Militant Equality

If I lived in Bayonne, I would probably hate Biarritz, too. It's full of rich people (even worse, rich tourists) and it's expensive and mostly lacks character. But it's also fairy-tale beautiful (think castles on hills) and there are beaches in little coves separated by cliffy rocks with holes in them (think Salvador Dalí), and even though I felt like I was supposed to, I couldn't quite dislike it. It's hard to argue with the beaches -- although the sand is rockier than you want it to be, which makes getting to the water a little bit of a death march.

Anyway, a few days is of course not enough time to figure out much about the French Basque country -- I don't even speak French. But I'm trying. People don't speak much Basque here -- less than on the Spanish side, it seems like. The French government never banned the Basque language, the way the Spanish government did under Franco, but it's also never supported it, the way the Spanish Basque country's regional government does now. So there aren't and never really have been (not in recent memory, anyway) many Basque schools in the French Basque country. And, for reasons I don't really understand, Basque-speaking French Basques don't necessarily teach their kids Basque. So, not that many people speak Basque. A few different Spanish Basques have told me that the Basque schools in the French Basque country are mostly supported by the Spanish Basque country -- because the Spanish Basque country controls its finances and the French Basque country doesn't -- but I haven't heard anything similar on this side of the border.

Because of internal migration, the Spanish Basque country has a lot of people who aren't Basque. I wondered if the same is true on the French side, but apparently the official answer is that no one knows: Everyone in France is French, period, and they don't keep statistics on race or ethnicity. It seems hard to believe that whether or not many people move from non-Basque France to Basque France is really not known, but I thought it was an interesting answer to the question regardless.