Seersucker is difficult to find in France these days, and the iconic fabric – perfect for warm weather – would be very welcome now as the country is ablaze in the worst wildfires the country has seen since the end of World War II.
Reading about the weather, several friends in the States have e-mailed me asking how I was and if the fires were threatening me in Meursault. The answer is, no; Burgundy has for the most part been spared, although Nuits-Saint-Georges, just a few miles north, did have a small wildfire last week. The reality is nowhere in France is safe. Politicians and voters all are very hot under their collars as the blame goes round and round.
Why hasn’t the government managed the maintenance of forests?
Why doesn’t France have enough planes or water to douse the flames?
For me, it’s a bit of déjà vu as I was living in Montecito during the Thomas Fire and my husband and I evacuated to our children’s house in Pacific Palisades for a week, not knowing if we’d have a house to come back to. Mismanagement of forests and brush, lack of water and other resources rings a loud, painful bell. Governor Gavin Newsom‘s and Mayor of L.A. Karen Bass’s utter failure to plan for eventual fires and their wholesale mismanagement of rebuilding Pacific Palisades speaks to me of ineptitude, corruption, and the toll socialism has and is taking on California.
Communist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, founder of the hard left party La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”), has blamed the fires on capitalism, saying “It’s not nature that has caused the fires, but the stupidity of capitalism, of its accumulation, of its refusal to regulate and organize.” Jordan Bardella, the young leader of France’s far-right National Rally party, blames “the French state and central government’s lack of anticipation and budget mismanagement.”
Everyone seems to be blaming Emmanuel Macron, whose popularity stands at just 22 percent. Last summer, Le Figaro reported that the French President’s failure to follow through on his promise to buy two more Canadair amphibious aircraft (water bomber planes fitted with two 3,000-litre tanks that are filled from a large body of water) was “untenable,” as Macron had slashed the civil protection budget by 53 million euros. France’s fleet of 16 of these aircraft is 30 years old, and only seven are operational.
So far in France, more than 115,000 hectares (1 hectare=2.47 acres) have been lost. Fifty-five thousand vacationers were evacuated last week from Cap Ferret outside Bordeaux (not to be confused with ultra chic Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, just minutes from Monte Carlo). Campers, second-homers, and middle-class French, had to flee by sea or on the one-access road with minutes to spare. Over the weekend, 110,000 residents in Gironde, the province containing Bordeaux, have been evacuated. The city of Bordeaux is now threatened, and its 268,000 residents are awaiting evacuation orders. The fires are a mere 12 kms from the city. The region’s vineyards have sustained major damage, and winemakers are wondering how to cope with the massive loss, which certainly will affect the country’s GDP, already suffering from the decline of wine drinking.
Meanwhile, Eleonore Caroit, a minister in the foreign office, told visitors they should not cancel their plans to visit France, even though she admitted that “the fires have been tragic and much worse than last year. I’m in Paris and it’s okay.” Where was she when 2,000 hectares of Fontainebleau’s forests, southeast of Paris, were burning? France leads the world in tourism and tourism is 70 percent of the country’s GDP, but tourists aren’t stupid (except perhaps American tourists who suffer from TDS) and they don’t want to suffer or die on vacation.
The Perfect Summer Fabric
That brings me back to seersucker. A week ago, when Fontainebleau was on fire, I was at a ladies’ lunch here in Meursault. One of the guests had brought her six-week-old baby boy in an adorable seersucker outfit. I commented on how cute baby and outfit were and how much I loved seersucker but couldn’t find any in France. “Seersucker? What’s that?” she asked me. “Why, it’s what Isaak is wearing,” I explained. She’d never heard of the light warm-weather cotton fabric, even though she sold fabric in her store in Beaune.
This has bothered me for two weeks. So, this morning I asked my neighbor, Jacqueline, a former couturière, if she’d ever heard of seersucker. “Mais oui,” she responded, “I made my daughters’ dresses out of it thirty years ago and now I can’t find it anywhere. It’s the perfect fabric for this heat hell we’re going through now.”
We agreed that it must be a generational thing. Or that it was just another one of those stupid American things, like air conditioning and capitalism that the French can’t bear. Tant pis, I say. Let them – to paraphrase Marie Antoinette – suffer from ignorance.
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