Le percheron à l’écomusée du Perche (Orne)

Abstract

The Percheron draft horse at the Perche Ecomusée (Orne). The Perche museum became an ecomuseum in 2000. A new approach tried to take into account the extremely diverse rural heritage of the region, of considerable complexity in its relations with the present day. The horse heritage is a good example of this complexity. The Percheron horse occupies a large place in the museum’s collections, in keeping with the symbolic load that this animal now carries. Left aside by the agricultural revolution of the second half of the twentieth century, the Percheron is an object of remorse, of fascination, of hopes for a revival, a figure symbolising the possibility of semi-self-sufficient agriculture. The Percheron is at the heart of many of the museum’s interpretative initiatives and the artefacts associated with this horse of world-wide fame can serve the cause of a living heritage within a rural world undergoing profound changes. It is vital today to undertake a programme to safeguard and preserve the vehicles and techniques of horse-drawn transport. Protocols of restoration, the sharing of reserve spaces in museums, the setting up of nation-wide research groups are amongst the possible solutions in order to conserve the less prestigious aspects of the horse-related heritage, but vital for an understanding of the history of techniques before the ultra-motorisation of the western world. At a time when society begins to think more seriously about how the planet’s natural resources are not infinite, it is perhaps not anachronistic to see the preservation of the horse-related heritage as an investment, a source of innovation for the environment.

Keywords

• workhorse
• ecomuseum
• Percheron
• Perche region
• rurality