Brussels: Where Beer is the Secret of World Class Cuisine

By Eric Van Vleet

Lili and I are self-professed Francophiles. Our unabashed love for the place even figures in our awe-inspiringly ambitious and alliterative blog title. But as you, dear reader, may have noticed, we also harbor a deep, almost obsessive love for Belgium. Not only is it our favorite beer nation but also because the food there is just as incredible. We have already written here about our travels there for the 2017 Bruges Beer Festival and more recently, about our visit to our favorite brewery in the world, Cantillon, when it recently opened its doors for a public brew day. Clearly our travels have been beer-focused, though we have always managed to stick to the glutton’s Belgian food pyramid that for us consists mainly of waffles, fries and chocolates.

Eating in Belgium goes far beyond these tempting and shockingly delicious street foods and sweets. As featured in Michael Jackson The Beer Hunter TV series, also the subject of a Biencuits blog post, Belgium’s chefs have developed an entire cuisine in which people cook with beer and pair food with beer as well. Beer is integral and fully incorporated into this cuisine. It is foundational. In Belgium, one does not have to choose between eating well and drinking well. In fact, just like in any wine-growing region, the two compliment each other undeniably well.

The common conception of beer food in the US in general includes fried foods, burgers and barbeque. While all can be delicious when done well, Belgian chefs have used their amazing beer not only to pair with ‘comfort’ foods, but instead to use beer at the same skill level that French chefs use wine. Beer is not an afterthought. It is an integral ingredient and component.

Lili and I have been fortunate enough to visit three amazing beer-focused restaurants in Brussels that were so delicious they did not make us miss wine for a minute. While they are different, we would unreservedly recommend them all for your next trip to Brussels. And there should be always another visit to Brussels, which for us is one of the world’s greatest cities.

Nüetnigenough is an intimate restaurant located a short walk from Grand Place. Along with Cantillon, it should be a stop on every Brussels beergrimage. Even the mantle is covered with bottles of good beer! Their beer menu alone is worth the stop as they have lambics/gueuzes from some of our favorites like Cantillon, 3 Fonteinen and Tilquin as well as other styles from De Struisse and Verzet. Their black pudding with gueuze was an amazing appetizer and delight for any blood sausage fan. The beautiful Jambonneau Dijonnaise was good enough that Lili and I have ordered it twice, while it is more than large enough for two people to share. Its almost sweet flavor worked nicely with a 3 Fonteinen Oude Kriek.

While Nüetnigenough has been a standby for us in Brussels, on our last visit we made new discoveries in the world of beer-based cuisine. Restobieres is a somewhat cluttered and cozy restaurant that has an old-school appeal that included sprinkled parsley as a plate decoration. Yet considering the deep tradition there, Belgium old school is an amazing thing, especially in places that serve affordable prix fixe menus paired with an amazing beer menu, like at Restobieres. The plate of cured ham for my appetizer matched any charcuterie I have had in Spain or France. Lili’s celeriac soup also was flavor-packed, warming and an overall auspicious beginning for the meal. For beer, they even had a Boon lambic on tap that was just tart enough but went well with food. Seeing duck on the menu, I could not help myself, especially when I saw that it was cooked in a cherry sauce and kriek beer. For our beer pairing with the main course, we had a Giradin Black Label Gueuze, which did not bring a full-on funk but was deliciously tart and did not overpower the food. Lili had what she proclaimed the softest and greatest meatballs of her life. They served these wonders with fries just to make sure that Lili would ascend to Belgian heaven. For the dessert course I had a passion fruit mousse, while Lili had Brussels style waffles (made with a liquid batter) topped with delicious strawberries.

