Small-Town France Decides

I’ve written before about my minor obsession with politics in Saint-Maxime. I love the outsized civic engagement represented by our small numbers, and how seriously everyone takes it. Today is the first round of France’s municipal elections, which will conclude in runoffs next week. I’ve already seen several of my neighbors out in the street, clustering around our tiny City Hall. At noon, the outgoing mayor and Stan, always a volunteer poll worker, were taking their hourly smoke break, lamenting the low turnout.

“We’re at about half the usual,” the mayor said, her cigarette dangling from her bottom lip like Gary Cooper. After experiencing a personal tragedy that had devoured her last molecule of patience for other people’s bullshit, she was retiring, but she was technically still on the job today.

She sighed with disappointment, but this should not be a glass half-empty situation. There is only one electoral list in the running. (In city-level elections in France, you vote for a party list, not an individual.) There is literally nothing to vote for, the choice has already been made, and yet fully half of Saint-Maxime showed out. By the end of the day today, I expect there will be more.

Cassandre and I attended a town hall meeting last week where a combined 33 candidates showed up at Saint-Maxime’s City Hall to present their program for the Big Village and its seven tiny satellites, including us. We had heard there was a list forming whose agenda including ceding all duties to the Big Village and abolishing the Saint-Maxime mayor job entirely. We hoped this was that group, if only to divest Benoît, in the running to replace Gary Cooper, of his enormous ambitions.

As a current member and former president of the Comité des fêtes, Benoît is the first to grab the mic at village-wide functions. At the choucroute garnie last fall, it was only once Saint-Maxime had collectively consumed a dining room table-sized hot plate of various smoked meats and sauerkraut, and the village elderly were falling asleep in their thimbles of Calvados, that he started yipping out bar trivia questions at top volume. (Read the barn, man!)

When Cassandre and I walked in and saw him at the conference table at the head of the room, at the right hand of the man who would be king of the Big Village, we realized this was the status quo program, and took our seats in the back like naughty schoolgirls.

Cassandre pulled out her phone and did a quick scan of Le Perche to find out what happened to the other liste electorale. It turned out they were proposing a “horizontal citizens’ council,” advocating for direct democracy. We both rolled our eyes. “Oh God no,” Cassandre whispered. “That would be a catastrophe.” We would later learn that the ragtag militants couldn’t get their platform or their list together in time for the deadline anyway, and decided to scotch it. Probably for the best.

Throats were cleared, and the future capo of the Big Village made introductions, with every one of the 32 others taking a moment to tell us their name, their day job if they had one, and how “engaged” they were.

“And now, we’ll take your questions,” said a farmer running for mayor in one of the other satellite villages nearby. “We’ll probably get around to them after the election, if we have time.”

Cassandre laughed out loud at that one, and then quickly ducked behind a large, ancient farmer seated directly in front of her.

That night there was a slice of just about every contingency in Saint-Maxime seeking answers. One of the pétanque club day drunks was in the house, wondering about the state of the hedgerows, as were several of the very elderly, and Stan and his mother. A 30-something woman in Hammer pants and Betty Page bangs whom neither Cassandre nor I recognized raised her hand to make sure that the retirement home in the Big Village was serving local, organic produce (it already is), and to militate for more bike lanes, despite many of our local roads being devoid of lane dividers even for cars.

A former grade school principal running to maintain her assistant post in the Big Village defended her management of the youth center there, despite having fallen for a phishing scam that saw over €30,000 disappear from its coffers. This was not enough to dissuade the future technocrats that night from proposing another local community center “as a meeting space, for markets or community gatherings,” which would require the gut renovation of an old farm complex currently in private hands. The Big Village already has a beautifully landscaped park including a half shell for live music that nobody uses. Do we need that much togetherness? Should the phishing lady be among the shepherds of this enormous feat of urbanism, given that money is already tight? No, but the theme of the night was, take what you can get.

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The vital work of civic engagement taking place at the front of the house appeared to be making Benoît giddy. He proposed an idea that I suspect he had been cooking up for a minute: an official tourism circuit launching in 2027 to celebrate 1,000 years of… something? The only thing I can find that happened around here in 1027 was two dukes fought it out and one of the bigger villages, not in our neck of the local woods, put up fortifications. But he was cooking, so who were we to stop him?

Benoît proposed informational plaques with QR codes—why is it always QR codes?—that would link to short films explaining the historic significance of our landmarks. “People want to know about the stained-glass windows of the church!” he hooted. Ours are contemporary. Some people like them. I find them tacky. Absolutely no one is going to come to our village expressly to look at them, much less less watch a glitchy infomercial about them. But coming up with initiatives is what small-town politicians do and Benoît wanted us to know that he was on the case.

It’s not easy to find people willing to take on these jobs. To want to stand you have to be either extremely kindhearted and independently wealthy, or playing a very long game of amassing power. Benoît’s day job is as an inspecteur de l’éducation nationale, a kind of Internal Affairs cop of the local school district. He is literally the chief narc, so you do the math. Even when vested with full power, though, Benoît’s future post pays between €800 and €1100 a month for a burg of our puny size.

The job means rounding up stray cats and humping paperwork for road works, and yelling at the Big Village to loosen its purse strings when we invariably fall through the cracks. Abandoned houses will be his problem. Wandering livestock will be his problem. The stipend isn’t a living wage, but he will always be on call. He will be the one arbitrating between competing nonprofits like the pétanque club and the senior citizens’ association, and settling land and property disputes between residents.

Property disputes in the French countryside are not just a question of where someone’s terrain ends and yours begins. If you let a neighboring farmer’s animals graze your empty field, you may be thinking, everybody wins and you’re doing your neighbor a solid and hey, now you don’t have to mow it anymore. Nope: now that farmer and all their descendants have rights to your land in perpetuity.

“Never let anyone graze,” Tom and Cassandre both warned me, dead seriously, on separate occasions back when I first arrived. It was like inviting a vampire to cross your threshold. Thankfully my garden is too small for even a vegetable plot and the only interested fauna are Jeannette’s cats.

Spiritual warfare may even be part of the job description, as evidenced by a story from Le Perche that Jean-Yves circulated in the “neighbors” text thread the other day.

“I’ve Known About It Since I Was a Boy: in the Orne, Jacques Claims to Be a Victim of Black Magic,” reads the headline. (Now you understand why I will never, ever let my subscription lapse.) According to pheasant breeder Jacques Lagoutte, rival farmers have long been in the habit of literally cursing the competition. Lagoutte called the paper to blow the whistle, and also filed a police complaint against a suspected dark arts practitioner for two different “acts of sorcery.” His suspicions were confirmed by a private label exorcist who charged him €600 for his troubles.

The paper was quick to point out that the Catholic church offers its exorcism services for free. I find it funny that the people who invented the practice are now considered off-brand in this thriving parallel economy. In case you are wondering, witchcraft is not a crime in France. But anyone believing themselves victim of any kind of injustice does have the right to make a complaint. The next step by the gendarmerie was most likely filing M. Lagoutte’s paperwork next to the coffee filters and calling it a day.

I suppose we should thank Benoît, because I certainly don’t want to be the one rounding up cows in the middle of the night, or getting my hands dirty with warlocks, nor does anyone else I know in Saint-Maxime. But then I know that thanking him is exactly what he would want, so I will simply congratulate him the next time I see him and keep it moving.