About Poitiers – Postcards from Poitiers

Stranded in Poitiers

We had planned to go to the UK for a quick two-day visit in a couple of weeks’ time. Now they have reintroduced a fourteen-day quarantine period, and France will almost certainly reciprocate. So we’ve cancelled our Eurostar tickets and now have a voucher for another trip, when, or if, this crazy situation ever ends.

It’s conceivable, I suppose, that things might not improve, might in fact get worse, and we are doomed never to leave Poitiers again. As if to plan for such an event, I have been beating the bounds this week. On Tuesday I walked from the end of Rue de Tranchée, the most southerly point in Poitiers, to La Tour du Cordier, the most northerly (the latter is currently decorated with bicycles to mark the imminent arrival of Le Tour de France.) According to my Fitbit, it was 1.6 miles, and it took me 30 minutes. On Wednesday I walked from the railway station in the west to the far side of Pont Joubert in the east (1.1 miles, 23 minutes). Finally, on Friday I cycled around the perimeter of Poitiers via Boulevard du Grand Cerf, Boulevard Jeanne d’Arc, Boulevard Chasseigne, and Boulevard sous Blossac. I would have walked this too, but these are typically dull, edge-of-town ring roads, with few distractions and a fair amount of traffic. My bicycle odometer tells me that the perimeter is 4.1 miles.

I know this doesn’t exactly put me in the Marco Polo/Christopher Columbus league, but nevertheless it marks a significant moment, because I have now finally defined my Poitiers. It has taken a long time. Some time ago I started looking at the administrative layers of France, starting with the highest of these, the regions. Since then I have looked at the departments and finally the communes. If you are interested, there are pages on each of these in the French Administration section of this blog.

Poitiers is most definitely a commune, as is Paris (population 2.15 million – the largest) and Castelmoron-d’Albret, near Bordeaux (population 55 – the smallest). The population of Poitiers is around 90,000.

On the municipal council website, the city of Poitiers is divide into nine quartiers, but the majority of these are suburban areas that have developed since the 1960s. I have a feeling I won’t be spending much time in any of them. The weekly market in Les Couronneries is good fun, but other than that it’s large expanses of bungalows and housing estates These are tree-lined and well-maintained, but really they are little different from the London suburbs. Poitiers’ major tourist attraction, the Futuroscope science park, is not far from us, but we haven’t got around to visiting that yet – it all sounds a little earnest for my liking.

The core of the city, my Poitiers, is basically a very large hill, or more accurately, rock promontory, in a valley between two rivers. Historically, this physical placement has made it easy to defend, and the strategic significance of this has contributed greatly to the city’s growth over the centuries. In guide books you will see this area referred to as the old town or centre-ville. Confusingly, the city council’s website divides it into two separate quartiers, Centre-ville, (the southernmost two-thirds) and Les Trois-Quartiers (the northernmost third). There is no doubt some historical significance in this, but I am still trying to find it. To most people who live here, the hill is Poitiers.

At the top of the hill is a narrow plateau, referred to locally as le plateau, some 140 metres above the rivers below. It’s just over half a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide. This is where the town hall, the main shopping area, and the market are. It is the heart of the city. Down the sides of the hill, away from the plateau, one will find a mazy network of narrow winding streets, where I still manage to get lost at least once a month.

On this relatively small hill, which can be crossed in any direction in half an hour, one can still find relics of a large Roman amphitheatre. There are medieval university buildings, monasteries, and convents that are still occupied today. There are wonderfully preserved Romanesque churches and handsome merchant houses dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Streets and squares tell stories of the French Revolution and the German occupation in the Second Word War. It has a museum, a gallery, two cinemas, and a fine médiatheque. You are rarely more than a couple of hundred yards from a bar, café, or restaurant. There are worse places to be marooned.

The Tour du Cordier, the northernmost point in Poitiers. Near the top, you can just see a couple of bikes put there to mark the Tour de France, which will be passing through on 9 September.

***

I collected my new glasses on Thursday, and they are rather handsome. The only problem is that I daren’t wear them. They were staggeringly expensive. We have recently taken out a mutuelle health insurance (you more or less have to have one here), and this covers about half of the cost of pair of glasses every couple of years. This being the case, I checked that my chosen optician accepted our mutuelle and went for the best sort of varifocals on offer. I cheerfully nodded when I was asked if wanted other optional extras; thinner glass, anti-reflective glare coating, and a couple of other things that I didn’t quite understand but which sounded nice. When I was told the total price, I was stunned but pointed out that I was mutuelle-covered. I could be wrong, but was there a hint of malicious pleasure in the assistant’s voice when she ever so politely pointed out that the mutuelle’s contribution had already been deducted?

