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Butter before votes (Tim Graham/Getty Images)
In rural France there are strict rules about dinner party chat. No politics, no religion, no work. The safe topics are the production of artisan goat’s cheese, floods or droughts, and the career of Rafael Nadal, who, despite being born south of the Pyrenees, has effectively been adopted by les Français. Asked to dinner last month by friends down in the village, the subject of Macron or Le Pen in the Elysée was never even on the table. The closest we got to discussing politics was to wonder whether euthanasia in Switzerland is worth the cost when you could get Claude, the alcoholic shepherd, to do the job for €100. After dessert, I was no wiser to the voting intentions of the gathered diners than I had been when we chatted over the apéros.
Not much happens in the little village of La Roche in Nouvelle-Aquitaine — which, to be honest, is how we all like it. True, there was a scandale last year. Someone painted their shutters mauve, as opposed to the regulation blue, earning a stiff letter from Monsieur le Maire. But in general the French are very good at privacy. Hence the distance-keeping, formal “vous“, and the reluctance to use Christian names on a first social encounter. You can see why: after Revolution, after the choice between Resistance and Collaboration, there lingers in France the feeling that you need to be careful what you say, and of revealing who you are. Unlike in Britain, there are no political posters in windows or gardens.
There are people in La Roche who, despite having known each other since the Stone Age, still address each other formally as “Madame” or “Monsieur”. But still, there was an air of excitement about the presidential election. “On va gagner”, someone had enthusiastically scrawled on the official poster of “Marine” — she’s always Marine, not Le Pen, like Boris is Boris — outside the polling station, the village Mairie.
In the event, Macron beat Le Pen by just nine votes here, out of a voting population of 235. His victory was not a surprise to me. My wife has evolved a near faultless theory on the presidential voting habit of our neck of rural France, this beautiful but forgotten land where you might need to drive for miles and miles to find a doctor, and the diesel cost of delivering goods to the local Intermarché is pushing prices through the sheet-metal roof.
Her theory is: pretty villages (such as La Roche, with its Romanesque church) go for Macron; everywhere else plumps for Marine Le Pen, whose vote is escalated by the number of nearby wind turbines. (Éoliennes are not placed in south-west France; they are dumped, like scrap.) If, on Le Monde’s interactive map of how France voted, you type in lovely Dampierre-sur-Boutonne, with its Renaissance château, you get a Macron win. Key in poor Les Églises with éoliennes every which way and you get Le Pen.
Now, as the National Assembly vote approaches, it is worth nothing that the French electoral process has a certain built-in capacity for paranoia. The base voting unit, the commune in rural areas, can be, as with La Roche, very small. The results are detailed, and precise. I suspect quite a lot of La Rocheans are walking around wondering not who voted for Marine, but who the hell were the two residents who voted for the Trotskyists of Lutte Ouvrière? (I must admit that one does get a wide choice in a French election: Lutte Ouvrière are also standing for the local Assembly seat, as is Le Mouvement de la Ruralité, the wonderful diehard defenders of la chasse, the right of cockerels to crow, and a landscape free of éoliennes — and, I kid you not, whose TV election broadcast is sung. Brilliantly.)
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SubscribeI thought you were a sheep farmer in Herefordshire, close to the lovely River Monnow, or is that not a full time occupation?
In our French village in the Midi political discussions at the table is ” de rigeur” and ordinary peoples understanding of, and interest in politics is so far superior to their equivalents in nu britn…. AND they read broadsheet newspapers, as well as being far more concerned about Islamic threats, and brave enough to express those concerns.
The French love to talk politics. Hairdressers, artisans, doctors, academics, they’re at it all day every day. The number of hours of political commenatry on TV is staggering. The difference with GB struck me forcibly when I first arrived in this corner of France some 40 years ago and it has never changed.
“Unlike in Britain, there are no political posters in windows or gardens.”
If I put up a Tory poster in my windows here in Bristol, they would get smashed.
Thank you for that insight into life in la France profonde, and in particular the introduction to the splendid signature tune of Le Mouvement de la Ruralité
I’m just coming to the end of Willian L Shirer’s gripping account of The Fall of the Third Republic. If French politics is anything like as barkingly bonkers as it was for the 70 years that Republic lasted there’s no chance of understanding anything about it.
Judging by the other commentators La Roche-Posay is a rather dull place, devoid of any political life. No doubt its well preserved 12th century Donjon reminds its inhabitants of the price of disobedience.
Well in today’s politically correct world, I’m surprised that the Donjon of La Roche-Posay isn’t full of people that had the temerity to ask for someone’s ‘Christian’ name!