Inspection: A Prequel

Béziers
(looking up to the Cathedral from the bank of the river Orb)

About a month ago, I went off to the small mediterranean city of Béziers to complete a week-long professional development course on safety, security, and health to be certified, particularly in fire safety, as the Director of the CAIRH. Also, I knew that the Centre was to be re-inspected for safety having failed in this area last March 2009. My doing the course was also required to regain one of our three licenses neccessary to remain a professional theatre centre and to continue our continuing education programme and receiving the public, like any other school. Plus, Octopus, a one star Guide Michelin restaurant in Béziers, was also in my sights and desires. I can put up with a lot, even mind-numbing bureaucracy and rabid actors, if good food is part of the perceived reward.

Béziers is a strange place. It existed and flourished in the Gallo-Roman epoch and the early Middle Ages. However, it was totally destroyed during the Albigensian Crusade with everyone in the city gruesomely killed except for seven maimed survivors. It wasn't rebuilt until the 15th century, but only began to flourish with the construction of the Canal du Midi in the late 17th century. 

Since Roman times, Béziers has been and is known for its white wines. Also it is famous as the home of the creator of the Canal du Midi and the birthplace of the French Resistance hero, Jean Moulin, who was tortured to death in Lyon by the Gestapo official, Klaus Barbie. It has two one star Michelin restaurants (I did eat at one), overall, is inexpensive, 10k from the beaches of the mediterranean, and still has some ruined vestiges pf Roman structures littered around. I also found a great Vietnamese restaurant, which featured some Lao plates; hard to find even in France, and an Indian restaurant with a slew of basmati rice dishes. They use as a base in the rice a unique Indian regional blend of 27 different spices. Even the Café du Théâtre on the central, tree-lined spinal column of a centre had an excellent goose gésier salad plate (including foie gras) with vinaigret dressing, fresh bread, and a delicious, plummy Corbieres red table wine, all for about 9 euros (around 12 dollars).

I seem to have been the first American to have ever attempted this training of five, 7 hour days of oral and practical instruction with 5 hours a day of memorization (no texts as help except notes taken).  I had to pass written, oral, and practical tests in everything from labor law, security procedures, putting out real fires in an abandoned parking lot with different devices, to understanding the complex French system of health and safety and its attendant arcane formulas. It was like trying to take a drink out of a fire hose, and not only was it all in French, but French in a heavy, rapid, southern French accent with a highly specialized vocabulary held together with a set of almost indecipherable acronymns.

The course was in a turn of the 19th century theatre, the Théâtre Minotaur, where Debussey gave his first  public performance. The inside of the theatre was dominated by two huge murals of so-called mythical figures, but really an excuse to show off full frontal, naked men. Strangely all the women in the paintings were clothed; odd for France except for art work found in Catholic churches (unless they depict Hell, then even the women are naked).

The Béziers Municipal Theatre 
(not the Minotaur, unfortunately)

Plus, much to my initial surprise, the inexpensive, charming, little hotel I had found on-line was right smack in the crumbling North African ghetto of the old town. The proprietors were a charming family from Lyon, who all had the expression of a dog that finally caught a car. Of course, with this site for a hotel, I had none of the neurotic worry that I would be running into any other tourists or Americans. I think I was probably not mugged or hassled because, with my loud Hawaian shirts, I was too strange a creature out of the local element to be taken seriously or suspected of scouting out potential drone targets.

The result, but not the restaurant reviews, are below.

Inspection: Part I

 The Magnanerie, Bonbonne, and Rock Outcrop at Malérargues

Two days ago, 1 June, was the Centre’s follow-up inspection for safety, particularly fire-code safety. Malérargues had failed the inspection in March 2009 and had to cease all public performances. The previous administrators had not done the work required to keep the place up to code, and had not informed either the new Director or the Association President about the violations from 1998. We were only allowed to give courses here through the permission of the mayor of Thoiras. In France the ultimate responsibility for public safety is in the hands of the local elected government backed up by the French Republic and their centralized rules and regulations. A French safety inspection is something I do not believe most Americans ever experience in France. They are much more likely to crash into a great bottle of red wine in a restaurant that never gets exported to the US, like the great  Roc d’Anglade from here in the Gard, than go toe to toe over fire extinguishers or alarm systems with a French major from the National Fire Department. Yes, the French give their firemen rank just as they give medals to mothers for having babies and to Union officials for I do not know what (strikes?).

