Feeding a Patriotic Hunger

Liberte, Egalite . . . and could you please pass the liver pate?

On Friday, France celebrated Bastille Day by hosting a picnic--600 miles long. Scattered along the meridian running from Dunkirk in the north to Prats de Mollo near the Spanish border, tables were set up and covered with identical red-and-white checked paper.

The Paris Meridian--2 degrees, 20 minutes, 14 seconds east--runs through the heart of the city. The tony Avenue de l’Opera on the Right Bank was closed to cars, as Parisians by the hundreds sat down at tables mounted on sawhorses and dug into their packed lunches.

“Do you believe this?” asked Marie Rambardeau, who attended the “Incredible Picnic” with a dozen friends, one of whom baked a large spinach quiche. “It’s exceptional, we’re picnicking in the street right in front of the Opera.”

“Like some quiche?” the 54-year-rold clothes designer and native Parisian asked a reporter politely.

From the North Sea coast to the Pyrenees, innumerable eggs were hard-boiled, green-bean salads tossed, and sausages and melons sliced. Organizers had expected from 3 million to 4 million picnickers, but the menacing skies and rain that blanketed much of the country reduced the turnout in many places.

Yet there was a feel-good ambience that even the often soggy weather couldn’t dampen.

“It’s wonderful to see so many people doing the same thing at the same time,” said Anne-Marie Peuvrier, 37, a Paris employee of the French League Against Cancer, one of the event’s sponsors. “It’s so friendly.”

There may have been nothing more to the gargantuan picnic than an opportunity to enjoy a nice meal and company. But the fact is, the French are feeling very good about their country and themselves lately. This month, their national soccer team, already the world champion, beat Italy to win the European Championship. France’s economy has replaced Germany’s as the most powerful engine driving Western European growth. And unemployment, a social scourge for decades, has dropped below 10%.

To welcome the picnickers, more than 400 miles of the spongy paper tablecloths in the checked pattern the French call Vichy were printed and distributed by organizers. The 337 municipalities that lie on the meridian sought to outdo each other to entice visitors, proof of how deep and sturdy local pride remains in this nearly Texas-size country, despite growing European integration.

In the northern town of Pitgam, for instance, bakers turned out a crispy baguette loaf that, once the sections were assembled, measured more than 100 feet long. In Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise near Calais, townspeople baked a raspberry tart big enough to provide dessert for 780 people.

La-Chapelle-Saint-Ursin, in the Loire Valley, invited for lunch the population of all 202 other French municipalities that include the French word for “chapel” in their name. According to the town hall, 4,000 people attended, under mostly gray skies. Mayor Yvon Beuchon had hoped for 10,000. Local farmers, who had been planning to sell their confit of duck, wine and Charolais beef to visitors, must have been very disappointed.

In Paris, 13,000 of France’s mayors and their spouses visiting for Bastille Day festivities didn’t let the leaden skies and occasional sprinkles impair their bon appetit. They were invited to a VIP version of the Incredible Picnic at the Senate building in the Luxembourg Gardens, with the $2-million tab picked up by taxpayers. The hungry “servants of the Republic” practically stormed the buffet tables.

In France’s geographic center, more than 2,000 picnickers ignored heavy downpours and fields churned to thick mud to assemble at noon in Treignat, a hamlet of 475. According to the mayor, it took two years of preparation and four days of volunteer work by nearly half the village residents to get ready for the event.

“We got wet, then we changed, and now we don’t have a single dry piece of clothing,” Agence France-Presse quoted the unidentified mayor as saying.

Elsewhere, the traditional rites of Bastille Day, anniversary of the 1789 storming of a royal prison by Paris revolutionaries, were observed as usual. There was a military parade on the Champs-Elysees, this year with honor guards and aerial squadrons from some of France’s partners in the region to spotlight the European Union’s growing role in defense. President Jacques Chirac hosted a garden party for dignitaries at his official residence, the Elysee Palace.

After dark, the skies around the Eiffel Tower erupted with fireworks. In the capital and many other French cities and towns, revelers danced into the night at firemen’s balls.

But it was what Michelle Demessine, government secretary of state for tourism, called “the biggest outdoor lunch of the century” that was intended to made this Bastille Day less stodgily official than usual. Underwritten in part by more than $2 million in government funds, the picnic was planned as one of the highlights of the millennial year, and an activity that would reach deep into rural France.

“There has never been such an assembly of people, and of people who like to eat,” Jean-Jacques Aillagon, president of the government’s commission on 2000 festivities, said on the LCI news channel.

In a related millennial activity devised by architect Paul Chemetov, and begun last autumn, 10,000 trees are supposed to be planted on the Paris Meridian, tracing a thin green line across the face of France that will be visible from space. The meridian, originally calculated by an observatory on Paris’ Left Bank founded under Louis XV, was used in this country until 1911 to figure longitude and the time until it was supplanted by Greenwich Mean.

“We like to take part in all holidays,” Jean-Pierre Sontag, 54, an auto-parts salesman from a Paris suburb, replied when asked why he, his 50-year-old wife and 28-year-old daughter had come into the city Friday to eat ham and bologna sandwiches on the Avenue de l’Opera. “Besides, what other chance would we have to sit here and have lunch in one of the most beautiful places in the world?”