As I said Andrew - fiefdoms!
1 Like
Very scary…
My personal project this year is walking to the monuments to the resistance in this area (we were on the border between occupied & unoccupied France, and next to the forbidden zone along swiss border). So the resistance was active here, and there are quite a few monuments to very nasty killings. My very elderly neighbours still talk about the nights they had to hide in a cave in the forest to escape, and the village next to us was burnt down. So it’s their children and grandchildren who are now voting FN.
2 Likes
I think that for most people, their attitude to immigration is a mixture of the rational and the emotional. As Brexit showed, emotions can be swayed by smart, calculated campaigning. I have always thought the French en masse would be swayed less easily than the English en masse because I don’t think France has a generation where the masses have simply soaked up whatever the tabloids tell them, because their schooling never taught them to analyse a text and think critically for themselves and their intellects have gone into a coma. I think the French would have seen through Farage, the Express and suchlike - well I think they have, and they think the Brits were stupid to fall for it. But, I also think that Le Pen is correspondingly smarter than Farage, smart enough to appeal to the intellect as well as the emotions.
As I said earlier, I wouldn’t stay in a hostile environment. That’s not the France I fell in love with 50 years ago. It would be like staying in a bad marriage, not a happy place to be, and I didn’t make any vows about “for better or for worse” when I moved here.
But - it’s not come to that yet and hopefully it won’t.
1 Like
Is there a correlation between where the support for MLP’s party is located in France and the areas of support for Brexit in the UK which tends to be in rural parts of the country and small/medium sized towns and cities - East Anglia, the West Country, Sunderland, Swindon, Derby etc?
Both Swindon and Sunderland have large car plants and although surrounded by countryside, as are most towns and cities in UK can hardly be called rural.
They don’t want to be tied to Germany, who they see as having an overriding power base in the EU.
Misplaced pride in their own country as in UK.
Unfortunately, there are Le Pen voters in our village, but not up here in the hauts of our commune.
Our hairdresser is on Rue Quatrieme Battaillon du Choc, which was formed when the Resistance fighters came down from the hills after D Day and were integrated into the French Army.
So the West Country and East Anglia aren’t rural then, my mistake as I thought they were massive areas of farmland with small market towns a bit like the Charente Maritime.
Can’t speak for the West Country but East Anglia was defintely rural the last time I looked.
Yep same here - the guy before me at the polling station earlier proudly picked up his FN ‘bulletin’ and stuffed it into his envelope in plain view - i.e. no heading off to the curtained booth!
Looking forward (I think) to seeing my cimmune results tonight!
I will be at a friend’s house where we will be ‘combing’ all the local results, probably with a glass or three to hand 
Just as an aside, yes I know it’s not LP, but did anyone else see the French news at 20h00 last night? In the Brantome area the British population is 10% and a reporter was asking some of the Brits about their worries re Brexit. Two of the couples they asked had business’ in France and had lived here some time, a few others were long term residents. Yes you have guessed they spoke in English and had to have an interpretor, I was spitting feathers. To be fair some others interviewed did speak French but how can anyone be here long term and not even have enough of the language to answer simple questions?
6 Likes
A memory just floated back into my head of travelling around la Brétagne profonde some 20 or 25 years ago, in the era when vast numbers of Brits were buying up cheap property in Brittany to renovate and sending prices up in the process. I can’t remember which village it was but the names and addresses of all the Brit-owned properties were daubed on a wall, with slogans in Breton. Gave me a bit of a shock, it seemed creepy and menacing, and I wouldn’t have been comfortable seeing my name written on a list like that. I don’t think that sentiment is there any more or at least nowhere near so militant, these movements build up and die down in waves, but maybe they are always closer to the surface than we think.
I totally agree with your sentiment but the “how” is easy enough.
I am sure that we could move to France and not feel a strong pressure to become fluent - after all I have English TV, I interact on the 'net in English and it would be easy to manage with spoken French being limited to a cheery Bonjour and shopping basics.
I think I would get much more “out” of France if I spoke French better (and I’m slowly working on it) but quite a lot will be happy to socialise with other Brits and manage day to day with very little French - it’s a shame but it’s only compulsory to have good spoken French if you go for nationality (and not even then for older folk).
@anon27586881. I have seen quite a bit of anti-dutch graffiti recently. But then if you don’t speak the language I guess you don’t understand the graffiti?
I don’t remember now exactly what it said, but the meaning was left in no doubt at all.
I did actually learn a little Breton back then, thought I might end up there, although I don’t remember much beyond Yec’hed mat and Kenavo.
I had a Dutch client who didn’t get on with his neighbours, at all. Constant conflict, verbal exchanges in public, resulted in him painting anti-French graffiti on his garden wall; to the effect that “French that don’t like foreigners in their village should move house…”
All this in 34, where there are “so many foreigners”, that the local mentality is a little “closed”, shall we say?!
Blimey!
Well, they’re a funny lot in the Hérault !
I have just got back from the market and it is hotching with anglophones some speaking extraordinarily loudly and not speaking French or saying even bonjour in shops just saying what they want in English, then no merci or au revoir naturally (not even in English) they have no manners, and being rude about us (because obv we are all half-witted peasants who can’t understand them) I can’t believe how rude some people are and it actually makes me wish they would just drop dead.
When I say not speaking French I mean not making the tiniest effort to speak at all even to the ancient man selling his asparagus who is highly unlikely to speak a word of English. How would they react if I were to turn up in whatever hellhole they hail from and speak nothing but French in their local shops?
7 Likes