Redrawing of French “Régions” to Buoy Right-Wing Normans but Stoke Breton, Basque, and Savoyard Anger

There is a world of difference between France’s new Socialist president, François Hollande, and his rightward-tilting, law-and-order predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.  But there is one thing at least that both seem to agree on: Hollande decided this month to revisit plans developed under Sarkozy to reduce the number of France’s constituent régions.  Hollande would like to see 15 régions, down from the current 22 (not counting overseas régions in the Indian Ocean and Caribbean, which make for a total of 27).

Hollande takes aim at anyone expressing regional pride

To redraw the map, Sarkozy, in 2008, had commissioned Édouard Balladur, a fellow conservative who had been François Mitterand’s prime minister in the 1990s, to proposes reforms to France’s governmental structures.  Though Hollande has not yet said how he wants the 15 régions to be organized, his party’s backing of the number 15 suggests a close hewing to the Balladur proposal.

Édouard Balladur and Nicolas Sarkozy cooking up reforms (careful—Bretons can read lips!).

It should be said here that France’s régions are not a big deal in the way that Italy’s or Spain’s regions are.  Many Spanish and Italian regions have devolved legislatures, even fully autonomous status.  France, on the other hand, is one of the most centralized states in the Western democratic world.  The départements—tiny collectivities much like counties in the United States—are the most significant level of local government, but the régions have no legislative authority but merely spend some education and infrastructure funds in accordance with decisions made at higher levels of government.  These régions were created only in 1982.  The original 40 or so provinces of pre-revolutionary France corresponded in many cases to strong regional and ethnic identities, but when, in the 1790s, the French nobility was abolished, so were the various duchies and other petty monarchies they governed.  The départements were designed specifically to be small enough to prevent regional identities from asserting themselves.  The Napoleonic interregna were similarly hostile to anything that challenged a centralized French national identity.

The French Republic, let us recall, has one of the worst records on the treatment of minorities of any Western democracy.  The French Revolution practically invented modern nationalist chauvinism as we know it, and the government doesn’t let their minorities forget it.  Official recognition of any minority language is constitutionally forbidden.  Breton and Basque citizens of the republic still recall being savagely beaten in state-run schools for uttering a mere word of their native languages.  France has some of the free world’s most restrictive laws against wearing religious clothing—laws blatantly crafted to punish and marginalize the country’s Muslims and Jews.  Gypsies are routinely rousted from their encampments by police thugs before being deported, with a brutality that alarms human-rights organizations.  And the openly racist National Front (Front nationale, or F.N.) political party is stronger in France than equivalent anti-immigrant hate parties in any other western European country.  France, as we all know, is a nice place to live—but really only if you’re French.  (See recent articles from this blog on sectarian frictions in Sarkozy’s France and on equivalent abuses in Québécois nationalism in Canada (plus a follow-up).)

Sarkozy goose-stepped his way into the hearts of French xenophobe voters.

When the régions were created in 1982, some pre-revolutionary provinces, such as Franche-Comté, Alsace, Lorraine, Brittany, and Burgundy, were reincarnated as régions, while others were not: Normandy was now split between Upper Normandy and Lower Normandy, while Poitou was absorbed into a larger region, Languedoc and Roussillon were merged, and others, like Anjou, Lyonnais, and Marche were left buried.  In 2010, activists in Picardy had to raise a stink to avoid the abolition of their region altogether.

The French régions as they are today

No scheme pleases everybody, but top-down schemes, which characterize the way nearly everything of this sort is done in France, please fewest of all, and the Balladur map, if implemented, will be not much of an exception.  Here is what the Balladur plan would look like:

