Fabb
August 15th, 2004, 05:13 PM
CHERENCE, France
The 11th-century Romanesque church of this village is a minor jewel. But not all of it is old. Concealed within the steeple, just below the proud cock that sits atop the spire, is an antenna recently installed by France Telecom that affords the 146 residents an excellent cell phone reception.
.
This architectural arrangement, a French marriage of the modern and the medieval, is the fruit of several years of negotiation involving the mayor, conservationists and telecommunications engineers. In the end a deal was struck: France Telecom spent more than $150,000 restoring the church and got its receiver in return.
.
The steeple contains something else - a bronze bell cast in 1591. Its chimes are sounded, not by some cassocked bell-ringer, but by an automated system whose nerve center is a digit-flashing metal panel affixed to the church wall. On the hour, the bell sounds.
.
Not only that: In the morning, at noon and at dusk, the angelus rings out across the village, just as it has for centuries.
.
All this chiming does not please everyone. Because Cherence is less than an hour's drive westward down the Seine from Paris, it has attracted Parisians who have second homes here. Being roused by bells at 7 a.m. on Sunday is not always their idea of rural tranquility. So a battle has been fought of late in the town hall that led to the angelus's being silenced for weeks before bitter let-the-Parisians-just-go-home protests led to its restoration.
.
So it goes in the French countryside, which still accounts for a lot of France. Half the surface area of the country is farmland. A church spire provides cell-phone service; a computer controls a 16th-century bell; an automated angelus attracts and annoys different couches of the new rural scene.
.
Change and tradition vie with each other, the old conceals the new, and the French ambivalence over modernity and the fate of its rustic soul is played out in clash and compromise.
.
Look at its villages.
The country remains more rural than any other in Western Europe, more tied through family and gastronomy and cultural identity to the local sources of its wine and weathered wisdom.
.
At the same time, it has modernized at a ferocious pace: Only three percent of workers are engaged in farming compared with more than 20 percent four decades ago.
.
The tension between these two Frances - the shifting and the rooted - is central to what the French might term their existential condition. This helps explain a few things. If the United States equals modernity and the rootless existence, it is natural that it should inspire some unease in a country playing out its own complex internal struggle between metropolitan culture and that mix of soil and hearth and tradition the French call "terroir."
.
Over the past two decades, the last two French presidents, François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, have been particularly attentive to "terroir" or the innermost rural France known as "la France profonde,", because they know what a potent cultural force it remains. They have at the same time been ambivalent at best about America.
.
But deepest France is changing. After the exodus from the French countryside in the 1960s and 1970s, a reflux has begun. People are returning to villages, particularly those within 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, of towns with more than 50,000 inhabitants. They are drawn by a calmer lifestyle, the possibilities of the Internet and by emergent business opportunities in rural tourism. A new class has emerged: the "Neo-rurals" or the "Rurbains" (a conflation of the French words for "rural" and "urban"). Sociologists speak of the "the new countrysides" of France.
.
"In some places, the countryside is getting younger, with the export to it of an urban culture," said Hélène Jacquet Monsarrat, an expert on regional development. "Traditional identity and new technologies are coming together."
.
Of course, this mix creates a rural world different from the old. In the neo-rural young professional couple, husband and wife are both working to secure the bank loan needed to restore the old house. Shopping is done at the hypermarket, children ferried about for the various activities ambition demands. The neighbors may be Germans from Dusseldorf thirsty for French charm or Brits from Portsmouth thirsty for French claret. A Francophile American professor may even appear.
.
All of this leaves little room for what was once a center of rural life and camaraderie: the village store. In Cherence, that establishment shut down 20 years ago, leaving no commerce. In nearby La Roche Guyon, the bakery shut this year. The butcher in Chaussy, a few miles away, closed recently. Studies suggest no shop can now survive in a French village with less than 400 inhabitants.
.
On-line commerce is spreading, although high-speed Internet is still scarce in rural areas. In 2002, the last year for which figures are available, high-speed services were available to 74 percent of the population but on only 21 percent of French territory. As that changes, the number of "Rurbains" is likely to grow faster, helping to mold the character of contemporary France.
.
What is that character? As seen from a neo-rural French village, it is subtle and stubborn, restless and rooted, proud and prickly, at once open to the world and cautious about the loss of truths contained in old stones and old cellars. A place where a church spire is not what it seems and a bell a bellwether of change. It is the Americanizing anti-America. It is not easy to grasp and so easily maddening.
.
On a notice board outside the Cherence town hall, the deliberations of the village council are recorded. A new communal lawnmower is needed. A willow in the middle of town has been recognized as a "remarkable tree of the Val d'Oise." A letter from one Annie Rage protesting at the number of barking dogs has been debated. And a decision has been taken to protect the name of the commune on the Internet at modest cost.
.
Roger Cohen can be reached at rocohen@nytimes.com
Feel free to add you comments and post pictures of the rural France as you see it.
