Over the decades, so many locals from the rural Brittany town of Goulens emigrated to the United States that Air France gifted the town a miniature Statue of Liberty.
Residents are so proud of their binational identity that four years ago they raised funds to have the bronze statue recast, which now sits in a prominent spot in Gorin’s central square, surrounded by columns carrying international flags.
But in the recent European Parliament elections, almost a third of local voters chose the Rally National, a far-right French party based on virulent anti-immigration sentiment.
“This is a region that knows what it means to be an immigrant,” said Pierre-Marie Caissevour, a member of the local Brittany Transamerica Association, who was surprised by the election results. “We are very open to all cultures.”
Similarly shocked by the results, and worried about what will happen in French parliamentary elections that begin this Sunday, is Hervé Le Floc, the centrist mayor of Gourland. President Emmanuel Macron announced general elections for June 9 after the far-right swept past his party in the European Parliament elections.
“We all have families in the United States,” Flock said in his City Hall office overlooking a mini Statue of Liberty. Many of the migrants stayed in the U.S., but some returned to Gorin with their savings and started their lives again here.
“When I was in high school, half my friends were born in New York,” says Le Frock, 61, who is also a dairy farmer.
Brittany, in the northwest, is a heartland of support for Mr Macron and has long been seen as an impregnable bulwark against France’s far-right movement. The Rally National holds just eight of the 83 seats in the regional parliament and has never won a mayoral or national election there.
Locals proudly call it “the Brittany exception.”
Regional council president Roig Chesnais-Girard explained that the local culture of cooperation between political parties did not mesh with the party’s divisive policies, in what he called a “fiercely moderate” region.
Thomas Frinault, a senior lecturer in political science at Rennes 2 University who has studied the history of Brittany’s National Union, said the party’s new popularity in the region was a sign it was “normalising and becoming dominant.”
In some ways, Brittany seems like a difficult region to embrace the far-right message that France is plagued by high crime rates and that too many immigrants are soaking up scarce resources and jobs.
Le Floc said he couldn’t remember the last time a serious crime had occurred in Grelins, a town of 3,800 people surrounded by cattle ranches a 50-minute drive from the coastal city of Lorient. Unemployment is so low that nearby food-processing plants sometimes have trouble recruiting workers, he said.
“We don’t face immigration issues here,” he says. “There are very few foreigners here.”
But talking to locals in the bars, restaurants and cultural centre where Golan holds his regular retiree get-togethers, it’s clear that far-right politics and a pessimistic view of the country’s state persist – along with bitterness at being abandoned by the ruling class in far-flung Paris and a searing anger towards Macron.
“He only caters to rich people,” Yolande Lester, 53, who works in a creperie, said during a break.
“Why not try the RN?” she asked, referring to the National Union by its French acronym. “They’ve never run a country before.”
She added: “It can’t get any worse.”
That’s not to say that no one here voted for the party: Its approval rating has been steadily climbing, Mr. Flineau noted. But local radio station owner Joel Thevenean said few would admit to voting for its supporters. “Now people are speaking up,” Mr. Thevenean said.
He hears most often from people who say life in rural areas hasn’t improved in 40 years — gas and heating costs are rising, local hospitals keep losing full-time emergency services — so when Jordan Bardella, president of the national coalition, says undocumented immigrants can get free health care, it rubs people the wrong way.
“The RN is capitalizing on this discontent,” Cevenean said. “There’s a general sense of disgust with Paris.”
In a small bar opposite the town’s 16th-century Roman Catholic church, where locals can buy newspapers and cigarettes, two men sipping beers after a long day of physical labor listed reasons why they intend to vote again for Mr. Bardella’s party.
“They commit crimes,” Thierry Benou, 55, said of those whose asylum requests have been rejected and who remain in the country illegally. “It’s not like that here,” he explained. “There isn’t a lot of crime here, but in France it is.”
“We don’t have any immigrants here,” agreed construction contractor Hervé Pensibee, 62. “But they will come.”
Frieneau, the university lecturer, explained those feelings: “Fear is being stoked on television, radio, in newspapers and on social media. People are kind of scared of these issues without having to face them.”
Natalie Guio Vieira, a candidate for parliament for the local National Coalition, acknowledges that the concerns are not based on local realities but on fears that the problems will emerge here.
“There is a risk of chaos,” she said during a brief break in a gruelling two-week campaign.
With no party base in the Morbihan region of Brittany, Guiot-Vieira, a retired naval officer, had to learn on the fly how to register as a candidate and how to campaign. Pickup She was put in charge of her party’s election campaign across the Morbihan department after the person holding that job was fired.
One of the party’s central tenets is “people first” – that is, social security, housing subsidies, certain jobs and free health care should be reserved for French citizens, not those living abroad.
“We pay taxes, we live in a medical desert and we can’t find a doctor,” Giotto Vieira said, “and yet foreigners get free medical care.”
“When you speak like this, people call you racist,” she added. “But this is not racism, this is a demand for equality.”
The National Rally party was openly racist in its early days: its founder and long-time leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, said people of different races “do not have the same capacities, nor are they at the same level of historical evolution” and was repeatedly convicted of making anti-Semitic remarks and openly downplaying the Holocaust.
Since his daughter Marine became leader in 2011, she has worked to rid the party of anti-Semitism and even expelled her father.
Still, many don’t believe the party has fundamentally changed.
Alex Frusen is one of them, having moved to Gaullin two months ago for work, but this weekend he plans to make the long six-hour drive to Paris, where he is still registered to vote.
“I am the grandson of immigrants and there is no way I could vote for the RN,” he said. “Both of my grandparents survived Auschwitz.” He added that the RN is “against all French values.”
Polls predict a high turnout, and Mayor Flock wonders what that means for Brittany and his small town.
“Were the European elections just a protest vote?” he asked. National elections might change people’s voting behaviour, he said.
“But maybe people will continue to protest,” he added.