The next day, we took a long walk out to the Ixelles neighborhood to dine at Les Brassins. While Restobieres is in a lively neighborhood, Les Brassins is located in a quieter, residential neighborhood. Despite its modest appearance they more than delivered on the quality of their food. I had a classic dish beer-based Belgian dish, carbonnade flamande, which is stew with beef, beautifully caramelized onions and a Belgian dubbel or strong dark ale. Previously we had enjoyed the dish from one of the fry stands in Bruges. At Les Brassins, the stew’s flavor was naturally sweet, rich and deep. It was without a doubt the greatest beer based stew I had ever tried. Since I cannot deny drinking Cantillon when available, I ordered their Organic kriek beer that went well with the stew. Hooked on meatballs after Restobieres, Lili ordered them cooked in flavorful tomato sauce. The acidity from the tomatoes did drown out some of the other more subtle flavors, so she preferred the meatballs from Restobieres. We each had a side of fries which were perfectly cooked. Beyond delicious food, Les Brassins has an amazing collection of beer signs and advertisements, some of which came from defunct Brussels breweries. Though its decor is not as welcoming as Nüetnigenough, Les Brassins has a clean comfortable feel compared to the slightly cluttered but homey feel of Restobieres.

For a beer hunter and food lover, a visit to any of these restaurants is a dream come true. It is not only that these foods can go with beer, but that that many of the dishes described above were cooked with beer and likely conceived with beer in mind. In each restaurant the staff was knowledgable and spoke English well. Especially at Nüetnigenough, waiters can not only recommend a beer based on the different dishes that interest you but also depending on what you like. They know that the proper beer elevates their food to another level entirely. After visiting these restaurants, you will realize that most chefs have too long focused on wine, even outside wine-growing regions. By visiting these restaurants you realize that beer just as well as wine can be an ingredient and accompaniment to world class food.

Have Beer, Will Travel: Michael Jackson, Beer Hunter

By Eric Van Vleet

The rapid expansion of so many craft breweries making so many innovate beers allows a person drink locally and almost never even have the same brew twice. There is no better time in the US than now to be a beer connoisseur. Yet even as local beer scenes in the US flourish, the consummate drinker should also travel to experience their favorite beer styles in the places where they were invented in order to appreciate them even more.

In your travels you would be well-advised to follow the example of the true OG of beer hunters, Michael Jackson. No, I am not talking about the self-proclaimed “King of Pop”. As the man himself explains in his deep British accent: “My name really is Michael Jackson, but I don’t sing. I don’t drink Pepsi. I drink beer.” Based on his global travels, he has published incredibly informative books on beer and whisky and left us an undeniable gem, his six-part, three and a half hour long The Beer Hunter series, which is available for free in its entirety on YouTube.

Jackson could not have made the series at a better time than 1989. While momentous shifts like the fall of the USSR were on the geopolitical horizon, equally revolutionary changes were happening in the beer world. During his episode about California, he visits a beer festival attended by many of the state’s first craft breweries, then called microbreweries, like Anchor, Sierra Nevada and Mendocino. During this visit, Jackson captures the beginnings of California’s ascendance into a global brewing powerhouse.

Jackson even interviews Fritz Maytag who bought the nearly defunct Anchor Brewing Company in 1965 in San Francisco and rejuvenated it and the California Common or “steam” beer style along with it. If one person can take the credit for relaunching craft beer in America it is Maytag. Yet this is California after all, and the incipient movement comes with what Jackson calls “a distinct whiff of utopia”.
There is a lovely segment where Maytag organizes a “California pilgrimage” to the state’s barley-growing regions with his brewers. Such a beergrimage helps to maintain a connection with the ingredients. In doing so, Maytag wanted to fight against a “factory attitude” and to be apart of the “risk” inherent in any agriculture cycle and harvest. Beer was leaving its ‘industrial’ trappings and to take on an “identity that relates to an actual farm.”

