His two horses are called Domino and Enndi: at the slightest whinny, even in his dreams, he knows whether one has escaped from the paddock.Used to faraway destinations, Christophe Cousin set off this time within France, “my dear country”, which people call sick and depressed, to meet those who have decided to free themselves from the weight of convention and follow their personal legend. The truant’s road appears on no map; yet it makes a true tour de France, from Brittany to the Basque Country. Manda, a free-spirited dharma bum, travels in the horse-drawn caravan he built; Jean-Bernard farms the old way; Simon and Yoann make the rooftops of Paris their playground; Pascal is one of the last transhumant shepherds in Europe. They would not change their lives for anything in the world, and each of these encounters is a reminder that other paths are possible.
The journey begins in the north of Brittany. A former sheep shearer, Manda decided six years ago to build his own caravan, cast off and take back his freedom. Once a carpenter, he knew his hands would remember; he wanted to live with his horses, because “horses, they ground you”. His land? “Wherever I stop.” An escape, perhaps, “from a monotonous life”, he is not ashamed to say so. To the children who watch him go by, he says he chose his life, and that they can too. At daybreak, each goes his own way, he towards the unknown, the other towards the south of Brittany. In Riec-sur-Belon, Jean-Bernard Huon has been sowing the seeds of another possible way for more than forty years. He worked with horses for fifty years before switching to oxen, and has had a tractor for only two years, for the hay. It was he, in fact, who put Christophe to the test during a location scout: “You’re a farmer’s son? Well then, get on the tractor and help me bring in the hay!” On his fifteen hectares, he has not chased after land: “Me, I wanted to work to live.” His retirement? “In paradise.” And his place, he sums it up like this: “In everything I’ve done, I’ve always been on the sidelines.”
Of the big farmer next door, he says nothing more than “me, I’m me”: he is on good terms with him.Amid the concrete and the tarmac, others still take the truant’s road, walking askew. Welcome to the French Freerun Family, led by Simon Nogueira and Yoann Leroux, champions of the art of movement. A GoPro each in their mouths, a few friends to film, and the outing begins. As a child, Simon was already edging along the walls of the playground and climbing trees, so much so that the teacher would call his mother. Down below, he says, when his mind is elsewhere, he bumps into everything that sticks out; putting himself in danger is training to stay focused, “in the same place with my body and my mind”. Not a wish to transgress, rather a wish to escape: on the rooftops he is alone, or with his “family”, friends he trusts. Of walls, one of them says: “I see them as friends who’ll help me go further.” Friends who hurt from time to time, and who teach you to grow stronger. You create new routes within the routes already laid down, you go straight up when everyone takes the stairs, and you seek, beyond the body, to glimpse the world differently. “Taking the risk, that’s what we’re missing. We’ve lost it.”
Some jumps are scouted the night before; they are done “by feel”, never because someone said to do them.
To those who come and ask “why do you do that?”, that is precisely the answer: to get them out of their comfort zone.
After the overload of information from the outside world, being alone to sort out what to keep and what to leave behind.
For fear of being led astray by Yoann and Simon, we put our trust in the rails, waiting for Paris to give itself to the night.Around eleven at night, at the hour when all cats are grey, a meeting with Allan, urban explorer. His thing: pushing open doors and lifting the city’s manhole covers to plunge into its bowels. As a kid, he sat at the back of the class, talkative, a bit anti-authority, never really part of the system. Nearly all the covers are sealed: the services in charge of the tunnels want to close them, the cataphiles to open them. Above all, don’t ask yourself questions, because whoever hesitates does nothing. Take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints, kill nothing but time; for Allan, exploring is not violating, it is making love in secret. Underground, no watch, no date, no time, and no more social classes: nobody asks who you are or what you do, you share your beer and your sausage, and all that counts is the way you live the place. Some sculpt, others paint murals, others wander. Then Allan leads the way to one of the bunkers of Paris, some thirty in all, designed to house administrative staff in case of war: a fake window there looks out onto a photo of mountains. His ultimate quest: to pass from one network to another, to have access to the whole city. The night ends on a rooftop.
It took him months, in an age without social media, to get hold of a first map; then he followed those who wandered through the metro.
Ten metres beneath the tarmac, the plaques follow the streets above, north side or “midi” side, “midi” meaning south in old French.
Memory from the shoot: “the feeling of silence and calm”, mingled with the sweet scent of transgression and the forbidden.After false leads in this empty France of closed shutters, the road crosses the border. Pascal is a French shepherd living abroad in the land of watchmakers and bankers. It is seven in the morning, five degrees: David, his young sidekick, warms himself by the fire, and Kiwi, the dog, waits for the flock’s eight hundred sheep to wake up. The shepherd’s greatest pleasure is sleeping outdoors, with no tarp over his nose. His whole house fits right there, and without discipline the flock is quick to put you back in line. The son of industrialists, Pascal spent his Wednesdays with a friend who bred Limousin cattle; an old sheepman, who had done fifty-six years of transhumance and once walked his lambs from Lausanne all the way to Paris, set him dreaming. All winter, they skirt motorways and cross valleys in search of grass, for it is by fattening the lambs through effort that the meat gains in quality. As the mist clears, David opens up: as a child he wanted to be a ninja, and swore he would never work with sheep after hearing a ewe bleat in pain while giving birth. Retirement does not worry Pascal: he will end up in a yurt, in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan or Siberia, with reindeer, yaks and sheep.
At the front, they walk “at the shepherd’s pace”, gently: behind follow the lame, the ones who are not doing so well.
An electric fence bars the way: they lift the wire, just enough for the sheep to pass underneath, before the cows arrive.Back to France, through the Ariège Pyrenees. Florian founded a small theme park, “Xploria, la forêt à remonter le temps”, whose outlines he redraws during the winter break. After studying mechanical engineering, he one day saw a man light a fire and knap flint: “That day, my life, it went click.” On Sundays, he puts on the animal skin he tanned and heads deep into the caves, where the only fear, he says, is the one you bring with you. Near Sazos, Pascale gathers wild plants, rolls dried lime leaves between her hands to make flour, and considers the thistle the ancestor of the Breton crêpe. She lays in no stores and trusts to each day’s providence: to gather is to gather the present, carpe diem, “and maybe that’s what paradise is”. Finally, in the Basque Country, Justin Becret, thirteen, a rising hope of French surfing, shapes his dreams in his little workshop. His dream: to travel everywhere there are waves. The tube, when the lip of the wave passes over his head, is “perfect harmony with the ocean”. He has read The Alchemist: find your personal path, be yourself. And even when there are no waves, he goes into the water, just to be in the ocean.
At four, in a nearby painted cave, he was already assuring the guide that he had been there before.
Outside, you could still hear the villages and the barking dogs; in the cave, “you’re out of time, you’re out of the cycle”.
A good spot, as he sees it: waves that break well, not too soft, nice and hollow, and coming often.
Third in his category at the last French championships, he sees himself one day on waves of at least four and a half metres.“I don’t know where I’m going, but I know I’m going somewhere.”Manda