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Self-Sufficiency in Style

france (and the french)

Part one

Where should we look for our house and land in France?

La France groans under the annual pilgrimage of  potential settlers - ooghing and aaghing at the lovely countryside, the ridiculously low prices and the overload of culture.

Who can resist the lure of the baguette and the vineyard? 

France is different. 

It is also the homeland of the Francophone world - and as the English will often unfairly complain, perhaps with just a hint of humour, "It would be alright, if it wasn't for the French."

France is one of the world's great delights and needs to be taken slowly, considered and savoured, tasted and rated.

The writer was a late convert - and like all recent enthusiasts has a real fervour for his new love.

For this reason alone, caution is more than usually necessary.

Settling in France is not just a question of a cheap house and land in a warm climate.

So, before we even think of emigrating, a good look at the relations between the English speakers and their incomprehensible cousins and neighbours is absolutely necessary.

The British and Irish are firmly of the opinion that they have the French well summed up, and will rarely tolerate any argument, but many of the readers are a hemisphere away and have no easy day-trip to test the water. This is written with them in mind too.

History, geography, religious and linguistic difference come together just a few miles north-east of Calais. 

Here the southern Mediterranean way of life abruptly gives way to the Flemings, Dutch and Germans.

Here the religious background of the majority changes from a formal, if easy going Catholicism, to a population whose cultural roots belong more to the Reformation. 

The language changes from the Romance to the Germanic family. You can even see the change happening just within France - the villages suddenly have Flemish names.

Politics too. The legacy of revolutionary France, the barricade cry of liberte, egalitie, fraternitie - and the brave tricolour above the town hall gives way to the relaxed monarchies of the Continental North Sea.

So even if the French spoke the same language as their neighbours, there is no guarantee of instant understanding.

Joan of Arc
national heroine and patron saint of France
martyred at the instigation of the English.

The area is thick with English and later British history. The islanders always preferred to fight their battles on Continental soil.

From Crécy and Agincourt, to Waterloo, from the Somme to Dunkirk.

Even the Canadians  and Americans have joined in with Dieppe and the Normandy beaches, just a little further along the coast.

Few British families failed to carry the scars and memories of two world wars often fought in France within earshot of the English coast.

Events continents away have been forged on the short sea route between Dover and Calais. 

From revolutionary bands in the forests of the New World, to confrontations in the deserts of Africa and pitched battles on the plains of India, the attitudes, grudges and prejudices were made here.

Huguenots, royalist refugees and the shattered remnants of British armies one way to England: invasion, dissolute aristocrats and shoppers for fine wines, the other to Calais and Paris.

Napoleon, bettered by an Irishman, Wellington, who preferred to be considered English - and made quite sure that Ireland would never claim him back by a typically brutal line in insult.

French was more commonly spoken in Ireland than English for quite long periods, especially although by no means exclusively in the south east.

France paid a big part in Irish history.

 Moving from country to country to farm or smallhold has a long history.  Sometimes it was peaceful, sometimes not. The big players found land for their retainers and servants.

And that's how it seems to the English, Americans and other English speakers, for the French usually make little distinction. 

Scotland and Ireland do have a distinctive historical relationship with France, sometimes remembered by the French. Affairs between the four island countries and France has been incredibly complex - and not always what they seem.

Whatever the state of the relationship, France has always played an important part in the concerns of the predominately English speaking islands to their north and west.

To the English speaker, France frequently remains a mysterious, slightly dangerous and often very attractive place with strange rules and special ways, usually seen through the mists and eddies of one of the world's great frontiers.

Mile after mile of cold white cliff stares across La Manche. Impressive, unpeopled and seemingly silent. 

Such clarity!  A trick of the morning light perhaps?

Those famous White Cliffs that have seemed so warm and welcoming to half a hundred generations of Englishman returning home across the sea, can seem so very different when seen with French eyes.

A cold white wall.

Chateaus at knock-down prices are not, needless to say, suitable for smallholding.

Incidentally, it is exactly this French style of building that is so common in Scotland, but rare in England and Wales.

The French see the world very differently, something that rarely comes across in the current rash of programmes about moving to France on British television. 

Low house prices and sunshine, cafes and patisseries, attractive though they are, are not a good reason for moving to France to begin smallholding.

Warily, we put our first foot on French soil less than a decade ago, thirty years after the first attempt.

We had the surprise of our lives. The story does have its lighter moments. We then made many trips and saw hundreds of smallholdings.

Attracted, but in the end, by a whisker, we did not buy.

The reality was very different from the current catwalk of television programmes - enticing though they are.

Fashion in clothes, building styles and, of course, food has always been an important French export.

Part Two of France (and the French) continues the warning theme.

If you have decided that you know more about France than the writer, which is far from impossible, you can return to Moving Away or go to the autobiographical Dinner for Two.

A more detailed look at smallholding possibilities in France will follow at an appropriately leisurely pace.

"surveying France"

from behind the White Cliffs

 at the remote Hangman's Cottage, just to the south of Misery Corner.