After re-watching The Beer Hunter series it is incredibly difficult not to give here an extended breakdown of each episode. The sheer excitement it produces makes to me want to head out immediately beer hunting. Just seeing the production process and the gorgeous pouring of a cask ale in Britain nostalgically reminds me of our days on that island or how his forays into Belgian lambics brings back an aftertaste of those “sour” beers that contain entire galaxies of different fermented fun. Elsewhere, in the Bohemia, Jackson tours the gorgeous caves and wooden casks at the Pilsner Urquell brewery. In Germany, he explores an all but vanished style of “stein beer”, where brewers would drop incredibly hot stones into the brew in order to bring it to a boil. In the Netherlands he visits Trappist monks and craft brewers riffing on these styles. This series is not just the travels of an eloquent student of beer but the recording of a pivotal moment in the history of beer when craft beer was beginning in America and the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) in Britain was trying to defend its “independent local breweries” from the homogenization of industrial lager.

In The Beer Hunter, Jackson has one foot in the past and one foot in the present. He respects tradition while also celebrating innovation. Any skilled brewer today should try to balance the two as well. As US craft brewers continue to add novel and crazy-seeming adjuncts, they are nearly all based upon beer styles that have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years. Jackson traces those links, explains them in a down to earth way that demonstrates his vast knowledge. We are lucky that his masterful series is freely available to all on YouTube. If you haven’t ever watched it now is the time. Just be ready as immediately after viewing you may be heading to a local brewery or even buying plane tickets to head out on an international beer hunt.

When the "Wild" Yeasts Come down from the Rafters: Brew Day at Brasserie Cantillon

By Eric Van Vleet

Brasserie Cantillon is without a doubt the favorite brewery in the world for Biencuits. In fact, during our first visit, Lili and I discovered that “sour” beers (lambics, gueuzes, faros, krieks) were for us the best beers of all. It was also that first visit that converted me into a unwavering beer hunter. I began my search for something as well crafted and complex as Cantillon’s beers. After we ordered our first bottle of their Fou’ Foune, an apricot lambic beer that not only brings a galaxy of sour glory yet still preserves a distinct ripe apricot fruit flavor, we knew we would have to return to Cantillon. And return we did three more times after, virtually making the beergrimage to Belgium for this brewery alone. Yet on our last visit, we were able to have an even more enriching experience than being in a beloved place drinking our favorite beers. We were able take a guided tour during a public brew day.

While you can always take a self-guided tour any time of year with the help of a multi-lingual brochure, the fact that we would have an actual tour guide describing the brewing process as it occurs was an enticing chance to see the masters at work. Better yet, they only open the brewery to the public a few days a year. Being able to visit the brewery on this day is like the beer hunter’s version of winning the golden ticket to visit Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, though unfortunately our tour guide did not have the same acerbic sense of humor as Gene Wilder’s version of Willy Wonka, though thankfully was not a creeper like Johnny Depp’s unfortunate take on the character. In general the staff is a tad brusque but knowledgeable and our tour guide that day was no exception.

But I digress…what is unique about Cantillon’s lambics and other beers is that because they are the product of spontaneous fermentation, brewers need the proper temperatures that can foster the reproduction of these “wild” yeasts. As a result of these yeasty limitations, they can brew only during the spring. The fact that they do not use cultured yeast means that they must rely on the yeast in the air of their 100-year-old building to start fermentation. Our tour guide reminded us that roughly 95% percent of beer styles are the product of controlled fermentation with the use of only one and more rarely two cultured yeasts. All beer was once brewed like this with "wild" yeasts. With these cultured yeasts one can hope to achieve an entirely uniform result. Cantillon’s spontaneous fermentation with dozens of bacterias and yeasts sets their beers apart and makes each brew at least slightly different.

Since these “wild” yeasts will vary depending on the brewery’s location, and hypothetically each place has their own local strains of yeasts and bacterias, only Cantillon and the other breweries in the Seine River valley around Brussels can legally produce “lambic” beers. Similar to my discussion of wines in a previous blog post here, the European Union has created a protected status for lambics, just as they have for Champagne.

