It’s Le Grand Départ as French do what they always do – speed for the coast

There are two abiding clichés about the French on holiday. The first is that they all set off and return on the same two days. The second is that they never leave France, convinced that there is nothing beyond their borders that is worth wasting August on.

But there is also the belief, much encouraged by the media and film-makers, that it is only Paris that goes on holiday, the rest of the country being required, apparently, to work harder than ever over the summer to ensure that hotels, restaurants, bars, beaches, leisure facilities and night clubs operate at optimum efficiency.

The first two assumptions are largely correct. Successive governments have more or less given up on trying to persuade the French to stagger their summer break. Some Parisians – Juilliettistes – do in fact set off in the second half of July, thus maximising the risk of having to share the beaches with Brits, Germans, Dutch and Belgians. Others, mainly those without children of school age, choose to head out in mid-August, returning to the furnace of the capital only in mid-September.

But the great mass of the French still prefer to load up their cars and camper-vans just in time to shoot off on the evening of their last day at work. And if this means taking that final day off, so be it, for they can be assured their bosses will be doing the same.

And so to the Autoroute du Soleil, or whichever of the motorways gets them quickest (i.e. least slowly) to the coast, whether it be Provence, St Tropez, Arcachon, Biarritz, La Vendée or Brittany. National television follows Le Grand Départ as if it were the Tour de France, with helicopters surveying the chaos below, complete with commentary and advice from the police and interviews with overheated holidaymakers queuing for petrol or sandwiches en route.

Their eventual arrival is greeted in the resorts with a mixture of relief and dismay: relief because August is when they make 70% of their annual income; dismay because for the next four weeks they will be worked like dogs.

One important difference between the appearance of coastal resorts in 2020 and the way they were in, say, the days of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, is the ubiquity of “mobile ’omes”. I am constantly astonished by the number of people I know who own camping cars. They don’t understand when I tell them I’ve booked into this hotel or that and that my only concern is that the air-conditioning might be too noisy.

“Why don’t you buy a camping car and enjoy the freedom of the open road?” they say, as if they were gypsies and France was a country without regulation, where everyone can do as they please.

In vain do I point out that all towns and villages in France now have near-identical sites for camping cars, in which, far from living a gypsy life, customers immediately plug in to water, sewage and electricity, roll out their pergola and align their satellite dish to pipe in television and the internet. “Yes,” they reply, but this way we bring all our own food and have the van furnished exactly the way we like it, as if we were at home.”

Well, quite. Give me a decent hotel, with a choice of restaurants down the street and a late-night bar within staggering distance of my freshly-made bed. Inevitably, the changing pattern of holiday accommodation has hit hotels hard, to say nothing of the many hundreds of thousands of seasonal workers who now have to scrabble to find employment. Lots of small, family-run hotels have closed. Others are struggling.

The good news, if you are me, is that camping cars are not designed for big city life. Try turning up in central Lyon or Bordeaux expecting to find a site in the centre of town in which to plug in. City sites, such as they are, are invariably well out of town, next to the airport or a bus terminus, and in high season they can cost more than a hundred euros a night.

But I mustn’t gloat. Parisians and other big city folk clearly like getting away from their crowded apartment blocks and into crowded lines of camping cars as close as possible to the sea. Do motorhomes – some as long as seven metres and wider than a delivery truck ­– improve the view? They do not. Do they save you money? Well, apparently you can’t put a price on freedom – except that I can. My next-door neighbour bought a five-year old mobile ‘ome for €20,000. A new model could set you back as much as €60,000. And they have to be insured, maintained and MOT’d.

Who could be bothered?

I mentioned earlier that the French don’t much like to leave their borders. This is true. Very few French bother with foreign holidays – certainly not in mid-summer. They want to be among their own. “Foreign” means “trips” to London, Barcelona or Rome, preferably for the weekend in March or October. If they have the money and the time, Berlin, New York or Australia might figure, but not in August. August is for spending time cheek-by-jowl with people exactly like you, especially if you have young children. To break the monotony, you might take the chance one morning to visit a subterranean cave or archaeological site inland. But most of the time, it’s the beach in 30-degree-plus temperatures, with fruits de mers for lunch and a barbeque in the evenings.

And don’t forget your bikini top if you’re thinking of beach volleyball.

But what of the elephant in the room? What about Covid? Has the coronavirus not scuppered the plans of millions of the French this summer? The answer is, I don’t know. There are certainly very few Brits about the place and an equal sparsity of number plates from north and east of the French border. What I can tell you is that the beaches are crowded and, if you didn’t book two months ago, its impossible to get a table in a decent restaurant in a busy resort.

Mask discipline is patchy. Some people seem to put on their masks when they get up in the morning and not take them off until they go to bed. Others just wear them as chin straps or earrings. There are signs on the floors of supermarkets indicating the direction of traffic as if food stores were branches of IKEA, and signs outside bars and brasseries warning that those planning on eating indoors must wear face coverings (but only until they get to their table, when all bets, and all masks, are off).

I assume that some people have decided to stay at home this year, not daring to risk infection. Others will have decided that the risks out of town are less than if they stayed put, which may or may not be true. But the fact is, on a hot day on the coast of Brittany this month, it’s hard to tell. As to the mood, everyone is edgy. They sense that the virus, like them, is en vacance and may very well come back with a vengeance in the autumn. Until then, the last one to the beach is probably not a German.