Système D - The power of the people

In which Gerrit the shepherd takes on Pôle Emploi and wins

 Here’s a David and Goliath story to gladden the heart.

France is a land of paradoxes that don’t make sense to outsiders.  It has a rigid, unthinking bureaucracy which snuffs out businesses and blights the lives of its citizens.  On the other hand, millions of ordinary Frenchmen and women outsmart the system every day using guile and imagination.   

Even under socialist president François Hollande, there are no free handouts for a worker who voluntarily quits his job.  However, employees axed by the company receive lavish redundancy compensation.  Social security then provides up to three years generous unemployment pay.

The vital difference between these two extremes is one sheet of paper, the redundancy certificate known as an Avis de Licenciement.

Back in 2010 Gerrit Andriaensen was a shepherd from Dorres, a village in the Pyrenees.  Sheep farming had struggled for years against cheaper lamb imports from far-away New Zealand.  One December day his employer, the local cooperative, had to let him go.

Declaring someone redundant is not for the faint-hearted.  It involves months of statutory notice periods, consultations, recorded-delivery letters and formal meetings.  Gerrit’s employers didn’t do it.  Already three months behind with his salary, they acted too late and no longer had the money to pay him.

They just told him verbally that their flocks would henceforth be one shepherd less.  Gerrit was jobless and minus his salary, redundancy money and the vital Avis de Licenciement.

The trade union, Force Ouvière, helped him to start legal proceedings against the cooperative to obtain the missing paper and the overdue cash. 

All that would take months and he needed to eat in the meantime.  His next stop was Pôle Emploi, the unemployment office in nearby Prades. They refused to register him without the Avis de Licenciement.   That meant no unemployment pay.

People living below the poverty level were entitled to Revenu de Solidarité Active (RSA), a welfare payment designed to keep body and soul together.  Naively, Gerrit thought that having no income was the same thing as poverty. 

The government didn’t see it that way.  He couldn’t have RSA either because, well, he should be claiming unemployment pay, shouldn’t he?

Over a year later in February 2012 the legal battle came to a head. A tribunal ordered Gerrit’s former bosses to pay all that was due and issue the Avis de Licenciement.   Insolvent and unable to comply, the cooperative opted for liquidation.  Its managers were replaced by a liquidator.

Now the liquidator refused Gerrit’s request for the precious Avis because he hadn't made Gerrit redundant.  The cooperative’s managers did that before liquidation.  Time for a whole new legal battle. 

In August 2013, almost three years after the nightmare started, Gerrit finally received the backdated Avis de Licenciement.  His joy turned to anger as Pôle Emploi now declared his claim for unemployment pay to be invalid.  The Avis was years late.  It had expired.

The desperate lack of cash and the sense of injustice would not go away – “I’m at a dead end.  I’ve worked 30 years without asking for anything.  I feel hurt that they’ve treated me as less than nothing” said Gerrit. It was time for some people power, known to the French as Système D. 

Let’s roll forward to the present.  Gerrit decides to go to Paris and petition François Hollande, but he has no money for the trip.  Cafés, restaurants and hotels are all but a pipe dream.  

When in real trouble, a Jedi knight calls upon the Force.  Aborginal peoples summon the spirits of their ancestors.  If you're French and in the merde it's time for Système D.

Besides being a shepherd, Gerrit is a volunteer fire-fighter and a champion fell-runner.  He’s aleady won the Gran Volta de Cerdanya, a gruelling 214 km (133 mile) race through the Pyrenees.  Why not run to Paris?  It’s not far, a mere 900 km (560 miles) with around 18 nights sleeping rough in the middle of winter.

The union, Force Ouvrière, launches a publicity campaign and local newspaper, “l’Indépendant”, takes up the baton.  On 21 January Gerrit leaves Dorres and the paper tracks his progress in a regular column, publishing his mobile phone number.

