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You Can Move and Live in France
It’s
estimated that roughly 500,000 Brits, 160,000 Americans as well as many
nationals from other Anglophone countries such as Australia, New Zealand or
Canada, have made the radical decision to leave family, friends and an
established way of life to re-locate to France. In addition, a good number of
Brits, while still residing, working or enjoying their retirement at home, find
neighbouring France enough of an attraction for them to invest in a holiday
home there. What, then, prompts people to quit their home country for one where
the culture, customs and mentality are different enough to challenge their
open-mindedness and powers of adaptation to an extent they’ve probably never
known before, and whose language they barely speak or, in some cases, don’t speak
at all?
I think that one of most commonly-shared
reasons for wanting to operate such a deep and far-reaching change is the
excitement and adventure involved in making a fresh start to life (it’s
certainly not by chance that the 40+ age group is the most concerned) in a
country perceived as enjoying a better quality of life - far removed from the
traffic jams, the pollution, the crime, the horrendous property prices, the
work grind, and stress of urban life at home. And it must be admitted that many
of the things France has to offer have the stuff of dreams: delicious food,
world class restaurants, good-quality wine, geographical and climatic
diversity, stunning scenery, a closer contact with nature, a wide range of
outdoor activities, relatively low country property prices - not forgetting a
public health and unemployment benefit system generally acknowledged to be one
of the best in the world. In addition, France is perceived as having a more
relaxed, country style of life with closer-knit, rural communities placing
greater emphasis on human rather than materialistic values, and where local
identities and customs are still very much intact.
It’s certainly true that, unlike England,
the process of industrialization in France was far more of a gradual evolution
than an all-sweeping revolution. Consequently, even though you have large
cities like Bordeaux, Lille, Marseille, and Lyon where life is not much
different from that of Birmingham or Leeds, the bulk of the population is still
concentrated in a multitude of small towns and surrounding villages. So, for
many, nature is still very much on the doorstep with little of the noise,
overcrowding, pollution and anonymity of city life. I personally live in a town
of some 11,000 inhabitants where traffic jams are unknown, where you can
breathe untainted air, where you can go for long walks in the surrounding
forests and mountains without seeing a soul, and where the only sound you hear
is the chirping of the birds. Yet, whenever I go shopping I usually meet, and
frequently stop for a chat with at least three people I know.
As a French teacher I came to France way
back in 1972 on an official teacher exchange scheme during which I taught
English in a lycée for a year while my French partner replaced me at my
school in England. Beyond the professional wish to improve my spoken French,
and gain first-hand experience of teaching in a French secondary school,
I had deeper, more personal motives which in many respects were very similar to
the ones I’ve mentioned above. For, even though I loved teaching, I began to
question the context I was working in. The constant staffroom moans from the
more senior teachers - how much they were underpaid, how difficult it was
getting to teach the kids, what an idiot the headmaster was, how they had to
scrimp to pay off their mortgages - began to depress and cause me to view my
future as little more than a prison sentence. So, moving to France was part of
an escape plan which, I must confess, extended beyond the one year term of my
stay - for, rather than returning to my English school afterwards, I was
seriously thinking of emigrating to Australia, New-Zealand or South Africa.
‘You’re young, single and free,’ I said to myself, ‘so now’s the time to get
out of the rut!’ But this fresh start to life first involved the exhilarating prospect
of embracing the culture and customs of a country which had exerted a deep
attraction on me from the moment I started learning its language at the tender
age of 11.
And, like my compatriots, I was not
insensitive to the weather. Applicants were invited to state the region they
would prefer to spend their year in, so, prompted by fond memories of a
wonderful, sun-drenched school trip to Nice, I had no hesitation in indicating
the Côte d’Azur. Things couldn’t have turned out more the
opposite. For I was assigned to a small town lycée in one of the most
rural départements of France - that of the Haute-Saône
(sometimes disparagingly referred to as the Haute-Patate), tucked far
away from the Mediterranean coast in the depths of Eastern
France. But this wasn’t of the slightest importance. What mattered to me
most was that I’d soon be heading for France!
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