A typical village in the Cevennes Mountains: "one of France's most remote and sparsely populated areas" ©Claudio Gioanni/Anni Colombo/Shutterstock
In a Europe that feels increasingly vulnerable to terrorist attack, where taking public transport can often feel like an act of bravery and where, according to a 2013 survey by the European Environment Agency, more than 90 per cent of Europe’s city dwellers are exposed to levels of air pollution harmful to their health, it’s no wonder that the lure of the countryside is stronger than ever. Urban exodus in Western Europe has replaced the rural exodus of the post-war years. In Britain, 60,000 people are fleeing to the country every year; in France that figure is over 100,000.
Most of us have, at one time or another, harboured the dream of escaping to the wild to live a simpler, less stressful life, or of raising our children in a clean and peaceful environment. For many this dream dovetails nicely with the rising cost of urban living. In England in particular, where there are more than 400 people per km2, (compared to 121 people per km2 in France) remoteness has become a luxury commodity and many look to France for a piece of the wilderness. Few of us utopians, though, consider what the hidden lifestyle costs of escape might be.
I’ve experienced the full arc of dream to reality. In the winter of 2009, my husband, two youngest children and I left Paris for the Cévennes Mountains, one of France’s most remote and sparsely populated areas. (The average population density in the Cévennes is 14 people per km2.) Remoteness can be very cheap in France so for our four-bedroom, 17th-century stone house, with its crumbling outbuildings and its hectare of chestnut forest, we paid €140,000. Eight years later we moved back to Paris more broke and stressed than we were when we left and desperately trying to play professional catch-up.
On leaving the capital it had seemed like a no-brainer to me: I had two small children prone to chest infections and a husband who was having nightmares about environmental apocalypse. I longed to escape Paris’s dusty, heavily patrolled playgrounds, which formed the backdrop of my two eldest children’s childhoods. I imagined opening the back door of our new home and watching our boys rush out into the woods with their makeshift catapults like characters from a Jack London novel. What I did not envisage was that like most of their friends they too would become addicted to video games and that, given the choice, they would not spend their free time in the woods but playing Minecraft online. Nor had I imagined that their classmates who lived in the village, and not as we did in the hills, were a source of envy because they could stream cartoons. Dangerous and fruitless as it is to wish one’s children different from the way they are, I couldn’t help hoping that this situation would change. Not only did it not change, but I too began to see the slowness and unreliability of our internet connection as grounds for relocation.
Beautiful as rural France can be, the realities of living there, as 130,000 or so Britons know, can be a struggle. British newspapers abound with schadenfreude-laced stories about idealistic expats lured by low house prices and unspoilt landscapes, whose dreams of escape have turned to ashes. Loneliness, cultural alienation and a lack of work opportunities are usually the cause. In my case it was the last, not because I couldn’t find work. I had plenty. I just couldn’t do it effectively and the reason for this, trivial as it may sound, was the speed and unreliability of my internet connection.
France has always claimed a deep commitment to new technology and in her history has often been ahead of the curve. During the 1970s, the French state invested massively in its telecommunications network, which by the early 1980s was among the densest and most efficient in the world. By the time I moved to France in the mid-80s, almost every French home was equipped with a free Minitel, a brown and beige computer that sat beside the phone and provided access to something called a “videotex online service.” You could look up a number, book a theatre ticket, a plane ticket, even hook up with a stranger for sex. Why is it, then, that France’s digital infrastructure is so patchy?
Despite the billions invested in broadband by successive French governments—which, ever since President Nicolas Sarkozy’s first mandate, have been proclaiming their commitment to state subsidised “ haut debit pour tous” (broadband for all)—there are big holes in the broadband network in this country and the Cévennes, a stunning biosphere protected by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco), is one of them. The name given to these holes are “ zones blanches” (white zones) and at the end of 2015, as many as 237 “communes” or rural municipalities were inside a white zone.
