Theme Parks, Golf Courses Spring Up : France Can’t Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm; Peasant Life Fading Away

In the hills where Jean de Florette struggled to raise rabbit food, farming is now small potatoes. The major local asset is a theme park called OK Corral.

This cobblestoned town in Provence, where people still remember what Victor Hugo had for lunch on a stagecoach stop, is where Claude Berry made two films about peasants from the pages of Marcel Pagnol.

But the sort of taciturn, hardscrabble peasants portrayed in “Jean de Florette” and “Manon des Sources” are history.

“Of the thousand or so residents in Cuges, two, maybe three peasants remain,” said Vice Mayor Giles Aicardi, who defines a peasant as one who survives only by what he grows and sells.

Too Much Food

Cuges reflects a crisis in Western Europe, and especially France. There is too much food. And big producers, who track their subsidies on computers, are pushing small farms out of existence.

Seven percent of French workers are farmers, three times the level of West Germany or Britain. But more than half are over 50. And half of that group have no heirs expected to stay on the land.

The problem is partly social. Spurred by television, with good roads into town, many young Frenchmen reject country life. It is a matter of keeping them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paris.

But few of those who want to stay have the choice.

“My kids are not in this business,” said Yves Cornille, 50, one of Cuges’ last peasants. “That was my decision. It is a wonderful life, independent, not too hard. You just can’t survive.”

‘Life Has Changed’

Cornille, with pressed slacks and a new Renault, is no Pagnol peasant.

“Oh, life has changed since then,” he said. “Once you could make it with 250 acres. Now you need 2,500. If I were 25 or 30, I’d quit tomorrow.”

Many, like Cornille, fault the European Economic Community for opening borders among its 12 members and applying complex subsidies and quotas. In 1992, borders are to open yet wider.

The Common Market, set up first for iron and steel, threatens to collapse over beef and butter. Two-thirds of its budget goes to subsidize or store food and wine, much of which goes to waste.

U.S. Urgings Rejected

European governments reject American urgings to end farm subsidies, citing a duty to preserve ways of life dating back 2,000 years. But they also discourage production they cannot sell.

Cornille grows wine grapes, more lucrative than food crops. Modern farmers stick with a single crop, or just a few. Their wives, instead of churning butter or putting up jam, look for jobs.

At the OK Corral, a version of Le Far West done with ample poetic license, a son of peasants swaggered down a dusty street. Asked his name, he replied in Maurice-Chevalier English, “Bronco.”

Far to the west, the town of Ampus plans to use 500 acres of farmland for a space research center and country club, with laboratories and an old-style bistro set inside giant golf balls.

Other Projects Explored

“Like so many places, we can no longer live by agriculture,” said Mayor Roger Casanova, a geology professor in Nice, an hour away. “We must find other ways to make our community viable.”

Casanova has found Norwegian-Lebanese interests to invest part of the $40 million needed for a 27-hole golf course around a futuristic campus.

Young people will learn the techniques of space research, aeronautics, advanced computer sciences and environmental science, he said, adding: “Half the town thinks I’m loony.”

Rene Aicard, 32, is sticking to farming. He squeaks by on his 150 acres, raising strawberries, potatoes, lettuce and rapeseed for oil. His wife, Denise, hauls it to market in a battered little van.

“It’s so sad,” Denise said, shaking her head. “Farming is the most beautiful profession in the world, and you work the hardest. But it just doesn’t pay anymore.”

Uphill Task

In Paris, Yves Van Haecke, chief adviser to the Ministry of Agriculture, acknowledged that the government had an uphill fight to encourage young people to hold onto family farms.

“The drop has become dramatic in the last 10 years,” he said. “Farms disappear now at a rate of 3% a year, and the rate is increasing. No question, they’re on their way out.”

As small farms go, hundreds of rural communities alter their character.

Ampus is not changing fast. The cubbyhole newspaper-dry goods store displays a tattered advertising poster on the door: “Canadian Rat Poison. Their Last Supper.”

New Businesses Emerge

A clutch of old men in cloth caps by the fountain seem not to have moved since the last king clattered by in a carriage.

In Cuges, on a wide road to Marseille, stylish hairdressers and shops full of electronic gadgets have replaced blacksmiths and cracker-barrel grocers.

“There is plenty of the closed peasant mentality left,” said Andree Chikitou, who decided against putting up a sign in her restaurant saying, “The Jean de Florette cast ate here.”

With only three years in residence, she found parking tickets on her car if she left it on the little plaza outside. Hometown people parked with impunity.

‘Kids Are Leaving’

Still, she said, it was better than the last small French town she lived in.

“One day the butcher woman said, ‘Well, you’ve been here 10 years; you sort of belong. I’ll tell you what happened this morning,’ ” Chikitou said.

But Martin Santoro, the aging town priest who played the priest in the films, sees Pagnol’s France as having evaporated. “They’re not interested in that way anymore,” he says. “Kids are leaving.”

Berry wanted to film around Pagnol’s hometown of Aubagne, but he found that to be a semi-urban sprawl.

Outdoor scenes were no problem. He located an old farm in the hilltop municipality and commune of Riboud, which has a restaurant, a post office, a town hall and a total population of five.

The village scenes for “Manon des Sources” were not so easy.

Finally Berry settled on Mirabeau, farther north in the Vaucluse. But he had to pay the town to put off installing parking meters and painting white lines around the fountain that gave no water.