finest
creative artists of the last hundred years, both French, Monet and
Matisse for example, and foreign, such as Picasso and Van Gogh.
If you are quite untroubled by a need to improve your mind in
the contemplation of old stones and works of art, France is equally
well endowed to satisfy to satisfy the grosser appetites. The
French have made a high art of daily life: eating, drinking,
dressing, moving and simply being. The Pleasures of the
palate run from the simplest picnic of crusty baguette, ham and
cheese washed down by an inexpensive red wine through what must be
the most elaborate takeaway food in the world, available from
practically every charcuterie; such basis regional dishes as
cassoulet; the liver-destroying riches of Périgord and
Burgundy cuisine; the fruits of the sea; extravagant pastries and
ice-cream cakes; to the trance-inducing refinements - and prices -
of the great chefs. And there are wines to match, at all prices,
and not just feel inadequate in the face of all this choice, never
be afraid to ask advice, for most French people are true devotees,
ever ready to explain the arcane mysteries to the uninitiated.