Le cochonnet

The cochonnet — literally, the piglet — is a small wooden ball, 30 millimeters of boxwood, thrown out at the start of every mène. Everything in pétanque revolves around it. Nobody throws at it; everyone throws for it. It is the reason the game exists and the one thing no player is allowed to touch.

Every republic has its cochonnet: the small, sacred thing everyone claims to be aiming at.

In France it is le pouvoir d’achat — purchasing power. Left, right, center: every program, every réforme, every strike is justified in its name. The cochonnet of French politics is thrown at the start of every campaign and chased for five years.

In America it is the middle class — or its dreamier cousin, the American dream. Every tax cut, every tariff, every speech is aimed at it. Like the wooden piglet, it is small, precious, constantly invoked, and somehow always just out of reach of the boule.

The comedy is identical on both sides of the Atlantic: watch the players gather around, squint, gesture, argue about distances — c’est à moi, non c’est à toi — while the cochonnet sits there, 30 millimeters of wood, utterly indifferent to the theater organized in its honor.

Every politics has a piglet. Find the cochonnet and you understand the game.