In October last year, an internet-based digital distribution platform called “Steam” published a survey on average internet speeds across European countries. France was found to have an average speed of 9.1 MBps (megabytes per second) compared to 20 MBps in the UK. It concluded that France had among the slowest average internet speeds in Europe. In a policy speech in April 2014, Manuel Valls, the French Prime Minister, had said, “Digital inequality is much more than a technical divide. It’s an economic, social and cultural divide.” A year later, he made a speech announcing that by the end of 2016 there would be no more zones blanches left in France. Today, it seems unlikely that he’ll be able to keep his promise. In very remote, mountainous areas like the Cévennes, only 18 per cent of homes are currently connected to the internet.
For Stéphane Richard, CEO of the telecommunications giant Orange SA (formerly France Télécom SA), the ancient hills of the Cévennes could become his worst nightmare. Richard, whose grandfather happened to be a Cévenol shepherd, owns a house in one of the region’s most picturesque spots, but receives no reception for his mobile phone (Orange has no antennae in the area) and recently lost the call box in his village that he used whenever he was there. It was dismantled by his own company, which, released last April by the French government from its obligation to maintain the nation’s cabines téléphoniques, sent some technicians to take it down; this despite the protestations of the village council that it was the only phone to which many of their elderly had access. Jean Hannard, the mayor of the village where my children went to school and with whom I had a cup of coffee last time I was in the Cévennes, told me that he had heard of a plot by locals to kidnap Richard in an attempt to extort a decent internet service from him. “Everyone knows where he lives,” Hannard said, adding with his characteristic laugh full of gravel. “He’d better watch his back.”
Orange SA, which, as heir to France Télécom, still owns most of France’s landline telephone infrastructure, is not popular in the Cévennes. Back in 1998, during the negotiations for its privatisation, the company (of which the French state still owns a 27 per cent share) agreed to the strict public and universal service obligations that Lionel Jospin’s plural left government sought to impose on it in exchange for continued state subsidies. Ever since, Orange has been squirming under these obligations in an effort to wriggle free of them and nowhere is this more evident than in the Cévennes.
The MP for the area, Pierre Morel-A-L’Huissier makes no secret of his antipathy towards Stéphane Richard. Early this year, Morel-A-L’Huissier expressed his exasperation in the National Assembly: “Not a week goes by without my office receiving complaints about line failures from residents, local businesses, or local councillors. I’ve alerted Stéphane Richard to this situation several times but he simply invokes the million kilometres of cable, the 15m telephone poles and the 16,000 broadband access nodes as justification for the failures. I’m here to denounce him publicly.” Morel-A-L’Huissier went on to remind fellow MPs of Orange’s responsibility for maintaining its landline infrastructure in exchange for its subsidies, saying: “I find it unacceptable that I have to fulfil the customer service obligations of a company like Orange.” He proposed a motion to “impose financial penalties in the event of the company failing to respect its obligations.” Most people in the Palais Bourbon that day recognised Morel-A-L’Huissier’s idea—albeit alluring—as a political hot potato and the amendment was not adopted.
I asked Hannard, the mayor, whether the situation was as bad as Morel-A-L’Huissier claims. “It’s a nightmare,” he said. “Every week Orange sends out a couple of clueless employees from one of their subcontractors to clear up their mess. Poles felled by the wind, lines cut by falling trees. And these poor guys aren’t equipped to deal with it. So they just tie it all up with duct tape, file a report and get sent back a week later. There’s not enough incentive for Orange to fulfil its obligations to the people of these hills. Why should it? It’s a multinational corporation answering to its shareholders.”
