[Marxism] Rural roots of French neofascism

[Louis Proyect]

NY Times, October 7, 2006
French Farm Town Is Fertile Ground for National Front
By ELAINE SCIOLINO

CHÂTEAURENARD, France — The neat rows of apple 
trees and grape vines that lined the road heading 
into this once archetypical French farming town 
disappeared long ago. In their place is a 
landscape of prefabricated warehouses, auto parts 
dealers, a chicken-processing plant and fields overrun with scrub.

This is not the romantic Provence of the author 
Peter Mayle, where the villagers are quaint, the 
views picturesque and the farmers happy.

Rather, Châteaurenard, a town of 13,500 — like 
dozens of other farming towns that were once the 
bedrock of rural France — seems to have lost its 
soul. The farmers are retiring and abandoning 
their unprofitable fields, and half the working 
residents here now travel to jobs somewhere else.

“Our farms are becoming the monuments of the 
dead, our town is a bedroom community that 
services others,” said Bernard Reynès, the 
center-right mayor of Châteaurenard. “We are 
losing our confidence that life will somehow get 
better, losing our roots, our rural identity.”

Much of the French countryside remains 
resplendent, of course, with rich farmland and 
impeccable towns. Yet the transformation of 
Châteaurenard — buffeted by international 
pressures — suggests that more of France’s 
regions will not escape the same kind of upheaval.

One change is seldom spoken of openly: up to 20 
percent of this town’s residents are ethnic 
Arabs, many of them young, under-educated, unemployed and isolated.

The result, locals and experts say, is contagious 
fear — for France’s economic future, of 
globalization, of the immigrant — that makes the 
Châteaurenards of France fertile terrain for the 
extreme right National Front in next spring’s presidential election.

“I take off my hat to those immigrants who took 
the boat here to work,” said Jean Courtois, 61, a 
retiree who until 2001 sat on the city council as 
a National Front representative. “But there is a 
huge problem with those who don’t want to 
integrate. When I see a woman in a veil walking 
in Châteaurenard, it revolts me.”

During the first round of the last presidential 
election in 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National 
Front candidate, came in first here, with almost 
twice as many votes as the second-place finisher, President Jacques Chirac.

In a nationwide referendum last year, the town 
voted by a 2 to 1 ratio — larger than the 
national average — against a European 
Constitution seen by many here as a ploy to open 
France’s doors to cheap immigrant labor and cede 
more of France’s sovereign rights to the European Union.

[Ségolène Royal, the favorite to win the 
Socialist Party nomination for the presidency, 
announced her candidacy on Sept. 29 in a speech 
from Vitrolles, a nearby town that was once a 
National Front stronghold. She referred to 
Vitrolles, which elected a National Front major 
in 1997, as a symbol of the victory of the left, 
which wrested it back from the National Front in 2002.]

“In so many places — particularly in the south — 
you have people in revolt: unhappy farmers, ones 
who are anti-immigrants and ones trying to assert 
their Frenchness,” said Jean Viard, a political 
scientist and author of a book on the National 
Front in Provence. “The collective identity has 
been weakened. So the National Front occupies a 
space that has been left empty.”

Mr. Reynès, the mayor, put it more bluntly. “The 
extreme right becomes the receptacle into which 
people put all their frustrations,” he said. “You 
could put a National Front hat on a donkey’s 
head, and it will get 20 percent of the vote.”

Part of the concern is simply the disappearance 
of a way of life. There are about 590,000 farms 
left in all of France, one-fourth the number 50 
years ago. A third of the French earned their 
living by farming then; today less than 5 percent do.

The Châteaurenard area has 150 working farms, 
down from more than 800 in the 1960’s. In 10 years, only 50 farms will be left.

Though it is near Avignon, one of France’s top 
tourist attractions, Châteaurenard has little 
star quality. The medieval fortress is crumbling, 
the church unlit and often closed, the museum a 
one-room collection of old farm tools.

