Letter from Languedoc: The letters CAV can be seen daubed in red paint on gable ends and on the reverse of road signs throughout the western part of the département of Hérault. The initials stand for Comité d'Action Viticole, the extreme embodiment of discontent among the region's winegrowers.
Prices, even for the best growths of Saint Chinian, have dropped dramatically. Growers can expect a little over five cents per litre for the harvest of 2005, making their year's work completely uneconomical. There are references to 1907 in the bars and cafés and the names Marcellin Albert and the 17th Regiment of Infantry are heard in conversation.
The CAV's name, which translates as "winegrowers action committee", sounds innocuous enough but the group has found itself in a list of organisations compiled by the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, an organisation funded through the US government's Department of Homeland Security.
The CAV's activities, mind you, are minor when compared to al-Qaeda. A gas pipe was blown up in 1999, a railway signal box on the line between Béziers and Narbonne was bombed in 2002 but sloganeering in red paint has been its main weapon of war.
There are other, unidentified, groups involved in action directe, a means of protest that put down its roots early in Languedoc. The local people have a long tradition of revolt against the centralism of Paris. This resentment played its part in a resounding regional Non in the EU's constitutional referendum last year.
It is wine and the dependence upon it by the locals for their livelihood that raises the hackles most. Last year a commando of winegrowers descended on the port of Sète in the dead of night, opened the valves on vast tanks of imported wine and made the sea turn red. Even the more peaceable vignerons, who form the vast majority, are proud to be the grandchildren of those driven to revolt by the crise viticole of 1907.
Overproduction and fraud, including the manufacture of "red wine" from sugar, water, tannin and beetroot - do not try this at home - had left the small genuine winegrowers penniless. Led by Marcellin Albert, a country innkeeper, they took to the streets. The slogan Le Vin Franc et Pur appeared on their banners. Huge demonstrations known as "meetings" took place; the use of this English word harking back to Daniel O'Connell's monster meetings in Ireland. The largest drew between 600,000 and 800,000 to Montpellier, the region's capital. In disturbances in Narbonne, six people were killed by a detachment of cuirassiers sent from outside to pacify the region.
It was different in Béziers. The 17th Regiment of Infantry was raised from the locality. In their temporary base in the town of Agde, rumours of further repression sparked a mutiny. Five hundred armed soldiers marched on Béziers where they camped on the the city's main thoroughfare until assured that the citizenry had not been attacked. The mutineers' lives were spared but the regiment was transported to Tunisia.
Marcellin Albert, a charismatic bearded figure known to his supporters as Le Rédempteur (The Redeemer), arrived unannounced at the office of Prime Minister Georges Clémenceau in Paris attempting to reach a solution.
But the "Tiger", aware of his opponent's political naivety, devoured the redeemer. Albert was given a letter of safe conduct and a 100 franc note to pay his train fare home. Clémenceau in an impromptu press conference told journalists that Albert had come to him in tears to admit his guilt and had accepted the 100 francs in recompense.
The movement was split and Albert became a pariah among his fellow vignerons. The events of that tumultuous year are never far from the minds of the people of Languedoc-Roussillon. It is no coincidence that the first action to highlight the current crisis has been announced as a Grande Manifestation Viticole, scheduled for the end of this month. The venue is Narbonne - where cuirassiers took six lives on June 19th and 20th, 1907.
