The People of Pleure

The People of Pleure is at once a personal chronicle, a series of portraits and a sociological analysis. Pleure is a small town of 364 inhabitants located on the Bressan plain in the western part of the Jura. I consider Pleure a community that could provide the answers to a number of questions relevant to the socio-economic status of France today.

France has over 30,000 villages with a population of under 1,000 inhabitants. In an era when these rural centers were at the heart of an agricultural economy one could easily talk of a nation of shopkeepers, a thousand types of cheeses, a wine for every village. To study a village was to study a microcosm of French society. In 1999, agriculture represents a much less significant role in the nation's economy. What then is the fate of these villages? How do they survive? Will they survive? With no tourist appeal, Pleure is an authentic paradigm for this investigation.

This is a book, written in English, destined not necessarily for students but for a wider Francophile public. The primary organizing principle of the book is the sequence appropriate to a sociological analysis that can be seen in the accompanying table of contents.

Into this fabric I have interwoven both my story and anecdotes of townspeople in order to create a living portrait of a rural town struggling to survive.