A Government Ban on Oysters Hard for the French to Swallow : Health: The mollusks are traditional holiday fare. But contamination is found in some harvests and growers are outraged.

Pity the poor oyster farmers of the Bassin de Thau.

Christmas was coming. All over France, people were preparing for their annual holiday feasts that traditionally include huge platters of the shellfish as a first course.

The 8,000 French oyster farmers sell nearly half of their annual production in the Christmas-New Year’s season. According to lore, if a Frenchman eats oysters at no other time during the year, he will have them for the midnight Christmas supper.

What a blow then for the 300 oyster farmers in the Bassin de Thau, an estuary in the Mediterranean Sea southwest of Montpellier, when a government laboratory discovered traces of salmonella bacteria in oyster beds during a routine test at the end of November.

For the Thau ostreiculteurs, it promised to be the bleakest Christmas ever with the French government cast as “le grinch who stole Noel. “

Finally, French President Francois Mitterrand came to their rescue this week, saying he was “touched by the drama of the oyster farmers in which a whole year’s labor has been ruined.”

Mitterrand, an inveterate oyster-eater himself, instructed the government of Prime Minister Michel Rocard to speed up compensation payments to the oyster farmers so they will have relief before Christmas.

Salmonella poisoning is a common problem with shellfish taken from polluted waters. Eating the contaminated food can result in acute gastroenteritis and even death among the young or elderly.

Health specialists theorized that a severe drought this past fall in the Languedoc plateau above Montpellier caused animal waste to build up in the fields. Heavy rains at the end of November washed it to the sea, polluting the shallow Thau estuary.

Acting quickly, the Ministry of Marine Affairs in Paris ordered the Thau oysters, which account for nearly 10% of the annual national crop of 120,000 tons, taken off the market.

Enraged by the government ruling, which they claimed contradicted reports from other laboratories showing their waters to be clean, the Thau oyster farmers went on the warpath. Gangs of them attacked the government laboratory at Sete, at the mouth of the Thau estuary, where the salmonella had been discovered. Using clubs and oyster trays, they broke windows and smashed computer screens.

The rampaging oyster farmers and their families then blockaded the highway leading into the coastal town of Meze. Behind the barricades were 2,400 tables heaped with more than 5,000 tons of oysters ruled uneatable by the French government.

“It is these kinds of ministerial edicts,” fumed Rene Couveinhes, a Gaullist opposition member of Parliament from the Herault region that includes the Thau estuary, “that during The Terror of the French Revolution sent people to the scaffolds.”

Despite the generally held view that the Thau oysters are not among the first rank of French mollusks--that honor is reserved for the famous fines de claires from Marenne and Oleron on the Atlantic coast--the plight of the Thau oyster farmers won the sympathy of many in France.

Food crises are taken very seriously here. People remember with horror the Vacherin cheese scare two years ago. Vacherin, a runny unpasteurized cheese from Switzerland and the French Jura region, is also a special Christmastime treat. In 1987-88, the Swiss brand Vacherin Mont d’Or was found to contain listeria, a potentially fatal bacteria.

In 1985, it was the American horse-meat scandal that had people talking after trichinosis-causing worms were discovered in meat imported from Connecticut. There are also dozens of recurring wine and spirits flaps usually involving someone mixing a common table wine with some pedigreed appelation controle such as Bordeaux or Champagne.

Oyster farming in France dates from the late 18th Century when the Baron Bellevert built an oyster park on the Normandy coast at Etretat. The oysters were delivered to Queen Marie Antoinette at Versailles in carriages pulled by a dozen horses.

Oyster raising became a major food industry under Napoleon III in the next century. Today, France ranks fourth behind the United States, Japan and South Korea in oyster production. In 1988, the French consumed more than 76 million dozen oysters, or about 18 oysters for every man, woman and child in the country. About half of these are eaten during the Christmas season.

To the French, oysters are as much a part of Christmas as an evergreen tree and the chocolate buche de Noel, or Yule Log. The slimy bivalves are extolled in French poetry and literature. The novelist Honore Balzac described himself as a “fat man with an incredible passion for oysters.”

Author Guy de Maupassant praised oysters as “sweet and fat, resembling little ears locked inside shells, melting in the mouth between the palate and the tongue like salted candy.”

Likewise, oyster farmers are held in high regard in France in spite of their penchant for violence, as exhibited in the recent Thau oyster riots.

“It’s an unusual profession,” commented Antoine Minaud, director of a government maritime office that was also attacked by the oyster farmers. “The shellfish farmers are restless people, difficult and traditionally very individualistic. Perhaps it is because they are half-sailor and half-farmer.”

With the plight of the Thau oyster farmers on the front pages alongside the massacres in Romania and the American invasion of Panama, it wasn’t long before the politicians began to react.

One of them, Couveinhes, the Gaullist legislator from Herault, was making trouble for the Socialist government by defiantly eating the Thau oysters despite the ban. “I eat oysters and mussels from Thau waters every day,” he said, “and I’m in good health.”

Finally, on Wednesday, during a meeting of the French council of ministers, President Mitterrand expressed his heart-felt concern for the Thau oyster farmers. He urged that compensation and other benefits, including government subsidized interest payments on agricultural loans, be given immediately, “before Christmas.”

Initially, leaders in the French oyster industry feared the Thau oyster scare would severely hurt the key holiday market.

Indeed, restaurants in the immediate Mediterranean coastal area have been badly hurt.

“This is breaking the local economy,” said Pascal Jacquinot, chef of the respected Cote Bleue restaurant in Meze. “Our menu is mainly known for its shellfish. In this season we normally have 120 customers a day. We have 30 employees and 12 cooks. But today we had only seven customers and no one for dinner.”

But as the Christmas feast, known as le Reveillon , draws near, most people in France are apparently discarding their fears and ordering their holiday oysters.

“We had a slight decline of about 15% because of all the publicity over the Thau oysters,” said Pascal Mousset, director of La Coupole, one of Paris’s more famous oyster restaurants. “But as the holidays approach, people have begun to forget.”