I have a bad track record with glasses. I leave them in pubs, I sit on them, and I drop them (this caused the crack in my last pair). In Sicily once, I had a pair whipped off my head in a gale and land under the wheels of a passing taxi. I couldn’t bear to have any of this happen to my lovely new specs. Reluctantly, I have dug out my old cracked pair (it’s only a small crack, I’ll get used to it) and will now keep my new ones at home. I will take them out once a week and just look at them, rather than through them.

Where is Poitiers: The Commune

As with the blog on régions, this is a part of a work in progress and will be added to from time to time.

Below regions and departments, the next level of administrative division in France is the communes, and they are probably the most difficult to get one’s head around. The UK has no exact equivalent, as communes resemble metropolitan districts in urban areas but are closer to parishes in those rural areas, whereas UK districts are much larger. Communes vary hugely in size and area, from large sprawling cities with millions of inhabitants, such as Paris, to small hamlets with only a handful of inhabitants. Communes are typically based on pre-existing villages and facilitate local governance. Except for the municipal arrondissements of the largest cities, the communes are the lowest level of administrative division in France and are governed by elected officials (the mayor and a municipal council) with extensive autonomous powers to implement national policy.

As of January 2015, there were 36,681 communes in France, 36,552 of them in metropolitan France and 129 of them overseas. The whole territory of the French Republic is divided into communes; even uninhabited mountains or rainforests are dependent on a commune for their administration.

Despite enormous differences in population, each of the communes of the French Republic possess a mayor (maire) and a municipal council (conseil municipal), which jointly manage the commune from the municipal hall (mairie), with exactly the same powers no matter the size of the commune. This uniformity of status is a legacy of the French Revolution, which wanted to do away with the local idiosyncrasies and tremendous differences of status that existed in the kingdom of France.

French law makes allowances for the vast differences in commune size in a number of areas of administrative law. The size of the municipal council, the method of electing the municipal council, the maximum allowable pay of the mayor and deputy mayors, and municipal campaign finance limits (among other features) all depend on the population bracket into which a particular commune falls.

In 2015, 57 per cent of the 36,681 communes had fewer than 500 inhabitants and, with 4,638,000 inhabitants, these smaller communes constituted just 7.7 per cent of the total population. In other words, just 8 per cent of the French population live in 57 per cent of its communes, whilst 92 per cent are concentrated in the remaining 43 per cent.

There have long been calls in France for a massive merger of communes. Many rural communes with few residents struggle to maintain and manage basic services such as running water, garbage collection, or properly paved communal roads. The last attempt at change was in the general reorganisation proposed by President Hollande in 2014, but this got nowhere. In 1971, the Marcellin law offered support and money from the government to entice the communes to merge freely with each other, but the law had only a limited effect (only about 1,300 communes agreed to merge with others). Mergers are not easy to achieve. One problem is that they reduce the number of available elected positions, and thus are not popular with local politicians. Moreover, citizens from one village may be unwilling to have their local services run by an executive located in another village, whom they may consider unaware of or inattentive to their local needs.

My gut feeling, however, is that there will be continued pressure from central government to change things, and various structural changes that have taken place in recent year may facilitate this. Alongside the high-level reorganisation of departments into regions, there are now various types of intercommunal entities (ranging in size of population from the smallest, communauté de communes,via communauté d’agglomération,to the largest, communauté urbaine).Grand Poitiers is a communauté urbaine, made up of 40 communities, with its headquarters in the Mairie of Poitiers. Its population is around 191,0004, of whom around 90,000 are in the commune of Poitiers itself. The communauté urbaine assumes responsibility in a large number of areas that were once controlled by its member municipalities. These include certain responsibilities in economic planning and development, housing, service management of sanitation and water, and environmental planning.

There is nothing inherently sinister in this, but one can see how it is much easier for central government to liaise with 18 régions and a growing number of number of intercommunal administrations, rather than with 101 départements and over 36,000 communes.

Where is Poiters: The Department

As with the blog on régions, this is a part of a work in progress and will be added to from time to time.

The history of French départements is more interesting than that of the recently formed régions.

