The Arc de Triomphe for mountain pastures and the most beautiful avenue in the world as a transhumance path: more than 2,000 ewes marched in Paris on Sunday, to carry the colors of Béarn and pastoralism high, at the end of the Salon de l’Agriculture.
Under the encouragement of the shepherds, a great swell of white wool invades the Champs-Elysées. On his white horse, Henri IV, the king from Béarn who bequeathed to the French the famous “hen in the pot” – post-Renaissance version of food sovereignty – leads the parade.
Flutes and polyphonic songs accompany the animals, followed by teams of solid mountain cows and old carts where a few sheep are entitled to early shearing.
Jules, 8, is amazed. He came with his mother to see “where the milk comes from” which makes his favorite cheese. Kahina, 40, brought her daughters, in homage to a shepherd grandfather in Kabylia, who “worked all his life in the mountains to send his children to school”.
This “Béarnaise madness” is the idea of one man: Jacques Pédehontaà, mayor of the small rural town of Laàs, 50 km from Pau, and ardent defender of “positive rurality”.
– “Beyond the country” –
He explains to AFP that he wanted to convey an “image of reconciliation” between “rural France and urban France, which understand each other less and less” when they “need” each other. .
With its Italian and Spanish neighbors in particular, it pleads to include transhumance, literally the journey “beyond the country”, in the intangible heritage of Unesco. “It’s 7,000 years of history”, that of man and “the mountain he maintains”, of “extensive breeding which gives a cheese with an incomparable taste” and of a “strong identity” that he wants to preserve.
From the Béarnaise valleys of Ossau, Aspe and Barétous, he came with 13 of the oldest shepherds and 13 young shepherdesses, proud of a renewal of generations which feminizes a profession that for a long time remained the sole domain of men.
In the 1990s, the tightening of European standards imposed on cheese dairies led to the modernization of the “summer pasture huts” – or “cuyalaa” in Béarn – where the shepherds live from June to October, perched at more than 1,200 meters.
“Water and electricity – with solar panels – have arrived, the huts have become much more comfortable”, explains Corinne Baylocq, 40, who transhumes with husband, children and their 300 sheep.
The first months are the toughest, with two milkings a day and cheese making – which will be sold on a short circuit in the valley – then “the lactation of the ewes decreases and we can enjoy the assembly”, she says. .
On the podium installed in the middle of the avenue, old Julien rejoices: “30% of shepherds today are young shepherdesses”.
In a rolling voice, full of pebbles from his mountain, he harangues the Parisian crowd: “Each time a farm disappears, it’s one less house in the village, a school that closes, public services that disappear. . Don’t let us down, maybe your children will join us!”.
Moved, he passes the microphone to an Italian neighbor, Francesca, who comes to recall that “transhumance is an example of peace between peoples”, an old solidarity “important, especially today”, she insists. , without however mentioning the war in Ukraine, in everyone’s mind.