The Role of Mayor in France
For the typical French person, the two most important and recognizable politicians in their lives are 1) the President and 2) their mayor. While France is an extremely centralized country, it’s the local mayor that can make or break daily life for you.
Town Hall in Le Havre, France
In 2020 there were 34,888 mayors in France! So how does one become mayor and what exactly do they do? I’ve done some research and interviewed a former mayor about her experience.
To be elected mayor you have to be over 18 years old, a resident of the commune and have French nationality. To be on the city council you don’t have to have to be French but do have to have the nationality of an EU country.
Besides age and nationality, there are no restrictions on degrees, skills, experience or qualifications.
A picture I took of a wedding in Saint-Cloud, France
Mayors (le maire) are addressed as Monsieur le maire (male) or Madame le maire (female). The French, like many other European countries, put a strong emphasis on titles as a form of respect and social distance.
One thing I’m impressed with is the unwavering continuation of certain traditions and symbols. Each town hall (Mairie) in France is required to have certain symbols of the republic. First is the Flag, the famous bleu, blanc, rouge.
Second, each Mairie is required to have a bust of the Marianne. The Marianne is an image of a woman wearing a Phrygian cap, she represents the French Republic and its values contained in the motto: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". It is an important republican symbol and an icon of freedom and democracy. You may have seen her in the famous painting Liberty Leading the People (La Liberté guidant le people by Eugène Delacroix commemorating the July Revolution of 1830, which toppled King Charles X of France.
The Phrygian cap derives its symbolism of freedom from its resemblance to the pileus (hat in Latin) which the freed slaves of the Roman Empire wore, representing their liberation. In the United States, it was a symbol of freedom during the Revolutionary War. It is still present on the New York State flag. Who knew, huh?
The Marianne’s profile appears on official government documents, stamps, and French coins.
Bust located at the town hall in Romainville, France
There is always a photo of the current president. There was a big joke with Francois Hollande’s official photo because the French flag was turned on it’s side and was pretty much the Dutch flag (um, Holland).
Portrait officiel de François Hollande
© DILA-La Documentation française. Photo Raymond Depardon
Lastly and most importantly in my view is the devise. Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité These three words are so important to France that they are written on the facades of every single town hall and school in the whole country
Avignon, France
While the electoral college in the United States seems strange, for me the election of mayors in France is also a little different. When you vote for the mayor, you are in fact voting for a “list”, a group of people. It is the “list” that wins who becomes the majority of the city council and then the city council elects the mayor by secret ballot during the first city council meeting which must be held between the Friday and Sunday of the election. This is my favorite part: if no candidate has obtained an absolute majority after two ballots, the election takes place in the third round by a relative majority. In the event of a tie, the oldest is declared elected!
The term of office of the mayor is six years and they can be reelected indefinitely.
Town hall written in French and in Breton in Saint-Pabu, France
The mayor has his/her own mandate: they can resign freely and be replaced in the event of death, or dismissal from office by court order or decision of the city council, without calling new municipal elections. In our tiny Breton village where we vacation, the mayor (who married us) is also a school teacher. He ended up getting an assignment to teach French at a school in Louisiana so he moved there with his family. There was no new election, the city council just nominated another council member to replace him.
Most mayors in France have another day job because the pay is hardly ever enough to live on and support a family. Their salaries are based on how many residents are in their village/city. For example, in 2022 mayors in villages with less than 500 people earn 991 euros per month. If your town has over 100,000 residents it's 5,600 euros per month. The mayor of Paris earns 6,500 euros per month, way less than the mayor of London who earns over 12,000 euros a month!
French mayors have an important role because they perform a dual function, being both an agent of la France and an agent of the municipality as a local authority. They carry out the deliberations of the city council, which they chair and whose agenda they set, but also have significant powers of their own, in terms of town planning, municipal police (public order) and town hall staffing.
Look how cute the town hall is in La Moule, Guadeloupe! (a French department)
The town hall or Mairie is where you go for the majority of civil matters, including registering births (within three days- the dads get sent there with paperwork from the hospital) and deaths (within 24 hours) and carrying out the civil part of a marriage. It’s also where you register children for the local public primary school.
Many mairies also handle the administration of identity cards and passport renewals but that has changed a little recently because all our passports are biometric and not every Maire has the capability.
All planning permission, parking permits and all those yucky disagreements between neighbors are handled by the Mairie.
I had the opportunity to sit with Nadine Bunel the former mayor of Anctoville-sur-Boscq, a teeny tiny village in Normandy not too far from Mont St. Michel. Nadine was the mayor for 12 years from 2008 to 2020.
I was really interested to hear about her challenges because Nadine was a female mayor, originally from Bretagne (ah oui- the Normans and the Bretons don’t always get along) and all the past mayors and city council members were farmers or owners of large plots of agricultural land. Nadine definitely had her fair share of push back but she said she never reacted to any insults and never took anything personally.
Mayor Bunel in the middle surrounded by her city council
One of her favorite parts of the job was creating studies for urban renewal projects. When she took the job in 2008, she and her team made it their objective to update their village’s PLU (Local Urban Plan). The main projects of the PLU were the reception of a new population, and more particularly young working people, to reverse the trend of the decline of the village population, by providing an area for new construction. Promoting social and generational diversity by offering a diversified range of housing was also important. Other additions to the PLU were the preservation of the natural (in particular- wetlands) and agricultural environment of the village. She worked on adapting and securing their roads to the different modes of transportation and traffic and in particular promoting shared modes of transportation. Rethinking public spaces in the town center (creation of a playground, for example, and development of a public space for local events) and developing hiking trails were also goals.
When asked what makes a good mayor, immediately Madame Bunel said patience. Not just in dealing with the daily squabbles of village life but patience in seeing your projects come to fruition. The changes to a PLU can take years and years.
Mayors in France, of even the smallest hamlets, play a national role because they help decide who the presidential candidates will be. As I wrote in an earlier article, mayors each have one signature to give to potential presidential candidates. Candidates need to have 500 signatures from mayors to be allowed to run. In this last election there were 12 candidates that made the cut. I was curious about this process but surprisingly Nadine and her village never gave their signature to any candidate in the 2 presidential elections that happened during her 12 years of service. She did not give a signature because she was elected by her ”list” and that list is free from political party affiliations. In her city council there were people on the right, left and in the middle so there was no clear candidate that they would support. Obviously, many villages around the country must do the same thing because there are almost 35,000 villages and only 12 candidates got 500 signatures.
When the burdens of the presidency seem unusually heavy, I always remind myself it could be worse. I could be a mayor.
Lyndon B. Johnson
I really like this quote from US President Lyndon Johnson. Being mayor is one of the hardest jobs in France. You are on call 24/7 and if you are the mayor in a small village you can imagine every trip to the bakery, after-school pickup or Sunday afternoon walk turns into an appointment with someone who has an issue.
One of Nadine’s (Madame le Maire’s) funniest moments was a call at 4 am waking her up to say that some cows from a village farm got out and were blocking the expressway. She had to act fast because in a couple of hours rush hour traffic would arrive and it could be a disaster. She got out of bed and put on her raincoat, big boots and helped lead the stray cows to a safe pasture so traffic could resume.
Paris town hall
All in a day’s work when you are the mayor.
