Krakatoa, South of Paris (Cont.)

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Outside Magaine November 2002

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Krakatoa, South of Paris (Cont.)

ENTER VALÉRY GISCARD d'Estaing, who served as France's president from 1974 to 1981. The onetime boy wonder of French politics, he's remembered for his brilliance and arrogance in a nation where you can get a lot of mileage out of those traits. After his center-right coalition bitterly lost the presidency to François Mitterand, Giscard sulked in Paris for seven years until he was elected to run the regional council in the Auvergne. These days, spry and tan at 76, he lives in Brussels, where he runs a committee that is drawing up a pan-European constitution, but he still likes to talk up the ancestral homeland.

"The Auvergne needed an attraction, something like Mont-Saint-Michel," Giscard told me, referring to the island castle off Brittany that attracts Americans like moths to a bulb.

The idea for Vulcania germinated in the early nineties, when René Monory, Giscard's former minister of

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing wanted a park that was, above all, tasteful. "There was never any consideration of rides," he says solemnly.

industry and economy, secured $300 million to augment an existing park, FutureScope, and equipped it with a high-speed TGV train line—the choicest cut of pork in French politics. "After that," says Imaginvest's Mongon, "all public authorities dreamed of being Mr. Monory."

Giscard did, too. He's never been a popular ex-prez—in a typical move, he irked everybody in 2000 with a controversial book, The French, in which he said France could stop its "decline" only by wising up to globalization. In this spirit, he decided long ago to place his oomph behind a world-class park. He knew he wanted something volcano-related, but reasoned that a straight-up museum "seemed too serious, and people would not come."

Giscard's eureka moment came in St. Louis, Missouri, during a visit to the Museum of Westward Expansion, an underground exhibition downstairs from the city's Gateway Arch that celebrates the Louisiana Purchase. "I decided on a subterranean environment because the volcano is linked with the center of the earth," Giscard says.

There was, however, the small matter of selling the Auvergne on a 140-acre tourist depot. Giscard treaded lightly—"There was never any consideration of rides," he says solemnly—and arrived at what European politicians call "the third way," in which successful but potentially vulgar American ideas (welfare reform, impossibly large soft drinks) are repackaged to appeal to local sensibilities. Thus, Giscard promised not only lava-based entertainment, but a world-class volcanology research center and educational experience.

Approval to build inside the Parc Naturel Régional des Volcans was fast-tracked, partly because Giscard doubled as park chairman. Then the delays began. Thanks to legal challenges—opponents filed various lawsuits aimed at halting construction—the park's opening was bumped from 1999 to 2000 to 2002. As Giscard's vision expanded, costs ballooned from $40 million to $70 million to $100 million. Locals made a bar game of guessing what the final number would be.

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