LIVING ABROAD

French Village Life — Charming, Peaceful & Idyllic, Or Boring, Frustrating & Impossible?

It depends on who you ask . . .

I’m a foreigner. My perspective is that of a foreigner who sees village life through the slightly rose-tinted lens of an outsider. I might feel inconvenienced by having to drive 15 minutes or so to get cash from the ATM, but I don’t have to depend on public transport. I don’t worry about keeping an old house warm in winter, or how I will pay for a new roof, or feed a young family. I love the village just as it is.

If you need quick cash here in my village, you’re out of luck. But if you love ancient history, you’re in the right place. One Saturday every month, there’s a guided tour of the 13th-century chateau that now serves as the village mairie (town hall.) Wander through the imposing halls, chambers and sunlit interior courtyards — peer into a dungeon. The bloodied plastic limb suspended from the ceiling serves as a reminder of what happened to those who ran afoul of the Lords of Fouzhilon who once controlled large swathes of the French countryside.

On a hot July afternoon, it’s cool and peaceful to stroll through the chateau and think about days gone by. I half expect the quiet courtyard where I’m standing to suddenly fill with strolling minstrels and animated figures in 13th-century costumes — one result of having lived in California for many years is that everything old seems vaguely Disneyesque

I have to keep reminding myself that this chateau — which the French guide calls a castle — is the real thing, built for a purpose other than entertainment. Peasants actually gathered for protection behind these very walls.

My small and otherwise undistinguished little village is a history lesson come alive, but that’s true of so many small French villages. In California, you’d be charged admission, in France history is everywhere you look, woven into the fabric of the country. This village with its medieval chateau is little more than a very local point of interest.

But, just a five-minute walk from the chateau, history gives way to a familiar symbol of 21st-century France. A lotissement — subdivision — of small one-story, almost identical houses, all built over the past eight years. Neatly fenced gardens and the requisite double garage. Most have backyard swimming pools. Street names — Grenach, Carignan, Merlot — are the only reminders that vines once grew here.

Depending on your perspective, these tidy modern homes are a much-needed solution to the shortage of affordable housing or a blight on the picturesque French countryside.

My friend Hélène, now in her mid 60’s, grew up in this village — in a house off the main square with no running water. The house, still there, overlooks a stream where the family — she stops her story to pantomime — performed their daily ablutions and related activities.

While the chateau offers me a glimpse into ancient French history, Hélène gives me a look at the more recent past. Her parents were married in the old town hall. On our walks, she shows me the little stream where she once caught les têtards (tadpoles) and the garden where she picked apples from her uncle’s trees. Walking down the steep hill of Le Grande Rue, the main street through the village, she points out houses where friends and family once lived — many empty and in poor condition. Some have been for sale for years, others abandoned.

French people don’t want them, she says. Too much work, too much trouble. French people prefer what I think of as the Monopoly houses in the lotissments on the outskirts of the village where there is room to park a car.

If it weren’t for les anglais (the English) buying these old village houses to fix up, Hélène says, they would remain unsold. And, as is happening throughout rural France, this small village with its ancient history would fade into the mists of time.

It makes me sad — the empty houses, the faded names on shuttered shop fronts, the news that this or that village cafe has closed. Estimates vary wildly on the number of closures, but there’s no dispute that rural cafes, once the social centre of French village life, are closing at an alarming rate. To the point that Macron’s rural agenda includes a project to open 1,000 new cafes in small and underserved communities.

I doubt if there’s a plan to rescue vineyards replaced by lotissments, but the à vendre (for sale) signs popping up in vineyards also make me sad. I’d like everything about village life to stay just as it is — except perhaps for the Monopoly houses on the edge of the village. I don’t want the boulangerie or the beauty salon to close and even though the village cafe is a little too — well, not a place where a lone woman might feel comfortable sipping a glass of rosé— I don’t want that to close either.

I have ventured in a few times with Hélène who feels quite comfortable drinking beer at the bar with les hommes, in their cloth caps and work boots, watching game shows on the TV above the bar, but she’s a local and I’m not. To me, this slightly seedy working man’s cafe is film scene material. I want to photograph the bartender — stomach falling over a grubby shirt, cigarette dangling from his lips — even though cafes in France are supposed to be nonsmoking — but I don’t.

I’m a foreigner. My perspective is that of a foreigner who sees village life through the slightly rose-tinted lens of an outsider. I might feel inconvenienced by having to drive 15 minutes or so to get cash from the ATM, but I don’t have to depend on public transport. I don’t worry about keeping an old house warm in winter, or how I will pay for a new roof, or feed a young family.

When I see teenagers hanging out in the bus shelter, faces illuminated by mobile phone screens, I don’t worry, as a parent might, that boredom will turn them to drugs.

But these are exactly the sort of issues French voters in rural areas like this do worry about. And they’re increasingly angry that their voices have been ignored for so long. The far-right politician Marine Le Penn — who I view as only slightly less alarming than the Orange Idiot back in the States — tapped into that anger and promised, if elected, to listen to those in rural areas and bring about much-needed change — better services, improved transportation, a long list of promises.

Although I breathed a sigh of relief when she lost, Le Penn is a not a topic I’d bring up sitting in the village cafe with Hélène. I’ve gleaned enough clues about my friend’s political leanings during our walks, views I’m sure she shares with the burly guys at the bar. Probably not a good idea to come off as a lefty foreigner badmouthing Le Penn while butchering the language of Moliere in the process.

I’ll always be an outsider in this French village, that’s fine. I never felt quite at home in California either. And I’m aware that my wish for everything to remain the same is selfish and a little unrealistic.

Change happens. Some of it welcome — faster internet thanks to the recent installation of fibre optic cable throughout the village, for instance. Supermarkets have brought big changes to village life. Like my neighbours, I drive fifteen miles or so to the Intermarche where the variety and prices are better than in the village epicerie where villagers once shopped. I feel slightly guilty — this is how villages decline, but finances dictate.

The peasants who once gathered for safety behind the chateau walls wouldn’t recognise the village these days. No idea what they’d make of the lotissments. A hundred years from now, who knows? The Monopoly houses may seem quaint and picturesque. Hard to imagine, but tastes change too.

I would like to make a request though — not sure where to direct it, maybe the ghosts of the Lords of Fouzhilon up in the chateau —that things in this village don’t change too much, too fast and too soon. Just my perspective — I’m sure the kids hanging out in the bus shelter would have a different take. Their parents probably would too.

Hope you enjoyed this story — here are a few other links to stories I’ve written about life in France.

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Merci!