While many breweries in the US produce American Wild ales with lambic-style methods, they cannot call them lambics. The idea being that these beers are like none other in the world because of the yeasts and bacterias that come down from the rafters at Brasserie Cantillon. Our guide described how the brewing of the grains that creates the wort attracts the bacterias and yeast present in the brewery to come and ferment the beers. These brewers try to welcome these “wild” yeasts and bacterias by practicing open vat fermentation, instead of enclosed vats that keep out such yeasts. Additionally, in order to be called lambic beers, they must have a minimum 35% malted wheat, which is different from most beers that are made exclusively of malted barley. Another important difference, the brewers at Cantillon in general use hops only to help to preserve the beers. They use incredibly dried hops that add no flavor or bitterness. By not using strong hops, their “wild” yeasts are truly the star of the show.

The next innovation for their beers is that they are barrel-aged for a minimum of one year in order to be a lambic. Interestingly enough, Cantillon’s brewers are not too concerned with the provenance of these barrels, but instead they buy used barrels that formerly aged wine. Unlikely many white whale American beers that are aged in Bourbon barrels to add a boozy flavor, barrels for Cantillon’s beers are not used to impart any flavor. Instead, they are only used as a vessel for fermentation. During the tour we saw that they cannot put the bung into the barrel at first or else the pressure from fermentation could destroy the barrel. We were even able to see a young lambic frothing up over the rim of the barrel in vigorous fermentation.

If all of this is not fascinating enough for fermentation fanatics, some lambics are allowed then to age for up to three years in the barrel. At this point the master brewer can produce gueuze, which is a blend of three different vintages of lambics. In effect, the blender is able draw from multiple barrels in order to create a perfect gueuze that reflects past years’ brews but is never exactly the same given the vicissitudes of spontaneous fermentation. As Cantillon has been a family owned and operated brewery for generations, they have been able to pass down blending skills generationally. Yet, they blend the different vintages of lambic not only to add depth of flavor, but also to aid in carbonation. They add in a one-year lambic to their blends which produces bottle conditioning and a lovely mellow carbonation. Our guide used the analogy that lambics are like white wine because they are flat and that gueuzes, given their bubbles, are like Champagne.

While their lambic base beer is a work of art, they take this base and create miracles (beeracles?) with creative additions. They add fresh fruits to lambics after fermentation has ended in order to leave some of the residual sugars from the fruit. Again we advise you to obtain a bottle of Fou’ Foune by any means necessary. Zwanze, a rhubarb lambic, has a kind of tartness that goes surprisingly well with the sourness of the beer. Their elderflower beer, Mamouche, has almost a tangy, slightly mustard-like flavor. Their Vigneronne pushes the wine analogy further while adding white grapes to a lambic that makes it taste like a gorgeous biodynamic white wine. Their take on the kriek style, a sour cherry lambic, has a lovely red color, nice tartness and in some cases uses only organic sour cherries. These additions of fresh local fruit to a gorgeous lambic base beer makes virtually all of them must try beers.

Seeing Cantillon on a brew day and having a guided tour made us even more aware of how unique of a place it is. For over a century the family has been making “sour” beers. Sadly all the other historic lambic breweries have gone out of business within the city of Brussels. It is amazing to tour the building that has become home to the kinds of yeasts and bacterias that come down from the rafters to help ferment what are for us are the greatest beers in the world. It is enlightening to see people working under highly unpredictable conditions, brewing beer roughly as it has been done for thousands of years before Pasteur’s discovery of yeasts. Their lambics, show how doing things the right way, the slow way, the labor intensive way, can yield exceptional results. From the work of the “wild” yeast to the brewer’s masterful blending abilities, Cantillon demonstrates the highest level of “craft” to which others should aspire.

