Braving inclement skies, millions of French brought out their cold chicken and folding stools for a national day feast organised yesterday along a 1,000 km corridor stretching the length of the country.
"The Incredible Picnic", billed as the biggest ever in the world, was the centrepiece of special millennium festivities for Bastille Day, intended to celebrate two highly-prized French values, food and fraternity.
But the crowds were sharply diminished by rain and mud, the culmination of 10 days of atrocious weather, and in parts patriotic spirit and the prospect of a grande bouffe (nosh-up) were insufficient to motivate the masses.
As the annual July 14th military parade got under way in Paris, in more than 300 towns and villages down the country organisers laid out sections of a specially-made 650 km gingham cloth for the linear dejeuner sur l'herbe.
The picnic took place along the so-called "green meridian", a line from Dunkirk in the north through Paris to the Pyrenean border with Spain, where as part of millennium plans an avenue of trees is being planted.
Market-stalls, cheese-tasting and ox-barbecues were laid on in different locations, and other attractions included hot-air ballooning, human chess and a relay race starting simultaneously from both ends of the line.
But in places like Trignat, in the central department of Allier, driving rain meant that of 10,000 expected to attend, only a quarter turned up.
In Paris 13,000 mayors lunched in the Luxembourg Gardens in a re-enactment of the 1790 fete de la federation, a celebration organised on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille prison, which signalled the start of the revolution.