An austere beauty
"Auvergne produces cabinet ministers, cheeses, and volcanoes," was the ironic observation of Alexandre Vialatte, a prodigious writer and native Auvergnat. For the rest of France, these rugged, wild old mountains--they date back some 600 million years--evoke the image of an isolated citadel in the country's heart, a land turned in on itself and somehow fettered to the past. True, Auvergnats are a tough breed, toughened to hard labor; and yes, they are attached to their past: loyalty to ancestral traditions has allowed them to preserve a culture that otherwise could not have survived. The Auvergnat farmer with muddy boots and backward notions is a cliché, but like most clichés, it contains a grain of truth: Auvergne is indeed a conservative, rural region. The famous men who were born here--from Gregory of Tours to Blaise Pascal, Lafayette, and Teilhard de Chardin--drew strength and inspiration from their land. The Michelin family's industrial empire is also grounded in the solidity and determination of the Auvergnat work ethic.
Auvergnats are passionate defenders of their independence. These mountain people know how to use the terrain as a means to safeguard their freedom, whether against the Romans (beaten back at Gergovia by Vercingetorix, before the Gauls' ultimate defeat at Alésia), the Crown (France failed to annex the Bourbonnais until 1527), or the Nazis (joined in furious battle at Mont Mouchet in 1944).
A unique style of Romanesque architecture took root in Auvergne, and blossomed in Clermont-Ferrand's Notre-Dame-du-Port, the abbey church at Mozac, and the twelfth century church of Saint-Nectaire. Even tiny villages in Auvergne often possess a treasure, like the church of Orcival, with its spare, spiritual statues. The Romanesque long reigned supreme in Auvergne. The Gothic style, which filtered down from its birthplace in Ile-de-France, made only minor inroads and is best represented at the cathedral of Clermont-Ferrand. Throughout Auvergne the vestiges of countless fortified castles repeatedly ravaged and rebuilt over the centuries, perch on their precarious peaks like eagles' aeries. To reinforce the authority of the Crown in Auvergne, Cardinal Richelieu had these citadels systematically destroyed in 1629. The old defensive walls of Tournoël, Châteaugay, Murols, Arlempdes, Léotoing, Polignac, and Billy bear witness to the region's tumultuous military history.
On these hardscrabble high plains and mountains, life has long been a struggle for subsistence. Farmers had to battle brambles and weeds for a share of stony soil on which only poor crops like buckwheat and barley would grow; they cleared forest for a patch of grass to feed their single cow; they braved floods and bitter storms. “My own grandmother” (says André Gayot), “the eldest of seven children, used to tell me how, when she walked her little brothers and sisters to school on the snowy tracks of Pontgibaut, she would have to ward off hungry wolves who loped out of the forest!”
A taciturn people
Auvergnats are a taciturn race of country people. Their innate reserve is reflected in Auvergne's culture, mentality, and even in the landscape. Opulent dwellings and showy châteaux are rare. The few examples that do exist are found in the cities of the plain: Clermont-Ferrand, Riom--and they are usually hidden away at the end of winding, narrow streets, behind ancient ramparts. Others are found on the northern plains of Limagne and the Bourbonnais, where rich soil yields plentiful harvests of wheat, or else in the foothills where almond and peach orchards grow alongside the vineyards of Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule, Corent, and Châteaugay. In fact, there are two Auvergnes: the fertile plains of the north that open out to the progressive influences of Paris (Moulins, Vichy, Riom, Clermont), and the Auvergne of mountains and high plateaus, increasingly abandoned by farmers and given over to grasslands, cattle-grazing, or tourism--skiing in winter, climbing and hiking in summer. In spring the herds of tawny-robed Salers cows are still moved to mount