At night, the streets of the town belong to young 
ethnic Arab men, most of them of Moroccan origin, 
whose fathers came to France to farm decades ago. 
There is no new industry, and young men — whether 
ethnic French or ethnic Arab — are repelled by the idea of farm labor.

At the social center in the town’s overwhelmingly 
Arab neighborhood, the young men explain why.

“My father came here with his children to find 
success,” said Mohamed Sghiouri, 18, a high 
school student who hopes to be come an 
electrician. “He was a farmhand for 30 years, and 
now he’s at home on disability with back 
problems. Since the time I was small, he told me 
to work, work hard in school — so I could do 
better than he did and stay off the farm.”

Even Laurent Ioss, who grew up here and now heads 
the town’s youth social services program, defends 
that argument. “You work like a beast on the 
farm, and there’s no real sense of dignity,” he 
said. “When you call someone a peasant, it’s like calling someone an idiot.”

The ethnic communities tend to keep separate. The 
Arabs congregate in one cafe; the Gallic 
Frenchmen in another. The Arabs gather in the 
shade of trees around the central town square on 
hot afternoons; the Gallic Frenchmen retreat 
indoors. When the mayor walks the streets, he 
reaches out to shake the hands of the old-timers, but leaves the Arabs alone.

Every Bastille Day, the town celebrates the arts 
and crafts of daily life a century ago. Last July 
14, Mr. Courtois ran an old-fashioned open-air 
cafe. A retired pharmacist ground potions with a 
mortar and pestle. A baker made big loaves in a 
communal oven. Residents dressed in period 
costume sang old French country songs. Children 
rode ponies. The Arabs stayed home.

It is that disruption of traditional rural life 
that has contributed to the rise of the extreme right in the area.

The malaise hovers over the vast regional 
wholesale produce market on the town’s outskirts. 
There, six mornings a week during the harvest 
season, hundreds of farmers and distributors 
gather at 6 o’clock to buy and sell in a frenzied, one-hour ritual.

They lament that the wholesale price of their 
lettuce is the same as the retail price in the 
supermarket off the highway, and that boats 
docked in Marseille are filled with cheap pears from Chile.

And tomatoes. Tomatoes are the real losers here.

First, there was the invasion of the Spanish 
tomato. The Moroccan tomato followed. But the 
decisive blow to the homegrown Provençal tomato 
was dealt two years ago when the Chinese 
industrial tomato giant Xinjiang Chalkis bought 
the local canning factory and began shipping tons 
of tomato paste all the way from China to can it 
in France. The price of local tomatoes plummeted.

“I used to grow tomatoes, wonderful tomatoes 
here,” said Richard Ferretti, 49, a farmer who 
was sipping coffee at the bar after the market 
closed one morning. “But price is everything. The 
Chinese don’t want to pay. So I stopped.”

Mr. Ferretti now earns a living not from his 200 
acres but as a Europe-wide distributor of 
customized four-wheeled Japanese motorcycles.

One local hero is Michel Chauvet, 63, a 
third-generation farmer has been working the land 
for 45 years. He runs a picture-perfect farm of 
80 acres near Châteaurenard of peaches, grapes, 
pears and seven varieties of apples.

Over the years, he has taught young students the 
secrets of farming on his farm at no charge. Of 
his 17 interns, only 3 have become farmers. An 
agrotourism project went nowhere; a direct-sale 
business on the Internet failed. All around him 
are abandoned farms with broken vines and fallow fields.

Mr. Chauvet promised his daughter, Hélène, now 
36, that he would not abandon the farm. She 
contributes a portion of her income as a 
pharmacist to keep the farm going, but neither 
she nor her husband, a bank officer, wants to take it over.

“The last two years have been financially 
disastrous, but I’m still a dreamer, living with 
my apples and my pears and my peaches,” Mr. Chauvet said.

Mr. Chauvet’s only full-time worker is Ali Dahbi, 
67, a Moroccan who has worked for him for 35 
years. Mr. Dahbi’s son Redouan, 19, wants to be 
an auto mechanic. Until then, he said, he helps 
his father, for one reason only: “out of duty.”