I have made Pain a L'ancienne several times and although the flavor and crust is wonderful I have two issues. First, since there is no kneading or even folding, there is little gluten development or structure so my loaves are embarrassingly flat. Complicating this is my inability to score the bread successfully, since it is a very wet loose dough, which further reduces the oven spring. Any suggestions? Thanks.
Kneading or folding should create gluten - eventually. How much and how long is up to you. If there is no gluten - you don't have what most consider bread. Question is - how come no gluten? I would look at that. Enjoy!
The overnight stay in the refrigerator will allow development of gluten, especially for a wet dough. The dough will feel slack because it's fairly wet. The direction to gently stretch out each piece after dividing will develop a little more gluten (going by a post I found on making the bread; the book itself is in storage).
Scoring such wet loaves is always hard. You could skip it altogether. Otherwise you have two choices - 1) sprinkle lots of flour on the loaves first; or 2) let the surface of the loaves dry out by leaving them uncovered for say 15 minutes first.
The oven spring and final height will depend a great deal on how you handle the dough. It takes some practice to get the feel of handling it without degassing or mangling it. One thing you could try: read up on "glass bread" and try making it a few times. Glass bread is even harder to handle yet loaves can pop up a surprising amount during baking. After this, Pain a L'ancienne will seem much easier.
If you can upload some pictures and tell us about the flour you used it might be useful.
TomP
Tom P, thanks for your reply. I will try the glass bread and your suggestions for scoring.