Feeling of isolation | Images of a French countryside with wineries, dairy cows and cheese makers is just for show
SOUSCEYRAC, France (Reuters) — The first thing a visitor to this rural French village sees upon entering town are road signs pointing the way out.
The sprawling parking lot that is Sousceyrac’s main square is mostly empty on a weekday afternoon. The tourist information office, post office and bull semen co-operative are closed, and the rumble of hay and lumber trucks passing through town without stopping adds to the air of isolation.
The economic handicaps plaguing this community of 930 people on the foothills of the southern Massif Central are many. Mobile phone service is spotty, the hospital is an hour’s drive away and the butcher and the bank are gone. Even the pizza lady, Paulette, is throwing in the towel.
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For decades, France has fretted about its banlieues, the racially mixed population belts around its major cities which, for many, became synonymous with delinquency and deprivation.
But while $57 billion has been pumped over the past decade into cities and suburbs for social housing and other initiatives aimed at appeasing discontent, country dwellers say some rural areas have been relegated to second tier status with a growing lack of essential public services.
“It’s not a gap, it’s a schism. Here in Sousceyrac I can’t even receive a text message. We’re behind on everything here,” rails local man Fabien Faure.
“How do you get people to come here if even the phone doesn’t work? Guess what? You won’t.”
Rural discontent is growing, as violent protests in Brittany have shown. And though a sluggish economy gives president Francois Hollande little room to salve country folks’ gripes with state largesse, he can ill afford to scorn France’s substantial rural vote as his approval ratings hit record lows.
The rural blight clashes with images of sunlit peasant idyll that draw summer tourists by the millions and that remain central to the earthy self-image of a nation whose forebears mostly quit the land for the towns generations ago.
However, whether governments in Paris can reverse the decline is far from clear.
Just outside Sousceyrac, where rich pasture land on rolling granite hills has sustained generations, livestock farmer Maurice Labrousse said rural dwellers feel abandoned.
“It makes me scared. I feel like life in the countryside is over,” said Lab-rousse, who has survived a wave of farm closures.
One-third of farms have disappeared since 2000 from the Lot de-partment where Sousceyrac lies, either sold to larger entities or now left fallow.
“We’re not forgotten when it comes to taxes, but we are for services. We’re good enough to pay for road works, but not to have basic services,” he said. “Better to live in the city. It’s a shame and I’m against it, but that’s the way it is.”
France is nearly twice the size of the continent’s economic powerhouse, Germany, but its population is 20 percent smaller, which creates costly problems for the distribution of public services. France also has double the proportion of people living in the countryside than Germany and 10 times that of Britain.
However, urban residents are better rewarded than their rural counterparts.
Rural mayors note that a special state grant to localities, which was worth more than $10 billion last year, provides $93 per head in the country, half what city dwellers receive.
“Rural areas always come up short in the balance,” said Cedric Szabo, director of the French Rural Mayors Association.
Successive governments, mindful of riots and tensions in the suburbs surrounding prosperous cities, have struggled to address the latest chapter in the long decline of rural France.
Tapping into the discontent, far right National Front leader Marine Le Pen did a Tour de France of the Forgotten to rural zones earlier this year, which passed through the Lot.
A 2009 report on rural poverty for the conservative government that preceded Hollande’s Socialists said the limited attention given to poor health care and transport access, housing and jobs resulted in en-trenched problems.
Hopes that the creation of a minister for rural areas that year might bring improvements were dashed when the post was scrapped again the following year.
For Sousceyrac mayor Francis Laborie, the goal is to “fight to make sure we’re less forgotten. In France who are we governed by? We’re governed by city people,” he said.
“You can see that country folk come second.”
Rural mayors are worried about a local government reorganization that will halve the number of the lowest level authorities, the communes, from 36,682, which accounts for 40 percent of all the municipal entities in the European Union.
Mayors say mergers mean they will no longer be able to steward the futures of their towns because their authority over roads and schools will go to out-of-town officials.
“We’re going to be eaten up by the big communities,” said Laborie.
“It’s going to accentuate the feeling of isolation.”
The government says shaking up a system little changed since Napoleon will help spread resources more evenly and do away with costly duplication of effort among local officials who sometimes provide services to barely a few hundred people.
