Trouble Erupts for an Ersatz Volcano

You’ve had your finger on your country’s nuclear trigger, managed one of the world’s largest economies and palled around on a first-name basis with other global heavyweights.

So what do you do when you’re in your 70s and off the international stage? If you’re Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the former French president, the answer is this: You decide to spend $71 million (at latest reckoning) of your neighbors’ taxes and other public funds to build a volcano in the middle of France.

“We are going to do it,” Giscard vows. “Barring an international misfortune, we’ll make it for the year 2000.”

A visionary idea from a man considered one of his country’s brainiest politicians, or a grandiose crackpot scheme from an aging figure desperate to leave his mark on the landscape?

Backers say the volcano--actually, it will be a “European center of volcanology,” a theme park complete with man-made cone and crater--is a masterstroke of tourism and popular science alike and will attract at least half a million people annually to the depressed and depopulated Auvergne region.

Opponents, who are no less sure of their arguments, call it a nutty idea and an eyesore that endangers the same pristine surroundings it is meant to showcase.

“By definition, power makes you crazy. The more power you have, the crazier you are,” charges Carole Deveau, a law student and spokeswoman for a coalition of organizations that are against the project.

For the moment, but probably not for long, the foes of Giscard’s Vulcania park have the upper hand. In December, an administrative appeals tribunal in Lyons found fault with the land-use plan of St.-Ours-les-Roches, which embraces the 140-acre site.

Construction, launched in August, ground to a halt. Now, on this high, wind-swept plain six miles northwest of the city of Clermont-Ferrand, where real volcanoes hissed and lava spurted from the Earth thousands of years ago, snow is piling up around the idled mechanical shovels, dump trucks and other construction equipment.

“The opponents have no idea what’s going on here,” complains Philippe Tixier, one of the consulting architects. “This project is necessary for Auvergne.”

Few doubt that if Vulcania does get built, it will be wonderfully innovative. “Built” may not even give the right impression, for Giscard’s park is supposed to be constructed downward, straight into the layer cake of black volcanic basalt and other types of rock exuded during repeated magma flows.

Three of its floors--about 150,000 square feet of theme park space--will be buried in the Earth, according to the design developed by Austrian architect Hans Hollein. Through a 70-millimeter film and multimedia and interactive exhibits, visitors will inhale the reek of sulfur--or a less smelly substitute--experience searing heat from artificial geysers and volcanic mud pots, cross a 100-foot crevasse and, thanks to the movie, hover on the edge of a volcano as it erupts.

Vulcania’s man-made crater will plunge 115 feet, and its stylized, lava-clad cone, which was redesigned after some people complained that it looked too much like a nuclear power plant’s cooling tower, will jut 80 feet in the air.

Science Commingles With Entertainment

It is all intended to be scientifically accurate--but sufficiently middlebrow and entertaining that French and foreign families on vacation will choose to make a detour to this isolated site 260 miles south of Paris.

“This is to give an object of interest for people to come and visit us,” says Giscard, 71, who has been president of the regional council in Auvergne for the past 11 years. “It’s one of the most beautiful parts of France, but it has always been remote. And a center of interest, a beacon, was lacking to make us known.”

To find the bait to catch tourists, Auvergne went back in time. For 7 million years, volcanic activity in this part of France waxed and waned. When the last of these fire-spitting mounts fell dormant 7,000 years ago, rain and wind softened their shapes.

West of Clermont-Ferrand, about 80 extinct volcanoes, known as the Chaine des Puys, stretch 25 miles from north to south in a spectacular giant’s necklace. In this rosary of craters, truncated domes and blue volcanic lakes, the highest, at 4,834 feet, is the Puy de Dome. This, the most famous of the Auvergne’s volcanoes, was active 11,000 years ago.

For his theme park, Giscard, Auvergne’s most powerful politician, successfully championed a site in the Puys that had been a military munitions dump until it was bought by Auvergne’s regional council.

The location is what especially riles environmentalists. Danielle Auroi, a member of the Greens party who forced Giscard into a runoff for the first time in his long political life in June’s elections to the French legislature, blasted her opponent for wanting to build “a Disneyland in the heart of nature”--inside, in fact, the region’s Volcanoes Natural Park.

The park’s charter clearly specifies that “large tourist units” are not compatible with its conservation mission. But the park’s president is none other than Giscard himself, who says, “I am very much of an ecologist.”

He points out that the digging machinery at Vulcania is being lubricated with sunflower oil to prevent contamination of the underground water table by hydrocarbons and that most of the park, far from defacing the landscape, will be hidden underground or in a dip of the Earth.

For Giscard, Vulcania has become something close to a crusade.

His region’s taxpayers are being made to shoulder most of the cost. The former head of state has also been able to obtain more or less firm commitments of $4.6 million from the central government in Paris and $12.7 million from the European Union, although most of those funds remain to be paid.