Lili’s dîner presque parfait: American Thanksgiving in in the south of France

By Eric Van Vleet

We recently wrote on this blog about our obsession with the French reality TV show Un dîner presque parfait. After watching so many episode we had realized certain commonalities for throwing a quality French dinner party. While this was mainly academic interest at first, we had the ability to put these ideas into practice Saturday night. While we did not fully follow the format of having five consecutive parties for each participant, Lili and I hosted four French friends for our own dîner presque parfait. We had discussed this party with friends for a while and finally arranged it as our time in France was sadly coming to a close. Also, sorry about the photo quality. We need an actual camera...

For our dinner, we already had the theme of American Thanksgiving. Why not introduce our French friends to American food on its greatest culinary day? Yet some problems immediately arose. Our oven, if you would call it that, is a glorified toaster oven. A whole turkey could not fit in it. Sweet potatoes are available but only from large chain stores. Cranberries are not at all common. So we quickly realized that we could not replicate an American Thanksgiving for them. In a nod to the French, we decoded to serve the meal in courses and not all at once as in the American Thanksgiving tradition. Serving it in courses, made our meal last roughly four hours, which is almost un-American, but very common for French social gatherings.

Yet when in France, with the greatest produce, cheese and meat that anyone could hope for, why try to exactly replicate an American meal? So as our guests would recognize, we put a French twist on typical American Thanksgiving based largely on what was seasonal and available. I say we, but this was largely Lili’s effort in designing and executing the menu. In giving credit where credit is due, Jacques Pepin’s video on how to debone a chicken was invaluable.

The meal started with an aperitif of that Italo-American staple, meatballs and gravy. Lili used a combination of ground beef and pork from our local butcher, which she mixed with dried oregano, salt, pepper, fresh shallot, fresh garlic and hand grated day old baguette. As it is not the season for tomatoes, she used canned tomatoes, which she added to a sofrito of onions and garlic and then added homemade chicken stock and bits of chicken, which she reduced for 20 minutes. She then browned the meatballs on each side and let them simmer on low heat in the sauce to help absorb more flavor. We served the meatballs with an interesting aperitif called Le Fou d’Ecausses, which is a low alcohol sparkling wine that drinks much more like a sweet cider.These meatballs were the biggest hit of the night as was the drink. Lili had impressed them right from the start.

As on Un dîner presque parfait, we had our game or (animation) after the aperitif. I decided to have us play trivia about Thanksgiving and the history of some of the foods we would serve. While people in general like something with more physical activity, we were offering as a prize, sea salt infused with Piment d'Espelette, a French hot pepper. I decided to make the questions multiple choice, so people were shouting out answers quite rapidly, and everyone seemed to be having a good time. We made the mistake that many contestants make of not paying much attention to the decoration. We made no hand-drawn turkeys nor cornucopias. We just stuck with traditional Thanksgiving colors and focused almost entirely on the food.

For the appetizer Lili made a soup inspired by an American baked potato. She used homemade chicken stock, caramelized onions, cream, salt, pepper and potatoes. For the French twist, she added fried crispy duck skin (gratton) and put this on top instead of bacon. As we wanted to focus mainly on beer to bring a more American character, we served it with 3 Monts, a French beer in the bière de garde style, one of the few indigenous French beer styles.

During this course, talk shifted to politics with many Trump jokes abounding. They tried to reassure us that Marine Le Pen could not win in the second round of France’s run-off elections, but they remembered how Lili had assured them that Trump could win, even when almost no pollsters said it was possible. Since Lili has spent a lot of time volunteering with old conservative French ladies who see themselves in Marine Le Pen, while our friends are progressive university students in Toulouse who hang out with like-minded people, they cannot believe her victory is possible. Though we desperately hope they are right about the impossibility of her victory, after Trump and Brexit, one can never be so sure.

