France is a mosaic of "pays": over the last 230 years, central planners have made every effort to standardise a country whose diversity is one of its greatest assets. In its long history, France as always been a collection of people. Since time immemorial, its inhabitants identified themselves by their "pays", the place from which most of them rarely left.
In its great essay "The Discovery of France", British writer Graham Robb perfectly describes it:
"The basic division was the pagus, the area controlled by a tribe. Two thousand years after the conquest of Gaul, the pays (pronounced pay-ee) was still a recognizable reality. The word pays – usually translated as 'country' – referred, not to the abstract nation, but to the tangible, ancestral region that people thought of as their home. A pays was the area in which everything was familiar: the sound of the human voice, the orchestra of birds and insects, the choreography of winds and the mysterious configurations of trees, rocks and magic wells."
Despite this systematic effort to destroy territorial memory, people continue to refer to their "pays" in everyday language, as it makes much more sense than using soulless administrative divisions.