Our Pyrenean shepherd descends to the Mediterranean and follows the coast north-east for a couple of days to Béziers before turning north towards Paris.  People phone to wish him well.  Along the route, journalists call as one local newspaper after another takes up the story.  Then a TV crew arrives and Gerrit appears on the evening news.  In the following days complete strangers seek him out with offers of food.

Six days into the journey things start to go wrong.  Gerrit only has what he can carry in a small backpack.  Under-equipped, he crosses the remote Plateau de Larzac in torrential rain which turns to snow.  His sodden sleeping bag becomes a death trap at night and too heavy to carry during the day.  He abandons it.

This bad news sets off an avalanche of support.  A fire-fighter friend drives a four-hour round trip bringing dry replacements for everything.   As Gerrit resumes the run north, towns and villages offer free meals and then, a bed for the night.  There’s no more sleeping rough.

Sometimes people join him and run alongside for a while.  Further up the bureaucratic food chain from the pen-pushers of Prades, someone notices and starts to wonder where this might lead. There's already too much publicity and the story's taking on a life of its own.

By the time this simple shepherd reaches Paris, his rag-tag bunch of supporters could become a cast of thousands.  François Hollande is already France’s most unpopular president since the Second World War.  The last thing he needs is a folk hero.

Two weeks after leaving Dorres, Gerrit is north of Clermont Ferrand and more than halfway to Paris.  His phone rings.  After months of intransigence, the Pôle Emploi has suddenly reviewed his case.   He can have his unemployment pay after all and they’ll backdate it to when he claimed.  You see, it was all a silly misunderstanding.  

 Oh, and a triumph for citizen power - Système D.

What have the Romans ever done for us? Well, there's the Pont du Gard

The story behind the Pont du Gard could easily have been a 21st Century one. It was a town planning drama which started in 45 BC when the Romans took over much of northwest Europe to create the colony, Gaul.

Within a hundred years, Nîmes had become a major centre in this new empire, a boomtown of 20,000 people. By 40 AD, the economic miracle was grinding to standstill for lack of water. The new affluence brought with it all the up market toys and luxuries of a consumer society. Unlike the locals, the Romans had baths.

Villas were no longer homes. They were executive homes with mains water. Soon, every square would have its fountain. Then new businesses and burgeoning administration attracted still more people from the countryside.

The local springs couldn’t cope with demand anymore. In today’s language, Nîmes was running out of bandwidth.

The nearest water supplies with sufficient capacity were in the mountains at Eure, some 20 kilometres to the north as the crow flies. But water follows the lie of the land. Avoiding the area’s twisted limestone hills and gorges would increase this distance to nearer 50.

At the heart of this civil engineering nightmare was a question - how to cross the valley of the River Gardon?

The scale of this enterprise is staggering even by today’s standards. Roman engineers designed a 50 km aqueduct which falls just 12 metres from beginning to end , allowing a smooth gravity-fed flow.

Local limestone was used to line the channels. Being porous, the stones were coated with mortar and lime to reduce water infiltration, parasites and root invasion.

Wherever there was a geological or topological obstacle the underground channel was progressively brought to the surface and continued on a support wall, arcades or over a bridge. To cross the River Gardon, they built the Pont du Gard.

At 49 metres, this is the highest aqueduct bridge ever built by the Romans and is remarkably well conserved.
It has 3 rows of arches: 6 on the bottom row, 11 on the second level and 47 on the top row. This is dry stone walling on a grand scale because the stones are precision cut to fit together – there’s no mortar.

Many pieces weigh over two tons and one wonders how they were lifted into position. The monument still bears traces of the project management of the work: numbering of stones, support points for scaffolding and lifting devices.

UNESCO declared the Pont du Gard a World Heritage Site in 1985. The site is now superbly serviced with multiple car parks, restaurants, museum, interpretive centre. There is excellent access for the disabled to the entire site. There’s also a network of footpaths and cycling trails so that visitors can enjoy not only the monument but also the surrounding landscape.

