FactualThe “calves’ heads” that have become neorural have a dirty reputation. They would be snobs, obsessed with working remotely, and would spur real estate prices up. If all is not false, the Parigots must, to integrate, overcome the clichés.
The adventure begins at the corner of the hedge. The gendarmes come out in the open at the entrance of a village in southwestern France and signal to the driver of an old scooter registered as 75 to pull over. ” Where are you from ? “ The pilot in shorts lives 200 meters from the place of control, 500 kilometers from Paris. “What address do you live in?” “ He lives here and the vehicle has been purring for more than six years on the local roads, but he is ” different “. ” You drank ? “, asks the officer to go to the end of his investigation. It is 4 pm, the driver is sober. In the provinces (this fuzzy expanse after the toll, where villages, fields and a few industrious towns alternate), the Parisian is, in essence, “Passing through”.
” Then ? On holiday ? “ This exasperating refrain from the provincial to the Parisian would however be nothing more than a reminiscence of a Pompidolian time when “going up to the capital” was a promotion. Now the map is scrambled. Because the said “Parisians” of Ile-de-France have flowed back long before the Covid to less populated, less expensive cities, to sow there the inflation of rents and per square meter. A first exodus of the upper middle classes took place by TGV, to Nantes or Bordeaux, transformed into a large suburb. These defectors who wanted Paris but elsewhere (a big city, but without the inconveniences of the big city) were already causing some annoyance. Stickers “Parisien, go home”, decorated with a TGV, had then flourished in the capital of the Gironde in 2017, when the high-speed line was put into service, while the average price per meter square rose from 3,410 to 4,722 euros, between 2015 and 2019 (figures from the LPI-SeLoger barometer). After a brief lull, prices started to rise again in 2021, by more than 6%.
With a little more humor, on Facebook this time, the Front de liberation bordeluche face au parisianisme (FLBP) mocked this new wave of immigrants. “It’s European Depression Day. A friendly greeting to the Parisians who have come to live “in the south, by the sea” and who find themselves in Villenave-d’Ornon under the fleet. “ The Parisian is this exile not always welcome, peddler of evils that often overtake him (snobbery, hatred of rooster crow, quinoa at all meals). A kind of archetype, like the bobo. Evacuation of the nerve center of France caused by confinement will have further accentuated this annoyance. By adding a little on the tone of snobbery, in his containment diary, the writer Marie Darrieussecq, who came from the capital to settle in her family home in the Basque Country, writes, in March 2020 : “We stash our car registered in Paris in the garage and take the old one that we keep here. I feel that it is not good to ride with a 75 on the buttocks… ”
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