For the main course Lili, with Jacques Pepin’s help, had deboned and gallentine-d two chickens. She stuffed them with Toulouse sausages, fennel, French cornbread, turnips, butter, salt and pepper. She baked these in our counter top oven to serve as the turkey substitute. To make things even better, she added thinly-sliced potatoes in with the chickens to absorb their succulent fat. For the side we made a monster serving of mac and cheese made with Comté, young Cantal, young Gouda and an aged goat’s-milk Gouda cheese. For an extra French twist, we added day old croissants for the crust instead of the usual breadcrumbs. One common complaint by contestants of Un dîner presque parfait is that the food is too heavy and I fear our guests found mac and cheese far too heavy, while they appreciated the work Lili put into the gallentine. We served this course with what was to be the best beer produced in Lot and one of the best French beers that we have tried, called Walk on the Wine Side by a tiny brewery called Les Alcolytes. It is essentially a winter warmer aged in local Malbec wine barrels. There was a lot of delicious wine flavor in there, though it did not take on an almost black Malbec color.

For the dessert Lili made a Florentine Chocolate Tart, which includes a ganache of melted dark chocolate, egg yolks and cream. For the local twist we added hazelnuts and walnuts bought from the farmers market into the ganache. The crust was simply made of butter, digestive cookies and sugar. The good thing about the dessert is the dark chocolate cuts down on the sweetness. Contestants often complain on Un dîner presque parfait that the dessert is sweet and too copious. We were already handing out cups of American coffee and Armagnac to get the digestive processes started.

Yet, too critique Thanksgiving as being overblown and too heavy is to misunderstand the whole point of Thanksgiving. The point is to have everyone passed out on the couch a few hours later. No one should feel like taking a brisk jog after the meal or being able to contemplate eating again a few hours later. The fact that the entire family gathering is based around food is very French, I see now the heaviness of the meal though is fairly foreign in these parts. Eating American-inspired food is one thing for the French, eating it in American quantities is another.
Overall, we had a wonderful time entertaining our friends, who have previously shown us what French hospitality is all about. They have invited us to share Christmas, New Year’s and various village parties that resemble the most idealized portrayals of French rural life imaginable. It was nice to try to show our thanks for all they had done. Even if the food was a bit too heavy...

The Dangers of Defending a Singular “Frenchness”

By Eric Van Vleet

The journalist/writer Adam Nossitier recently published an essay in the New York Times that is incendiary to anyone who loves rural France. The title states his case well enough: “As France’s Towns Wither, Fears of a Decline in ‘Frenchness’”. Nossitier focuses particularly on the town of Albi, which has a population of 49,000 and is located in the département of Tarn about an hour northeast of Toulouse. It is a beautiful town. The historic center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, home to the grandiose Sainte-Cécile Cathedral and also the well-done Toulouse-Lautrec museum. Such attractions make Albi a prime tourist destination. But attracting tourists is not Albi’s main issue, according to Nossitier.

Nossitier describes its “withering” as the continuous closure of businesses in its historic center. He had been to Albi decades before and found it thriving, but upon his return this January, he found it to be “withering”. While clothing stores and shops selling tourist goods remain open, bakeries, grocers, butcher shops and cafes have closed in the town center. It is these closures, which Nossitier argues indicate a declining ‘Frenchness’. These shops acted as spaces for people to meet and exchange gossip. Vacant stores and dwellings further corrode community ties and the ‘vitality’ of the town is lost in these processes of “devitalization”.

Albi is not the only town “withering”, according to Nossitier, but many other “provincial” towns throughout France are experiencing the same phenomenon. He makes the bolder claim that this “withering” makes voters in such places all the more willing to support the extreme-right Front National  party and its candidate Marine Le Pen in the upcoming election even when they previously voted for left-wing or centrist candidates. He says that Le Pen claims that she can defend not only France, but “Frenchness”. Such appeals by Le Pen to some static notion of “Frenchness” are troubling. For Americans, we can hear some echoes of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” with a French twist. Each make campaign promises not to diverse groups of people living in large urban centers, but people in smaller towns with predominantly white populations that have faced long-term economic decline and yet fear change like immigration.

