The Mental Load

The main traits of the Breton race are uncleanliness, superstition, and drunkenness.—M. BUSSON, Geography manual for high school students, 1929

1.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’”

In the villages one sees children and pigs rolling pell-mell on the manure; the mash eaten by the former would probably be refused by the swine of Canigou. —Prosper MERIMEE, Letter to Jubert de Passa, 1835

C. and I have spent a pleasant summer in Finisterre, looking after a restored 17th-century manoir. Our principal house-sitting responsibilities are to water the many plants and shrubs, mow the many lawns, and feed the owners’ goat and three black sheep. Easy enough tasks, given that it has been mainly cool and wet since our arrival. The garden is thriving. There is ample grass for the animals. Strictly speaking, the lawns do not require mowing; all the same, when the rains allow, we mow, we mow and we mow, and we enjoy mowing. It is satisfying to cut swathes through thick grass and lay waste to lush weeds and wildflowers, despite the guilt we feel for depriving bees of pollen and burning gallons of fossil fuels in the process.

Our true and most indispensable duty, however, requiring single-minded vigilance, is to ensure that nothing and no one takes up residence in the house. Brittany is home to invasive swallows, starlings, sparrows, bats, rats, snakes, squirrels, mice, titmice, dormice, and Celts and Gauls of all persuasions—socialists, anarchists, freethinkers, clog-wearing peasants, red-bonnetted slaughterhouse maidens, stupefied degenerates, brandy abusers and bewildered altar boys, newly joined by a marauding contingent of post-Brexiters dispossessed of continental rights and status. Housing is scarce, thanks in no small part to the influx of outsiders buying up every inch of land for intensive piggeries, chicken abattoirs and secondary residences. Most of the indigenous population “live” in the former, in closed buildings with perforated floors to allow their droppings to pass through. Gestation cribs are common, as are farrowing cribs. As is artificial insemination—much more common than natural mating, as it allows up to 30-40 females to be impregnated from a single male.

Some cribs allow more space than others, for greater interaction between mothers and their young. Most, however, are designed with cost-effectiveness or efficiency in mind and are therefore small. In the absence of stimulation and sufficient space, their inhabitants often develop behavioural problems: aggressive comportment or pathological stereotypies (rhythmic, repetitive movements).

Squatters, however, are protected. If you occupy a principal or secondary residence for more than two days, you cannot be forcefully evicted but must be sued by the proprietor, which takes months.

We are not as yet considering this course of action.

2.

“It is forbidden to spit on the floor and speak Breton”

”The question is,'“ said Alice, `”whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They've a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they're the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!”

I came across two Breton sailors on the shore of Port Navalo: stupefied faces of degenerates, eyes washed out by the abuse of brandy; they look at the sea like cows watching the Quimper train go by. I try to strike up a conversation, but all I get from them are inconsistent babble.—Gustave FLAUBERT, Par les monts et par les grèves, 1847

The manor house and its gardens and lawns are next to a pond fed by a stream surrounded by fields of livestock corn and hay. The closest village, half abandoned, was once a thriving market town. Before the Revolution, it had its own judge, tax collector, solicitor, notary, administrative governor, and sergeant-at-arms. Justice was dispensed there every Monday. A gibbet stood next to the butcher shop on the main square, which was lined with lime trees. To this day the square remains resplendent, as does its central fountained garden, which is filled with aromatic and medicinal plants. Most of the surrounding homes and shops, made of granite quarried from the nearby coasts, are well-kept but shuttered.

Just as we pass, two approximately female creatures, wearing a long, unattractive tube probably to compensate for their congenital dwarfism, sign to each other, then rush into a low-legged aedicula that must be a chapel.—Gustave FLAUBERT, Par les monts et par les grèves, 1847

One of the many beautiful chapels contains a large stone slab that is venerated—if a child is slow to walk or to understand its place in the world, its parents lay it on this slab and pray to the saint who once slept on it, without bedclothes or pillow, and is now buried under it. When a child is too sick or small or weak to be brought to the stone, his mother or aunt brings its shirt and dips it in the fountain where the saint quenched his thirst. The shirt is slipped over the sick child while still wet. Doing this will return the child to full health, should it be worthy.

Night-washers are said to appear at the fountain during certain phases of the moon, especially in summer. After midnight, they will plead with you to help them wash the linen of the dead. If you refuse, they will seize you, drag you into the water, and break your arms.