The 11th-century Romanesque church of this village is a minor jewel. But not all of it is old. Concealed within the steeple, just below the proud cock that sits atop the spire, is an antenna recently installed by France Telecom that affords the 146 residents an excellent cell phone reception.
.
This architectural arrangement, a French marriage of the modern and the medieval, is the fruit of several years of negotiation involving the mayor, conservationists and telecommunications engineers. In the end a deal was struck: France Telecom spent more than $150,000 restoring the church and got its receiver in return.
.
The steeple contains something else - a bronze bell cast in 1591. Its chimes are sounded, not by some cassocked bell-ringer, but by an automated system whose nerve center is a digit-flashing metal panel affixed to the church wall. On the hour, the bell sounds.
.
Not only that: In the morning, at noon and at dusk, the angelus rings out across the village, just as it has for centuries.
.
All this chiming does not please everyone. Because Cherence is less than an hour's drive westward down the Seine from Paris, it has attracted Parisians who have second homes here. Being roused by bells at 7 a.m. on Sunday is not always their idea of rural tranquility. So a battle has been fought of late in the town hall that led to the angelus's being silenced for weeks before bitter let-the-Parisians-just-go-home protests led to its restoration.
.
So it goes in the French countryside, which still accounts for a lot of France. Half the surface area of the country is farmland. A church spire provides cell-phone service; a computer controls a 16th-century bell; an automated angelus attracts and annoys different couches of the new rural scene.
.
Change and tradition vie with each other, the old conceals the new, and the French ambivalence over modernity and the fate of its rustic soul is played out in clash and compromise.
.
Look at its villages.
The country remains more rural than any other in Western Europe, more tied through family and gastronomy and cultural identity to the local sources of its wine and weathered wisdom.
.
At the same time, it has modernized at a ferocious pace: Only three percent of workers are engaged in farming compared with more than 20 percent four decades ago.
.
The tension between these two Frances - the shifting and the rooted - is central to what the French might term their existential condition. This helps explain a few things. If the United States equals modernity and the rootless existence, it is natural that it should inspire some unease in a country playing out its own complex internal struggle between metropolitan culture and that mix of soil and hearth and tradition the French call "terroir."
.
Over the past two decades, the last two French presidents, François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, have been particularly attentive to "terroir" or the innermost rural France known as "la France profonde,", because they know what a potent cultural force it remains. They have at the same time been ambivalent at best about America.
.
But deepest France is changing. After the exodus from the French countryside in the 1960s and 1970s, a reflux has begun. People are returning to villages, particularly those within 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, of towns with more than 50,000 inhabitants. They are drawn by a calmer lifestyle, the possibilities of the Internet and by emergent business opportunities in rural tourism. A new class has emerged: the "Neo-rurals" or the "Rurbains" (a conflation of the French words for "rural" and "urban"). Sociologists speak of the "the new countrysides" of France.
.
"In some places, the countryside is getting younger, with the export to it of an urban culture," said Hélène Jacquet Monsarrat, an expert on regional development. "Traditional identity and new technologies are coming together."
.
Of course, this mix creates a rural world different from the old. In the neo-rural young professional couple, husband and wife are both working to secure the bank loan needed to restore the old house. Shopping is done at the hypermarket, children ferried about for the various activities ambition demands. The neighbors may be Germans from Dusseldorf thirsty for French charm or Brits from Portsmouth thirsty for French claret. A Francophile American professor may even appear.
.
All of this leaves little room for what was once a center of rural life and camaraderie: the village store. In Cherence, that establishment shut down 20 years ago, leaving no commerce. In nearby La Roche Guyon, the bakery shut this year. The butcher in Chaussy, a few miles away, closed recently. Studies suggest no shop can now survive in a French village with less than 400 inhabitants.
.
On-line commerce is spreading, although high-speed Internet is still scarce in rural areas. In 2002, the last year for which figures are available, high-speed services were available to 74 percent of the population but on only 21 percent of French territory. As that changes, the number of "Rurbains" is likely to grow faster, helping to mold the character of contemporary France.
.
What is that character? As seen from a neo-rural French village, it is subtle and stubborn, restless and rooted, proud and prickly, at once open to the world and cautious about the loss of truths contained in old stones and old cellars. A place where a church spire is not what it seems and a bell a bellwether of change. It is the Americanizing anti-America. It is not easy to grasp and so easily maddening.
.
On a notice board outside the Cherence town hall, the deliberations of the village council are recorded. A new communal lawnmower is needed. A willow in the middle of town has been recognized as a "remarkable tree of the Val d'Oise." A letter from one Annie Rage protesting at the number of barking dogs has been debated. And a decision has been taken to protect the name of the commune on the Internet at modest cost.
.
Roger Cohen can be reached at rocohen@nytimes.com
Feel free to add you comments and post pictures of the rural France as you see it.