FRANCE NOW:THE SETTING – a lazy village cafe in the south of France on a sunny midweek morning – makes it all the more incongruous to listen to Cathy Guillermet describe her high-octane Paris advertising career and the punishing commuter lifestyle that went with it.
She and her husband, Jean-Maurice, both native Parisians, had built successful careers in the capital and had fallen into the sort of routine that left little time for family life.
“We lived in the suburbs, and to drive 15km into the city would take me an hour and a half every morning,” Guillermet recalls.
“The advertising industry is never-ending stress. Clients expect to be able to reach you at any time of day. I’d be arriving home at 8.30pm, just in time to put the children to bed.”
The idea of leaving Paris had been a vague dream of the couple for a long time, but when Jean-Maurice was offered a job in the building industry in Montpellier seven years ago, they saw their chance.
In their early 40s, Guillermet and her husband packed in their jobs, sold the house and headed south with their two youngest children, then aged three and four. Now, they live in the village of Montaud, about half an hour from Montpellier.
“It was about quality of life more than anything else,” she says. “I felt I wanted a change in life – a chance to give ourselves and our children more time. I wanted the children to be able to run around, to be free, to play sport.”
In moving from Paris to the south, Guillermet and her family were joining a wave of internal migrants – one million each year, according to the national statistics office – who are rapidly changing the demographic and political map of France. Large-scale shifts such as this have been taking place for centuries; the difference now is that the route has been reversed.
In the early 1800s, the French population was concentrated in the west of the country, but the growth of industrial centres in the north and east drew huge numbers of people to those regions’ cities in search of work.
In recent decades, however, people have increasingly been moving in the opposite direction. Broadly, today’s wave is from the north and northeast towards the coasts, leading to huge population growth around southern and eastern cities in a belt that stretches from Nantes to Nice via La Rochelle, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier and Aix-en-Provence.
The shifts are so significant that, in the past 15 years, France’s long-standing trend of rural depopulation has, by some measures, come to an end. People are still leaving the countryside to look for jobs, but they are being replaced by urbanites who have fled the cities.
Rocketing property prices have played their part, but other driving factors are technology, longer life expectancy (which means more leisure time), rising incomes and better transport.
In 1950, the average distance a French person travelled in a day was five kilometres (three miles); today it is 45km (28 miles). A majority live within three hours of Paris by train.
Cyril Esnos found himself in a similar situation to the Guillermets, tiring of his busy commuter lifestyle and pining for an escape to the countryside. A marketing executive at a company based in Paris, he was living with his wife and three children in a house in Melun, outside the city.
“We had spent a weekend in Montpellier a few years before – we liked the way of life, the proximity to the beach, the sun.”
So as soon as he could find a job, they sold up in Paris and rented an apartment in the heart of Montpellier.
Five years on, the family have no regrets, Esnos says, but he admits that they did come close to giving up and retracing their steps. “From a lifestyle point of view, we never had regrets, but professionally it’s different.”
Montpellier was pinpointed as a new capital of the south by the then president Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, and it has been developing since. It is home to a renowned medical faculty, and a big pharmaceutical and biochemistry sector has emerged here.
Under the guidance of Georges Frêche, its dominant mayor between 1977 and 2004, the city underwent huge development.
Its industrial base remains relatively narrow, however, and unemployment is high.
Esnos’s wife, a psychologist, could not find work, and it was only her success in passing the civil service entrance exams while in Montpellier than kept them from leaving. “That changed the dynamic. I set up my business, my wife got the exam and the kids settled in.”
The business Esnos created was the website changerdeville.fr, the first in France aimed specifically at those who want to move to a new region.
“People who move need to find a house, a job, a transport company, a new insurer, a new bank – everything changes,” he explains. “I thought, maybe there’s a business in this.”
Some 120,000 French people move to the Mediterranean coast, between Perpignan and Nice, every year.
Half of these are retirees and the other half are young, generally highly educated couples looking for lower rents and more space. The effect is striking in Montpellier, where two-thirds of the population were not here 30 years ago.
“This is a mass phenomenon,” says sociologist Jean Viard. “It’s not a small social group.
“In the 19th century, a poor peasant didn’t have a choice. He went towards industrial cities – and in France, that meant north. The significant element is that today people move because they want to live in a place, and generally they’re the places where tourists tend to go.”
All of these movements are gradually redrawing France’s political map. Toulouse and Bordeaux were right-wing bastions encircled by left-wing strongholds, but now those cities are moving to the left.
The opposite has happened in Aix and Avignon, which have shifted from left to right.
“It’s disrupting the old equilibrium,” says Viard.
After seven years, Cathy Guillermet feels firmly rooted in the south. She runs her own communications company from home and has been elected to the local village council. Does she miss Paris?
“Not at all. I go there once or twice a year on holiday, and we do things we never did before, like visiting the Eiffel Tower. That was something I never did in 40 years there.”
She adds: “You have everything here. This afternoon, we’re thinking of taking our books and going to the beach.”
Irish voices: A low cost of living, a gentle life
Sinéad Ryan, an acupuncturist from Co Dublin, moved to Pézenas in the south of France four years ago
“I had been in senior management jobs, and had a fairly charmed life overall. There was a house and a sports car and all the rest of it – appearance-wise, I’d made it. But I wasn’t happy, so I went back to college in my early 40s.
“I moved to France in May 2008. When you come to live in a place like this, you have to be prepared to try anything. I did a bit of waitressing, and then I got a job in a spa. These days I’m freelance – I work hard for six months of the year, and then I take most of the other six months off. The cost of living is not that high here – there’s a lot you can do at very little cost. Actually, it’s a very gentle life.
“One of the things that always hits me is how there’s no concept of customer service in France.
You go into a shop and say: ‘I’d like a pack of red thumb-tacks’, and they’ll say: ‘Sorry, we don’t have any’. They could have blue, green, black, purple, pink. But you asked for red, and they don’t have it. They wouldn’t say to you, ‘We have all these other ones, Madame’. You have to learn to ask open questions all the time. It’s not a complaint, just an observation.
“Village life here is wonderful. I know that I wouldn’t have the social life in Ireland that I have here. As a single woman in Ireland, I found it very difficult. Here, I feel very comfortable going to the local café on my own, and there’s so much going on in summer that you meet people quite easily.”
Tomorrow: One town, two colleges – France's third-level divide
