A different France

Opinion: D-Day emotions stir, but France sees the good life wane

Mort RosenblumJune 6, 2009 13:42Updated May 30, 2010 11:57

U.S. President Barack Obama, England's Prince Charles, British Prime Minster Gordon Brown, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and France's President Nicolas Sarkozy arrive at the Colleville-sur-Mer cemetery to attend a ceremony to mark the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, June 6, 2009. (Philippe Wojazer/Reuters)

DRAGUIGNAN, France — It is D-Day up in Normandy, but down here people are watching their coin purses, not their TVs, trying hard to hold onto a beloved way of life they see slipping away.

At Carrefour, a graying gentleman in one of those flat caps favored by Frenchmen of a certain age poked among a mountain of avocados as carefully as if selecting a fiftieth anniversary diamond.

“These are only 45 centimes (63 cents),” his freshly coiffed wife said. “Do you think we can afford a third?”

This hardly approaches the price paid by 9,000 men buried at Omaha Beach, whose sacrifice helped defeat what French President Nicolas Sarkozy called “one of worst barbarisms of all times.” (Click here to read about what U.S. President Barack Obama said on Saturday, which was the 65th anniversary of D-Day.)

And in most of Europe, social safety nets and reserves of wealth still keep food on most people’s plates.

But still.

Edwin Ferbach, 44, runs a fruit stand near Draguignan, a little Provence city, and works for Feeling Transport to deliver stuff that people buy online. Both businesses are suffering.

A worker these days might take home $1,700 a month and pay $1,000 in rent, he said. That limits options.

“Go to the St. Tropez market when it closes and watch people paw in the garbage for vegetables they can’t afford to buy,” Ferbach told me. Actually, any market will do.

Clearly, it is not just France. In most industrialized countries, as in the poorer ones, a gap is widening between those who have and those who haven’t got a chance.

For “Out of Poverty,” the latest issue of dispatches quarterly, I probed the slums of Calcutta and New Delhi. But I found a different sort of desperation in Youngstown, Ohio.

Steel plants closed in the 1970s and secure jobs suddenly vanished, as is happening in so many places today. If you are not born into poverty, it takes some getting used to.