More than twenty years ago, I jotted down a few "insights" about France and the French people, and I thought it might be interesting to see how well they have stood the test of time. Attention, as the French would say, these are not the usual clichés you can read in the works of Peter Mayle. These are high-class observations you are unlikely to come across elsewhere!
- The French are essentially an urban people.
On the face of it, this seems a strange thing to say of the inhabitants of a beautiful country over twice the size of the United Kingdom and with a similar population. But I am convinced that it is nothing less than the truth.France, like other industrialised countries, has witnessed a mass exodus from the land (though the process began later here than elsewhere). But this has not been mitigated by any movement in the opposite direction, as it has in England for example where living in the country is both the dream and reality of vast swathes of the English middle classes.
In France, in marked contrast, the country is looked upon as somewhere to work (if you are a farmer) or to spend your holidays in, but scarcely to
live in! You sometimes feel that the French countryside is peopled exclusively by peasants and the occasional
seigneur, and it is not always easy to tell one from the other...
Posted by Barnaby Capel-Dunn at 7:14 PM
1 comment (Thank you for your extraordinarly interesting blog. Best wishes, Barnaby Capel-Dunn)
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