Why fear of violent crime has gripped my expat idyll in France
5 min read
It’s close to nightfall in Lamagdelaine, a village in rural France. Nearby, the Lot River proceeds at a stately pace past vineyards, limestone houses and an ancient parish church. On the hillside, the sinking autumn sun catches the foliage on the vines, making them glow as if lit from within.
This bucolic, wine-producing corner of southwest France has long attracted British expats. It certainly looks like a vision of tranquillity — but appearances can be deceptive. Lately, residents here have not been sleeping well at night.
The trouble started a few months ago when the village bar was robbed at knifepoint. Since then, there has been a spate of burglaries, some occurring while the victims were at home and asleep. The inhabitants, many of whom are elderly, are seriously rattled. “People are scared,” one homeowner recently told the local press, reporting that some have spoken about “going to bed with weapons under their pillows”. He is worried, he says, about the risk of “an accident of self-defence”.
In response to the mounting fear, the mayor has called a public meeting between the villagers and the police force. In the community hall, a uniformed gendarme addresses an uneasy audience, warning them that the innocent days of blithely leaving the back door unlocked are over. “We can no longer say that in the Lot, or other rural departments, we’re safe, burglaries don’t happen here,” he says.
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A few years ago, I moved to a provincial town in southwest France in a department neighbouring the Lot. I was immediately charmed by how serene and safe life felt compared to the capital cities in which I’d previously lived.
For generations, “la France profonde” has existed in the collective imagination of French citizens as the repository of a romanticised sense of nationhood, a quasi-mythical place defined by terroir, tradition and connection to the land, celebrated by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the “most peaceful, the most natural, and the most attractive to the uncorrupted heart”.
But recently, locals in this region fear the uncorrupted heart of rural life is endangered. National press regularly carry reports of an “alarming surge” of drug-related violence, spreading from the cities into the countryside. Gun crime and drug gangs are relatively new arrivals in my adopted home town, but on five occasions this year alone, the peace in one neighbourhood has been shattered by rounds fired from an automatic weapon.
“It’s not like it used to be,” complains a woman I start chatting to in the dentist’s waiting room. Just last week, she adds, an armed robbery took place at the tabac around the corner from where we are sitting. There are parts of the tiny, medieval town centre, much of which is a Unesco world heritage site, where she will no longer walk alone at night — “Un coupe-gorge,” she mutters when I ask why. The term means “no-go area”, but the literal translation is “cut throat”. It’s a disquieting new addition to my growing French vocabulary.
Is this sense of fear and loathing grounded in reality? Or just paranoia? That is a hard question to answer. In national media, the debate around crime, especially in rural areas, is deeply politicised. A widespread perception among the French that public safety is in decline has become a cause célèbre for the anti-immigration right, while the left blame the problem on growing wealth inequality and popular immiseration. Some commentators suggest that talk of spiralling lawlessness is greatly exaggerated, pointing to the fact that drug-trafficking and burglaries are on the rise, but crime rates overall remain relatively stable.
Of the types of crime which have increased in recent years, “home-jacking” is among the most feared. The anglicised term is used in France to describe violent armed robbery carried out while victims are in their home. A number of very high-profile incidents have drawn intense public interest in recent years, including a Paris attack in 2016 during which Kim Kardashian was bound, gagged and robbed at gunpoint in her hotel by an organised gang. The phenomenon, previously associated with the big cities and their peripheries, has started to extend into rural regions.
In some cases, British expats and tourists have become unwitting victims, adding to the annual tally of violence in France. Last month a report in The Times detailed a horrific home-jacking incident endured by Bernard Hayes and Celia Bridges, a retired British couple living in Lot et Garonne. Their peaceful lifestyle came to an abrupt end in 2022 when three men wearing balaclavas and carrying knives broke into their house, beat them viciously and made off with jewels and cash. Soon after, they abandoned their provincial dream and went back to the UK. In late September they returned to see their attackers convicted in a French court.
There’s been no such resolution, however, for the husband and children of 65-year-old Karen Carter, a British-South African pensioner who lived in a quaint hamlet in the Dordogne. Carter was found collapsed in her driveway with multiple stab wounds in April. Her killer is still at large.
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Back in the Lot, it’s now dark outside the community hall. The tolling church bells mark the hour, as they have done for centuries gone by. Inside, the gendarme exhorts villagers to equip themselves with high-quality doors, locks with chains and spy holes, movement-detection lighting and alarm systems as a defence against “highly organised” burglary gangs now operating in the area.
His brigade is busier than ever. The trope of the dozy rural policeman, growing paunchy from inactivity, is evidently out of date. Large investigations targeting drug dealers and covering multiple departments have become common. Arrests for driving under the influence of cocaine used to be virtually unheard of here; now, he and his team are averaging “one a week”.
One man in the audience, dismayed by what he considers a toothless response from the authorities to the burglaries, stands up to address the room. He and a few other locals are ready to form a citizens’ police, he says, carrying out “nightly patrols” and “stakeouts” of the area. His resolve, animated by civic-mindedness and militant zeal in equal measure, strikes the outside observer as terribly French. Ordinary folk, he reminds frightened members of his community in a booming voice, are legally entitled to carry out a citizen’s arrest on reasonable suspicion of foul play.
His neighbours, for the most part, are not so daring. As the evening ends, it is agreed by committee that the village will launch a neighbourhood watch scheme, overseen and managed by law enforcement. There is an app to download; the older people in the crowd obediently take out their spectacles and their phones. But as they peel off into the night and head for home, plans for reinforced security taking shape in their heads, it seems like rather scant consolation for what they have lost.