"The problems of broadband access in the Cévennes is the single greatest problem for newcomers to the area"As I learnt from experience, Orange’s customer service is notoriously unhelpful. When I first moved to the Cévennes where, as the only landline service provider, Orange is the only option for broadband, I spent most of my first year there trying to get a better connection, which Orange quickly told be would not be possible. I had also been told that they would say this and that I was entitled to demand it anyway, so I just kept calling. The pushback was powerful because Orange was busy streamlining at the time. People were losing their jobs and the pressure to perform was enormous. Satisfying customers who lived in remote areas was not a company priority, nor was bringing extremely expensive cable to a house clinging to a mountainside seven miles from the nearest broadband access node. Even though I always kept calm, Orange’s employees frequently hung up on me and to this day I have Malcolm McDowell-style post-traumatic flashbacks whenever I hear “Sudden Dreams,” by Sophie Hunger, Orange’s hold music.
In their defence, French Orange employees seem to have been operating under unusual levels of stress. Between 2008 and 2010, during a wave of cut-backs, 32 employees killed themselves, in what an official enquiry subsequently described as “an epidemic.” One suicide note read, “I’m committing suicide because of my job at France Télécom. It’s the only reason. Constant pressure, overwork, lack of training, total disorganisation of the company. Management by terror.” A Parisian investigative magistrate called Pascal Gand tried and failed to charge Didier Lombard, France Télécom’s former chief, with “endangering the lives of others,” but managed to charge him with harassment. Lombard had shown his colours during a meeting of the management when he first took office as CEO: “We have to put an end to our role as mother hen,” he said. “In 2007 I’ll make them go [referring to the 22,000 planned lay-offs] one way or another—out the window, or out the door.” In 2013 and 2014, 21 more Orange employees took their own lives.
On a hot day in July 2010, I gave up on France Télécom’s call centres and drove to the only shop they have in our department, in its capital, Mende. With me was my youngest son Raffy, who was still in nappies. After a long wait, during which Raffy began to fret, I asked to speak to the person who actually had the power to decide if and when a better connection could be brought to our house. A further two and a half hours later, eager to get rid of me but more importantly Raffy, who had crapped in his nappy, a young woman scribbled a name and number on the back of an envelope, asking me not to say where I’d got them from. Armed with the direct line to the well-named Monsieur Ballant, which means “dangling” in French, I began a campaign of attrition.
Ballant, who always answered the phone in the same, somewhat archaic way: “Ballant, des Télécoms” (“Dangling, from Telecommunications”) was a patient man, but I called him almost daily for the next three months. I told him that unless I had a phone and broadband, I could not work and could therefore not stay in the region. In October that year, I pointed out that the new President of the Languedoc-Roussillon had expressed his commitment to eliminating “the digital divide” ( la fracture numérique). I reminded him of Sarkozy’s recent announcement that he was allocating €2bn of a €4.5bn government loan to improving the nation’s high-speed digital network and that from this package, subsidies would be offered to service providers like Orange so that broadband might be brought to 100 per cent of homes.
At the end of the year, Ballant des Télécoms finally gave in and told me that a team would be arriving the following week to hook me up. At the time it felt like an existential parting of the clouds: I was connected! The connection was too slow for streaming or large files but I could henceforth use Wikipedia and send documents without incident. I could leave the café in the village, which I’d been using as my office for the past year, and save a fortune in tyres, petrol and coffee.
Three of my neighbours down the hill would also benefit from the precious new connection and I became an object of admiration to some and resentment to others. At the time, the nearest hamlet was still struggling with its dial-up connection and, irony of ironies, I received a call from its mayor seeking advice on how to deal with Orange. I liberally handed out the number for poor Ballant des Télécoms, who, alas, seemed to have moved on. With time, our hard-won connection became saturated because my neighbours and I were at the end of the line and the signal was too weak to sustain much traffic. Over the next seven years, my desire to be in a place where I could work properly shifted from a whisper to a roar. Unlike some writers, I love and need the internet and feel no shame in this, or in plundering Wikipedia, in raking through data from obscure non-governmental websites, or in outsourcing my memory to Google.
