Un dimanche à la campagne, suite

Just a typical Sunday afternoon on our village square, packed with revolting vignerons. A local film-maker is making a film about the dramatic events of the winemakers' revolt in the Languedoc in 1907 and had put out a call for extras. As you can see, lots of people volunteered and entered fully into the spirit of the occasion. This is the scene where the mayor of Narbonne, Ernest Ferroul, and one of the leaders of the revolt, Marcelin Albert, are making impassioned speeches to the crowd, allegedly in Narbonne. See the speechifying at my spare blip.

While it might not be internationally or even nationally famous, the revolt of 1907 is a very vivid memory here. Weekly demonstrations by desperate winemakers facing a crisis of overproduction and unfettered cheap, adulterated imports from Algeria drew increasing numbers, culminating in over 600,000 people gathering in Montpellier -- that is, about half the population of the lower Languedoc at the time. The government sent in troops, one regiment of which mutinied and refused to police the demonstrations, instead fraternising with the locals who offered them soup. Others were not so delicate, and there were deaths of innocent bystanders as they fired indiscriminately into crowds. Ferroul led a tax strike and a mass resignation of over 600 local mayors, who hung black flags from their town halls.

The situation was resolved eventually, partly by the government agreeing to tax the sugar added to cheap wine to make it stronger and more palatable, and partly by the First World War -- French soldiers were supplied with a daily ration of red wine. If you can read French, you can find out more here. The story of Marcellin Albert is particularly sad. A charismatic and impassioned orator, but politically naive, he used his own initiative to visit Georges Clémenceau in Paris in order to find a way out of the crisis. Clémenceau patted him on the back and astutely gave him a 100-franc note for his train journey home. Back in Argeliers he was accused of selling out, and universally ostracised by his former admirers. After being imprisoned for a few weeks, he ended up emigrating to Algeria to escape the opprobrium, and dying in poverty. Nowadays nearly every town in this part of the Languedoc has a street or a square named after him. The crisis is also one reason that the cooperative movement is so strong here -- almost every village formed a wine-making coop in the early years of the 20th century.

Un dimanche à la campagne episode 1 -- still one of my favourite blips.

Yesterday is backblipped.