Sousceyrac is relatively lucky: it still has a bakery, two schools, a few cafes and even a Michelin-starred restaurant. Worse hit are northern areas where industrial decline and population exodus have left land derelict and towns gutted.
But put aside Sousceyrac’s clean air and gentle landscape and bitter realities remain. One in two jobs are in public services, the largest employer is a retirement home since a textile factory shut in 2008 and the population is steadily declining. It is now less than half what it was a century ago.
“It’s the beginning of the end for Sousceyrac,” said Pascal Deleris, an out-of-work mechanic who expects more businesses to shut and friends to leave town.
“It’s not what it was.”
National nostalgia for the soil that made France rich and powerful throughout history remains strong. The annual Paris farm fair is a fixture in the calendar for politicians keen to burnish their rural credentials by posing beside a dairy cow or sampling farmhouse cheeses and charcuterie.
But to many in the country, that is just for show.
“For 30 years I’ve heard the politicians say rural life is important, we can’t let it disappear, it would be the end of France,” said Jacques Andurand, mayor of nearby Aynac.
“I have the feeling, and I’m not alone, that it’s a load of hot air.”
And yet, for all the problems, the long depopulation of the countryside has reversed in recent years, as people seek refuge from high rents in towns. Nine percent growth in the rural population between 1999 and 2007 was double that in urban areas.
A bigger rural vote may tempt politicians to do more.
“Growth … has to come, first and foremost, from investing in these areas, which for too long have been left behind economically,” said Szabo.
Health care remains a problem area.
Nearly one-fifth of French people live a long way from a general practice doctor, and seeing a specialist is even more difficult. It creates what a French Senate report this year called a threat to the “equality among citizens” that is a founding tenet of the republic. There is no national shortage of doctors, but the newly qualified shun rural areas where, for example, it can be hard for working spouses to find jobs. That is a problem as an older generation of family doctors retires.
“It’s over for doctors like us. I’m among the last,” said Alain Ducoq, 67, of Leyme, southwest of Sousceyrac. “By 2015 there won’t be any more doctors around here.”
Mayors in nearby towns are skeptical of a government plan to tempt young doctors to the countryside by subsidizing their pay for two years. They think isolation and long hours will ultimately take their toll. Access to hospitals is also fraught.
The area hit headlines last year when a woman lost her baby en route to a maternity clinic over an hour’s drive away.
If health care is a matter of life and death, poor telecommunication service is an economic strain. Szabo said a lack of high speed internet is the biggest handicap for rural areas.
The internet and flexible hours create possibilities for urban residents to work from homes in the country, but not if they find themselves cut off when they get there.
France has issued licences for a new generation of mobile phone technology without requiring winning bidders to start building in rural areas first, which Germany has done.
However, an alternative approach to encouraging firms to build 4G relay stations in the countryside by letting them share costs and radio frequencies among themselves has not had the hoped-for effect.
While French cities are tuning in to 4G, even old-fashioned cellphones are a problem in Sousceyrac.
“I can’t do my work. The phone doesn’t work.” said Jean-Louis Trin, a cattle dealer who echoes a common gripe.
Even the police cannot use cellphones at work, said Laborie.
Such brakes on economic development keep both entrepreneurs and employees at bay. A major regional employer, the Andros jam factory in nearby Biars-sur-Cere, struggles to find executives willing to move with their families to the area, said Laborie.
Social workers say poorer urban families who move to the country for lower rents often get a shock when they discover that fuelling a car and heating drafty old houses can offset the savings.
And while the area is picturesque enough to draw tourists, seasonal income for local people who rely on them quickly evaporates.
“It’s idyllic in the summer but catastrophic in the winter,” said Michel Labrunie of the charity Secours Catholique.
Some small towns are finding creative ways to stay vibrant.
Aynac bought the 17th-century chateau in town, reselling it for what is hoped to be a bed and breakfast to lure tourists.
Nearby Mayrinhac-Lentour bought the last remaining store in town and turned it into a multi-purpose business: inn, bar, restaurant, tobacco shop, bread depot and grocery store.
And many residents of Sousceyrac say they wouldn’t live anywhere else despite the handicaps, isolation and frustrations.
Trin, the third generation of cattle traders, said he feels privileged to live in the countryside, but its dwellers feel a world apart from France’s city residents.
“People don’t care,” he said.
“They’re going to start throwing peanuts to us, like at the zoo.”
