Les jeunes ruraux entre ville et campagne

Abstract

Young country people between town and country. According to a survey conducted on 2 400 young country people aged between 19 and 25 years, in six different regions, 54% wish to remain in a rural environment, only 36% of these being still second or third level students as against 62%) who have finished their education, the latter group being generally older, already filtered by emigration. However, this exodus is counter-balanced by an important inverse flux, since a quarter of the young people surveyed had grown up in the town. The attraction toward owner-ship of one's own house is another factor which will undoubtedly slow down this emigration. All in all, what is taking place is a movement towards concentration of the population in fairly large communes situated fairly close to urban centres, these being perceived as the most "attractive", whilst the country area, on the other hand, is perceived rather as being "dead" and "lost". It would appear that the slogan of the young people surveyed is not "live and work in the country" but rather "in the region" : 61% would see their own region as the geographical area in which they would like to live. And even if it means going far away, the tendency now is to think of Europe in preference to the Parisian region. The strenght of regional identity plays a much more important part than one might have expected in influencing where the subjects would wish to live and work. Certain areas like the Languedoc, Molsheim or Redon are clearly more attractive than others, the Limousin area suffering because of employment problems and the Dreux area being the least attractive notably because of its dispersion into small widely scattered communes. The tendencies to leave the rural environment, to move closer to the town or to depart to another region all follow the same logic which the link with the regional language synthesies very well : these tendencies are greater the less one has lived in a rural environment (or in the region), the weaker one's local family roots, or the higher one's academic or social standing, the three factors frequently going hand in hand by without being narrowly determined. Several conclusions can be drawn from this survey as far as the politics of development are concerned. First of all, it must be pointed out that the country youth do not define themselves in terms of rural-urban opposition : the label is of little importance to them. What counts is the realisation of their desired lifestyle. Equally, their attachment to the locality or to the region is far from unconditional. Indépendant of the employment problem, their desire to live in their region and in the rural environment is all the greater where regional identity is strongest and where the rural communes are larger and less isolated. This means most notably that, as France has the smallest communes in Europe, the formation of communities of communes, especially in the most fragile zones should be speeded up.