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Bradt Guide Eccentric France
Ref: BRA004
So you think eccentric France means frogs’ legs and pigs’ trotters? Think again.
Piers Letcher takes you to places where you can feast on forgotton vegetables, saddle up for national donkey day, or gorge yourself at the world tripe championships. He also reveals the truth behind France’s most colourful characters, including Coco Chanel, Joan of Arc, Mata Hari and the Marquis de Sade.
The latest addition to the Bradt eccentric series makes fascinating reading for those looking to discover the hidden side of France, as well as for armchair travellers who delight in the extraordinary.
Book Reviews
"Informative and highly entertaining."
-- Living France
"Compulsive reading for all of us who have a love-hate affair with our nearest continental neighbour: Eccentric France by Piers Letcher (Bradt, £12.95). All the facts and trivia that you never needed to know are there. To make a tonne of boudin (blood sausage), for example, you'll need 440 litres of blood, 65kg of fat and 65 sets of intestines. Bon appetit! As you'd expect, food and drink underpin a rich selection of museums and festivals, including the Frog Festival at Saint-André-le-Bouchoux, the Sardine Museum in Sète and the Pig Trotter Fair in Sainte-Menehould. And not forgetting the Pig Squealing Championship at Trie-sur-Baïse, where human contestants have to imitate the noise a pig makes at various stages in its life, starting off as a piglet and followed by noisy lovemaking. Don't try too hard: the prize is a whole pig, ready prepared, including the head and feet."
-- The Times
“This is the sort of book I love. Pick it up and open it, anywhere – and there will be some fascinating piece of information on each of its 294 pages. It quite truly is a ‘guide to mad, magical and marvelous France’ with plenty of maps for you to locate it all….If you are not careful the washing up will not have been dine, the dog not taken for its walk, etc as one intriguing entry leads you to another and another and another."
Motoring & Leisure, January 2005
Author's Note, by Piers Letcher
France is a country astonishingly rich in social, cultural and sporting events, and in total around 20,000 are organised annually -- that’s an average of more than 50 a day, year round. Amongst them you’ll find a wealth of theatre, film, comedy, folklore, music and dance festivals, any number of more or less successful replays of historical events (from the medieval to the revolutionary), a whole range of sporting activities, and plentiful excuses to eat and drink more than might strictly be considered good for you. Regional fare and regional fairs still come very high on the French agenda.
Be warned, however, that not everything is quite as it may seem -- the Défilé des Sans Culottes, in Mutzig, near Strasbourg, isn’t a panty-free occasion at all, but instead a colourful re-enacting of the storming of the Bastille in 1789. Equally, something billed interestingly as the ‘Frairie des culs noirs’ (literally the black-bottomed brotherhood), which struts its stuff every year at Saint Yrieix la Perche, near Limoges, is actually only celebrating the wonderful flavour of the local saddleback pigs.
Born and educated in the UK, Piers Letcher has been permanently based in France since 1984. As an independent writer and photographer he has published 14 books, more than a thousand newspaper and magazine articles, and hundreds of photographs. From the mid-nineties he spent several years as a speechwriter at the United Nations in Geneva, before once again taking to the road, in 2002, to write Croatia The Bradt Travel Guide, and Eccentric France. He’s not half as eccentric as people would have you believe.
£12.95
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