FRENCH LIFE

A Young French Engineer’s Passion For Keeping History and Tradition Alive

As French villages lose population and housing tracts replace vineyards, Antoine Guibert considers future generations

Image Antoine Guilbert, used with permission

Walking along the Grande Rue, the main street running through my village, I see half a dozen or so empty houses, paint peeling from shuttered windows. Houses where walls have crumbled, some with partial roofs. Old houses that my friend Hélène, who keeps an eye on such things, tells me have been on sale, or just abandoned, for years.

Modern housing tracts built on former vineyards (unless noted, all photos by author)

Yet on the edge of the village, a sort of sub-village exists on what was once a vineyard. Streets of tidy pastel-coloured bungalows that seem to sell as fast as they are built. When I moved to this village ten years ago, vines were still growing on parts of the undeveloped land where I once picked a handful of wild asparagus. Ten years from now, will kids have any sense of the history of this area?

On the main road into Beziers, I’ve watched housing tracts and commercial properties spring up around a recently built Lidl — again on land…