Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves

I left the house this morning at 4 to drive my husband to the Toulouse airport. He was sad to leave, and I was sad to have him go. The full moon was so bright that I had to drive with the windshield visor down.

The freeway heading south towards the Mediterranean and Spain was surprisingly crowded for so early in the morning. In August, the French leave en masse for their vacations and most French people don’t have air-conditioned cars, so they drive during the cool nights when the days are hot. Listening to the radio, there were reports of huge traffic jams at five in the morning, all of them caused by car wrecks. At 4:30, we passed by a horrible wreck where a person traveling down the freeway plowed into the side of a car merging onto the freeway from a rest area. The car that was entering the freeway had rolled, several times I surmised, and resembled a piece of wadded up aluminum foil.

This year, the French government started cracking down hard on speeding and drunk driving. They stiffened up the fines and penalties considerably so that no one speeds on the freeway any more. You might see your odd German or Italian speeding by, but the French remarkably, and quickly, have given up the habit. The French still roar around the small roads and towns, but the 100-mph-plus norm on the freeway is a thing of the past. Our accountant told us that the drunk driving crackdown is working so well that two out of four nightclubs in our big town have closed down this year.

There is a cute billboard campaign running now, featuring the real bodies of models with their heads replaced by ping pong balls, trying to get people into the habit of having designated drivers. My husband was commenting on the fact that the government health warnings in France are much more frightening than the government warnings in the U.S. For instance, in the U.S., a pack of cigarettes carries the rather uncertain statement that “the Surgeon General has determined that smoking is hazardous to your health.” In France, the warning takes up a third of the front of the pack of cigarettes, is printed in a bold black font on a white background and bluntly states, “Smoking Kills.” I pointed out to my husband that since the French government provides the health care for its population, it has more of an incentive in making bold health warnings in an attempt to keep its citizenry healthy.

In 2001, when my smoking brother was visiting, he loved France because it gave people the freedom to smoke anywhere, and smokers weren’t ostracized. But I think that era will soon come to an end, just as the speeding and drunk driving eras are fading into history. However, we did hear on the radio that the government is discussing liberalizing the marijuana laws in France. They feel they have no choice but to do so because Holland and now Great Britain are allowing cannabis growing and smoking. Since we have so many British and Dutch people traveling back and forth, the French government doesn’t see the need to have a ban on marijuana any more.

Many Americans I know are under the mistaken impression that people in the U.S. are “freer” than any other people on earth. But I believe the French (and probably other Europeans) have much more personal freedom than we do in the U.S. Here in the provinces the police, or gendarmes, are virtually non-existent. I’ve pointed out to my son that the rural French seem police themselves. It’s very much like the American Old West. People aren’t running around with guns, but because everyone knows who everyone is, the villages and towns do a good job of policing themselves. I suppose the best analogy an American would understand would be to compare the area to the fictional portrayal of Mayberry RFD: there are law enforcement personnel, but they don’t do much, and the crimes aren’t hardcore. When you go to an all-night street party, the police aren’t there. The only time I see the police at public events here in the south is when they show up at the street markets in the morning to collect the vendor fees.

Before the crackdown on speeding, one rarely saw the police on the road. And still, compared to the ever present Highway Patrol in the U.S., the French police are infrequent sights on the freeway. The French police occasionally set up road blocks to check for insurance and registration, and sometimes administer breath analysis tests, but they don’t drive around patrolling towns and streets. Yet without this police presence, the French crime rate is low.

There is a lot of petty stealing. But your French thief is one who wants to avoid physical confrontation so it’s not likely he’ll enter your house while you are in it. The big crime in our area is car theft. Someone told me that last year there were over sixty cars stolen from our little town of 4,000 people. My manicurist told me that her car was stolen in town and the insurance company wouldn’t pay her for it because it was never found.

The townspeople all seem to blame the local gypsy camp for the car thefts, or for any missing item. But I would think that if they really thought the gypsies were stealing over sixty cars a year that they would put pressure on the local government to clear out the camp.

The grandson of the woman behind us is a well-known thief. However, none of the neighbors want to talk negatively about him. He was parking all of his stolen motorbikes on our property when we weren’t here. I keep asking the caretaker why these motorbikes were showing up, and he would just shrug and say they belonged to the grandson of Arlette. He didn’t give me an indication that they were the STOLEN motorbikes of the grandson of Arlette. One day the police showed up to retrieve one of the motorbikes and they spilled the beans. When I mentioned the police visit to some of my neighbors, they just shrugged. I guess I was simply the last to know about the thief living behind us.

It seems to me that the French don’t have a need to see people locked up in jail for crimes, and they don’t get indignant over crime. They just accept it as part of the burden of being the owner of something. For centuries they have lived a very simple life here in the countryside, and the general consensus seems to be that if you have enough money to buy something fancy enough to attract the attention of a thief, then you only have yourself to blame for not protecting it better when he steals it.

I was told about a carpenter, or plumber, whose van was stolen. He found out who took it, so he went to visit them at the Gypsy camp. Sure enough, there was his van parked outside the Gypsy’s camper. The carpenter/plumber told the Gypsy that he could keep the old truck if he would just let the carpenter/plumber take back his beloved tools. The Gypsy told him that it was too late; he had already sold all the tools, but that the carpenter/plumber was free to take the truck if he wanted.