From Roman times, dozens of semi-independent fiefdoms and formerly independent countries were gradually, if somewhat haphazardly, incorporated into the French kingdom. Until the French Revolution, the kingdom was organised into provinces, which were roughly the equivalent of the counties of England, each having its own sets of feudal traditions, laws, and taxation systems. During the Revolution, in an attempt to centralise the administration of the whole country and to remove the influence of the French nobility, the entirety of the province system was abolished and replaced by the system of departments in use today. Almost all of the new departments were named after physical geographical features (rivers, mountains, or coasts) rather than after historical or cultural territories which could have their own loyalties; thus Paris was in the department of Seine, and Savoy became part of the department of Mont-Blanc. Boundaries were defined so as to erase cultural differences and build a more homogeneous nation. As a security measure, and to facilitate centralised control, they were also set so that every settlement in the country was within a day’s ride of the capital of a department.

Originally there were 83 departments, but the number rose and fell throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in line with France’s fluctuating fortunes in the Napoleonic and Franco-Prussian wars and the large-scale administrative reorganisations in Île-de-France (1968) and Corsica (1975).

Currently there are 96 departments in metropolitan France. Corsica was divided into two departments (Corse-du-Sud and Haute-Corse) in the 1975 reorganisation. However, as of 2019, these two no longer have the status of departmental ‘territorial collectivities’, as regional and departmental functions have been managed by a ‘single territorial collectivity’ since 2018. Despite this, they are still classed as administrative departments.

All of France’s overseas territories (French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte, and Réunion) are administratively classed as being both departments and regions, which gives a grand total of 101 departments.

Metropolitan French departments are assigned a two-digit number, the ‘official geographical code’ allocated by the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques. Overseas departments have a three-digit number. The number is used, for example, in the postal code, and was until recently used for all vehicle registration plates.

Each department is administered by an elected body called a departmental council (conseil départemental) overseen by a president. The council is responsible for all the main departmental services: welfare, health, administration, and departmental employment. It also has responsibility for local regulations, manages public and private property, and votes on the local budget. Local services of the state administration are traditionally organised at departmental level, where the prefect represents the government; however, regions have gained importance since the 2000s, with some department-level services merged into region-level services.

In 2014, President François Hollande proposed to abolish departmental councils by 2020, which would have maintained the departments as administrative divisions, and to transfer their powers to other levels of governance. This reform project has since been abandoned.

A map of the current French departments.

A map of the First French Empire in 1812.

Vienne

Poitiers is in the department of Vienne (departmental code 86). Established on March 4, 1790 during the French Revolution, Vienne is one of the original 83 departments. It was created from parts of the former provinces of Poitou, Touraine, and Berry, the latter being a part of the Duchy of Aquitaine until the fifteenth century. The department takes its name from the river Vienne. In terms of both population (about 437,000) and size (69,090 sq. kilometres) it is roughly middling in French departmental tables.

At present, I’ve not found not much of interest to say about Vienne as a department.

It is twinned with Berkshire in the UK, which somehow feels about right.

Édith Cresson, France’s first woman Prime Minister (1991–1992), was a deputy (MP) for the department.

One thing may be worth looking into further. During the Second World War, the demarcation line, dividing the occupied zone in the northern and western part of France and the ‘free zone’ under the Vichy government, went through the middle of Vienne, with the arrondissements of Poitiers and Châtellerault being in the former and Montmorillon in the latter.

Poitiers Confiné

A bird’s-eye view of Poitiers

A local film-maker, Henri Guillon, has used a drone to made a two minute video of Poitiers under confinement: Poitiers Confiné. The city is completely deserted and looks very peaceful. Those who have been to Poitiers might like to see this – and it may tempt those who have yet to visit. There’s an article about the making of the video here which you can run through Google Translate if necessary.

The first stage of deconfinement starts today in France. We can now go out whenever we like and don’t need our notes of attestation. Shops are open but not bars and cafés. This means I can buy a pair of gloves but not a pint of Guinness. I don’t need gloves.

Place de la Liberté

“suppositories and exploding mules”

One of my favourite places in Poitiers is Place de la Liberté, a tree-lined square just off Rue René Descartes. Although it is only a few hundred metres from the site of the main market in Place Charles de Gaulle, it’s a peaceful little place in which to sit and while away a few minutes. If you are lucky you can watch a game of boules being played. There used to be an attractive-looking bar, L’Auberge du Pilori, in one corner of the square, but this closed just months before we got here and at present shows no sign of reopening. While the closing of a bar is nearly always a cause for regret, I suspect that my guardian angel might have had something to do with this, as a few minutes might too often have turned into a few hours sitting on its terrace.

