National Post (National Edition)
RURAL FRANCE PULLS TOGETHER IN ISOLATION
SENSE OF COMMUNITY GROWS AS NATION COPES WITH VIRUS
In December 2018, a handful of “yellow vest” protesters walked 482 miles from Lozère, a district in southern France, to the presidential palace in Paris. They collected grievances from people they met along the way: people who felt isolated, forgotten by the government, socially and economically disconnected from the French capital.
Now, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, isolation has become a means of survival, and the people of Lozère have found themselves at something of an advantage. As of Friday, only 20 people in the district had been found to have had the coronavirus, with just two of them hospitalized. Lozère is the only district in metropolitan France to count just one coronavirus death.
“Isolated like we are here, it’s a little bit like we’re permanently confined,” said Elisabeth Piéjoujac, from Villeret, a village with just a dozen inhabitants in the winter.
Not much has changed in the village in light of the pandemic. People wash their hands more often. They stopped kissing their neighbours and the friends they meet on Saturdays at the market. In some ways, the pandemic has exposed the strengths of what is called “la France périphérique,” or peripheral France, the same type of places that rose up during the “yellow vest” protests in 2018.
People in Lozère and other peripheral areas of France say the pandemic has brought out a sense of communal solidarity — more so, perhaps, than one might feel in Paris.
“People are supporting each other,” said novelist Nicolas Mathieu, who wrote about the forgotten corners of France in his 2018 novel, And Their Children After Them. He has spent the lockdown in a house in Nancy, a mid-sized city in eastern France. “Between neighbours, asking if they need anything, etc. I’m sure that exists in Paris, as well. But the other day, while doing errands, I found something on the ground in front of the cashier’s station. It was a little note, and it read, ‘Thank you for doing this for the building,’ and clearly someone had indeed done all the shopping for an entire building. That says it all.”
That’s not to say that the complaints about inequality have been resolved or forgotten. France this week has begun to reopen schools, as it relaxes its coronavirus lockdown. But the two months at home have been especially hard for some students in peripheral France. Salomé Berlioux, author of Invisibles of the Republic, said nearly seven out of every 10 families she has interviewed reported difficulties in establishing an online connection for their children to follow school lessons remotely. Nationally, Education Minister JeanMichel Blanquer told Le Parisien newspaper that only about five per cent of families would have difficulty following courses online.
“In peripheral France, we are very far from national statistics,” Berlioux said.
Still, she said, the coronavirus crisis “is mostly a crisis of metropolitan centres. The real violence is in the big cites and the sensitive neighbourhoods there.”
Niels Planel, a poverty reduction consultant, is in confinement in Semuren-Auxois, a town of about 4,000 people in Burgundy — one of the most vocal regions during the yellow vest uprising in 2018.
“The good thing, for example, in my district — which has 345 villages and towns, and two or three bigger cities — is that people know each other,” Planel said. “Even if you don’t have the administrative information
IN PERIPHERAL FRANCE, WE ARE VERY FAR FROM NATIONAL STATISTICS.
as to how someone may be living, you actually know who’s doing well and who is not. For instance, I knew a young kid who I knew would not be able to generate revenue anymore, and I knew where he lived, so I called him. He said he was fine, that he needed food soon, and I was able to connect him to the social centre,” he said. “This is stronger than you would see in a place like Paris.”
Photographer Emilienne Malfatto has felt that sense of community during her confinement in Lozère. Her mother is from the region, and that’s where the ultra-local means something, she said. “Several times during this reportage, as I explained my local origins, faces lit up. ‘I knew your grandmother.’ And, suddenly, I wasn’t a foreigner anymore and doors opened.”
As France slowly reopens, little will change for the people in Lozère. Yet, the way it is perceived by outsiders might evolve, and that sense of isolation and community, dismissed before the pandemic, might suddenly be more attractive to some.