First, the winners.  Normans were the most vocally disenfranchised—or, let’s say, explicitly not re-enfranchised—by the 1982 reforms.  Surely this has something to do with the Second World War.  Normans, after all—snug against Flanders and across the English Channel from Britain—speak a dialect full of Scandinavian and other Germanic idioms and feel a particular kinship with England.  Every English schoolboy knows that his kingdom’s history only truly picks up the pace with the Norman Conquest of 1066.  Queen Elizabeth II, as monarch, holds also the ceremonial title Duchess of Normandy, signifying her suzerainty over the crown dominions of Jersey and Guernsey—the only remaining places where the old Norman language is spoken—while the right-wing English Democrats party, which seeks England’s exit from the United Kingdom (discussed recently in this blog), waves the triple-lion flag of Normandy at its rallies.  Then, in the 1960s, France’s greater economic integration with Germany as founding members of the European Common Market (precursor to today’s European Union) disgruntled Norman nationalists in France, who felt their ties with the U.K. (which did not join until 1973) weakened in favor of ties with the much less well liked Germans to their southeast.  Most Normans, like most Scandinavians, had reacted coolly to Nazi Germany’s attempt to woo them during the war as “fellow Aryans.”  But Normans were more specifically anti-German than anti-fascist: the radical Norman Movement (Mouvement normand) of the 1960s, had a distinctly right-wing tilt which emphasized their Teutonicness, if not specifically Germanness (much like the way in which northern Italy’s right-wing Northern League (Lega Nord) clings to the attenuated historical “Nordicness” of the Lombard people).  The movement’s leader, Didier Patte, was convicted in the 1970s of running guns to Breton terrorists (more on the Bretons below).  Surely, in 1982, Normandy was left partitioned as a way of ensuring that a distinctly un-French regional identity did not rise again.

Likewise with Alsace–Lorraine, an even more culturally Germanic part of France which has spent about as much time under German dominion as under French in the modern period.  They were left as two regions, Alsace and Lorraine, perhaps for fear that uniting them as Alsace–Lorraine would reawaken proud memories of the short-lived Republic of Alsace–Lorraine, a Soviet-sympathizing workers’s state which existed for 12 defiant days in 1918 in the chaos of the end of the First World War.  The Balladur plan would reunify both Normandy and Alsace–Lorraine.  After all, the war was far in the past now, and, after all, it was important for Sarkozy to court the votes of supporters of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the Nazi-sympathizing founder of the National Front.  Indeed, Alsace First! (Alsace d’abord! / Elsaß zuerst!), the main Alsatian nationalist party (Lotharingians have always felt more French than Alsatians), has itself come under criticism for being far too right-wing and anti-immigrant.

Completely ignored in the Balladur plan are the interests of the Basque people of Pyrenées-Atlantique département in the région of Aquitania and of the small number of Catalans in Provence–Alpes–Côte d’Azur région on the Mediterranean.  Clearly, the French government regards these ethnic groups’ ties with larger and more autonomous communities of radical separatist kindred just over the border in Spain to be a security threat.  The terrorist group Basque Homeland and Freedom (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or ETA) has been a major force mostly in Spain but has killed innocent people in France as well, while the Republican Left of Catalonia (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, or E.R.C.) political party is the king-making junior partner in the fragile ruling separatist coalition in Spain’s autonomous region of Catalonia, seeking not only full independence for Catalonia but reunification with the “Northern Catalonia” region just over the Pyrenees in France.  So no surprises there in the Balladur map, though it might not be wise to take up this issue in 2014 as both Catalan and Basque nationalism in Spain are cresting as never before, threatening to unravel the kingdom itself.

Members of the Basque nationalist group ETA.  Something tells me they’re not moderates.

Savoy is another problem area.  It used to be a powerful independent duchy, with a capital at Turin and territory that included a large swath including what are now southeastern France, northwestern Italy, and much of francophone Switzerland, Savoy was always at least as Italian as it was French.  It became part of the Kingdom of Sicily in 1714, then was taken over by France after the Revolution, then given to the Kingdom of Sardinia after Napoleon’s fall in 1815, then retaken by Napoleon III in 1860, which modern Savoyard nationalists still call an illegal, secret deal.  In fact, when the Kingdom of Italy was established soon after, the House of Savoy became the royal family of all Italy.  Even today, residents of the two French départements of Savoie and Haute-Savoie, abutting Italy and Switzerland, speak a group of Frenchish–Italianish dialects which are sometimes called a separate language, Arpitan.  This is also spoken in Geneva and in Italy’s fully autonomous francophone region, Val d’Aosta, just over the border in the Alps, where there is a popular movement to reunify with their kindred in an independent Savoy Republic.  Savoyard nationalism is very active in French Savoy itself.  Not only is there a Savoy Region Movement (Mouvement Région Savoie, or M.R.S.), which seeks a separate région of Savoy, but there is also a political party called I Believe in the Savoy Region! (La Région Savoie, j’y crois!), which wants a fully autonomous Savoy with a devolved autonomous parliament—in addition to the Savoyard League (Ligue savoisienne), which has set up a provisional government-in-exile in Geneva.  A poll in 2000 found a quarter of respondents in the two Savoy départements wanting to be an independent state, while a full half wanted an autonomous region.  In 2010, 48% of Savoyards liked the idea of Savoie and Haute-Savoie becoming Swiss cantons, and a whopping 43.7% of all Swiss and 55.9% of French-speaking Swiss agreed.  In that Swiss survey, the question also included the annexation of Franch–Comté, a région to the north, along the Swiss–French–German border which would also, incidentally, be obliterated in the Balladur plan and merged with Burgundy.  Why Hollande wants to kick awake the sleeping giant of Savoyard nationalism by producing yet another map that denies their existence and keep them barricaded from the Italian and Swiss citizens they regard as kindred is beyond me.

