June 2024

Manufacture Berthoud Cycles
Text: Jean-Acier DANÈS

... I spent the month of June questioning, more than ever, the varied landscapes of this country.

    From the coast of French Normandy during the 80th anniversary of the D-Day to Brittany, from the South of France to the Opal Coast, changing my plans as we French are heading back to the polls, I spent the month of June questioning, more than ever, the varied landscapes of this country.

     This is the sixth article in the "Journal de Paysages" (‘The Landscape Diary’) series launched with the Berthoud cycles team. Half a year has already gone by, marked by this half-dozen articles. Each of these entries underlines the originality of the relationship we have with the landscapes we live in. They also bear witness to the trust a company has placed in the written word and its loyalty to ideas and products over the long term. Nowadays, it's not hard to find a company that seeks to gain influence through extraordinarily inspirational people, but it's exceptional to find one that trusts the landscapes for which it designs its objects.

landscape by bike with greenery

Photo credits: © Philippe Marguet

     Naturally, when I started writing these texts at the beginning of the year, I couldn't have imagined a hundredth of the surprises that the new year had in store for us. All I wanted to do, and I knew I could get good support for my initiative, was to tell the story of what shapes "the landscapes of the Manufacture". In the literal sense, to talk about the 'nature' of Berthoud: the roads, the hills, the surroundings of the design and production site in Fleurville. To evoke an identity by translating what you feel when you stop at a Cistercian washhouse in Cluny to sleep for a few hours (humility). To evoke a memory by recounting what it's like to cycle through a country you thought you'd known since childhood (wonder).

    I'm happy to continue this journal, probably because one aspect of this commentary on maps, this sharing of a geographical cause, moves me at a time when people want us to believe that we are divided, different, incapable of talking to each other. It doesn't have to be that way. It's not the case, and the gathering moments of sport, sharing and surpassing ourselves prove just how good it is to come together around what makes our hearts beat faster. The identity of craftsmen or artists is so well illustrated by the environment in which they work: you don't think about wine, paintings or bicycles in the same way if you live in a picture of waterlogged English thatched cottages or in mountains strewn with Tuscan villas. You don't think about your journey in the same way, you don't experience the world in the same way, and you don't see it in the same way, when you're riding along lanes winding through cypress trees as when you're skirting needle-shaped bays of rock, with cliffs sharpened by the Atlantic winds. And that's what makes this Europe so wonderful: these nuances that everyone cherishes, this places that foster communities.

    At the beginning of these articles, therefore, the idea that it was enough to say that Berthoud was 'somewhere' in France was not enough for me. To make an impression on the heart and mind, you need an image: a crimson reflection in the Saône, a creaking railway line that gives rhythm thanks to its central noise, villages that evoke the Burgundy sky, its vineyards, its facades and its stone. Hence the specific landscapes in these photographs. Hence the idea that it's good to come together behind an image, a capture, a photograph. Precisely. The landscapes around the Manufacture, those presented in these articles, are not simply portions of nature, pieces of the Earth. They are projections of the eye, they are choices, they are lived emotions. They are the mark of a sensitivity that is expressed day by day.

landscape with cloudy sky and view of the vineyard

Photo credits: © Philippe Marguet

    More than ever, at a time when so many questions are being asked about what holds our country, our regions and even our future together, I write that landscape is a political fact, a sensitive choice, proof of the aesthetics that attract us. On the road this week, I came across houses that had been walled in, gardens that were invisible behind thick walls. As I rested my bike against the low wall of a café, I was talking to people for whom the landscape is necessarily natural, for whom it is a kind of primeval forest, untouched by man, a mythical space to which he would come for recreation (at most) or live freely without production constraints. And then I hear, elsewhere, following the magpie flying over a fence, that to be beautiful a landscape must be man's grandiose achievement, the proof of his will, that it must be enclosed and not welcome people without a pass, that it must be cemented by authority and ego. We associate it with something orderly, something manipulated by man, with an owner demonstrating his glory, like the views we get when we stroll through the gardens of Versailles, France or the Pitti Palace in Firenze, Italy. Yet a landscape is nothing more than a piece of land, a piece of nature's expression. It is composed, with shadows and views, with choices that we make when we come face to face with it. A landscape is a space of the heart. You do what you want with it, you see what you want, you even choose where you're going to look at it from: whether it's made up of skyscrapers or caves full of brambles, it has no hierarchy. It's just a picture, one that you grasp and look at, always trying to move forward, never forgetting your itinerary, always loving it.

cityscape for bike

Photo credits: © Philippe Marguet

    "June. Along the Autoroute du Soleil (the fast highway that goes to the Southern part of the country). Necklaces of wind turbines, which look like a necklace. There are white rods, the ones under construction, which have no tips and no wings (they look like the lone legs of a bird without a body). Irregular hills. I faithfully follow hill after hill. I take photos with this old silver Leica that goes Clac-Clic-tchak. A farmer has made cultivation furrows, they undulate under the sun. My wheels carry me. The weather is mild. The jockey wheels on the derailleur follow the slopes over which I climb and slide. For some, the view of that hill in the distance is nothing. For others, it's the house. For some, a small yard with a hammock waiting for them, a tin car and a shed full of beautiful vegetable gardening tools, it's nothing. And yet, deep in someone's heart or in the imagination of a city dweller, somewhere, under the bombs or in the thunderbolts of clans, it's paradise. All it takes is a little spirit.”

landscape seen by a cyclist on the vineyard

Photo credits: © Philippe Marguet

   I'm back on the road, popping the first blackberries of the year into my mouth and looking forward to sharing them with friends. Happy kilometres to you all.

Jean-Acier DANÈS, auteur de Bicyclettres (Éditions du Seuil).

October 2024

October 2024

October is a harvest of sunlight. The world is drenched in cinnamon, the leaves have hues of maple syrup and my heart full of envy illuminates the lines of this landscape notebook like a Jack’O Lantern pumpkin.

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Editorial: the monthly journal of Manufacture Berthoud
Jean-Acier DANÈS
September 2024

September 2024

I have two wishes for September, the first being to evoke the feeling of putting on a pair of long shorts again and riding through the woods towards a cup of cappuccino and a slice of cake.

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Editorial: the monthly journal of Manufacture Berthoud
Jean-Acier DANÈS
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