To Understand France, Look Around Its Villages

The New York Times' Roger Cohen on "the Americanizing anti-America" in the International Herald Tribune:

…the French countryside … still accounts for a lot of France. Half the surface area of the country is farmland. A church spire provides cell-phone service; a computer controls a 16th-century bell; an automated angelus attracts and annoys different couches of the new rural scene.

Change and tradition vie with each other, the old conceals the new, and the French ambivalence over modernity and the fate of its rustic soul is played out in clash and compromise.

To understand France, look at its villages. The country remains more rural than any other in Western Europe, more tied through family and gastronomy and cultural identity to the local sources of its wine and weathered wisdom.

At the same time, it has modernized at a ferocious pace: Only three percent of workers are engaged in farming compared with more than 20 percent four decades ago.

The tension between these two Frances — the shifting and the rooted — is central to what the French might term their existential condition. This helps explain a few things. If the United States equals modernity and the rootless existence, it is natural that it should inspire some unease in a country playing out its own complex internal struggle between metropolitan culture and that mix of soil and hearth and tradition the French call "terroir."

Over the past two decades, the last two French presidents, François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, have been particularly attentive to "terroir" or the innermost rural France known as "la France profonde,", because they know what a potent cultural force it remains. They have at the same time been ambivalent at best about America.

But deepest France is changing. After the exodus from the French countryside in the 1960s and 1970s, a reflux has begun. People are returning to villages, particularly those within 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, of towns with more than 50,000 inhabitants. They are drawn by a calmer lifestyle, the possibilities of the Internet and by emergent business opportunities in rural tourism. A new class has emerged: the "Neo-rurals" or the "Rurbains" (a conflation of the French words for "rural" and "urban"). Sociologists speak of the "the new countrysides" of France. …

On-line commerce is spreading, although high-speed Internet is still scarce in rural areas. In 2002, the last year for which figures are available, high-speed services were available to 74 percent of the population but on only 21 percent of French territory. As that changes, the number of "Rurbains" is likely to grow faster, helping to mold the character of contemporary France.

What is that character? As seen from a neo-rural French village, it is subtle and stubborn, restless and rooted, proud and prickly, at once open to the world and cautious about the loss of truths contained in old stones and old cellars. A place where a church spire is not what it seems and a bell a bellwether of change. It is the Americanizing anti-America. It is not easy to grasp and so easily maddening. …