July 1, 2013; Ex-pats

July 1, 2013
Ex-pats

          I have met many ex-patriates over the last month, both in Mèze and in Caunes-Minervois.  All are retired, with the exception of a punked-out, good looking man in his late 30s who was sketching at an outdoor café off the beaten track in Pézenas.  His hair had in it what is known in the trade as "product", which gave his short, blonde crop a smooth shine.  He boasted an earring and a football player's build, as well as a cleanliness that immediately identifies the American.  Indeed, his father lives in France and he was raised in the South of France.  What could have led to him living a life so exotic, I never found out, although I have all sorts of guesses: his father is a painter; his father is an art dealer; his father served in the American Army in WWII, studied in France on the G.I. bill and, not wanting to leave, cobbled together a career, marrying a French wife in the process.

          Funnily enough, such a scenario is not that unusual for the French.  There are many people living in the South of France whose parents and grandparents lived in Algeria or Morocco or Tunisia.  They were called pieds noirs, a derogatory term that referred to the blackening of the settlers' feet as a result of their absence from European France.  Yet Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia were all part of what is known as Metropolitan France, that is, indisputably French territory, with all born there holding French passports.   When France gave up its lands in North Africa, the piers noirs were compelled to return to a country that had decidedly ambivalent feelings about not only its colonial past, but about the French citizens who had called these lands home.  Some of them had intermarried with locals, who were legally citizens of France, whether they were native Algerian or Moroccan or Tunisian.  The children of this blend were raised in post-colonial France, internalizing both cultures.   Among French actors, some notable ones are products of this métissage: Danny Boon (French/Kabylye-Algerian) Gad Elmalah (Jewish-Mrooccan-French); Jamel Debbouze (French-Moroccan).

          In contrast, the ex-pats I meet are voluntary transplants.  One, a Danish woman who lives most of the year in Deauville but keeps an apartment in Mèze, where she vacations with her husband (--who lives in Paris!), is out for sun, a rare commodity in Denmark, at the best of times.  An Englishwoman has just sold her house in the U.K. and has moved here to develop the business she started last year: running wine tours of the Minervois.  A few years ago another started a catering business with her husband and this year opened a restaurant as well.

          Many of the English ex-pats live here solely interacting with the English colony.  Their children visit, or they pick their grandchildren up at the airport and tend them while their children get some time away with their spouses.  You know the English on sight, before they have opened their mouths, because they tend to be taller and bigger and more boisterous than the French, who are stocky and inclined to greater reserve in public.  Older English women here wear their hair long and casually styled.  French women of the same age wear shorter hair, and bikinis, whatever the state of their bodies: Englishwomen wear decorous one-piece suits.

           The idea of leaving home to live in a foreign country was considered, for a very long time, something that only very wealthy, very bohemian or very pursued people did.  Yet in recent years, and in large measure to the existence of a European passport that is the right of anyone from one of the 28 member countries, small colonies of ex-pats have sprung up all over the European Union.  If you cannot afford France, you can go to Croatia, which became an EU member today.  You don't need to speak the language much, because most of your relationships are with others also from wherever you once called home, and the locals are glad for the business you bring, even if you can't do more than point to what you want to buy.

          We are not talking Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald or Hemingway here, let alone Gertrude Stein or Virgil Thompson, the composer, to name a few famous American ex-patriates.  The desire to leave Main Street plays only the smallest part, if any, in the decision to put down roots in France.  More pertinently, real estate is cheaper here, food you pay through the nose for in restaurants at home, is readily available through local producers at prices everyone pays --ex-pats buying where natives do.  If along the way you pick up some of the language, that's gravy.