France - Rail threat to Cézanne's landscape

[John Ashworth]

Rail threat to Cézanne's landscape

The vines and olive trees of Mont Sainte-Victoire made famous by the artist could be grubbed up to make way for a new TGV line

* Jason Burke in Trets, France
* The Observer, Sunday 12 April 2009

Patrice Doudon bends over the vine and carefully trims the buds on its gnarled stem. It is 40 years old, three years older than he is. His great-grandparents worked this land, just a few miles from one of the most famous landscapes in the world.

Doudon wakes up every morning and looks out over what one of the greatest artists of the modern era saw. "I wake up, look out of my window and see a Cézanne. How many can say that?" asks the farmer. "Now they want to ruin everything."

For, if Paris bureaucrats have their way, that landscape is about to change forever. The views of Mont Sainte-Victoire, as important a landscape in Provence as the bay at Antibes or the promenade at Nice and one of the inspirations of modern art, could soon have an addition: a high-speed line carrying trains from Marseille to Toulon at 220mph. The countryside around the craggy mountain painted 87 times by Paul Cézanne as he searched for a new visual language to communicate structure, light and space will be no more.

"It's a disaster. The noise will be infernal. All the vines and olive trees will be ripped up," said Doudon. "I'm all for progress and trains, but this is just destruction for the sake of it. It is not even going to be useful."

The criticism strikes home because the construction of the new line along the south coast of France to extend the existing high speed line further east is to be accelerated as part of the nation's response to la crise. President Nicolas Sarkozy has ordered that billions of pounds' worth of investment in France's renowned TGV network be speeded up to help kick-start growth in the ailing economy.

But for the likes of Doudon, the line is a disaster. "We are a small business. I've poured money and sweat into my vines and that could just all disappear," he said. Doudon makes the famous Provençal rosé on his 10-hectare plot. But falling demand and rising costs means that any loss of land will signal the end.

"They will take some of my land and compensate me, but that means nothing. First, my great-grandfather worked this land; secondly, I simply can't make ends meet with less than 10 hectares," he said.

The campaign against the new TGV line has powerful local support. The route by Mont Sainte-Victoire and the famous landscapes of Cézanne, which are in line to be listed by the UN, is still being debated. Doudon and his fellow vignerons favour the "metropolitan route", along the coast between Marseille and Toulon, although it would add 20 minutes to the journey and cost €3.5bn more than the route under Mont Sainte-Victoire.

There have been a series of demonstrations, with thousands of protesters, led by the winemakers and olive oil producers, shouting the movement's slogan "Wake up, Cézanne, they've all gone mad". According to the mayor of Aix-en-Provence, Maryse Joissains-Masini, "the basic rules of the Republic have been trampled".

A descendant of the great painter has been enlisted, too. "It's a sword plunged into the landscape. I know that modernity means a certain number of things are necessary, but we have to preserve this environment," Philippe Cézanne, the artist's great-grandson, told reporters recently. "The soul of Cézanne lies in these hills."

One of the first pictures of Mont Sainte-Victoire painted by Cézanne was a protest against the Aix-Rognac railway line that was set to cut across the family lands of the artist. "It was painted in 1870 and traces the railway line's route like a bleeding wound across the landscape," according to Michel Fraisset, a leading Cézanne expert.

Patrice Doudon continues to tend his vines with his 66-year-old father, Gilbert, hoping for a reprieve when the final decision is taken by a minister in Paris later this year. "Someone takes a pen and draws a line on a map. They don't really see what that can do to real people with real lives," he said.

"I just want to wake up and see things as Cézanne saw them every morning. That can't be too much to ask."