PARIS, May 4 - Ice-creams and spring salads are off the menu, farmers cannot sow crops for the summer, and in parts of northern France the army has been called in to lay barricades against rising floodwaters.
Northern France, like Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, just across the border, last month experienced 26 out of 30 days of rain and as May began remained blanketed by grey skies and drizzle.

Soggy Paris, feted in song for its sunny April riverside walks and open-air cafes, saw its wettest springtime since 1873 with 30 percent more rain than normal.

Welcome to the wet years, screamed the daily France-Soir on Friday alongside a picture of a rain-shrouded Eiffel Tower. Spring has disappeared.Luc Guyau, who heads the country's biggest farmers' federation, the FNSEA, warned that a veritable catastrophe was in the offing as farmers in the water-logged north and west were unable to sow. Summer harvests are in danger, he said.

Southern France on the other hand was drier than usual and last winter was mild across the country, a contrast to the bitter cold that hit Britain, Russia and Scandinavian countries in the winter months. The unusually wet weather was due to the land mass being trapped between cold air high over Spain and surrounding depressions, but environmentalists seized on the depressing weather to take polluters to task. Too much rain here, too many deserts elsewhere, this is too much!moaned a petition being circulated on a new Internet site by a Committee for the return of good weather and for the fight against the greenhouse effect.

More than 80 years after the worst battles of World War I scarred the rolling landscape of the northern Somme region, troops were again laying sandbagged barricades, this time to contain the forces of nature.

In the valley, where 1,029 people have been evacuated and 2,800 homes flooded, waters were still rising a month after thousands of French families came downstairs to find two feet (60 centimetres) of water sloshing around their living rooms.

In the northern French towns of Amiens and Abbeville algae is growing in the streets. In the country fields have been turned to stagnant lakes fed from new springs on the plateau above.

One ancient castle tower collapsed in France's Loire Valley chateaux region, while northwest of Paris several countryside homes were on Friday endangered due to rising water tables.

On Thursday 200 small children from Abbeville were sent back to class after weeks off school. But the floors of their own classrooms remained covered in water, the playground a lake and the roooms emptied of their blackboards, tables and chairs, shipped off for storage until the water subsides.