La France profonde revisited
The Dordogne in south-west France is often thought of as the ultimate embodiment of la France profonde (“deep” or rural France). It features beautiful countryside, fields of sunflowers, slow-moving rivers, medieval villages, golden buildings, old chateaux dating back to at least the 12th century and a traditional way of life rooted in local agriculture, Saturday outdoor markets, and world-renowned cuisine, including duck confit and countless varieties of cheese and pâté.
What struck me most on a recent visit this summer were visits to several old village churches. First, there was their beauty. Second, the details of memorials to the war dead. It wasn’t just the names of those who died in the two World Wars, as you would also see in British churches, but the tributes to those who had died in Vietnam, Algeria and other colonial wars.
Then there were the streets named after great French politicians from the Third Republic, such as the socialist Jean Jaurès (1859-1914), assassinated in the year the First World War broke out, and the socialist leader and three times Prime Minister, Léon Blum (1872-1950). Perhaps Blum was the most striking. After all, he was a Parisian Jew, not a man of the soil or one of the great modern French rural writers, like Gabriel Chevallier (Clochemerle, 1934) or Marcel Pagnol (Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources. 1962).
Sitting in traditional cafés overlooking open-air markets and medieval churches, and watching old Frenchmen reading their Saturday papers, is like going back to the long-lost world of the prewar Third Republic, the world of Jaurès and Blum. Almost everyone is white. There is a small handful of Muslims in headscarves, but no black immigrants. This is, in De Gaulle’s words, “a certain idea of France”, but it is hardly the “new France” of today’s hard Left party, La France Insoumise.
It is hardly surprising, then, that in the 2024 Legislative Election, the Dordogne, a bastion of centre-Left politics since the beginnings of the Third Republic, voted largely for the National Rally (known as the National Front from 1972 to 2018). Rural voters felt left behind and neglected by Parisian elites, whether in terms of local wages, job prospects, regional investment or the number of available health care professionals. In 2015, the French demographer Hervé Le Bras produced a startling analysis of politics and rural life, which concluded that “the further you are from a railway station, the more likely you are to vote from the Front National”. For example, in the Dordogne, there are 134 doctors for every 100,000 inhabitants, compared to 248 doctors per 100,000 people in Paris. And from 2010 to 2021, the number of doctors in the Dordogne fell by 20 percent. The shortage of dentists is even worse.
In an article in 2022 for Politico, the former Guardian journalist, Martin Walker, a longtime resident of the Dordogne, wrote, “The same goes for transportation. You can now easily commute the 584 kilometers to Paris from Bordeaux in just two hours, but it takes me more than that to travel the 160 kilometers to Bordeaux from my village — even without counting the 10-kilometer trek to the nearest station. Many of my friends are more than 50 kilometers from any station at all.”
The Dordogne remains one of the most beautiful rural regions in France, rich with a sense of the past, going back to the Middle Ages. But it is changing fast, demographically and politically, like the rest of modern France. Next year’s presidential election will show whether la France profonde will stay true to its prewar republican past or embrace a reactionary future.
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