He rammed through the choice of Hollein, who designed Frankfurt’s Museum of Modern Art and New York’s Richard Feigen Gallery, although a special jury formed by Giscard himself had opted for someone else. Giscard was even able to win a route for the proposed highway to Bordeaux so that an exit can be built near Vulcania, although that will mean bypassing Clermont-Ferrand, Auvergne’s capital.

Even the idea of burying the theme park in rock is Giscard’s, which he credits to a visit he made to the St. Louis Science Center. In the Missouri attraction, a 310-foot-long tunnel leads visitors through a 19th century brick sewer, a coal mine during a cave-in and other underground environments.

Giscard loved the drama--”I wanted the same thing: people descending on foot, entering the belly of the Earth,” he says.

Vulcania is a gamble for this Massachusetts-sized region, which, along with the rest of the isolated Massif Central, has long been known in France as a “desert” bypassed by the nation’s major roads.

With 1.3 million people, Auvergne has fewer inhabitants and jobs than a century ago, when many of its sons and daughters trekked to Paris and other cities in search of better prospects. Vulcania is supposed to put the region firmly on the map for tourism and serve as an economic elixir.

“It’s either Vulcania or we leave the key under the door,” says Marc Bailly, restaurant owner in the nearby village of Orcines.

Vulcania’s founders hope to emulate the success of another public-financed theme park, Futuroscope, which attracts about 3 million visitors a year to Poitiers, a city between Paris and Bordeaux. Futuroscope was also the brainchild of a politician, Rene Monory, who was minister of industry and economy under Giscard.

In a pun on the Poitiers attraction, Vulcania’s opponents, who claim to have assembled 20,000 signatures on petitions, sarcastically refer to it as “Giscardoscope.”

Time Running Out for Conservatives

Time, however, may be running out for the park’s most high-profile advocate. Opinion surveys by the Renseignements Generaux, a French police agency that keeps track of the populace’s political moods, have concluded that Giscard and other conservative politicians will lose control of Auvergne in March’s regional elections unless they ally themselves with the far-right National Front.

If they wrest control of the region from Giscard, the Socialists, who are now in charge of the national government, have promised to suspend work on Vulcania and perform an “audit.” They could then either resume or scuttle the venture.

Unusually for France, support for the project cuts across most party lines, from the National Front to the Communists, but the park is associated in most people’s minds with Giscard. That clearly is a double-edged sword.

“It’s not an issue of politics, but of a man,” says Manuel Armand, a reporter for La Montagne, Auvergne’s largest newspaper. “Giscard bothers more people than the project does.”

Had the French not voted Giscard out of office more than a decade and a half ago, Vulcania might never have come about. In that 1981 race, the aloof and cerebral Giscard, seeking a second term as France’s president, was beaten by the Socialist Francois Mitterrand.

After his defeat, Giscard came back to Auvergne and began rebuilding his political career from the grass roots. In the meantime, Mitterrand was dotting Paris with vastly ambitious--and expensive--public works projects such as the Bastille Opera and the Grande Arche de la Defense. Did Giscard’s nemesis on the left inspire him to try something of the same in his own backyard? Many think so.

“Giscard didn’t mark his passage as president with a great monument, so he wants to leave his mark here, in the region,” Deveau says.

Asked to comment, Giscard departs from his customary courtly demeanor and laughs.

“I’ve heard all these stupidities,” he says. “I don’t have the intention to live there; let me tell you that straight away.”

Political Career Fades as the Project Grows

Giscard’s political career, however, may wind down before his pet project can be finished. In 1995, he made a try for the mayor’s post in Socialist-dominated Clermont-Ferrand and lost by 861 votes. That same year, his wife and son were beaten in local elections elsewhere in the region.

“The Twilight of the Pharaoh of Auvergne” was how one newsmagazine, L’Evenement du Jeudi, headlined its report last month on Giscard’s fading fortunes. Even in his own right-of-center camp, plenty of people hope he’ll be forced to bow out. For in his 11 years as regional president, Giscard has been careful to keep anyone in the rising generation of politicians from becoming big enough to challenge him.

Many onetime supporters now openly seethe with resentment or with feelings of betrayal.

“He takes all the decisions,” complains Serge Teillot, 47, lawyer and mayor of La Bourboule. Teillot defines himself as a “Giscardian” who has fallen out with Giscard. “He is highhanded and autocratic, and has always tried to arrange things so that there is him, and only him, and so no one is prepared or put forward to assume the would-be succession.”

Certain that he is championing the forces of progress over the French “subculture of negativism,” Giscard is serene about the future of Vulcania, although estimates keep ballooning and legal snags have seen the original scheduled opening date of spring 1997 pushed back several times.

“Nothing will manage to discourage us,” the ex-president said when the Lyons tribunal’s ruling forced construction at Vulcania to halt.

He reminded the people of Auvergne that their Gallic ancestors, encamped at Gergovia outside present-day Clermont-Ferrand, successfully withstood a siege by Julius Caesar and 20,000 Roman legionnaires.

“The first character trait of an Auvergnat,” Giscard said, “is tenacity.”