With her Le Mokiroule bookstore truck, Pascale Girard brings “thee book closer to people“. For more than six years, this traveling bookseller has been traveling around fifteen Ardèche markets and offers readers up to 3,000 references on its shelves. But with the increase in the price of fuel, Pascale wonders about the relevance of her tour, as it exists today. She considers “to stop going to certain municipalities or to do more than one out of two“, she laments, sitting behind her book stands. From Saint-Laurent-du-Pape, where she lives, thehe nomadic bookseller travels 120 kilometers to reach the market in Alba-la-Romaine. This rise in the price of gasoline, Pascale cannot pass it on by increasing the price of books because it is the publishers who set the price.
? LISTEN – Our report in the traveling bookstore
Drop in attendance
In addition to this additional expense, she observes a decline in market attendance that she attributes both to the “aftermath of two years of pandemic” and to “significant ambient gloom since the end of February“, or since the war in Ukraine. Shrugging her shoulders, she continues “Literature is essential for many people, but it’s not what makes us eat. With all these increases”customers prefer food rather than books notes, fatalist, Pascale, the bookseller.
“The presidential campaign does not interest” – Pascale, traveling bookseller in Ardèche
Fortunately, Pascale can always count on around thirty clients per morning. Most have become regulars, like Nathanaël, a high school math teacher, who makes at least one purchase a week. In his hand, a complete list of books his wife and daughter have ordered. For him, “it’s easier to get advice” with Le Mokiroule. Especially since Pascale, who reads all the books stored in her truck, is known for her recommendations. “She introduces my teenage daughter to series and trilogies“.
Two weeks before the first round of the presidential election, it is mainly comic books and manga that customers come for. She notices that political books are not sold. This morning, among the customers in front of the stand of Le Mokiroule, Philippe, deputy mayor of Alba-la Romaine, is the only one looking for political books. For Pascale, the explanation is simple: “a few people order political programs, such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s L’Avenir en Commun, but there are far fewer orders for programs than in previous elections. The campaign does not interest“ she explains.
Make a link
The presidential election, the first round of which is scheduled for April 10, does not interest Pascale either, who says to herself “far from the countryside“. Tired of “politician politics“, she prefers to focus on Le Mokiroule and her daily relationship with her customers. Because the objective of Mokiroule is also to make the link between readers and writers from Ardèche. On the stands of the truck, we find the comic strip “Where is the boss?”, written by three peasant women recently settled in Ardèche, in the Eyrieux valley. Gérald Amacha, Ardèche author and regular customer of the itinerant bookstore, meanwhile, has just left his travel book “La Bolivia est notre avenir” on deposit with Pascale.
Even if customers show a lack of interest in the presidential campaign, Philippe, elected mayor of Alba-la-Romaine, assures that “People are reinvesting in another political field. We really feel it, in Ardèche. Here, there are really a lot of initiatives, which are political but which are totally on the fringe” he rejoices.
- To follow the Le Mokiroule truck, find the next dates of its trips on its website.
————————————————– ———————————————-
A few days before the first round of the presidential election, France Blue Drome Ardeche shares his microphone with seven students from the school of journalism in ESJ Pro, in Montpellier. From Monday March 28 to Friday April 1, for a week, they will meet the Ardéchois, from the Cévennes to the Mountains, to tell us about the most beautiful citizen initiatives “Here, how do we do it?” to heal, move around, eat, adapt to climate change, love each other, in the only department of France without a motorway and a passenger train.
Find their reports on the radio antenna of France Bleu Drôme Ardèche at 7:15 and 7:45 every morning and on www.francebleu.fr