SAINT - SEINE - SUR - VINGEANNE, France — As mayor of this postage - stamp village deep in Burgundy, France, Louis Gentilhomme presided over a small but seemingly idyllic patch. The loudest noise on a recent day was the autumn breeze whistling in the trees. There were a few streets of stone houses, a 13th - century church, one baker and not much else.
So it may come as a surprise that late last year, Mr. Gentilhomme wrote a letter to President Emmanuel Macron telling him that the stress was too much and that he was quitting. He could not stand watching his village of 400 wither anymore.
“After 30 years, I’ve had enough, ” wrote Mr. Gentilhomme, a vigorous 77 - year - old former French Navy SEAL diver. “The compromises, the unkept promises and the state’s withdrawal have used me up, morally and physically. ’’
His letter speaks to a broader anxiety in France’s heartland. This year, like him, more than 150 of the country’s mayors, mostly rural, have quit. The number of mayors quitting their posts may be at an all - time high, up anywhere from 32 percent to 50 percent over the previous electoral cycle, according to the French news media.
The resignations provide an echo of the larger clash taking place in France today between Mr. Macron’s drive to shake up the country’s sometimes archaic institutions, untouched for centuries, and a way of life that may no longer be sustainable.
[Read about Mr. Macron warning this past week of the dangers of nationalism as he hosted world leaders to commemorate the end of World War I 100 years ago on Sunday. ]
It is in villages where the president’s ambition to pare back the government most squarely runs up against French traditions and expectations — one of which is that the state provides services and should make its authority felt in even the quietest corners.
That has long been the role of the village mayor, as much a French specialty as the 17th - century castle that graces Mr. Gentilhomme’s tiny territory, and almost as anachronistic.
Mayors have been a mainstay of French life since the revolutionaries of 1789 decreed that wherever a church steeple arises — even if only a few houses are clustered around it — there should be a mayor.
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It has remained this way ever since. No country on the Continent surpasses France’s 35, 502 mayors, who make up 40 percent of all the mayors in the European Union. Twenty thousand of these towns have fewer than 500 inhabitants.
But even before Mr. Macron came to office in May 2017, France was confronting the question of whether it could still afford so many little fiefs, which were already straining under cost cutting and administrative “regroupings. ”
Under a 2015 law, small towns were ordered to combine into administrative units of at least 15, 000 people, where 5, 000 had been the previous benchmark. Real power — to handle economic development, to manage water, even to raise taxes — passed to the new clusters.
Now the young president has accelerated that drive toward even more administrative efficiency.
“In the era of the internet, fast transport and cuts in local funding, it makes sense for these towns to group themselves together to confront these new challenges, ” said Jean - René Cazeneuve, a Macron deputy in the French Parliament who is studying why so many mayors are resigning.
“It’s Emmanuel Macron who wants to speed things up, who wants to reform, ” Mr. Cazeneuve said. “And that could make local officials feel uneasy about their future. ”
No doubt it has. More mayors are shedding the sash that denotes their authority, as the appeal of presiding over the tricolor flag that flutters outside every mairie, or town hall, is not what it used to be.
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