The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [128]
The 212,000 people in the French Basque provinces represent less than 9 percent of Basques. But they have played an important role because, though they have not had the prosperity of Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya, neither have they had the political turmoil. The little provinces of Labourd, Basse Navarre, and Soule have been the safe haven of Basqueland, where refugees could go, where troubled Basques from the other side could find shelter. But what would the role of French Basqueland be in a peaceful Euskadi? If the seven provinces were ever united, the situation of the French Basques would be similar to what it is now under France: Neither the population, nor the money, nor the power would be in their provinces.
A belle epoque postcard from Biarritz.
THE BASQUES WERE among the inventors of beach resorts. Biarritz, like San Sebastián, is one of the oldest beach resorts in the world. In 1892 on a visit to Labourd, Pierre Loti, the French merchant marine officer-turned-novelist, wrote, “Poor Basqueland, such a long time intact, like some sort of little Arabia, protected by loyalty to its ancestral traditions and by its language that no one can learn, and here it is, vanished just like that. In just the last few seasons, tourists, who seemed not to know about it, have made the discovery.”
Since then, French social programs have greatly expanded both tourism and retirement to the Basque provinces. In Loti’s day, the Basques had only to stave off an invasion of the wealthy. But six weeks guaranteed vacation and early retirement pensions have made tourists and retirees the basis of the economy in coastal Labourd, which the French tourist industry insists on calling La Côte Basque.
Ugly white housing, of a design that speaks of nothing so much as quick construction and easy cleaning, much of it occupied only from May through October, is marring the outskirts of the beautiful ancient port of St.-Jean-de-Luz. Tourism is moving into Basse Navarre, and in Soule locals wish it would come their way too because their farms cannot compete with agro-industry, and traditional crafts cannot compete with Asian factories.
Soule, where fewer than 14,000 people live in quiet villages surrounded by mountainsides patched with small cornfields, is the forgotten province. It has always been that way. On May 5, 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, when Louis XVI presided over the États Généraux, Soule, neighboring Béarn, and also Brittany were the only parts of France that were not represented. Soule had not been making a political statement. It simply could not raise enough public funds to send someone to Paris. Mauléon, Soule’s capital, has a shady main square with a fronton court, where a few dozen people might pass at the busiest time of day. This is called the lower town. The upper town is built along the ramparts of a medieval castle. Why don’t tourists visit the castle? locals wonder. Without them there is only the corn crop, and a few sheep. Little is left of the town’s main business, making espadrilles.
In the thirteenth century, the king of Aragón commented on the curious hemp-soled cloth shoes, tied at the ankles, worn by recruits from the Pyrenees in the army of the Crusade. In nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Mauléon, the identical shoe was still being made and sold throughout Basqueland. In the famous photo of Sabino Arana behind prison bars, he is wearing espadrilles. Even in the early twentieth century, every morning, the now quiet town of Mauléon would fill up with about 1,000 espadrille workers. One plant made soles, another made fabrics, and women, often working at home, sewed them together.
In the 1950s, when Maïte Faure’s father died, her mother had to support the family with the only work available for women: sewing espadrilles. Strapped to her