France profonde

Rural France, unlike rural Britain, is the habitat of the poor. While more Brits buy cheap homes here, it is dying. Decentralisation is just speeding up the decay
February 20, 2005

The British are having one of their periodic waves of house-buying in France. "Ill with speed," in the phrase of sociologist Thomas Eriksen, they see France as a place to slow down and catch up with the real them. The great majority buy deep in the countryside—there is so much of it and old buildings here are cheap. But there are times, particularly in midwinter, when the future in France profonde looks bleak. To find a way forward, the mayor of our commune calls a meeting to pool ideas. "We're not going to sit here and let them close the school, kill off our village like they've killed off all the others." The words are strong; people are angry. Everyone talks passionately but with a note of desperation, as though they already know there is nothing they can do.

The French countryside is closing down. Not just the usual shops, cinemas and restaurants, each one representing a personal tragedy of debt and failure, but schools, local hospitals, public transport, post offices. The whole state-supported infrastructure which sustains French life as we know it is being withdrawn. It is not simply that there is not enough money. The kitty is being re-allocated—instead of Parisian civil servants deciding national school budgets, responsibility is being handed to the 22 administrative regions. You could see this as a good thing, breeding self-reliance, but that would be to misunderstand the French people's relationship with the state. Rather than feeling oppressively dominated by it, most French people see the state as a just father figure to whom they turn when in trouble, a guarantor of equality and uniformity across the nation, ideally placed, because remote, to rise above regional factions. For decentralisation means, in the practice of local politics, that ancient feuds resurface and those like us, who live beyond the pale, get only crumbs: our school transport and canteen now hang on the shoe-string of charity—whence my neighbours' anger. The state has broken its promise. In November, 263 elected mayors and local councillors from just one rural region resigned, symbolically emphasising their powerlessness in the face of the state's deafness to their pleas.

We all toss ideas on the table: summer music festivals, book fairs, motocross and ATV races. I came here to avoid tourists, but everyone else at the meeting craves their business. It is not the answer, though: the season is too short. Green tourism has not taken off here because in the summer it is too hot to walk and in the autumn it is too dangerous—the risk of getting shot by hunters is very high. But tourism remains the limit of our collective imagination. There is nothing else to do here. In a country which is breeding national champions, we are the underachievers, stuck in the slow lane. Yet despite what those English housebuyers imagine, the slow movement has not reached France. In Praise of Slow, Carl Honoré's bestseller in 12 languages, has not even been translated into French. The idea of those dreamy Italian villages, cittàslow, with their busloads of tourists eating slow food and listening to slow gurus telling them how to slow down their lives, would be received with derision here. This is a shame, because the foundations are already in place: mobile phones don't work, broadband internet grinds to a halt 15km away and will, we are told, go no farther. Our young, dynamic mayor hammers the table: speed for him is everything. Over in Toulouse there is the Airbus, competing successfully against the American Boeing; there is the fast train; only a few miles away French engineering has created the world's highest road bridge, opening up our rural enclave to the world. Or so it is claimed. In reality, all the bridge will do is take people past us at ever greater speeds. France even boasts the world's fastest politician, Nicolas Sarkozy, whizzing with unstoppable energy.

But France profonde will never move into the fast lane and the reason cannot be expressed at a public meeting. Rural Britain, the habitat of the wealthy, is expensive because of its scarcity. There is so much rural France that it has always been, and will increasingly remain, the home of the poor. According to a recent study, three quarters of those who move into the country earn less than the limit allowing them to qualify for council housing, and nearly half are below the official poverty line. In France, the wealthy live in town centres, close to work, busy shops and restaurants. Those on modest incomes frightened by insecurity in the high-rise estates which encircle every big town move farther out, encroaching on the fringes of the countryside and thus pushing those with no incomes at all ever deeper into France profonde. Instead of staying where there is at least some possibility of finding work, they have to move to where there will never be any. In simple terms, and this is what cannot be said in local meetings, most people moving to rural France are either the fag ends of French society or the unsuspecting British: two shifting populations, mixing uneasily with the established core of trades people and ageing paysans.