KEY POINTS:
With its view out over the forests and valleys, its tractors, sheep, roosters and wood stacked for the winter, Lussaud, a small village of three dozen inhabitants, a handful of farms and a church in rough-hewn granite, surrounded by fields 1000m up in the Auvergne, is about as far from Parisian chic or from Cote d'Azur glamour as you can get.
If there is a "deepest France" then it can't get much deeper than Lussaud.
This week wooden windows slammed shut as journalists approached. "Enough damage has been done by words," said one old lady through a half-opened door.
For last week, Lussaud stumbled blinking and dressed in its shabby Sunday best into a very 21st century media spotlight. Five villagers face prison sentences for assaulting an author who, after years living on and off in the village, wrote a slimly disguised book about them and their ancestors.
The episode is a dramatic final chapter in a long story, described by Le Monde as "terrible and sad", which has pitted urban intellectuals against the rural back country, set the liberty of the creative artist against the privacy of an isolated community, revealed the vicious reality of rural poverty and questioned the romanticised vision that many French citizens still have of their own countryside.
"The people of Lussaud do not live, they survive" said Michel Masson, vice-president of France's biggest farming union. "Now perhaps townspeople will understand that better."
In Paris a different view prevails.
"The fundamental ability of a writer to write about real life is at stake," said Guy Koponicki, a novelist and journalist.
"Flaubert wrote harshly about the people of his native Normandy; Zola wrote about his home town, Aix-en-Provence, with plenty of easily identifiable characters; Balzac wrote about Angouleme. This writer has written about real living people in a village in the Auvergne. So what?"
The writer in question is Pierre Jourde, a controversial and critically acclaimed 52-year-old novelist and university academic whose family is from Lussaud. Though not a fulltime resident, Jourde, with his family's tombs in the village cemetery and the months he has spent every year in Lussaud, was an honorary villager.
The "terrible and sad" story started with the death of a 12-year-old girl of leukaemia in the village nine years ago. One of the guests at the traditional wake, held in the house of the bereaved family with the body of the child still in her deathbed, was Jourde.
The episode inspired him to write, The Lost Country, a spare, dark and grotesquely comic description of a land where the local gods are "alcohol, winter, shit and solitude", where old ladies sleep beside the decaying corpses of their dead dogs, where children are raised with a bottle of sweet cassis liqueur to the lips and where men don't leave home without a flagon of cheap wine.
One passage relates the story of how an unacknowledged adulterous liaison resulted in the marriage of a brother and sister.
His book was meant to be, Jourde explained last week, "a description of the brutally hard reality of life in Lussaud ... a memorial to a generation that is disappearing".
Sadly, his description was too real. The adulterous liaison, for example, may well have happened; the marriage certainly did.
The book appeared in 2004. The reviews were good, the sales less so. It took a year for word to filter back to Lussaud. And so in July 2005, when Jourde, whose previous works include unflinching and controversial portrayals of the worlds of literature and academic scholarship, arrived with his family for a summer break, six villagers appeared outside his house shouting insults.
Blows were exchanged and stones thrown. A car window was smashed. Jourde's 15-month-old baby was slightly hurt and his mixed-race sons were called "dirty Arabs".
The writer and his family locked themselves in their car and fled. They have not returned to the blue-shuttered farmhouse with its black cat and pebbled yard since.
Last week a tribunal in nearby Aurillac heard the case, sparking a media scrum that stunned locals.
"That alone provoked some resentment here," said Olivier Choruszko, a local reporter who has covered the story from the beginning. "There are incidents of petty violence around here all the time. No one would have said anything if Jourde had not talked about it to a major magazine. Then suddenly the whole of the French media turned up."
The interest was in part the result of a very French fascination, often mixed with fear and miscomprehension, with their own countryside.
The idea that France is still a rural nation is rooted deep in the collective consciousness. It underpins France's self-assumed role as the defender of global agricultural, gastronomic diversity and European farm subsidies. Yet the most recent figures show that only 1.1 million Frenchmen work the land, half the total of ten years ago and a quarter of that in 1979.
"A lot of people in France see the countryside as a giant fun park," said Michel Masson, one of only four farmers remaining in his village 100km south of Paris. "They idealise the countryside, seeing just peace and quiet, not the negative side. And they look down on people. Yes, we may have manners that might seem a bit rustic but we are less stupid then we look."
That negative side includes profound poverty. According to Jacques Levy, a social geographer at Lausanne University, the real "lower classes" in France are often now found in the countryside.
Jourde's portrayal of widespread alcoholism is accurate, and in court last week the Lussaud villagers revealed that none of them lived on much more than ¬450 ($800) a month.
"The contrast with Jourde in his suit and open-necked shirt was pretty stark," said Choruszko. "And not just at the level of oratory."
There was little verbal jousting in the courtroom. The writer's protestations that he had changed names and places fell on deaf ears.
"He made my mother out to be a temptress," said Dominique Magne, one defendant.
The writer's defence of his description of one defendant's dead son-in-law as "boar-faced" as being in fact "a mythological reference" was followed by a long silence. Jacqueline Rongier, another accused villager, simply responded: "He's a poet, we are not. We are peasants. We can't express ourselves like him."
Locally, the affair has been closely followed. But not everyone has sided with the villagers. Regulars at Le Canterbury bar in Massiac, population 1800 and the nearest significant town to Lussaud, were sanguine.
"First, you should read the book before commenting on it and I don't think anyone has," said Francois Laporte, 41, a lorry driver. "Second, it's a novel anyway."
"They are pretty isolated up there," added Gilles Dumazel, a carpenter sipping his coffee.' "Some of them have barely left the village for decades."
Others talk of the local attachment to an oral cultural tradition and a long-standing distrust of the written word.
In the village itself, Jourde still has at least some supporters. One family that bear no grudge are the Liandiers, whose daughter's death nearly a decade ago lies at the origin of the whole story.
"Some here might think differently but we are very happy with what he wrote," Marie-Jose Liandier said.
"He just told some stories which are surely true. He wrote a wonderful poem for the funeral of our daughter. He can come back when he wants and we will welcome him."
- Observer