In anyway, you should know, that to help prepare the Centre for this inspection, a month ago I went to the small, French southern city of Béziers to take a course in fire and health safety for theatres. I passed it, and with my new knowledge of French law and regulations, I have been readying the Centre for the inspection over the last month. So, I have been putting up hot little red signs above big red fire extinguishers throughout the Centre, cleaning out the stuff people tend to want to store in common areas (then leave here and never reappear), the garage, ancient cellars, and nooks and crannies; i.e. a broken drum that no one claims stuck under the theatre’s seating but no one dares throw out. Yet most of my time has been spent with a chainsaw and clippers clearing brush and small trees that have grown up around the theatre especially in the outside area near the boiler and electrical room and around the outside of a large, white, gaz storage tank. In French these are called either a bonbonne—close to bonbon, French for candy—or a sausage. The one we have is identical to the one shot and blown up by Matt Damon in the first Bourne movie. Ours is perched on a piece of the granite outcrop on which the present theatre building, called the Magnanerie, was built in the 19th century as a silk factory. Brush tends to grow under and around our bonbonne and is nicely shaded by a French evergreen oak.

The Centre's Bonbonne; area cleared

The Magnanerie—another view

I found myself clinging on the side of this granite outcrop just a couple of days ago trying to cut the last difficult bits of brush around the bonbonne when I came eye to eye with one of the small vipers found in the Cévennes. I then noticed a tail nearby not connected to the snake I was eyeballing. I didn’t panic but understood that I had just probably come into a nest of snakes and was balancing myself on a rock with not much to grab onto. I had just cut away my brush hand-holds and did not have a safety rope tied on. I could easily fall—the drop was about 20 feet—and if I did, I probably would have broken something. Instead, I slowly, without breathing or oozing panic, moved along the cliff back to my ladder. At that point I decided that this brush clearing would have to be good enough for the Fireman Major at the upcoming inspection, and I really needed to get back to the office to finish the required pre-inspection report (called the Document unique).

So, at 1600 hours or 4pm the inspectors arrive. The first thing they do is not park in one of the two parking lots but come right up to the theatre and park where I have just recently put up the required signs prohibiting parking, because the drive area in front of the theatre is a fire exit. I can’t understand this, except to think they must figure they are the ones entitled or that the signs they insist go up don’t apply to them but are for them. All the inspectors look healthy, except the Building inspector who has an enormous stomach like the ones seen in old agit-prop cartoons characaturing capitalists. I imagine him to be a good socialist bureaucrat in his life-time job checking concrete. Actually, he was mostly silent and pleasant as were the majority of this inspection gaggle (seven of them—a French government official, his assistant, the Fireman Major, his secretary, a local policeman, a mayor’s representative, and a building inspector) with the exception, this time, of the Fireman Major.

The Boiler Room (left) and Electical Hut Area (front)

Last time, the Fireman Major was pleasant and helpful, even accomodating. This time he was contradictory, confusing, picky, and shaming. When I approached the inspectors gathering in front of the office, I noticed the Major was missing. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him coming from the direction of the boiler room and electrical hut area I had meticulously cleaned. Last time he and the French government representative were pissed when they saw the mess that had grown up there in brush, trees, old pipes, rotting wood, old stacked beams, stove wood, piles of stone, a compost pile and box, and a couple of rags hung on a clothesline obviously still in use run right over the gaz bonbonne and near the gaz pipes. I, too, felt embarrassed by the mess, which had accumulated from residents over the years. I had cleaned that space with Malérargues' handyman and gardener, Roland, leaving nothing but two trimmed hedges of laurel and lilac at a safe distance from the gaz tank. Also the access to the space was cleared of any obstructions like big flower pots, which tend to mysteriously appear in the path, and old stumps, weeds, broken glass, and stones.

 The back area of the Magnanerie cleaned and cleared

However, the Fireman Major was not smiling, and he was not impressed when I announced I had passed a fire safety course since the last time he was here. In fact he raised an eye in a kind of dismissive way similar to West Pointers who sneer at other officers who got their commissions in 90 days at Officer Candidate School. Well, okay, the last time the inspection was in the morning. This one was in the afternoon. Maybe this Major is a morning person? In anyway, I felt the next two hours were going to be long and tense.

They were.

© 2010 J. Livernois 

Kafka-Lite

Recently, I did something that I believe most Americans in France never get to do. I ventured into the belly of the French bureaucratic beast and found myself in the offices of the Inspection du travail in Nîmes, or what we call in the US, the Employment and Labor Office. I will not go into all the boring and sordid details of why I was there, just let me say that employed as a director of a French cultural centre who hires people, I needed some more precise information and advice, a kind of second opinion, after consulting with a lawyer. Needless-to-say, I will not name names to protect the guilty.