Savoyard nationalists protest at a Swiss border crossing

The most anger, however, over the Balladur plan has been generated in Brittany, where the Balladur suggestion of attaching Pays-de-la-Loire région’s Loire-Atlantique département to Brittany has been popular, but not at all the suggestion of merging Brittany with all of Pays-de-la-Loire into a single region.  This is regarded, quite rightly, as designed to dilute Breton regional identity and make the establishment of a Breton autonomous region even less likely than it already is.  (And it is unlikely; France doesn’t “do” autonomous regions.)  The nationalist Breton Democratic Union (Union Démocratique Bretonne, or U.D.B.), a left-wing, sometimes radically left-wing party, has been especially forceful on this point.

This is a bad time to alienate Breton nationalists.  At a time when Scotland is planning a referendum on independence for later this year, Welsh and Cornish nationalism (see my recent article) are becoming more strident, and even the Celtic nation of Galicia is only agreeing to stay within the Kingdom of Spain because the current Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy Brey, is himself Galician—at such a time, this is not when you want to needlessly piss off a bunch of radical Celts when you could just as well leave things be.  But the insular mindset of French nationalism chauvinism sort of doesn’t even “get” what regional and ethnic pride are; why, after all, would anyone want to not be French?  As the United Kingdom, Spain, and Italy unravel all around them, François Hollande may be the next European leader to get a rough lesson in what the new European ethnoscape is shaping up to be.  Good luck with that map-redrawing business, Monsieur Président.  Tell us how it works out for you.

[You can read more about Bretons, Basques, and other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

Right-Wing English Separatists Declare “Precious” Cornish Nationalism “Dead”

The idea of a national identity for the people of Cornwall, England’s southwesternmost point and the most obscure of the Celtic nations, is “dead,” according to the chairman of the English Democrats political party.

Robin Tilbrook

The party’s chairman, Robin Tilbrook, was exulting over recently-released census data which show depressed figures for those identifying themselves as ethnically or nationally “Cornish.”  He added, “The census figures show that not many people are precious about declaring themselves as Cornish.  There’s at least five times more people for English nationalism than Cornish.”  Only 14% of Cornwall residents in the 2011 census indicated Cornish as their national identity—though that is a more impressive figure when one considers that Cornish was not one of the printed choices and that those 73,200 people Cornish nationals were all write-ins.  Moreover, Cornwall has one of the highest rates of immigration from other parts of the United Kingdom among England’s counties, and nearly 5% of the population is from immigrant ethnic groups.  Given that, the true figures for those thinking of themselves as Cornish first may give greater cause for English Democrat worries.

The English Democrats were founded in the late 1990s (as the English National Party) in response to devolution of powers to Scotland and Wales.  On the face of it, they are a devolutionist and Eurosceptical movement favoring removal of England from the European Union and of course from the U.K.  But its true motives are less savory: English Democrats regularly march in white-supremacist rallies alongside National Front neo-fascists, and the movement is part of a broader movement of Continental European right-wing extremist groups such as Serbia’s neo-Nazi Obraz movement, the affiliated Russky Obraz in Russia (which the English Democrats publicly support), the New Right (Noua Dreaptă) hate group in Romania, and even Golden Dawn, the violent, high-profile fascist party in Greece whose leaders and M.P.s have recently been rounded up by the Greek government.*

Coming to a Skinhead rally near you

The English Democrats have no seated legislators and have recently lost ground to the more centrist (but still plenty right of center) United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which aims to remove the entire U.K. from the E.U. and currently seats three parliamentarians in the House of Lords and nine in the European Parliament’s U.K. delegation in Strasbourg.  So the English Democrats are floundering for an edge in the polls.  Picking on the Cornish seems especially pathetic and bullying, but that sort of image problem has never bothered them before.