The rest of the square consists mainly of private housing. The Poitiers conservatoire is nearby, which probably accounts for the one or two places offering music lessons. At no. 3 there is the workshop of Laurent Gayraud, a luthier (a stringed instrument maker).

Despite its tranquil air, Place de la Liberté has had its share of excitement over the centuries. Designated as the city marketplace by Eleanor of Aquitaine in the mid-twelfth century, it was given the name Place du Pilori in 1307 to mark the spot where common criminals were paraded for public humiliation and, quite often, physical abuse. During the Hundred Years War, the whole area was razed to the ground by the English in 1346.

In the accounts I’ve come across so far, there is some disagreement about the date of the next significant event in the Place’s history – that of the exploding mule. In either 1733 or 1775, depending which report you read, a mule driver who was transporting sacks of gunpowder had stopped for a drink in L’Auberge du Pilori. The animal, waiting outside, had grown impatient and started pounding its feet on the cobbles. Unfortunately, a spark from one of its hooves ignited the gunpowder, sending the poor beast sky-high. All the reports agree that, almost miraculously, the mule was the only casualty of the disaster. They also record that one of the animal’s legs went through a window and landed in the bedroom of the Provost Marshal – a police superintendent in today’s terms. It presumably made a good story down at the nick. ‘There I was, lying in bed minding my own business when …’

A horseshoe was embedded into the wall of the house as a memorial to the incident and it is still there to this day. I have to say that this this seems a little uninspired to me. You would think the least they could have done would be to change the name of the Auberge to The Flying Horse.

With the coming of the Revolution in 1789, the Place du Pilori became the site of the local guillotine, and some thirty people met their death there over the next five years. However, the most famous execution, the one that was to give the Place its current name, happened some time later, in 1822.

Jean-Baptiste Breton was one of Napoleon’s most respected generals, serving throughout all his major campaigns from 1805, up to and including Waterloo in 1815. After Napoleon’s defeat and exile, Breton was a leading member of a group of ex-officers plotting first for the return of the emperor and then, after his death, for the enthronement of his son, the Duke of Reichstadt, as Napoleon II. In February 1822, Breton was tricked by agents provocateurs into leading an abortive coup attempt at Saumur. He was then tried and condemned to death by a royal court in Poitiers, and guillotined on October 22nd.

Breton’s dying words were Vive la liberté! Vive la France! and in 1900 the municipal council put up a commemorative plaque and renamed the square Place de la Liberté in his honour. A fund was started by republicans and the local masonic lodge in order to erect a monument, and on Bastille Day 1903 a scale replica of the original Statue of Liberty was erected in the centre of Place de la Liberté. This is generally seen as a riposte to the Catholic Church’s building of Notre Dame des Dunes in 1876, itself a political act of expiation for the republican ‘sins’ of 1870 (see last week’s blog). One thing that can be said for conducting politics by statuary is that it does tend to slow things down to a leisurely pace.

I think the statue, which stands 2.9 metres high, is very handsome in this setting. On the front of its pedestal is a dedication: Aux défenseurs de la liberté and on its side a quote from Montesquieu: Quand l’innocence des citoyens n’est pas assurée, la liberté ne l’est pas non plus (‘When the innocence of the citizens is not guaranteed, neither is their freedom’). While this is obviously of relevance to Breton, the words will have a greater resonance to a France still coming to terms with the consequences of the Dreyfus affair.

It’s seen some changes in its 117 years of existence, as the following pictures (mostly supplied by my friend Véronique) will show. Its original globe disappeared for many years, and this was replaced for a while by a strange suppository-like device. In 2014 the local council funded a replacement globe, which is a definite improvement, though I think it’s just a little too large. Sadly, it doesn’t light up at night, and I have pledged that if ever I win the Lottery jackpot I will personally fund its illumination.

A week in Poitiers

The World at War

We are now near the end of our third week of home confinement and an improvement in the weather adds a subtle refinement to the irritation this causes. It’s far less of a hardship to be stuck indoors on a rainy day; once the sun starts shining you instinctively feel that outside a bar somewhere there is a seat with your name on it. Still, ‘mustn’t grumble’, as they say – a ridiculous piece of advice in my view, grumbling being one of the few real pleasures left in life.

