Picards Erotic

Picards are the people of the flat, chalky north of France, between Paris and the Channel coast. What holds them together is less a border than a way of speaking. The old province of Picardy was abolished in 1790, came back as an administrative region in the twentieth century, and was merged into Hauts-de-France in 2016. Through all of that, the language kept the idea alive. Picard is an Oïl language that linguists usually treat as a sister of French, not a broken version of it. It is spoken well beyond the old province: in the Nord and Pas-de-Calais, where people call it Ch'ti or Rouchi, and across the border in western Hainaut, around Tournai and Mons. Belgium's French Community recognized it as a regional language in 1990. France gives it no official status. Most Picards now speak French at home, and Picard lives on among older villagers, in songs, in puppet theater and in a small but steady local press. The 2008 comedy Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis turned the northern variety into a national joke, and then, somewhat unexpectedly, into a point of pride.

The region is Catholic by tradition and mostly secular in practice, but that tradition left big marks. Amiens has the largest Gothic cathedral in France, and in Beauvais the builders pushed a choir so high that its vaults collapsed in 1284. For a thousand years Picardy has also been a road for armies. Crécy in 1346, the Somme in 1916 and the German offensives of 1918 were all fought across its fields, and farmers still plow up shells and shrapnel every season. In medieval Paris, students from the north formed the Picard nation at the university, one of its four, which shows how clearly outsiders saw them as a distinct people even then.

Everyday Picard culture is local and unshowy. In Amiens, the hortillonnages, market gardens cut through by canals, are still worked from flat-bottomed boats. Lafleur, the city's puppet hero, is a red-coated valet who speaks Picard and has carried working-class humor on small stages since the nineteenth century. Villages still play ballon au poing, a ball game in which the ball is struck with the fist. Home cooks make flamiche, a leek tart, and the ficelle picarde, a crêpe rolled around ham and mushrooms. Picard identity is regional, not separatist. Picards are French, or Belgian, first, and Picard in how they talk, eat and joke.