Readers of Truffle Trouble will know that it's set in two villages, Bordumont and Sagnac, in the beautiful Luberon region of Provence. Both villages are fictional and so, fortunately, are their respective mayors, Gandroux and Loquet, who in their different ways are redoubtable dictators. But as in most fiction, the story draws on reality: a fair number of rural mayors, through a combination of cronyism, bribery and guile, exert an impregnable grip over the affairs of their community.
Many have been in place for decades. My fictional mayors have run their villages for 30 years or more, but I’m a good way off the actual record in France: Paul Girod, 88, has been mayor of Droizy, with its 80 inhabitants, since 1958, and was well on his way to a 12th successive mandate when the municipal elections of March were thrown into disarray by the virus. So sure was Girod of re-election that he wasn’t intending to bother with a campaign – his confidence of the villagers’ trust in him was enough. Girod took over the record of longest serving mayor after Bernard Cacquevel (pictured above) stepped down as mayor of Mesnil-Rogues (168 inhabitant) in 2014 at the age of 92 - he'd been mayor since 1947. Meanwhile, Marcel Berthomé, France’s oldest mayor at 98, has been at the helm for a mere 49 years. (I should add that these mayors bear no resemblance to Gandroux and Loquet. There is no suggestion here of impropriety; indeed the position of mayor is often an unenviable one, increasingly under pressure from the hassles and constraints that modern life imposes. Often it’s hard to find anyone willing to take on the responsibility.)
The administration of France is complex. Though it remains a highly centralised state, there are different layers of territorial organisation, and as is often the case, the tendency has been to add more legislation without undoing what was already in place. In an effort to decentralise, the Regions, of which there are now 18 (five of them overseas), were established in 1982; at that point, it was suggested that the level of département could be done away with, but that never happened. The départements were established at the Revolution; there are currently 95. At the smallest level are the communes, again dating from the Revolution but based on the older division into parishes; they number 36697. It’s at this level that our Mayors get to exercise their authority.
With the drift of the population towards towns, many rural communes have become obsolete, but scrapping them isn’t easy. Rochefourchat has just one inhabitant – its mayor doesn’t actually live there. Majastres has two, Aulan four, while Caubous fairly buzzes with activity at six. But empty as they are, none of these is the emptiest: there are nine communes with zero inhabitants. All were destroyed in the Battle of Verdun in 1916, and due to the presence of unexploded ordnance, six were never rebuilt. But after the war it was decided to preserve their memory, and their mayors today still don the tricolour scarf to hold ceremonies, and keep a register of births and deaths, its pages poignantly blank.
At the other end of the scale are the largest communes of Paris, Marseille and Lyon. They have an overall mayor, but they’re also divided into arrondissements or districts, each with a mayor of its own. But for all the prestige attached to running such cities, neither of my fictional mayors would ever want to swap. Like the big fish they are in their village ponds, they manage their affairs just swimmingly.
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