“Bonjour, can you please ask your frog to stop croaking? It’s bothering the neighbours.”
A surreal line more suitable to a Wes Anderson film than real life, but in the sleepy French village of Frontenex, that’s exactly how it happened. The police knocked on the door of a 92 year old after a neighbour complained that frogs from her garden were croaking too loudly. It’s reminiscent of the now famous “I am Maurice” case, where a couple unsuccessfully tried to prevent their neighbours’ cockerel from crowing at dawn. It ignited a fierce town v country debate in France and Maurice became a national symbol of the countryside. Though these cock and frog cases are humorous little examples of a culture clash, underneath this drôle exterior there is genuine urban v rural conflict at the heart of it.
As someone who grew up in a village of less than 3000 people in Brittany, I’ve had my fair share of urban prejudice. The pervasive rural stereotype in France is that you are uneducated, unsophisticated and poor. “Paysan”, literally meaning farmer, is a common insult across the Channel (remember Parisian Eva Green’s “shitty peasants” jibe?). I still cringe at interactions I had as a teenager with Parisian boys whose families owned second homes in the chic coastal town of La Trinité-sur-mer. “I’m from Camors” I’d mutter under my breath as I chatted to a chino clad Thibaud from the 16ème.
“Where do you live?” coast, country or town is the French equivalent to the English question “Where did you go to school?” They both serve as shortcuts to establishing what your socio economic background is and the subtext is always, “How rich are you?”
There is no French equivalent to the Home Counties or the Cotswolds. There is no landed gentry tilling the land of their ancestors keeping the Conservative grassroots alive. The bourgeoisie own vineyards not farms. There are no second homes in the Massif Central serving the Parisian upper classes. The coast is where the rich city dwellers flock to. Unlike in England where some of the areas of greatest poverty are by the sea, the French coast line is nearly always a place of wealth from Deauville to Dinard, from Carnac to Cannes.
This is what Brits fail to grasp when they move to France and pick up a Château at a bargain price. The reason why properties are so cheap in la Dordogne is because the French don’t want to live there.
I would also argue that the concept of “the sticks” is something the English haven’t really grasped. France is roughly twice the size of Britain with the same population, so whatever your concept of rurality is you can double that and you get la campagne (countryside). I’ve only ever used the word cesspit in English in the figurative sense, to describe Twitter for instance. In France, I grew up on a literal cesspit, a fosse septic, a large container that collects your human waste because you live too far away from the community sewage system. That’s “the sticks”. Growing up in the French countryside pre-the internet was about as sheltered a teenage life as you could get. There was extremely limited public transport and even if you could walk 2km to catch one of two daily buses that went through my village, it was not the done thing. Hitchhiking was my preference. And you can forget taxis, in Camors Uber is still just German for “great”.
These are just some of the reasons why the French hinterland has never generated the bucolic appeal that the English countryside has. In recent years though, there’s been a shift in the status quo. With the adoption of work from home and a greater awareness of the environment, more French city dwellers are opting to move out to the provinces. For instance I recently discovered a website called Paris je te quitte (Paris I’m leaving you) whose sole objective is to facilitate Parisians leaving Paris by giving advice on where to move to and how to find accommodation.
That isn’t to say that mindsets have completely changed, I’m still affectionately referred to as the paysanne amongst my French friends, but if you’d like to pick up one of those dirt cheap Châteaux in the middle nowhere: I’d get a move on.
Tatty Macleod is a comedian and improviser. She will be taking her debut show to the Edinburgh Fringe this summer