The 2000 year old pillars still bear the holes which held Roman scaffolding

Open all year round, the site is signposted from the A9 autoroute, exit 23 between Nîmes and Avignon.

Places to go: St Martin du Canigou in Pyrénées Orientales, Languedoc Roussillon

It’s an easy 40 minute walk up the public footpath which climbs 300 meters through a limestone gorge but it’s worth it. Clinging to the side of Mount Canigou, the abbey of St Martin du Canigou perches high above a ravine with breathtaking views over the eastern Pyrenees.

First built as a monastery around the year 1000 for Guifred the Second, count of Cerdagne and Conflent, the site was home to an order of Benedictine monks until 1786. It was abandoned and left empty for the next 120 years. 

Then the Bishop of Perpignan and Elne bought the ruins in 1902. The abbey was restored and extended twice during the twentieth century. 
 
Since 1988 it is home to the Catholic Community of the Beatitudes, a fundamentalist group within the Catholic Church. They’ve been likened to a cult, but they receive visitors, both tourists and also the more serious variety in search of enlightenment and repose.

The abbey itself is closed to visitors in January but offers guided tours throughout the rest of the year, except on Mondays. The situation, complete with a dramatic public viewing point is spectacular anytime.

The short 1.6 km walk to reach it starts from the village of Casteil, 3 km south from the picturesque spa town of Vernet les Bains. For those to infirm to make the climb, one of the brothers will happily descend with one of the holy fleet of Suzuki jeeps.

Not to be missed...

Photos: Martin Castellan

The TGV Paris-Barcelona arrives. . . almost

A French TGV speeds across Catalonia en route for Figueras.

Photo: Martin Castellan/Sud Media Images

From 19th December 2010, the Catalan capital of Barcelona will be a step nearer to France. French high speed TGV trains from Paris will continue past Perpignan as far as Figueras in Spain.

The twice-daily service will stop at Nimes, Montpellier, Narbonne and Perpignan. Slower Spanish regional trains will take passengers on to Gerona and Barcelona, shortening the journey between the french and catalan capitals by an hour and a quarter.

Part of the EU dream of a pan-European transport network, the new link will be part of the Brussels-Barcelona high speed route. A new high-speed line snakes across Catalonia to the Barcelona suburbs. Finding a way through urban areas has proved a tougher proposition with the need to tunnel beneath existing buildings.

The French and Spanish rail networks are different gauges, preventing the French TGVs from continuing their journey on older regional Spanish tracks. Built to the European gauge, the new high speed lines will enable the TGVs to go all the way in 2012 or 2013. Reducing the Paris-Barcelona journey to 5 hours 35 minutes.

To reach Barcelona’s main Sants station, the line will pass under the new cathedral, La Sagrada Familia. Designed by the catalan architect Anton Gaudi, the cathedral, under construction since 1888, is still not finished. Despite a visit by the pope in November to consecrate the building, construction continues as tunneling machines burrow gingerly underneath.

No-one wants to be the catalan who dropped 128 years of Catalan pride into a train-shaped hole. The tunnelers will take their time and do it right. This is one job that will be finished when it’s finished, and that's that.

Transhumance in the Vicdessos

About 100km south of Toulouse in southern France, the E9 European trunk route passes through Tarascon sur Ariège on its way through the Pyrenees to Barcelona in neighbouring Spain. Tarascon is a kind of frontier town astride the river Ariège and surrounded by mountains. South-east from the town the Vicdessos valley climbs for 40km or so towards the 3000 metre high summit ridge which separates the two countries.

I pass this way in June to catch up with the spring movement of horses, cattle and sheep up to the mountain pastures. Known as the "transhumance", this will leave at around seven o’clock in the morning from the « Pla de l’Isard ». In the language of the region, Catalan, “Pla” is a plain or flat open area. “Isard” is the local Pyrenean name for the chamois, a European species of mountain goat. Livestock have been mustered here for centuries. It is the last flat place that we shall see today.