Nearby once lived a rich and powerful seigneur whose son was born with a horse’s head.

After the Revolution, the town’s five parish priests refused to take the oath of fidelity to the Constitution and were run out of the chapels and replaced by constitutional priests. The roads became impassable. Cattle would disappear up to their necks and remain sunken on the spot, until they were pulled out by groups of men with ropes. A band of these men, forty in all, moved into the forest next to the pond, from whence they ambushed stagecoaches and robbed travellers of their purses.

A strange town in a strange place, Finisterre—Land’s End—filled with saints and monsters. For the Romans, it was the last populated spot on earth. Today it is one of the most industrialized agricultural regions of the world.

3.

“Would you tell me, please,” said Alice “what that means?”

“Now you talk like a reasonable child,” said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. “I meant by ‘impenetrability’ that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life.”

“That's a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful tone.

“When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.”

The wind whips up the smell of kelp, dung and badly washed clothes. I'm overwhelmed with dismay. What hole of drunkenness and superstition have we fallen into?—Gustave FLAUBERT, Par les monts et par les grèves, 1847

Next to the pond, near its eastern shore, are the remains of a motte castrale, a feudal motte, which, in English, and in certain modern philosophical circles, is called a motte-and-bailey castle. Initially, this was a simple earth mound on which stood a fortified wooden house. In the 13th century, the local seigneur added a stone keep. A house, still there, was built in the lower courtyard, below the motte, in which lived the farmer responsible for collecting the lord’s taxes and tithes. Today, it is the secondary home of a couple from Saint-Brieuc, a town two hours away by car. Many of its stones have been stolen. Its surrounding gardens are overrun by knotweed, an invasive species from Asia that springs from monstrous systems of rhizomes that spread deep into the earth. It grows quickly and is hard to kill without glyphosates, which were banned for use in private gardens in 2016. New plants sprout from even the tiniest fragment left in or even on the ground. In some parts of the world, it is considered Satan’s spawn.

4.

“Ah, you should see 'em come round me of a Saturday night,” Humpty Dumpty went on, wagging his head gravely from side to side: “for to get their wages, you know.”

(Alice didn't venture to ask what he paid them with; and so you see I can't tell YOU.)

First communion day. Round, pinkish, shaven, swine-like faces of the kids engulfed in their black velvet clothes; girls already grown up sweating hard under their piles of lace. Bewildered altar boys following in the footsteps of the gilded priest. Lunch at the "Albatros dolent", an inn recommended by Joanne (the guide) as the best in the area. The food was abysmal; the cider was an infamous piquette; in the coffee, we were served pieces of a local cake with rancid butter called "far"; I nearly lost a tooth on a prune still with its stone.… Pestilential smells. Maxime and I walk down a steep street lined with vague shops. Behind the filthy windows, we can make out shrivelled, wrinkled faces, scabbed like tree frogs from the previous autumn: they have been removed from their racks to let them catch the grey daylight so that they don't rot before October.—Gustave FLAUBERT, Par les monts et par les grèves, 1847

A motte is a raised mound of earth. It is a Norman word. Its accompanying bailey, from bayle, is a walled courtyard surrounded by a protective ditch in turn surrounded by an embankment defended by a palisade—a fence of pointed wooden stakes set into the ground in a close row. Such castles were first built in Normandy and Anjou. They then spread across northern Europe. because they required nothing but dirt, rock, wood and unskilled, brute force to build.

This one is said to date from the 11th century. It is believed to be part of a settlement dating from the Neolithic period.

As a system of defense it is as impressive as it is simple. A stone tower high up on a mound (the motte) surrounded by habitable land (the bailey) protected in turn by a ditch:

Being dark and dank, the motte is not a habitation of choice. The only reason for its existence is the desirability of the bailey, which the combination of the motte and ditch makes relatively easy to retain despite attack by marauders. When only lightly pressed, the ditch makes small numbers of attackers easy to defeat as they struggle across it: when heavily pressed the ditch is not defensible, and so neither is the bailey. Rather, one retreats to the insalubrious but defensible, perhaps impregnable, motte. Eventually the marauders give up, when one is well placed to reoccupy desirable land.—Nicholas Shackel, Motte and Bailey Doctrines, 2014

Here, the motte is situated on a rocky spur, and oval in shape. It is 80 metres long, 50 metres wide and 10 metres high. The ditch surrounding is five metres wide and surrounded by an embankment on which a drawbridge was built. Presumably, the bailey once contained stables and workshops, perhaps a kitchen and crops. It would have been difficult to defend against enemy attack. The motte, however, with its impregnable keep, was the perfect fallback from whence to launch stones and shoot arrows at the encroaching foe.

