IT'S HUNTING SEASON...

DON'T SAY YOU WEREN'T WARNED.

           This week begins the huntng season in France - the signal for anyone living in the country to get out their tin hats and orange safety vests, or, better still, head for a place where there's nothing worth shooting.

           On the afternoon of July 14, 1789, as his subjects stormed the Bastille, igniting the French Revolution, Louis XVI updated his diary, summarising the day in a single word –“Rien”  (Nothing.) “Nothing” didn’t mean the day was without incident, but rather that he hadn't gone hunting, and therefore killed no animal. In a culture which made it a point of pride to do no work and pursue only pleasure, hunting was one of the few activities in which the nobility could honourably indulge. 

            The plagues that killed half the population of Europe didn't affect animals. Receding, they left vast tracts of woodland teeming with game. First for the kitchen, then for sport, landowners hunted. Plenty of them still regard it as their right to load up a rifle or shotgun and prowl the nearest forest with their faithful hound, alert for something to kill. Sometimes it's a rabbit, a pigeon, even a wild boar or deer; just as often these days, however, it's a jogger or tourist.

           I’m no hunter. And Oscar Wilde was right to call fox hunting a case of "the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable." On the other hand, pheasant, rabbit, even wild boar and hare are all extremely edible, particularly when accompanied by the wood mushrooms of autumn and the fragrance of apples and pears. The great chef Antonin Carême said "I can't understand anyone who doesn't love September."  

           How one behaved during the hunt also used to count as much as a successful kill.  Etiquette required that the gentleman hunter not show excessive zeal or expertise, for example by ostentatiously outrunning the pack or beating the hunt master to the kill. In Isabel Colegate's novel The Hunting Party, a lord taking part in a shooting weekend at a country house is exposed committing the ultimate transgression - practicing. And there's a touching moment in The Crown where the queen, moved by her glimpse of a noble stag, shooes it away in the opposite direction to the hunters.

           Unfortunately, this etiquette didn't run to being careful about non-hunters. Traditionally, hunting was the sport of aristocrats, in which commoners had no place. In medieval times they could be punished, even killed, for poaching. In parts of rural France, the local establishment, which includes the police and the judiciary, seem to feel that anyone who strays into the woods during hunting season deserves everything they get.

A stag hunt at Versailles with Louis XIV.

           As I said, I'm no hunter. But I wouldn't have minded being a guest of the Prince de Condé at his chateau at Chantilly on Friday April 24th, 1671. "I meant to tell you," Madame de Sévigné wrote to her daughter, "that the King arrived at Chantilly last evening. He hunted the stag by moonlight; the lanterns were very brilliant; and altogether the evening, the supper, the play,—all went off marvelously well."

           A stag by moonlight...  Those guys really knew how to throw a party.

           On the other hand, at the 1900 Olympics in Paris, one of the sports was pigeon shooting - with live pigeons.  Strange people, the French.