French Letter: life and local politics in a French commune

The commune, as emblematic of France as the appellation controlée label on a bottle of what ought to be a good wine, and for much the same reason, is the nation’s oldest administrative division. In all, there are a bewildering 34,965 communes, including 129 in the overseas territories. 

Some, headed by Paris, are large; others are very small. In 1999, the commune of Rochefourchat, in the foothills of the Alps, was recorded as having only one inhabitant, a 38-year-old man whose divorce from his wife had seen the population fall by an alarming 50 per cent. In 2008, Jean-Baptiste de Martigny, a Paris-based lawyer with a second home in the area, was elected mayor with 100 per cent of the vote. 

The most remote commune is to be found in L’Île des Pins, in New Caledonia, some of whose citizens, ironically, are descended from Communards transported from Paris to Polynesia after the failed insurrection of 1871. 

Most communes – reflecting their literally parochial origins – date back to medieval times, but it was in 1789, shortly after the fall of the Bastille, that the revolutionary National Assembly, seeking to establish a fair and equal society, created the model that we know today. 

Every commune, large and small, is headed by an elected mayor and run by a municipal council. The mayor, who on public occasions wears a distinctive red, white and blue sash, has extensive powers, particularly in the area of planning. 

In the case of Paris, deemed by a nervous political establishment to have become a threat to national stability, the job was abolished in 1871, when the governance of the capital was placed in the hands of a Prefect answerable to the head of state. 

It was only in 1977, under the lordly watch of President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, that the role was revived, allowing its first modern-day holder, Jacques Chirac, to use it as a stepping stone to the Élysée. 

Big city mayors, rather like their counterparts in the United States, are powerful figures. But unlike in America, they are not subject to term limits and often remain in office for decades at a time. Not only that, but if invited by the President to join the government, as is frequently the case, they invariably hold on to their day jobs. 

To take one well-known example, Alain Juppé, while serving first as foreign minister, then prime minister in the Chirac administration, remained major of Bordeaux, only finally resigning in 2019 to take a seat on the Constitutional Council. 

Down at the bottom end of power and influence, where I live, things are very different. Our village, in central Brittany, with a population of 539, survives under the suzerainty of Jacques Le Creff, a local farmer, nominally a member of the Socialist Party, who has occupied the Mairie since 2001 but recently announced that he would retire at the end of his current term, in 2026. 

Everybody knows Jacques, and he knows everybody. If you want to add an extension to your house or build a garden shed, you need the signature of Jacques Le Creff. 

If, as I have to do next week, you have to satisfy the UK’s Department of Work and Pensions that you are still alive and entitled to your monthly stipend, Jacques is your go-to man, as he was when my wife and I had to prove this year that we genuinely lived in France in order to qualify for our titres de séjour. 

According to M. Le Maire, safety, parking and “the enhancement of heritage” will be his key priorities over the next five years. Heritage means mainly the church, Notre Dame des Grâces, dating from the sixteenth century, which has been showing its age recently and is in urgent need of attention. But the definition is also likely to extend to the fate of the local bar and restaurant, La Table Gourmande, whose owner, an ex-gendarme, is set to retire as soon as a buyer can be found. 

Keeping the village in working order is a full-time job, which is hard when you are trying to run a farm. Everybody has issues, whether it is to do with keeping verges cut or keeping hold of a reliable internet connection. My wife is keen that the road running out of the village towards the main highway should finally be repaved — something that was achieved in double-quick time when a different road that happens to run next to our house, was selected to host a stage of the 2012 Tour de France. But I am not holding my breath. 

At least the sign indicating that you are entering the village from the north has been replaced. It fell off its mounting two years ago and was only restored last autumn.  

Plusquellec is probably typical of the way in which rural France is run in the twenty-first century. Money is tight, budgets are stretched and change comes dropping slow. But there is no hint of fraud — not in our neck of the woods anyway — and every evidence that the Mayor and his team are doing their best in trying times. 

It may not be exciting stuff, but among the things we can look forward to locally in the months ahead are sets of sleeping gendarmes, a new set of telephone poles and the exterior grouting of the chapel of Saint Fiacre. 

There is even a chance, Covid permitting, that the 2022 Fest Noz, our annual Breton knees-up, will take place at some date in the late summer after a two-year suspension. It doesn’t get any better than that.