Villages which once supported 800 people now have 150 in the winter and 250 in the summer. Yet each village has a mayor. The roads are well maintained. The main roads are improved every year, three lane nightmares becoming four or even six lane highways of motorway standard. Even more curious to the incoming British, Belgians, Dutch and Germans, the villages are not rotting.
Rural poverty is as bad as the urban kind.
I know that where I come from. But you do not feel it in France in the way you do at home. Townies and foreigners are regarded with suspicious distain in France too, though I know a Sunday morning market where an English couple have been selling homemade marmalade and Dundee cake for years. And BBC TV recently described how an English farmer had given up but started again in the Ardeche. That too is a trick we have yet to learn properly though the rural white paper will help.