It’s the story of a burn-out, as we weren’t saying yet, but a happy burn-out. Having become the artistic director of a large Parisian advertising agency at the age of 20, Jacques Massacrier believed himself, for fifteen years, to be the most fulfilling of men: a fabulous salary, a luxury car, a 160 square meter apartment… A few days of vacation Christmas in Ibiza, in 1968, will be enough to call everything into question.
The island, then, is nothing like the paradise for amphetamine revelers of which David Guetta and Dan Ghenacia will one day be the prophets. The hippies, for whom it is a rallying point, are still only a few hundred, and their way of life – Indian tunics, the scent of hashish and freedom of morals – hardly affects that of the islanders.
The following summer, the decision of Jacques and his wife, Greta, was taken: “We dropped everything, we wiped the slate clean, we really wanted to change our lives. No more working eighteen hours a day for the consumer society. They rented a farm without running water or electricity 5 kilometers from San Juan, a tiny mountain village, and settled there in April 1970 with their two sons, 10 and 14 years old. A vegetable garden, 40 hectares of rocky land, goats, a dozen hens: enough to live in virtual self-sufficiency, with 300 francs per month (about 45 euros) for rent and essential purchases including butane, rice, sugar … and cigarettes.
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We may be the pioneers of a great migration to a better world that is on our doorstep.
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The advice of the surrounding farmers and the consultation of agronomic guides make up for the couple’s inexperience. Getting up at 6:30 a.m. in summer, 7 a.m. in winter, going to bed at 9 p.m., exhausting work but oh so rewarding! Jacques will make a book of it, “Knowing how to live again”: how to grow your vegetables, fix up your house, make your furniture and your clothes, take care of yourself with plants, give birth without medical assistance… Published by Albin Michel, the book, calligraphic and illustrated de crobars, became, in 1973, a bookstore phenomenon, the breviary of rural cool babas. On May 19 of the same year, the Massacrier tribe is on the cover of Paris Match. “Change the life? They did it…” proclaims the teaser.
The affair could then come to an end, as was the case for the majority of similar attempts in the 1970s. natural and stop collaborating with a society whose vitality is based on waste. We are perhaps the pioneers of a great migration towards a better world which is at our doorstep.
It is in Ibiza that Jacques will die, at the age of 87, on September 1, 2020. Joël, his eldest son, has gone into exile in Thailand, where he is a fish farmer. Loïc, the youngest, still lives on the island and deals with traditional construction. As for Greta, retired to San Juan, she continues to cultivate her garden. Change the life? Yes, they did.
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