Our Man In France: Pilgrims, flowers and a secret roadside shrine

I must have walked past the place a hundred times. My wife, more observant than I am, had spotted the little shrine inside a hawthorn hedge, but had thought little of it. Roadside shrines are common in our part of Normandy. It was not until our neighbour, Madeleine, began to take our nine-year-old daughter to visit the shrine, situated nowhere in particular, beside a quiet lane, 400 metres from our village, that I went to look for it myself.

Deep inside the hedge, there is a wooden box a foot high, with a pointed roof, like a miniature kennel or a bird house. Inside, there is a brown, wooden carving of the Virgin and Child. In front, there is a pile of flowers, wild and garden, brought by local pilgrims, mostly by Madeleine and her grown-up daughters, and now by my daughter Clare.

Madeleine, who is in her late fifties, visits "La Sainte Vierge" secretly and defiantly. Her husband, Michel, is a Jehovah's Witness. He disapproves of his wife's lingering Catholicism. Madeleine never goes to Mass, but few French Catholics do these days. When she visits the hedge shrine, she tells Michel, rather grandly, that she is doing a "tour of the village".

There are two other, more elaborate shrines in our commune: grottoes made of stone, encasing white, plaster figures of Mary, 2ft high, surrounded by plastic, paper and, sometimes, real flowers. Why should a commune with 300 people – maybe 600 in the early part of the last century – have three shrines to the Virgin? Why are they still visited when the church in the village, a mile from our hamlet, is mostly unused?

The last parish priest left more than 20 years ago. We are now part of a group parish, with three priests covering what used to be 35 parishes. Even in Normandy and Brittany, relatively more faithful than the rest of the country, Catholicism, as an organised, participating religion, is dying slowly. According to a poll published last week in Le Monde, 62 per cent of French people still identify themselves as Catholic (67 per cent in 1994), but only 12 per cent say they go to Mass regularly (14 per cent in 1994).

The vacuum has been filled – up to a point, and especially in rural areas – by new faiths and dotty sects. The Jehovah's Witnesses are especially strong in rural France. And yet the small Catholic shrines flourish. The hedge shrine near our village was, according to local memory, built by a young man just before he went to the trenches in the First World War. By building a shrine to Mary, he hoped to survive. He did.

After his death, the shrine was kept up by locals. A couple of years ago, one of Madeleine's daughters noticed that the original statuette of the Virgin was broken. She replaced it. The box was recently rebuilt by Bruno, a fortysomething who was brought up by his grandmother in the village. He is now a secular, left-voting, professional who lives in Paris and comes back to the village once or twice a year. He and his sister Patricia, another Parisian professional, always visit the hedge shrine.

An association called Oratoires has been created in France to preserve local shrines. On its website – www.oratoires.com – the organisation argues that such places are, in a minor key, as much a part of the religious heritage of France as medieval cathedrals. It calls for a national effort to conserve them. This seems to me to miss the point. If local people lose interest in such shrines, they have no reason to exist. The devotion to oratoires is, partly, a devotion to local tradition; a way of remembering the way things were. They are Catholic shrines but they are also a link with something much older, something pre-Christian. They have become – or maybe always were – shrines to local memories, a way of celebrating, and worshipping, Mary as a local deity, someone in the hedge up the road, not in a church seven miles away.

Franceÿs row with the US is 'a family quarrel'

Normandy, for obvious reasons, finds itself in the front line of the economic assault by some American companies and individuals to punish France for opposing the war on Iraq.

Hotels in Deauville say that they have lost up to half of their usual American clientele this Easter. The Memorial (war museum) in Caen – a town that was completely devastated by US and British bombing and shelling in 1944 – says that American visitors are 30 per cent down on a normal year.

Many Normans have also been distressed by the use in American newspapers of pictures of American graves near the D-Day landing beaches with captions such as, "Forgotten". Such emotional blackmail has been especially galling to the 1,200 members, young and old, of an association called Fleurs de la Mémoire (Flowers of Remembrance), which regularly places fresh flowers on the 3,400 American war graves in Normandy. Its president, Claude Lavielle, says that Americans should grasp that a "family quarrel" in 2003 does not mean that France has forgotten what was done back in 1944.

Fox and the pit-bull

The most strident demands for US economic reprisals against France have come from Rupert Murdoch's Fox News channel. Bill O'Reilly, the network's star pit-bull presenter, has instructed his viewers to "tip France into recession". However, propaganda is propaganda, and business is business. A few days ago, Fox signed a large contract for an undisclosed sum to buy some hi-tech editing equipment from the Thomson company that, despite its Anglo-Saxon name, is actually 100 per cent French.