At first glance, for the visitor driving by, Guingamp in northwest Brittany looks idyllic. It is a typically lovely stone-built French small town, it has a sweet river running through the middle, it has pretty ramparts and a ducal chateau and riverbank gardens, with agreeable new fountains in the centre. It even has a decent-sized supermarket open on Sunday.
In Guingamp, on a dead Sunday afternoon, I somehow felt more uneasy than I did in war-torn Ukraine
At least it did last Sunday, the first French election day, when I paid a visit. The difference for me is that – unlike most trippers – I didn’t breeze on after a peek at the historic watermills. I lingered. Because Guingamp is not just another dainty French town, it is highly representative of several things: of the way Brittany (traditionally left wing) has slowly shifted to the right. And of a provincial France which, however nice it may appear, feels itself left behind, even abandoned, and always ignored by Paris.
That said, and ironically, Paris has not entirely ignored Guingamp. So striking is the town’s slow but inexorable shift towards the discontented right, that most Parisian of newspapers, Le Monde, actually sent a journalist here in 2023, to check out the mutinous locals, like a vicomte inspecting the peasantry in about 1788.
However, I didn’t want to rely on Le Monde’s perspective, I wanted to see for myself. So I parked my car by the Hotel de Ville, and started walking. The first place I visited was Bar des Sports, the bustling bar-tabac, the equivalent of the biggest pub in a British town (plus newsagent, tobacconist and café). In many French towns these are the places to hang out, for gossip, a beer, a croque monsieur, and the chance to buy lottery tickets. Quite a few people were buying lottery tickets.
The barwoman was jolly and covered in tatts. Grannies were eating ‘steack cheddar + frites’ [sic] and sipping cheap wine, as kids ran around. Half the people were in tracksuits. A 60-year-old man in a World of Warcraft T-shirt and big metal necklaces was amiably shouting at his friends.
Everything was made of plastic, yet it was a fun place to hang out, and it all felt a long way from the Macroniste opulence of Belle Ile and the Breton coast, where I had come from. It was notable that everyone zealously ignored the TVs when they showed the election, then a few people perked up as the channel switched to that weird French horseracing with anorexic chariots.
The more I explored Guingamp the stranger it got. It was like someone had taken 10,000 people from a rough place in northern England, dropped them in Verona, and forced them all to talk French. It also, as I explored, got steadily more depressing, even as I admired the essential beauty of the town.
In the main square I saw drunk parents, with their young kids. I saw a couple of homeless people, the first I’d seen in eight days of touring Brittany. I passed the beautiful half-timbered houses near the venerable church, turned a corner, and found a car with four 20-somethings taking hard drugs. My educated guess is that they were shooting heroin. They ignored me, either because I was so obviously a stranger, or because they were already too stoned to care.
A lot of premises were shuttered for good, including the fake Irish pub. This also surprised me, elsewhere in Brittany I’d been marvelling at how much better French town centres are faring compared to Britain; not here. That said, one or two places were doing business. The Souk d’Alep was open, as was the Turkish barbers right next to it. A few metres further on I found something that looked like a betting shop. A man inside was screaming in Arabic at his friend via his smartphone. It was a discordant noise in a town which – away from the Bar des Sports – was deeply quiet, almost desolate.
I soon began to feel slightly and weirdly menaced – something I have maybe never felt in a European town in daylight. And I am quite robust: last month I spent two weeks in Odessa and, from my hotel balcony, I filmed Putin’s drones attacking the port. In Guingamp, on a dead Sunday afternoon, I somehow felt more uneasy than I did in war-torn Ukraine – perhaps because the ambience of stifled anger and sad small-town tension was more unexpected, and so jarring.
The shouty political graffiti didn’t help. Elsewhere in Brittany I’d been looking for signs of the election and found barely any (just one poster in remote Ile de Sein). Here it was everywhere. La France Insoumise posters – ads for the far left – were slathered on otherwise vacant shop fronts. Most of these had been ripped away. On one shopfront someone had added more graffiti: Vous avez Zemour, nous on l’amour (you have Zemmour, we have love).
I saw the same bitter dispute slapped all over the clever metal bridge that follows the river through Guingamp. There were lots of small witty posters which visually turned jars of Nutella into jars of ‘Bardella’ (Jordan Bardella is the parliamentary leader of Le Pen’s RN). The text implied that ‘Bardella’ is a brown paste of merde. However, every single one of these posters had been ripped to shreds.
Right at the end of the riverside parade I saw ‘Fuck BZH’ scrawled over a Breton language sign. BZH is short for Breizh which means ‘Brittany’ or the ‘Breton language’, in Breton. I wondered if it was French people expressing their contempt for the Breton tongue. If so it was surely unnecessary. France has so successfully exterminated the Breton language that, despite the pious claims that 200,000 speak Breton, the language has gone functionally extinct – no one speaks it naturally. However, I later learned that the graffito might have been done by angry football supporters. Guingamp has a surprisingly successful football team.
It was a good lesson. You cannot draw firm conclusions from one day in one town, so I shall not try. But you can form an impression. And if I had to use one word to describe my impressions of Guingamp on election day it would be this: Brexity.
My day done, I got in my car and I headed to St Malo, which oozed prosperity and seemed not-at-all-ignored. As I downed half a dozen Cancale oysters by the English Channel the first results of the elections came through. As those shredded posters suggested, Guingamp and its constituency (4e circonscription des Cotes d’Armor) is seriously divided, it split three ways between left, right and centre. But there was nonetheless a clear first place – and it went to Noel Lued. He’s the candidate for Rassemblement National, the party of Marine Le Pen.
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