Wired Britain—How the UK's countryside will get connected
There is a sharp difference between the French government’s attitude to investment in rural regions, which Lucy Wadham describes, and the policy of the UK government, at least in theory. In November, David Cameron said that superfast broadband should be distributed just like basic services such as gas and water.“Access to the internet shouldn’t be a luxury, it should be a right—absolutely fundamental to life in 21st-century Britain,” he told the BBC.
“We’re getting Britain—all of Britain—online, and on the way to becoming the most prosperous economy in the whole of Europe.”
Using £780m of public money, the government aims to connect 95 per cent of UK households to broadband speeds of at least 24 megabytes per second (MBps) by 2017. The real target for Cameron is to make universal broadband of 10MBps a service that every person has access to by 2020.
James Barford, head of telecoms at research company Enders Analysis, says that when the government says we want 10MBps, or 20Mbps, consumers end up paying for that. He added: “The vast majority of money that’s invested in telecoms networks in the UK comes from private companies and is thus paid for by consumers... The higher the speeds you demand the more every consumer will have to pay.”
The average speed of broadband in the UK rose by almost 30 per cent last year, but the gap between rural and urban areas persists—mainly because their location makes them too hard for private companies to reach.
In desperation last year, a Wiltshire farmer was reported to have built his own 4G mast with a pole and battery. In the same month, Computing Magazine reported superfast internet hadn’t even reached parts of Lancaster or Pimlico in London.
By Harriet Agerholm and Thomas Seal
Even those who have no interest in the internet can recognise its importance. Hannard, a self-confessed “techno-peasant,” says the problem of broadband access in the Cévennes is the single greatest problem for newcomers to the area. In the years I was living close by, the population of Hannard’s village went from 332 to 278, a drop of 16 per cent. “We’re haemorrhaging young people,” he said. “They can’t live without the internet.”
During the accumulated hours I spent listening to Sophie Hunger’s “Sudden Dreams” I would often check my internet speed using speed testing sites in preparation for my long discussion with the Orange employee, who would always deny that it was as slow as I was claiming. Our connection never reached 0.5 MBps, which ruled out YouTube or Spotify and, for good or ill, kept my children from playing Minecraft with their friends. I suspect that the French government, when it comes to the nation’s zones blanches, is in a similar state of denial as Orange.
Something is stopping the usually lavish French state from investing enough money in these areas to bring them into the digital age. Or as rural politicians like Hannard and Morel-A-L’Huissier might put it—something is stopping Paris. France is a notoriously divided nation and one of its enduring fault lines is between Paris and the countryside. As Hannard once put it to me, “France is a nation of thousands of small villages grudgingly ruled over by Paris.” (Out of its 36,792 communes, 32,000 of them are made up of fewer than 1,000 inhabitants.) Addressing Valls in a parliamentary session last year, Morel-A-L’Huissier exploded: “Paris does not understand our local problems! The decisions taken in Paris are the origin of our difficulties... The pseudo-visits from members of the ministerial cabinets are nothing but a smoke screen!”
A mutual ignorance reigns between Paris and the provinces and there would need to be a minimum of curiosity about each other in order to bridge the gap. Many of my Cévenol neighbours have never been to Paris and feel no desire to go there. The few who have did so for the annual Salon de l’Agriculture (Agriculture Forum), a brief moment in which the two worlds come together for a tense photo opportunity involving reluctant Parisian politicians, posing with prize cows and saucisson, in an ugly scramble for the farmer’s vote.
What most Parisian politicians don’t seem to understand is that the French countryside is changing fast. According to the national statistics agency, INSEE, less than 4 per cent of France’s active population now makes a living from agriculture. In 1955, there were 2.3m working farms in France. Today there are fewer than 500,000. And the profile of these farms has changed: 22 per cent of them are now run by women, compared to only 2.5 per cent in 1970. Of the 100,000 people fleeing from France’s cities, most are young families searching for new ways to make a living in the countryside—ways that will require a decent internet connection.