France, as you might have heard, is the country par excellence for bureaucracy due to its particular history (can you say Louis XIV, Napoleon, and Charles de Gaulle) and because of the establishment of socialist government and policies under the presidency of François Mitterand in the early 1980s. As an American, and especially a New Englander, I have a certain antipathy to a centralized system of government rules and regulations without real local autonomy or control. However, I have found the French system does contain much reason and justness given human nature seen from outside an American progressive and optimistic point of view. The French view, which I would argue is medieval and Catholic, is much more pessimistic about human behavior and nature and does not believe in human perfectibility. It seems they have a greater sense of the animal in us rather than all that « being made in the image of god » stuff because, due to their hundreds of years of religious warfare from the Albigensian Crusade to the wars against Protestants to the French Revolution and the Dreyfus scandal and finally the deportation of Jews during WWII, they seem to have gotten over religion to a greater degree than Americans. It is also probably why they have a much more permissive sense of sexuality and a fuller sense of sensuality. Yet, I find these attitudes of the French changing more towards an American sense of « Yes, we can change, and change is good » as their economic present and future becomes worse and worse. Here religion can come in with irrationalism to fill a void created by the logic and reality of economics.

But back to the Inspection du travail, what does it look like? First of all, it had moved from the imposing yet charming 19th century government centre of Nîmes to the new, rapidly developing outskirts, which is a French version of American sprawl but not mall. Here you have big box-like structures of warehouse style stores just like US Walmart stores. Plus, there were new, large, gaudy restaurants—like the Tendance Rouge (or Red Inclination), a Chinese fusion restaurant specializing in cheap Wok fried food and nightly and family entertainment—built to pack them in, with parking; French bistrot, forget it. This is not the picture postcard France that attracts the most tourists of any country in the world; 75 million annually, the US is second with 50 million. With the Conforamas and HyperUs there are sprinkled in new government office buildings; the exurb yet within city limit space to give all those French contemporary architects a palatte to work on no restrictions, so they can create their boxes and contemporary horrors, usually depressed even before they are finished being built, a place away from archaic, charming France, commonly known in as La France profonde (deep France).

The building I had to go to had the blandness of dirty, white concrete, with a flat roof, and much glass and steel, but with no real view except the highway and other late examples of bad bauhaus. The inside design seemed to take no concern of where humans were to be. On entering, the receptionist was placed in an odd corner and angle that immediately gave off a Kafkaesque feel.

I made my way up to the floor where the employment consultants had their offices, knowing there would be the inevitable bureaucratic wait. Sure enough, there was an oddly angled room off the corridor with a ticket box to take a number, just as if I was getting in line for some meat or fish at a supermarket in the States. Of course, for such a huge building, the interior space had been ingeniously reduced for the public, so that the waiting room, filled with women, babies, limping young men, and piles of folded information flyers on small tables, seemed to have no air to breathe or feel the least bit comfortable in; no lounging in the waiting area.

The other clients were silent but polite, and even the babies were quiet with no crying or fussing, and after a half an hour I began to imagine they were drugged. Every so often a person would appear, ask who is next, and disappear with the next person or group waiting. The inspectors, mostly women, were casually dressed looking like they were about to vacuum a house rather than try to explain the byzantine rules of French labor law.

After an hour wait, not too bad for this kind of thing, a gray, thin man asked who was next. I gave him my ticket, which he did not even look at, and I followed him into a kind of half office with an empty desk, a couple of chairs, and nothing on beige walls in front of a wall of glass covered by venetian blinds looking out to nowhere. I was expecting to be in some kind of cubicle, but this was more pleasant, although open entirely on my backside to the corridor.

I explained why I was there and that I was an American. I think with this cue, he proceeded to speak deliberately and clearly as if I was a 5 year old. This was fine with me, because I had some rather complex questions, which he logically and systematically explained. Only a few times in the hour I spent getting information did his face show any surprise. I kept thinking to myself that this guy has probably heard it all in one form or another. Still he was not jaded, condescending, unpolite, or obtuse. In fact he was clear, rational, helpful, and pleasant. Again given the design and reputation of this bureaucratic structure, I kept on wanting to know, « Where’s the Kafka? » Just in the architecture? On this trip, this day, there was to be little of it except in the exurb aspiration of contemporary sprawl.

And so, to a good restaurant, Le Riche in Alès—with that blog to come later.

© 2010 J. Livernois