Festival Retro, St Aubin des Bois
France has remained much more rural than England. One result is that many more people retain their links to their agricultural past. In St Aubin des Bois they celebrate this once a year with a Festival Retro. Started in 1980, it's a celebration of the old ways of farming. It's not just a ploughing display, or a parade of old tractors. Instead, it takes in all aspects of rural life over the past 100 years.
The whole village is given over to the event. It started with a procession of people dressed up as their ancestors or, in many cases, as they would have dressed up when they were young. They were followed by old cars, mostly Citroens, with their occupants in period dress. There were also a few very old lorries, some chain-driven and dating back 100 years. Then followed a range of tractors, many of them with huge single-cylinder engines blowing smoke rings from their vertical exhausts.
Last came the animals, with a team of six bulls ready for ploughing, another pair pulling a hay cart, several Percherons pulling carts, even a goat with a child's cart behind.
Once the parade had passed, the demonstrations started. Wherever you looked there were groups of people demonstrating everyday tasks, from cooking to washing, from threshing by hand to sawing a log on a tractor-powered circular saw (safety equipment - straw hats and neckerchiefs).
Every stage in the production of flour was re-enacted. From cutting the wheat by hand or with a mechanical scythe drawn by two Percheron horses to hand threshing, threshing by a horse on a treadmill, threshing by a steam-driven machine (all the traction engines were UK-made) and by a tractor to milling the wheat on a tractor-driven contraption, finished by hand-sieving. You could watch the wheat being cut and follow the process right through to buying a small packet of flour to make your own bread or crepes.
One of the highlights was something not seen in the UK - ploughing with six full-grown bulls. Being France, there wasn't a roped-off area set aside for it. Nor were there marshalls, crown control barriers, health and safety monitors etc. No, as it's rural France, the ploughing took place in the car park, up and down between the rows of cars. When the bulls were wheeled around to retrace their footsteps, small children were pulled out of the way so they weren't crushed. Of course bulls are big and can be dangerous, but it's up to you to get out of the way. If you get too close and get hurt, then it's your own fault for not giving them enough room. The bulls were controlled by one man walking in front, steering the front two with gentle taps from a stick. If they walked too fast and nudged into his back, a stern word was all it took to slow the bulls down again. Between each set of bulls was another man making sure the bulls followed the lead pair. The plough was guided by one man and it was he who shouted instructions to the rest of the team.
.The overriding impression was the sheer number of people every task took. Nowadays, most tasks take one man and a tractor and a few hours. A century ago a similar task would occupy half-a-dozen men for several days. Compared with nowadays, farming was once a very social affair.
