Sat, Mar 07, 2009 page6

• French proposal may erase ancient regions from map

  STREAMLINING A plan to reform France’s complex administrative system by redrawing boundaries or eliminating regions has stirred a storm of protest

  • THE GUARDIAN
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  Francoise Rose-Auvet stands on stage before a row of inquisitive faces and introduces the puppets of Amiens to her youthful, restless audience. There are the three little pigs and their mother, and the wolf who blows down their houses. And then, she says, there are Sandrine and Lafleur, the Punch and Judy of local puppetry.

  “But they don’t speak French,” she said. “They only speak Picard.”

  Rose-Auvet, artistic director of the Theatre de Marionettes, has no doubt in her mind about her own cultural identity. Born and brought up in the region around Amiens in northeastern France, she is Picard and fiercely proud of it.

  But, after a career spent celebrating the language, culture and history of her lifelong home, she is now faced with the possibility that it could cease to exist. Under proposals that were to be submitted to French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday, the ancient region of Picardie may be wiped off the map.

  “It’s as if someone took away your surname,” she says. “It is part of us. We are French, but we are Picard too. We are one big family.”

  When Sarkozy asked former prime minister Edouard Balladur to look into the reform of France’s complex administrative system, the president said he hoped the result would be a road map to a more efficient and streamlined country.

  France is the most thoroughly administrated nation in the world, with 22 metropolitan regions, 100 departments and 36,783 communes forming a three-tier system through which the policies of local government are filtered down. Critics say that cutting the number of regions to 15 would save the state money, reinforce the power of local authorities and help slash France’s notoriously sticky red tape.

  But Balladur’s proposals have provoked horror among those who face having their boundaries redrawn, their capitals changed or — in the case of Picardie and western Poitou Charentes — their names erased altogether. The outlying suburbs of the capital fear being encroached on by the creation of a “greater Paris.” Rennes fears it will lose out to Nantes at the head of a newly enlarged Brittany. The central Auvergne region fears it will lose its local flavor by being lumped together with the upper Rhone valley and the French Alps.

  In Picardie, where residents lay claim to an easygoing regional temperament and joke that even 1789 passed through their homeland with relative calm, the proposals have unleashed a storm of protest. Deemed to be an artificial region made up of three departments with little in common, the Balladur report recommends removing Picardie altogether. The northern Somme would be taken into Nord-Pas de Calais, the southern Oise into Ile de France and the western Oise into Champagne Ardenne.

  But 63,000 Picardians have signed a petition, and a Facebook group aimed at spreading the movement has 27,000 members. The Socialist president of the regional council, Claude Gewerc, has decried the proposed mergers as “one stupidity too far.”

  “Picardie is a real historical land. It’s not a modern region that was born just like that very recently. It was in Picardie that the French language was born,” he said.

  Some have questioned the motives of Sarkozy and his right-wing administration. The newspaper L’Humanite said it was reminiscent of an age when the ruling monarch would decide the fate of others in an arbitrary and self-serving fashion.

  Balladur said in an interview on Wednesday with <> that reform was needed, and the changes were necessary with an impending recession.

  “Having a local system based on about 15 regions with extended economic powers ... would contribute to this dynamism,” he said.

  That regional tongue, Picard, is a major unifying factor, along with gastronomic specialities such as gateau battu and pistachio duck pate. The original language behind the chti patois which is spoken in the Nord-Pas de Calais and has become famous in France thanks to a blockbuster film, is now undergoing something of a revival. For people like Rose-Auvet who have worked for decades on shows which say mi instead of moi and <> instead of bonbon (sweet), it is ironic that a renaissance is occurring just as its mother region faces eradication.

  Others have questioned the motives of Sarkozy and his right-wing administration. Describing the proposed carve-up as the return of the <>, the Communist newspaper <> said it was reminiscent of an age when the ruling monarch would decide the fate of others in an arbitrary and self-serving fashion.
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