Sud de France 4.1: It Takes a Mayor

Saint-Genies, a village in the Herault

One of the things that makes living in France so different from America is the system of village Mayors or “maires.” It’s something an American living in France needs to understand to make it easier to get along. 

In France the mayor is in charge of his or her village or city. He or she and their adjunct or vice mayor have an enormous amount of power. When you want something done you go to them. They are the fixers, the people who get things to happen. Mayors get the money from the State to build roads, operate schools and hold festivals. They are so important that in a large city like Paris there is a mayor for each neighborhood (arrondisement) as well as one for the whole city.

The Hotel de Ville

In America mayors are often just ribbon-cutting figureheads whose authority is limited by hundreds of regulations, layers of law and fractious city councils. In the States if you want to put an extension on your house you go through a permit process. In France you ask the maire and if he or she says it's okay, you’re on your way. You don’t even need a piece of official paper. The position is so important that if you pay property taxes in a village, even if you are a foreigner, you can vote for the maire, although you can’t vote for anything else. 

Want to add a driveway, ask the mayor.

As a foreigner one of the things you do have to do is to present yourself to the mayor and tell them who you are, show them your papers and get “permission” to live in the village.

Our village celebrated St. Martin’s Day on November 11^th and our maire held a reception at City Hall, the Hôtel de Ville. (Our City Hall is an old chateau with a Roman wall.) I took a lot of photos at the event, some of which I posted in my last blog. A few days later we were in Beziers for lunch and I stopped at the local camera shop and had a couple of enlargements made of the fanfare band seen in the group shot. 

The next day I was going to the bar, the village has only one, to drop the photo off for the band when I ran into our maire, Mayor George. I almost walked passed him because he wasn’t wearing his mayor’s suit from the celebration but his winemaker work clothes; a big jacket, traditional “flat” hat and muddy work boots.

The St.Martin's Day gathering at the Hotel de Ville

I showed him the photo and his face lit up. “What a beautiful photo” he said to me. He patted me on the arm and beamed at my appreciation of the event (which was his event). Then he said, “You are among us now.”

He took the photo and went on his way. I stood there dumbfounded. Just like that I was “street legal.’ From that moment it was okay. No formal presentation of forms and passports and such, just Mayor George’s okay. 

Last weekend French President Nicolas Sarkozy shuffled his cabinet resulting in a more right of center government. He appeared on TV and tried his best to appear calm and thoughtful, remarkably losing his temper over reporters' questions only three or four times. The next day the Midi-Libre, our local regional paper, ran the results of a poll in which they had asked if the changes would make any difference. 80% of the respondents said "non." 

I read that and saw it as reflecting two things. First of all people are not fooled by “kabuki” politics and know that the cabinet shuffle was just a charade. And secondly they know that the State government doesn’t affect their daily lives as much as their village government does. In a way, the mayors protect the people from the whims and fancies of that big "French" government. 

Now before you begin to think that these mayors are little tyrants who run towns like private fiefdoms, let me tell you a true story that points out the good side of this arrangement.

The mayor hosting the celevration.

Not so long ago in a nearby village, there was an elderly couple who had lived together for twenty years but never gotten married. They finally decided to get married only to have the man suddenly take ill and be rushed to the hospital.

The woman went to the mayor distraught. She knew that her partner was dying and said that they had decided that they wanted to conduct the wedding ceremony as soon as possible. But there was a problem.

In France the mayor of your village is the one who must preside at marriage ceremonies. But this authority is limited to the boundaries of his or her village. The hospital was in another village where this mayor had no authority. 

So the mayor asked the woman to wait and went off to call the mayor of the village where the hospital was located. A few minutes later he came back and told her that he and the other mayor had agreed and he had declared the man’s hospital room to be a part of his village for the day. That meant he could perform the ceremony in the hospital room that afternoon.

Which he did just a few hours before the old man passed away.