Cornwall has a peculiar status within England.  The only English county known formally as the Duchy of ..., rather than County of ..., this does not actually translate to any kind of autonomy.  It is semantic merely, like Pennsylvania’s designation as a “Commonwealth” or Quebec’s parliament being called a “National,” rather than provincial, assembly.  But it is also the constituent part of England with the most recent experience with sovereignty.  King Edward III unilaterally annexed to England the previously independent Duchy of Cornwall in 1337 and designated his son Edward, the “Black Prince,” as Duke of Cornwall.  Since then, that title has been reserved for the first in line to the throne, alongside the title Prince of Wales.  Today’s Prince of Wales, Charles, is thus Duke of Cornwall as well.  His specific royal prerogatives include silly medieval stuff like the right to all shipwrecks that wash ashore on Cornwall’s beaches or any porpoises “or other royalle Fishes” caught in Cornish waters, but also more serious assets such as over 540 square kilometers of productive land in and around Cornwall, including enough lucrative farmland to support his lavish lifestyle without dipping into other royal coffers.  Cornwall is really Charles’s personal royal fief—and is one day to be Prince William’s.

The current Duke of Cornwall is ready to claw the county back if necessary.

That is, unless the nationalist Party for Cornwall (Mebyon Kernow, or M.K.) has anything to say about it.  They argue that the original ducal line, and the Cornish sovereignty it embodied, were never formally extinguished.  In 2003, a non-binding referendum showed 55% favored a devolved legislature for the duchy.  Others favor being made a full constituent “country” of the U.K., like England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, or a quasi-independent “Crown Dependency” like Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man.  Still others, like the sometimes violent Cornish Nationalist Party, back full independence.

Cornwall is, along with Brittany across the water in France, one of the only two of the seven (as they are sometimes defined) Celtic nations to lack any home rule.  (Ireland is independent—most of it, anyway—while Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, and Spain’s region of Galicia all have powerful regional parliaments, and Scotland is voting on independence next year.)  The Cornish language went more or less extinct in the 19th century, by some reckonings, but recently it has been brought somewhat back to life by schooling elders who had dimly remembered passive knowledge of it up to proficiency, with the help of younger speakers of the more-healthy, mutually-intelligible Breton language in northwest France.

Cornish nationalists reacted strongly to Tilbrook’s death certificate, with one local leader, Wendron Loveday Jenkin, saying, “Most Cornish people define themselves as Cornish and British but not English, and many non-Cornish people living in Cornwall would recognise Cornwall as a land apart, a duchy and a distinct region, if not a nation.  A significant number of people have voted for Mebyon Kernow and more than 50,000 have called for Cornwall to have its own assembly to run its own affairs.”  And even this does not include the even greater popularity in the county of the Liberal Democratic Party, now the U.K.’s ruling junior coalition partner, which champions Cornish autonomy.

Indeed, the English Democrats and M.K. are a study in contrasts.  Like the separatist movements in Scotland, Wales, Brittany, and Galicia and Ireland’s Sinn Féin, Cornish nationalists are considerably left of center.  Galician separatism even includes a Communist component (though there are, to be far, smaller far-right Scottish and Welsh nationalist movements).  The English Democrats, however, have more affinity with far-right separatist groups on the Continent, nearly all of them from the more prosperous parts of their countries, like northern Italy’s Lega Nord (Northern League), Belgium’s Flemish nationalists, and the fascist-tinged Norman Movement in northeastern France.

But Lega Nord, for all its racist anti-immigrant bluster, does champion the rights of linguistic minorities such as Provençal and Swiss-German speakers in Italy’s northwestern Alpine fringes, and the Friulian, Ladin, and South Tyrolean peoples in the northeast along the border with Austria.  The English Democrats, by contrast, are as intolerant of indigenous diversity as they are of immigrants.  They hate anything that spoils the picture of an English unitary state and are even cold to movements to establish devolved parliaments for the Wessex and Yorkshire regions.

With high hopes for referenda on Scotland and Catalonia next year and rising nationalism in Wales, Cornish national identity may in fact be on the upswing.  It is the English Democrats who may be headed for the dustbin of history.  Good thing, too.

*Note: This article includes a revision of the original version, which featured a statement to the effect that the English Democrats were formally allied with the extremist groups listed in the third paragraph.  See comments below for the discussion.  Thank you to all readers who provide feedback, clarifications, and corrections.



[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]