As we can only leave the house for shopping trips and exercise each day, I’ve increasingly been resorting to various forms of virtual travel, one advantage of which is that you can move through both time and space. Quite by chance, just before we were told to stay at home, I’d ordered a box set of Granada’s The World at War series. It has been digitally remastered, with each frame restored and the sound upgraded and enhanced. The results are extremely impressive. There are over twenty-two hours to watch – some of which is background material – and at present we are watching one forty-five-minute programme an evening. In the six we’ve seen so far, the action footage is clear and sharp and the interviews, with everyone from Sir Anthony Eden to a group of East Enders reminiscing about the Blitz, look as if they might have been made last year instead of nearly half a century ago. It is compelling viewing and has stood the test of time remarkably, a painless way to absorb history. The series cost £900,000 to make, the equivalent of £11 million today. By comparison, according to Peter Morgan, its producer, the combined cost of series one and two of Netflix’s The Crown was £97 million.

Another form of time travel is provided by www.pepysdiary.com/, a fascinating website that is updated each day with an annotated extract from Pepys’ Diary for that day. If you register with them (it’s free) they send you an email with the day’s entry. Along with the extracts themselves, the site provides an encyclopaedia of information about people and places in Pepys’ time, with maps and a host of articles on broader aspects of seventeenth-century history. At the moment we are in April 1667, Pepys’ mother has just died, and everyone at court is getting twitchy about the prospect of war with the Dutch. The sudden appearance of a phrase in Latin or French usually means that Samuel has been trying to take his mind off things by indulging in some form of naughtiness or other.

My last virtual journey is more local and will, I hope, eventually be replaced by the real thing. I have discovered a book called Les rues de Poitiers by the magnificently named Raoul Brothier de Rollière. It was written in 1905 and is a biographical dictionary of all the streets in Poitiers. Obviously it is out of date: streets have disappeared, new ones have sprung up, and some have changed names. Nevertheless the potted descriptions are a fascinating insight into the history of Poitiers. Take for example, our own Rue des Carmes, a fairly quiet backstreet. It merits a whole page in the book and, amongst other things, one learns that it was an interior pathway between two of the main gates in the original Roman settlement. It got its current name from the ancient Convent des Carmes built here in 1367, and in the religious wars of the sixteenth century, cannons were placed on a platform a few doors away from our house to fire on the Protestant forces laying siege to the city from the hill on the other side of Pont Joubert.

The convent is long gone, replaced by a small block of flats, and this has given me an idea. Once the current crisis over, if I am spared, I intend to slowly start translating and updating M. Brothier de Rollière’s book, or at least the entries for the main streets. It will be a fine way to get to know the city better, and I will repay the debt by making amendments where necessary. I don’t think there are any new convents, but I will dutifully add details of all the vape shops, tattoo parlours and fast food establishments I come across.

***

You cannot buy bacon in France. Well, that’s not strictly true; there are online suppliers from the UK, and in Paris you can buy bacon at Le Bon Marché (the French equivalent of the Harrods Food Hall) or the very handy M&S food stores that are dotted around the city. We usually pick some up from one of the latter whenever we visit. What I mean is you can’t pop into your local supermarket and buy half a pound of back or streaky. It’s odd. One or two of them sell something they call bacon, but the slices are perfectly circular, leathery and taste like salty beermats.

What they do sell here is lardons, and one day last week I bought some of these for cooking our evening meal. When opening the packet, it occurred to me that the various small bits inside might once actually have been slices of bacon which were then chopped up. Out of curiosity, I sprinkled the contents onto a chopping board and started absent-mindedly moving them around with my finger trying to get some sense of how they had arrived in their current state. While doing this, I looked up and saw Madame S standing in the doorway. She stared at me thoughtfully for a few seconds and then left the room. I thought no more of it until later, when I passed the living room where she was on the phone to her mother in Perth. I’m increasingly deaf, but I am almost certain I heard ‘… and now it’s bacon jigsaw puzzles …’.

Where is Poiters : The Region

A piece about Poitiers at the regional level.

