The headline news stories of culture in the 20th century have been the rise of cinema and then television. And these successes, it was always assumed, would mean failure for older forms of entertainment and information. Since the 1950s, commentators have regularly predicted that the two new visual behemoths would eventually destroy theatre, radio, newspapers and books by taking over the functions of these earlier forms or eroding the time available for pursuing them. And then it’s “Aux armes, citoyens”, into the Gortex boots and the army fatigues, down to the woods and mort aux sangliers !. BEFORE predicting the hierarchy of the arts in the next century, it is sensible, and sobering, to recall the pundits’ predictions for the period in which we now live. That passed, there’s £20 to pay for the permis, another £20 to pay for the fiscal stamp which goes on the permis (that’s money set aside for farmers for the damage done to their land by wild boar – £14m last year), and then insurance. According to Coco, it all comes to 1,000 francs (£125), tops.

Introduced 15 years ago, le plan chasse has helped bring down the number of hunters and restore some semblance of plenty for the over-hunted hare, rabbits, partridge and pigeon. Now, the aspirant chasseur must take an exam – audio-visual, multiple-choice, tremendously modern – and get at least 16 correct answers out of 21 such questions as: “How many eggs will a partridge lay a year?”, “Is this a roe or a red deer?”, “How many hare may be shot annually to allow an ecological balance to be preserved?”, and so on. Parliament agreed; the old ways were the French ways and Brussels could put their directives in their pipe and smoke them.Of course, the French have their own dirigiste, and highly effective, government regulations. In all, 50 wild boar were killed there last year.)These nods at environmental concerns are all so much baloney. The French love hunting, and the authorities mess with it at their peril. When Brussels last year issued directives declaring illegal the netting of wood pigeon and the shooting of migratory birds, les chasseurs took to the streets – 150,000 of them in Bordeaux last May – and President Mitterand was moved to waffle warmly about the good old ways of catching wood pigeon.

Unless the boar are kept under control, they argue, whole tracts of forest would become no-go areas for humans. And, conversely, unless the terrain is kept as wild as it need be for hunting, crazed developers would snaffle up the land and turn it into manicured golf courses. (Not that golf courses are sacrosanct: so eager were wild boar to rampage on the greens and fairways of a course at St Quentin en Yvelines, just 19km from Paris, that the owners of the course pleaded with the government to organise a shoot. Game wardens manage the park, and huntsmen’s dogs are welcome there to practise their craft. In due course, the boar are released for the huntsmen’s pleasure. But most boar are genuinely wild, and huntsmen argue their own place in the environmental chain on two counts: woodland, formerly employed for charcoal gathering and the like, is now abandoned, and populated with boar.

Indeed, across the valley from Vagnas, there is a fenced off area of several hundred acres where wild boar are bred (each female can bear up to seven young a year). The boar may once have been hunted for food alone, and their million-strong population may play havoc with farmers’ crops, but there’s food enough now, and electric fences that could be erected around the vineyards and the barley, and more ruthlessly efficient culls that could be run. All the standard justifications hardly bear close investigation. The bowels go to the dogs – or to make andouillettes (sausages).There is also Vagnas’s own speciality: amarettes, or wild boar testicles, seasoned with garlic and basil and fried very lightly in olive oil These are, says Dickinson, sharp and bitter and raw. At the end of the evening, everyone present at the day’s hunt gets to eat them; “a way” says Dickinson, “of taking in the boar’s power.”But that’s a rather metaphysical gloss on a good day out, which is, really, what the chasse is all about. The blood can serve to make a boudin noir (black pudding), the head the basis of hure de sanglier (brawn). It’s all very democratic; a numbered scrap of paper is attached to each chunk of meat, and a lottery drawn to determine which hunter gets what piece of meat.

Women, notably absent from the whole voluble ritual of the chase, potter in to watch the butchery, grandchildren on their arms. There, the chasseurs don’t skin the boar; they shave it, pouring scalding water over its fur. And then, while the younger huntsmen sip their tomates (pastis with grenadine) in the caf, the older hands cut the boar up into legs, haunches, breast, head, trotters or what you will. But they did as they always do: took the dead animals back to their base, the garage behind the Caf Vagnas, where, under the harsh glare of a tungsten light, they set about dismembering their kill.In shacks and huts all over France the same scene is played out, but Vagnas has its own local peculiarity. On one of the days on which Nigel Dickinson took pictures, they slew seven; which was, some hunters felt, too many. It’s the same France over: a strip of soil will have been raked clear around a section of forest, so that any prints are clearly visible; or an experienced hunter and his tried, tested and very quiet dog will have drifted their way round a wood and found evidence of a boar within.