Today, however, there is nothing here but the mound of earth, covered in trees, ferns and knotweed.

5.

There was a long pause.

“Is that all?” Alice timidly asked.

“`That's all,” said Humpty Dumpty. “Good-bye”

This was rather sudden, Alice thought: but, after such a VERY strong hint that she ought to be going, she felt that it would hardly be civil to stay. So she got up, and held out her hand. “Good-bye, till we meet again!” she said as cheerfully as she could.

There is a majority of women in this slaughterhouse. Many of them are illiterate. Many are told: ‘You no longer have a future in or around here. Go and work 50 or 60km away.’ But these people don't have driving licenses. What are we going to tell them?—Emmanuel Macron, F1, 2014

Most days here, as Bretons like to say, contain all four seasons. “It's better to have rain now than when the sun is shining.” Still, we swim most days. The coastline is magnificent. There are no good restaurants but many markets. The local Super-U is excellent. Next to it is an organic shop that sells small-holder vegetables, cheese, pork, chicken, bread and wine.

We have seen many sheep, goats and cows out the car windows. We have seen very few chickens. We have not seen any pigs. Most of the chickens and pigs are, presumably, inside. There are intensive piggeries and chicken farms throughout Brittany. The animals in them are produced and processed exactly as they are in China, Canada, the US, Germany, Ukraine and Brazil. Journalists who write about some of the problems these forms of intensive farming have brought to the region—toxic waste, toxic green algal blooms, occupational illnesses, fatal animal epidemics, high suicide rates—have had their car wheels unbolted, fences smashed and dogs poisoned. Some have had funeral notices left in letterboxes and dead foxes dumped in their gardens.

6.

Alice waited a minute to see if he would speak again, but as he never opened his eyes or took any further notice of her, she said `Good-bye!' once more, and, getting no answer to this, she quietly walked away: but she couldn't help saying to herself as she went, “Of all the unsatisfactory—” (she repeated this aloud, as it was a great comfort to have such a long word to say) “of all the unsatisfactory people I EVER met—” She never finished the sentence, for at this moment a heavy crash shook the forest from end to end.

For my original purposes the desirable but only lightly defensible territory of the Motte and Bailey castle, that is to say, the Bailey, represents philosophical propositions with similar properties: desirable to their proponents but only lightly defensible. The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard-pressed. Diagnosis of a philosophical doctrine as being a Motte and Bailey Doctrine is invariably fatal. Once made it is relatively obvious to those familiar with the doctrine that the doctrine’s survival required a systematic vacillation between exploiting the desired territory and retreating to the Motte when pressed. Clearly, the diagnosis is not confined to philosophical doctrines: others may suffer the same malady.—Nicholas Shackel, Motte and Bailey Doctrines, 2014

On 14 June 2023, just under two weeks after we moved into the manor house, a new “anti-squat” bill was passed by the French parliament, with stiffer fines, three-year prison sentences, and easier eviction procedures. It became law July 27.

Every year in France, almost 150,000 “households unable to pay their rents” are taken to court. Of these, around 120,000 are evicted. Until the passing of the new bill, only a minority of these evictions were enforced: just under 70,000 orders to vacate were served in 2018 and 16,000 households were forcibly evicted. This represents just over 36,000 people in total. In ten years the equivalent of the entire population of Montpellier has been evicted. Or Tampa. Or Brighton. Or 230 times the population of the town up the road, with the lovely fountain and the saint’s magic bed.

The town lost a third of its inhabitants between the Second World War and the 1960s, when an even larger exodus then occurred, as it did throughout Brittany, as modern farming pushed out most of the small holdings, and families caught the train to Paris and stayed.

In the late 1960s, the son of the local butcher (we rented our car from his son) opened a chicken slaughterhouse. By 1975, the abattoir was killing, packaging and freezing almost a million chickens a week. Over the next 20 years, the town’s population almost doubled. Then the company relocated. Then it was bought by foreigners. Then it went into receivership. Today, it has reopened, but only employs a handful of people. The streets are quiet. The original butcher shop is closed. Its facade has been painted to look like there are people in the windows.