A landslide in the Midi
Frank Johnson on how (and why) they voted in his part of rural France Dept d’Hérault Our TGV, slipping through La France Profonde from Lille to Montpelier three days before the referendum, would now end its journey earlier, at Nîmes, the intercom told us: unspecified faults on the line. Midi Libre’s headline had it the next day: ‘Vineyardowners’ discontent, travellers in trouble.’ Militant winegrowers had damaged the line. It was to do with the referendum.
The winegrowers were for Non. But since they looked like winning, why damage the railways? It confirmed the traditional English view that, in a nation with a revolutionary tradition, important politics must if possible include token revolutionary acts.
We reached the village — a hamlet, really, the nearest shop six miles away — where we have a small house. There is a vast view across vineyards. Wine was the only issue down here. Probably the constitution mentioned nothing much about wine. But the French were not voting about the document as such; the exit polls had unemployment as the first discontent. The second — felt by 40 per cent — was the untranslatable Ras le bol, which the French-English dictionaries have as ‘fed up’. ‘Fed up’ — is that not what much of French history has been about people being? We were in the midst of continuity down here in Languedoc.
We called on neighbours at the local winegrower’s solid stone house. All would vote Non. Cheap Spanish wine was everywhere. The foreigners were allowed to put more chemicals in, which helped make it cheap to produce. Also, the labour that produced it was cheaper than in France. With EU enlargement, Bulgarian wine threatened.
But wouldn’t the French prefer to drink the better French wine? I phrased it that way, even though Britons who seem to know about wine are less sure that the average French wine is that much better now. But price was vital.
Then there was cheap foreign labour. Too many cheap Polish builders. Good workers; old ally of France; brave in the war; but this is economics. The Albanians were a different matter again. They were Musulmans, apart from other things. France had nothing against Islam, but France was not an Islamic country. I pressed them on the fear of Islam, but they did not dwell on it. No Le Peniste sentiment emerged.
Did they not still believe in the European ideal? A pause. It was good once, in prosperity and full employment. Then there was Turkey. They’re not Europeans. But did France not see Europe as a balance to a too powerful United States? No. Did they fear United States power in the world? Perhaps surprisingly, no. They were against the Iraq invasion. ‘Only good thing Chirac’s done, keeping us out of that,’ one said, but none of them was anti-American.
Russia? No fear of them? Not a great power any more, they thought. Germany? One replied by asking me, did I feel méfiance des Allemands? I am not sure I do, but for discussion purposes I said I did. No one else did. Localism, it seems, was not the same as ‘paranoia’.
The winegrower’s wife is the mayor’s secretary. Would we like to come to our little village’s mairie and sit in on le dépouillement (the count) with the mayor and councillors? I wonder if a similar invitation would be extended to a French couple in rural England.
Come Sunday, and there was a certain hum even in these timeless hamlets. It was agreed that the referendum had aroused more interest and debate than any presidential or parliamentary election since the early Fifth Republic. At the mairie, we joined eight councillors, mainly middle-aged, a couple elderly and one a man in his twenties. They laughingly greeted us with cries that everyone had voted Non. They fell silent and looked at their watches as close of polling approached. A golden early evening sun slanted in. The mayor rose. A M. Elie Kubica, his parents were born in Poland. They cannot be that bigoted. To an English eye, he is rural France incarnate: round, jolly, appalled by Bezier rugby team’s new relegation to Ligue 2, nothing having gone right for them since they built that expensive new stadium that will be used for the World Cup in three years’ time.
‘C’est le temps,’ the mayor announced. Oui ballots to his right, Non to his left. The vineyard owner, M. Taillefer, took the first from the brown envelope. ‘C’est Oui,’ the mayor announced, rhetorically and loudly, putting it to his right. Silence around the room. A sensational upset in our village? The mayor took the second paper. Non. The next. Non. Then: Non, Non, Non. Fifty-six ballots were cast out of an electorate of 59 in six hamlets. A landslide for the Non deep in the Midi. We accompanied the votes to the canton headquarters ten miles away, where the results from the surrounding villages were being written on a board. Non from everywhere. There was no jumping up and down. There would have been no one to jump up and down at: no Parisien or Strasbourg proOui haute bourgeoise. Ours is not a place of rootless fonctionnaires.
Perhaps the meaning of it all lies in French electoral history. The French are ‘political’ and the political are prone to discontent. Even De Gaulle failed in one of his three referendums: the one about an unexciting but highly localised regional government reform, forcing his resignation in 1969. He won only the two referendums necessary to create the new Fifth Republic constitution after the Algerian crisis had at last shown the weakness of governments which parliament could easily overthrow. It is hard for governments of any kind to win over such a political people. The Third and Fourth Republic parliaments (1870s to late 1950s), with that stream of prime ministers always at the mercy of a parliamentary vote, tended to follow a discontented public by overthrowing governments once they had become unpopular with the country, even if the last general election had elected those governments. The left-wing Popular Front parliament elected at the 1936 general election voted Pétain to power in 1940.
True, an incumbent president has lost only one of the Fifth Republic’s seven presidential elections (Mitterrand’s defeat of President Giscard, 1981). Mitterrand was reelected against M. Chirac in 1988. But that was not necessarily a government win. An unintended consequence of the Fifth Republic constitution is that France can be depicted as having two governments at the same time. President and parliament are elected at different moments. Before he faced re-election, Mitterrand’s socialists had lost a parliamentary election — another way in which voters can hurt an incumbent president and hurt the government.
So, by the time of the presidential election there was cohabitation: an anti-socialist M. Chirac, alongside a socialist president M. Mitterrand. If anything became unpopular, M. Mitterrand blamed the prime minister. At the ensuing presidential election which the two fought against one another, Mitterrand depicted M. Chirac as the government and won. The present incumbent, M. Chirac, was re-elected only after another defeat of the president’s parliamentary party had produced another cohabitation in which the socialist presidential candidate, M. Jospin, was prime minister and therefore ‘the government’.
If a politician, even when president, can play opposition leader, people will tend to vote for him, but this was something M. Chirac could not do this time. There was no cohabitating prime minister — he was of M. Chirac’s party.
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