OPINION: Don't believe the complaints - life is good in rural France
Five years since the 'yellow vest' movement sparked a massive revolt by claiming that rural France was abandoned and impoverished, village-dweller John Lichfield makes the case for the French countryside, with its impressive services, state investment and high-speed broadband.
The time has come to shut out all the miseries of the world and celebrate the joys of living in rural France.
There will be plenty of opportunities to return to the miseries of the world, and France, in the weeks ahead.
It is five years – five years already! – since the Gilets Jaunes told us that rural and outer-suburban France had been abandoned by the roadside of modernity by the big cities and “political elites”.
It was never true but it had a kind of spiritual truth - a lived truth - for people living in La France Profonde or La France Périphérique.
I spend most of my time in a village in Calvados in lower Normandy. We are 35 kilometres from a big town (Caen) and 30 kilometres from a railway station.
The area was a hotbed for the original Gilet Jaunes (yellow vest) movement in November 2018. My local Gilets Jaunes, whom I came to knew well, claimed that the local economy had been pillaged by “globalism” and their tax-euros were piped directly into the pockets of the big cities and corrupt politicians.
Local services, they said, were being dismantled. Local jobs were vanishing. To find work, they had to drive into Caen.
Pump-prices were exploding and the speed limit had been reduced from 90kph to 80kph so that the politicians could harvest an increase in speeding fines.
Where was all the money going? Mostly to Brigitte Macron, they insisted. Facebook told them that she was claiming a secret salary running into the millions. (Real salary of the French First Lady: zero).
So how terrible, in truth, is life in deepest Calvados?
There are 10 doctors within 10 kilometres of my house. There are three hospitals within 40 kilometres. At a medical centre 15 kilometres away, there are six physiotherapists who treat the young and the old - including me - for free (if you have a state health card and cheap add-on insurance).
Within 10 kilometres, there are nine bakeries, six butchers and three supermarkets. There are three cinemas. The local railway line, closed since the late 1970s, has been converted into a 50-kilometre cycle and foot path to the sea at Ouistreham.
We have a fast broad-band cable system, part of a network which is scheduled to reach every hamlet in France in the next two or three years. If I need a new laptop, as I did recently, it is brought to my door within two days along the excellently maintained local roads.
It is a long time since I lived in rural England. We did not have such facilities and services in the 1970s. I doubt there are many British villages which have them now.
France is a big and varied place. In parts of Orne and Mayenne to the south of me, there are towns with boarded up shops. Doctors are scarce.
“Les déserts médicaux” do exist in France - but they are most acute in the multi-racial, inner suburbs, such as Seine-Saint Denis north of Paris. Overall, the distribution of doctors in rural France is about the national average - one for every 1,000 people.
I reckon that we, with our ten local doctors, are even better off than that. I can get an appointment for the next day or the same day.
When I point out to my neighbours how many services they still have, I’m reminded of a scene in Monty Python’s Life Of Brian: “What have the Romans/ the politicians done for us?”
Oh yeah, the medical centres, Oh yeah, the broad-band. Oh, yeah, the new cycle path. Oh yeah, the cinemas.
But what have the politicians done for us?
Overall, the notion of a rural and outer suburban France which has been “abandoned” while a dozen great urban areas thrive - an idea popularised from 2014 by the geographer Christophe Guilluy - is misleading.
One of the central beliefs of the Jaune “philosophy” can be summed up as follows: “All politicians are corrupt and steal our money. Rural and Outer Suburban France finance the success of the Bobo elites in the big cities. They do nothing for us.”
The truth is quite the opposite. The cities subsidise the countryside and small towns. In a recent book, the economist, Laurent Davezies, dismantled the founding Gilets Jaunes myth.
The greater Paris area, the Île-de-France, creates 31 percent of the nation’s wealth but takes only 22 percent of national income. The rest goes, in effect, to rural/provincial France.
In the poorest rural communes, state spending is 36 percent higher than the national average. State jobs are proportionally more numerous in the countryside than in the towns and cities.
The Gilets Jaunes movement sprang from somewhere all the same. It was not entirely concocted on Facebook.
My belief is that it sprang from something existential rather than strictly factual: a sense of a lost past, of a lost local pride and of a lost local identity; or in the case of the outer suburbs, the absence any identity at all.
There is an obvious overlap with Brexitism in the UK and Trumpism in the USA.
Rural France feels excluded from the prosperity of the cities and fails to recognise itself in multi-racial, multi-cultural urban France that it mostly sees on TV. The local sources of prosperity, from small-scale farming to home-grown factories, have been swept away.
Farming used to be the core of local identity. Now farmers are a small minority who block the roads with their monster tractors.
There is little sense of community left. One of the reasons for the initial success of the Gilets Jaunes was that they were a social club as well as a social movement.
For a while. My local GJ’s split after a month and quarrelled over the money they had received/extorted from motorists.
The new opportunities offered by, for instance, fast broadband will be important for rural France in the long run. Older local people can see no point in it. Relatively few people in my commune have paid for a connection.
The cycle-path to the sea has brought in many weekend tourists but the grumpier local people shrug their shoulders. It is not for them. A tram to Caen would have been better.
In sum…
Living in the French countryside is great. I would not want to live anywhere else. But I admit that my view might be different if I was local and young and I still had a life to make.
