"It is deep inside us. A passion." Our local gravedigger watches his comrades gut a deer on the floor of the Salle de Chasse. "It's not something a law can stop." He smiles: "Thank God we're not English." Pity mixed with scorn is what most of my neighbours feel about the recent vote to ban fox-hunting in England. Thierry Coste, however, political advisor to the Fédération nationale des chasseurs (FNC), disagrees: "We're worried," he told me from his Paris office. "Though if it does happen here, it'll be done by stealth - banning firearms, for example, for security reasons. In Britain the relationship between town and country has broken down. We have to work hard over the next few years so that doesn't happen here."
Hunting in France is different from hunting in Britain, which the French see as the elitist preserve of landed wealth. Hunting in France is inexpensive: a licence, a gun, some cartridges and an obligatory fluorescent orange cap (protection against being shot by your own side). Available to everyone, hunting has worked its way into the fabric of country life, and many see it as a right bequeathed by the revolution. "The Frenchman has a need for roots," says Thierry Coste. "Even a town-dweller needs to feel connected to the terroir of his parents." All recent French presidents have stressed their link with a region of rural France.
But analysis of voting habits shows that while country people are largely right-wing, they are increasingly disillusioned with the right. They feel abandoned by politicians, who seem concerned only about urban issues like security or immigration. Debate about the countryside is limited to whether wine should be advertised. Yet the rural population is increasing. The only major politician trying to turn the sense of abandonment among 30 per cent of the electorate to his own personal advantage is, inevitably, Nicolas Sarkozy.
The right's principal presidential candidate for 2007 has one major electoral weakness - his roots are not in the country. Born and brought up in wealthy Paris suburbs, his father is Hungarian, his mother of Jewish Greek stock. His wife is no better, telling Le Figaro recently that she is proud of "not having a drop of French blood in my veins" (Russian father, Spanish mother). But when it comes to choosing father-figure presidents, this will be a disadvantage. So Sarkozy needs the rural vote, and since it is not going to identify naturally with him, he has to go out and woo it.
Although not a hunting man himself, Sarkozy quickly cottoned on to the power of the hunting vote. His predecessor at the interior ministry had introduced a bill banning sales of firearms by mail order. When Sarkozy took over, the president of the hunters' federation went to see him. After their meeting, the new law mysteriously disappeared, the ministry omitting to publish the final "decree of application." Later, when he moved to the ministry of finance, Sarkozy came under pressure from the ecology minister to raise the annual fee for a hunting permit. Despite being desperate to fill the state coffers, Sarkozy kept the fee the same. "Sarkozy is the hunter's friend," said a statement from the national federation, drafted by Coste. On the 15th September, the hunter's friend employed Coste to devise a three-year strategy to clinch that neglected rural vote.
Thierry Coste describes himself as a "professionnel de l'influence." He was employed by another ruralist party, Chasse, Pêche, Nature et Tradition (CPNT), to increase its vote in the 2002 presidential elections. With his help, their candidate did surprisingly well. But the right did not like CPNT because, attracting voters from both left and right, it was that dangerous anomaly, a successful party with no partisan attachment. So Coste was "used by the Elysée to terminate" the party he had so effectively promoted. For four months leading up to this year's regional and European elections, Coste exerted his influence over the notoriously compliant press to run down CPNT. The party did so disastrously that it lost its mandate, running up huge debts. Now the urban Sarkozy wants to use Coste's influence to market himself as a green-welly manqué, partly to France's 1.4m registered hunters who, with their families, represent a powerful lobby, but also, cleverly, to townies who want to know that their backyard is being looked after in their absence. Coste's new book, Chasse, politique et influence, is a study of why the hunting lobby is so powerful in French politics. The prime minister hunts, as do several of his ministers. Of the 577 deputés in the Assemblée nationale, 220 belong to the hunting group. "Chirac made the mistake of assuming that 'rural' still means farming - but only one person in five living in the country actually farms any more," Coste says. "Before Sarkozy, politicians failed to see that rural life touches on many areas: health, air, food, stress, education. It's about quality of life. A perfect illustration of all these is hunting." For voters to agree with that last statement, Coste has to persuade the deeply conservative hunters to share these beautiful wooded hills with others. Otherwise, dragging hunting into the election spotlight may reveal that the French are not so different from the English as they think.