The sky is the colour of lead, the mountains cloaked in cloud, and my camera is already complaining about the light. It wants its flashgun. That is not the way to natural-looking photographs on a mountain. I debate with myself whether to continue the day’s shoot or simply give up and go home.

I was born to be in the mountains and I have come a long way today so I decide to stay with the transhumance until we reach the solid cloud layer above. Then at least honour will be satisfied and I can go home.

Exactly on time, the cattle leave first preceded by a classically red-faced farmer in a Citreon van who shouts at the spectators to keep out of their way. The narrow road follows the side of a gorge with a steep drop to one side. He fears that urban visitors will not anticipate the cows’ movements and will place themselves between the animals and the abyss. All it takes is one cow with a calf that have fallen behind the others and are trying to catch them up. One jostle with a tourist and it will all be over. It has happened before and there have been injuries but, so far, no deaths.

Next follow around twenty Mérens horses, a native Pyrenean breed. Today, silhouetted against the half-light of a dawn already two hours late, these jet-black horses will not make a story either. So it is all down to the sheep. I set off in front of several hundred ewes of the local tarasconnais breed.

Contrary to popular belief, sheep are anything but stupid. They know what they are doing even if it does not make immediate sense to some humans. They stick together because they know that this confuses predators. While it is true that this lot are protected by shepherds, sheep farming has only been around for a few thousand years. That is not very long in evolutionary terms. Better safe than sorry.

The flock ebbs and flows around me as the leaders fix on some approaching patch of grass. When they turn aside to snatch this pasture on the move, others will overtake and become the next front row. The browsers will rejoin the rear of the column as it passes. This cycle continuously repeats itself like waves breaking on a beach.

The sheep need to browse continually, not just for nourishment, but also for the moisture which the grass contains and carries on its surfaces. Climbing on a June day is hot work and dehydration is a risk. A couple of vans follow the flock, ready to collect any stragglers who find it all too much. There is usually the odd geriatric ewe or a lamb born too late in the season to make the whole trip on foot this time.

I notice that some sheep are wearing eye-catching red or yellow pompoms. Obviously this must have some profound cultural or religious significance. Ever keen to understand other people's lives and cultures, I ask a shepherd to explain the meaning of this historic and traditional custom. He stares at me, wide-eyed, trying hard to keep a straight face. He says “It seemed like a good idea - today is supposed to be fun. We just wanted to make them look pretty”. He even wears a few pompoms himself.

After such a silly question, he contains himself no longer and explodes into laughter. His colleagues follow suite five milliseconds later. I am confronted by a line of hysterical shepherds. Unfortunately we are all men and so cannot walk and laugh at the same time. The human vanguard shudders to a temporary halt.

Following are hundreds of woolly females that can walk and chew grass simultaneously. They don’t stop. . .

The flock reaches the cloud base where I had promised myself that I would turn back. Most of the spectators have long since returned from whence they came. But, I am having fun with my new-found friends so I continue and a strange things begin to happen.

As we climb through the mist, the light level improves rapidly and serious photography becomes an option. Then the white of the sheep’s fleeces melds with the grey mist to ghostly atmospheric effect. Images appear one after another telling the story and I am glad I stuck with it.

Three hours after leaving the Pla, the sheep suddenly stop at around 1800 metres. I ask a shepherd what is wrong - “Cows up ahead”. We have caught up the grey gascon cattle that began the day. A hundred metres ahead, the track has narrowed to single file. The cows search diligently for a way up through the rocks.

One of the shepherds runs forward, staff in hand, to direct the bovine traffic jam. He stands high on a boulder, complete with staff and beret. What a gift for a photographer! As this oil painting comes to life before my eyes, I run forward across the rock-strewn slope, hoping that he stays there long enough to be recorded for posterity. Obligingly he does. . .

Once past this little drama, it’s a short walk to a footbridge across the river Soulcem. The final destination, open mountainside, beckons on the other bank. The transhumance is complete. A shepherd will stay with the flock throughout the summer to make sure that all is well. They’ll descend again in October.