Do you live in rural France? Do you agree with John? Share your views on the good - and the bad - of rural living
Comments (6)
See Also
The time has come to shut out all the miseries of the world and celebrate the joys of living in rural France.
There will be plenty of opportunities to return to the miseries of the world, and France, in the weeks ahead.
It is five years – five years already! – since the Gilets Jaunes told us that rural and outer-suburban France had been abandoned by the roadside of modernity by the big cities and “political elites”.
It was never true but it had a kind of spiritual truth - a lived truth - for people living in La France Profonde or La France Périphérique.
I spend most of my time in a village in Calvados in lower Normandy. We are 35 kilometres from a big town (Caen) and 30 kilometres from a railway station.
The area was a hotbed for the original Gilet Jaunes (yellow vest) movement in November 2018. My local Gilets Jaunes, whom I came to knew well, claimed that the local economy had been pillaged by “globalism” and their tax-euros were piped directly into the pockets of the big cities and corrupt politicians.
Local services, they said, were being dismantled. Local jobs were vanishing. To find work, they had to drive into Caen.
Pump-prices were exploding and the speed limit had been reduced from 90kph to 80kph so that the politicians could harvest an increase in speeding fines.
Where was all the money going? Mostly to Brigitte Macron, they insisted. Facebook told them that she was claiming a secret salary running into the millions. (Real salary of the French First Lady: zero).
So how terrible, in truth, is life in deepest Calvados?
There are 10 doctors within 10 kilometres of my house. There are three hospitals within 40 kilometres. At a medical centre 15 kilometres away, there are six physiotherapists who treat the young and the old - including me - for free (if you have a state health card and cheap add-on insurance).
Within 10 kilometres, there are nine bakeries, six butchers and three supermarkets. There are three cinemas. The local railway line, closed since the late 1970s, has been converted into a 50-kilometre cycle and foot path to the sea at Ouistreham.
We have a fast broad-band cable system, part of a network which is scheduled to reach every hamlet in France in the next two or three years. If I need a new laptop, as I did recently, it is brought to my door within two days along the excellently maintained local roads.
It is a long time since I lived in rural England. We did not have such facilities and services in the 1970s. I doubt there are many British villages which have them now.
France is a big and varied place. In parts of Orne and Mayenne to the south of me, there are towns with boarded up shops. Doctors are scarce.
“Les déserts médicaux” do exist in France - but they are most acute in the multi-racial, inner suburbs, such as Seine-Saint Denis north of Paris. Overall, the distribution of doctors in rural France is about the national average - one for every 1,000 people.
I reckon that we, with our ten local doctors, are even better off than that. I can get an appointment for the next day or the same day.
When I point out to my neighbours how many services they still have, I’m reminded of a scene in Monty Python’s Life Of Brian: “What have the Romans/ the politicians done for us?”
Oh yeah, the medical centres, Oh yeah, the broad-band. Oh, yeah, the new cycle path. Oh yeah, the cinemas.
But what have the politicians done for us?
Overall, the notion of a rural and outer suburban France which has been “abandoned” while a dozen great urban areas thrive - an idea popularised from 2014 by the geographer Christophe Guilluy - is misleading.
One of the central beliefs of the Jaune “philosophy” can be summed up as follows: “All politicians are corrupt and steal our money. Rural and Outer Suburban France finance the success of the Bobo elites in the big cities. They do nothing for us.”
The truth is quite the opposite. The cities subsidise the countryside and small towns. In a recent book, the economist, Laurent Davezies, dismantled the founding Gilets Jaunes myth.
The greater Paris area, the Île-de-France, creates 31 percent of the nation’s wealth but takes only 22 percent of national income. The rest goes, in effect, to rural/provincial France.
In the poorest rural communes, state spending is 36 percent higher than the national average. State jobs are proportionally more numerous in the countryside than in the towns and cities.
The Gilets Jaunes movement sprang from somewhere all the same. It was not entirely concocted on Facebook.
My belief is that it sprang from something existential rather than strictly factual: a sense of a lost past, of a lost local pride and of a lost local identity; or in the case of the outer suburbs, the absence any identity at all.
There is an obvious overlap with Brexitism in the UK and Trumpism in the USA.
Rural France feels excluded from the prosperity of the cities and fails to recognise itself in multi-racial, multi-cultural urban France that it mostly sees on TV. The local sources of prosperity, from small-scale farming to home-grown factories, have been swept away.
Farming used to be the core of local identity. Now farmers are a small minority who block the roads with their monster tractors.
There is little sense of community left. One of the reasons for the initial success of the Gilets Jaunes was that they were a social club as well as a social movement.
For a while. My local GJ’s split after a month and quarrelled over the money they had received/extorted from motorists.
The new opportunities offered by, for instance, fast broadband will be important for rural France in the long run. Older local people can see no point in it. Relatively few people in my commune have paid for a connection.
The cycle-path to the sea has brought in many weekend tourists but the grumpier local people shrug their shoulders. It is not for them. A tram to Caen would have been better.
In sum…
Living in the French countryside is great. I would not want to live anywhere else. But I admit that my view might be different if I was local and young and I still had a life to make.
Do you live in rural France? Do you agree with John? Share your views on the good - and the bad - of rural living
Join the conversation in our comments section below. Share your own views and experience and if you have a question or suggestion for our journalists then email us at [email protected].
Please keep comments civil, constructive and on topic – and make sure to read our terms of use before getting involved.
Please log in here to leave a comment.