An Apology for Tourism

Anatole Desmarais-Lefranc is thirty-four years old, has eleven years of a thesis on ‘subaltern ruralities’ behind him and a secret: he has never seen a cow. With the Collectif Terre Désirante (fourteen members, a manifesto, not a farmer among them) he sets out for the Aubrac to liberate peasants who have asked him for nothing. On the Bousquet farm one gets up at five in the morning and answers ‘Have to see.’ Fraternité, an Aubrac cow, eats page seven of the consent form and becomes the most reasonable character in the book. Then a general strike interrupts trains and transfers: for the first time our revolutionaries will have to stay — and work.