Could refugees save rural villages?
Some greet, others jeer fading French town’s revival plan
CALLAC, France — A shrinking town set among cow pastures in Brittany seems an unlikely setting for France’s soul searching over immigration and identity.
The main square is named after the date in 1944 when local resistance fighters were rounded up by Nazi soldiers, many never seen again. It offers a cafe run by a social club, a museum dedicated to the Brittany spaniel and a hefty serving of rural flight — forlorn empty buildings, their grills pulled down and windows shuttered, some for decades.
So, when town council members heard of a program that could renovate the dilapidated buildings and fill much-needed jobs like nurses’ aides and builders by bringing in skilled refugees, it seemed like a winning ticket.
“It hit me like lightning,” said Laure-Line Inderbitzin, a deputy mayor. “It sees refugees not as charity but an opportunity.”
But what town leaders saw as a chance for rejuvenation, others saw as evidence of a “great replacement” of native French people that has become a touchstone of anger and anxiety, particularly on the hard right.
In no time, tiny Callac, a town of just 2,200, was divided, the focus of national attention and the scene of competing protests for and against the plan. Today, it sits at the intersection of complex issues that have bedeviled France for many years: how to deal with mounting numbers of migrants arriving in the country and how to breathe new life into withering towns, before it is too late.
As in many towns across France, Callac’s population has been in slow decline
since the end of the Trente Glorieuses, the 30-year postwar growth stretch when living standards and wages rose. About half of the population are retirees; the biggest employer is the nursing home.
A wander around downtown reveals dozens of empty storefronts, where florists, dry cleaners and photo studios once stood. The town’s last dental office announced in July it was closing — the stress of turning new patients away was too much for Francoise Meheut.
She stopped sleeping, she burst into tears over the dental chair and she turned to antidepressants before finally deciding to retire early.
“It’s a catastrophe,” Meheut said. “I have the impression of abandoning people.”
“I am selling, and no one is buying,” she added of her business. “If there was a
dentist among the refugees, I would be thrilled.”
While many in town say there are no jobs, the council did a survey and found the opposite: 75 unfilled salaried jobs, from nursing assistants to contractors, despite the town’s 18% unemployment rate.
The council still hopes to carry out its plan in cooperation with the Merci Endowment Fund, an organization created by a wealthy Parisian family that made its fortune in high-end children’s clothing and wanted to give back.
In 2016, the matriarch of the family volunteered to host an Afghan refugee in the family mansion near the Eiffel Tower. Her three sons decided to expand the idea broadly.
“The idea is to create a win-win situation,” said the eldest son, Benoit Cohen, a French filmmaker and author who wrote a book about the experience called
“Mohammad, My Mother and Me.”
“They will help revitalize the village.”
The Merci project has proposed handpicking asylum seekers and recruiting for skills, as well as a desire to live in the countryside. The Cohen family also wants to develop a wraparound program to help refugees assimilate, with local French courses and apartments in refurbished buildings.
The plan also calls for new community spaces and training programs for all — locals and refugees — something that most excited Inderbitzin, the project’s local champion on the council and a teacher in the local middle school.
The town has more than 50 nonprofit clubs and associations, including one that runs the local cinema and another that delivers food to families in need.
“Social development
for all — that’s in Callac’s genes,” Inderbitzin said. “It’s a virtuous circle. They could bring lots of energy, culture, youth.”
Not everyone is as excited at that prospect. A petition launched by three residents opposing the project has more than 10,000 signatures — many from far beyond Callac.
But even in town, some grumble about lack of consultation or transparency. They worry Callac will lose its Frenchness and will trade its small-town tranquility for big-city problems. Others question the motives of a rich family in Paris meddling in their rural home.
“We aren’t lab rats. We aren’t here for them to experiment on,” said Danielle Le Men, a retired teacher in town who is starting a community group to stop the project, which she fears will bring “radical Islam” to the community.
Catching wind of the dispute, the right-wing anti-immigrant party Reconquest organized a protest in September, warning the project would bring dangerous insecurity and complaining that it would introduce halal stores and girls in headscarves.
A block away, counterprotesters crowded the main square. “To the fascists who wave the red banner of a hypothetical replacement,” Murielle Lepvraud, a local politician with the radical left France Unbowed party, told the crowd, “I respond, yes, your ideas will soon be replaced.”
Even many of those who have experienced Callac’s decline firsthand remain unconvinced.
“All the young people left because there are no jobs here,” said Siegried Leleu, serving glasses of kir and beer to a thin crowd of white-haired gentlemen gathered around her bar, Les Marronniers, on a Friday afternoon.
There was a time, she said, when she offered billiards and karaoke and kept the taps running late. But with the town’s youth departed, she recalibrated her closing time to match her remaining clientele’s schedule — 8 p.m.
“Why would we give jobs to outsiders?” she said. “We should help people here first.”
Standing on the street outside his bar, which doubles as an antiques store, Paul Le Contellac assessed the proposal from another angle.
His uncle married a refugee who had fled Spain with her family during the civil war and found shelter in the village. Later, when France was occupied by Nazi Germany, his grandmother harbored resistance fighters in her attic.
“This is a town that has always welcomed refugees,” Le Contellac said. “Callac is not ugly, but it’s not pretty either. It needs some new energy.”