The administrative geography of France is complicated. It is easy to get lost in the tangle of régions, départements, communautés d’agglomération, communautés urbaines, arrondissements, cantons and quartiers. To complicate things further, in the last forty years there have been significant changes in the administrative structure, and it is clear that some of these changes are still in the process of implementation. Using the internet to try and navigate one’s way through this maze is made more difficult by the fact that websites relating to organisational entities that are now defunct or moribund are still littered around all over the place. Similarly, any publication that tries to present a clear picture of the current structure is likely to be out of date very quickly. I’m learning as I go, and what follows is as much an aide-memoire for myself as anything.

The highest level of local administration in France is la région. Regions are a relatively new development in French territorial organisation. They came into being as part of a sweeping process of functional and territorial decentralisation initiated by the government in 1982, following François Mitterrand’s election to the presidency the previous year. The 1982 law set up directly elected regional councils with the power to elect their executive and manage the region’s finances. They levy their own taxes and, in return, receive a decreasing part of their budget from the central government, which gives them a portion of the taxes it levies. Regions lack separate legislative authority and therefore cannot write their own statutory law, but the 1982 law also devolved to the regional authorities many functions hitherto belonging to the central government, in particular economic and social development, regional planning, education and cultural matters.

Between 1982 and 2015, there were twenty-two regions in metropolitan France and five overseas regions (French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Réunion and Mayotte, the latter becoming a region in 2011). Corsica is classified as a metropolitan region. In this original regional configuration, Poitiers was part of the region of Poitou-Charentes.

In 2014, the French parliament passed a law reducing the number of metropolitan regions from twenty-two to thirteen with effect from 2016. This meant the merging of several regions into new larger regions. (The ‘Avant/Après’ map from Le Nouvel Observateur has a clever little slider gizmo that shows the before and after status of the regions.) The new law formed interim names for the larger regions by combining the names of their constituents, thus the region created by combining Aquitaine, Poitou-Charentes and Limousin was temporarily called Aquitaine-Limousin-Poitou-Charentes. Catchy, isn’t it? Permanent names were confirmed in 2016, at which point Aquitaine-Limousin-Poitou-CharentesbecameNouvelle-Aquitaine.

This reorganisation is reminiscent of the UK county reorganisation undertaken by the Heath government in 1972–74 and, as far as I can tell, it is about as popular. There was a lot of resentment about the new name from the residents of Limousin and Poitou-Charentes. It probably doesn’t help to remind them that both Aquitaine and Grande-Aquitaine were at one point seriously considered as the new region’s name. At the time, Alain Rousset, the president of the new region, pointed out that when the old Aquitaine had previously subsumed the identities of Périgord and Pays Basque, they had not disappeared, a remark that must have gone down really well with Basque separatists. For me, one problem with something like Nouvelle-Aquitaine is that, apart from in administrative terms, it is difficult to visualise it as an entity. It’s just too big. Culturally, and historically it seems meaningless.

Nevertheless, as they say, here are some facts. Nouvelle-Aquitaine, the largest of the eighteen regions of France, is located in the southwest of the country. It is the largest region in France by area, with a territory slightly larger than that of Austria. It covers 84,061 km² (32,456 sq. mi.) – or one-eighth of the country. It has approximately 5.9 million inhabitants, putting it fourth in size after Île-de-France with 12.1 million. There’s an interesting French regional population breakdown here.

Nouvelle-Aquitaine comprises twelve departments: the four that used to make up Poitou-Charentes (Charente, Charente-Maritime, Deux-Sèvres and Vienne) along with Haute-Vienne, Corrèze, Creuse, Dordogne, Gironde, Landes, Lot-et-Garonne and Pyrénées-Atlantiques. Its main cities are its capital, Bordeaux (population 1.14 million), Bayonne (283,000), Limoges (282,000), Poitiers (254,000), Pau (240,000) and La Rochelle (205,000).

I think that’s enough about le région, for now at least.

It’s difficult at this stage, certainly for a newcomer, to decide how beneficial or otherwise the regional reorganisation will be for the people of Poitiers. The city was the capital of Poitou-Charentes, and inevitably there is bound to be some leakage of status and influence to Bordeaux. A friend has mentioned a drift of people towards Bordeaux for work reasons. Instinctively one feels that being a big fish in a smaller pond had its advantages. On the other hand, small can be beautiful. Poitiers has its heritage sites and its prestigious university. The mixture of tourists and students gives the place a lively atmosphere. Its housing is relatively cheap (certainly compared to Bordeaux), and it has fast rail links to Bordeaux, Paris and La Rochelle on the coast. All of these, to me, make it a very attractive place to live. Time will tell.