Nossitier argues that the opening of big box stores spurred processes of “devitalization” in Albi, which began during France’s Trente Glorieuses (a period  of peak economic vitality and prosperity from 1945-1975). Instead of supporting downtown local grocers and other businesses, people used their increasing incomes to shop instead at chain big box stores that offered more choices at lower prices but little in the way of community. Competition from these suburban big boxes drained downtown businesses of their customers in Albi and similar French towns. The havoc that Wal-Mart has wrought on many American small towns is not dissimilar.

The same broad narrative fits the town of Cahors, which is a small provincial capital an hour north of Toulouse and an hour and a half from Albi, where Lili and I have been living in France. There is a street filled with former merchants’ buildings where at best 20% of the businesses remain open. In other parts of old town Cahors there are still are bakeries, butcher shops, cafes and grocers. The city only really comes alive on Wednesday and Saturday markets. Even if it has fared better than Albi as it has multiple bakeries and butcher shops, Cahors can appear to be “withering”, especially on Sundays and Mondays.

While clearly business closures and the sprouting up of chain big box stores are not favorable trends for Cahors or Albi, and should be combatted, the concept of “devitalization” is a lot more complicated than Nossitier claims. Again Cahors is vital on market days. Many businesses depend on these days for their earnings. Business is also highly seasonal. Shops seem to make their entire year during the summer. Therefore on a market day in August, Cahors is anything but “devitalized”. Business cycles are far more varied than in large cities like Paris.

Nositier fits all of this talk of “withering” and “devitalization” in the context of a potential rightward political swerve for such places.The big questions this article raises for France in an election year is if one must choose between this kind of “withering” “Frenchness” of today or that of the “vital” past. Yet such a choice is unrealistic, just as unrealistic as returning the America the great to the 1950s as Trump wishes. Nossitier nostalgically wishes that Albi could return to the city as it was on his first visit, vital in the midst of its economic “glorious years” before chain stores and suburbanization. If only this is the sole inflexible version of “Frenchness”, then there is no doubt why it is “withering”. There seems to be little political possibilities in such a narrow definition of Frenchness that wants to turn back the clock. Few if any places are still experiencing such rapid economic growth or are free of suburbanization or chain stores. Rolling back such sustained macro-economic trends is ambitious and admirable as a continued political project, but likely of little electoral practicality in the short-term.

Instead of hoping for the return of some ideal “Frenchness” that is “withering”, change is not so simple or somehow resoundingly negative. No doubt “Frenchness” may be in part composed of artisanal bakeries, local butcher shops and locally-owned cafes all located in a walkable, historic city center. As well, it is an increasingly multicultural society in large urban areas, just as it is in the housing blocks outside small and large French cities where people have comparatively fewer opportunities and higher rates of employment than in old town Albi.

Yet “Frenchness” is even more than that. It can be a life organized around twice weekly market days, alternating with days without shopping. It is the land of the 35 hour work week  that people have fought to defend as well as their universal socialized medicine. Firing and hiring people is complicated. France has half as many people living below the poverty line than in the US but double the unemployment. France provides its citizens with relative stability compared to the US, a quality of life that is likely far better than having more diverse shopping outlets that have extended hours.

The kind of pessimism and obsession with a “withering” national identity as expressed by Nossitier, Le Pen and Trump seems to be running rampant. Politicians need to censure Marine Le Pen’s race-baiting, and instead demand equality that brings the aforementioned benefits to all French people in large cities as well as in the provinces. It is a glorious country that does not need ‘defending’ from outsiders nor is it in some state of imminent “withering”. There is work to be done to be sure, but there is so much that is glorious and thriving even in places like Albi and Cahors. Instead of falling under the spell of a Le Pen that France is in need of some kind of anti-Europe savoir, there are viable left-wing candidates with a far more vision and expansive ideas of “Frenchness”. France would far more likely to be “devitalized” the more narrow “Frenchness” is defined and the more people are convinced their wonderful country is in an inexorable state of “withering”.