THEY say that to make a fortune in France today, all you need is a lot of money. But if it’s still in francs in a biscuit tin under the floorboards, you had better move fast, because the Banque de France will no longer exchange them for euros after 17 February.

That’s the last of several deadlines aimed at weaning the nation’s 65 million inhabitants off their historical currency, and comes ten years after the switch to the euro that’s been blamed for so much inflation.

Well, everyone cashed in by rounding up their prices, didn’t they?  Well, no, actually, they didn’t. Or only a few did, anyway, and then only for the everyday, tuppenny-ha’penny purchases like newspapers and the baguette, which has indeed gone up from about one franc in 2002 to around one euro, or just over six francs today.

But even there, not all or even most of that is the fault of the new currency.
And despite some wailing and tearing of hair at the time over the loss of a national icon, most people today don’t even bother to convert back to francs any more. Nor do businesses have to employ armies of currency experts to juggle with the constantly shifting exchange rates for the peseta or lira, the drachma or zloty, and it’s made travelling in the Eurozone a lot simpler too,
of course.

Anyway, they stopped exchanging coins in 2005, with the older notes featuring lesser-known notables (to most Brits, anyway) like Pascal (500F), Montesquieu (200F) and Delacroix (100F) going west three or four years later. Now we are bidding adieu to Pierre and Marie Curie (500F), Gustave Eiffel (200F), Cézanne (100F), Saint-Exupéry (50F) and Debussy (20F).

But the Banque estimates that there are still about four billion francs tucked away in the nation’s bas de laine, or woollen stockings, France’s ‘biscuit tins’. Yup – that’s about 600 million euros or £480 million that will become just so much Monopoly money or, at best, collector’s items worth 10% to 20% more than face value, but only if they are new and in perfect condition.

And yet Lord knows there’s more than a few people here who could do with a euro or two. In the five-year presidential monarchy of Monsieur Sarkozy (aka President Bling Bling before he watered down his wine, as they say here), the poor have got poorer, and there are a lot more of them, and the rich have got richer, a lot richer, while the rest of us in the middle are getting squeezed ever tighter. He plans to raise VAT from 19.6% to 21.2%, too, if he’s re-elected in May.

The top footballers in France’s Premier League may be on 15,000 euros a day and Jacques Séguéla, a leading publicist and snake-oil spin doctor, might feel able to boast that if you haven’t got a Rolex by the time you’re 50, you’re a failure, but in 2009, 8.2 million people here lived below the poverty line of 954 euros a month, benefits and allowances included, compared to 7.8 million at the start of Sarko’s reign.

The face of poverty is also changing, and the winter soup kitchens and free-food distributors are seeing more and more single-parent families and long-term unemployed, particularly among the 18 to 25-year-olds and the over-50s.

Here in Brittany and Lower Normandy, we have also been hit, but less than most other regions because salaries in our essentially rural communities are lower than elsewhere to start with, and we traditionally have the fewest rich and the fewest poor, anyway.

Not everyone round here has escaped the present crisis unscathed, though. France is the adopted home of about 600,000 Portuguese people, and 50,000 of them live in the west, including Manuel Ferreira, who is furious.

He is president of Cap Ouest, which federates most of their local clubs and associations, and he’s hopping mad because the cash-strapped government back in Lisbon has just confirmed the closure of the Lusitanian’s vice-consulate down in Nantes as part of stringent cutbacks.

So now they’ll all have to go to the embassy in Paris for their passports and so on, and even to vote in national elections.

OK, he says, maybe the mission in Nantes was the smallest in France, but it was also the most efficient and financially the most viable. With only two secretarial staff and one diplomat, they still dealt with 6,200 compatriots a year at a cost of 30,000 euros, but generating receipts of 70,000 euros. No other Portuguese consulate here could beat that.

Crime in France is also up, but the Côtes d’Armor, which covers us Mastermen in Dinan and most of northern Brittany, is still very much a sleepy hollow where most of the statistics are actually down. Yes, police and gendarmes dealt with 18,739 incidents in 2011, which was a drop of nearly 3%.

We rank 40th out the 96 départements, or counties, for the number of inhabitants, but only 75th for crimes concerning property and 88th for physical attacks on people.

But the réputation de tranquillité is itself a significant cause of the relatively few problems that we do have, say the crime prevention specialists. People feel so safe that they often don’t take even the most elementary precautions.

Mind you, Brittany did make the national news rather than the parish-pump sports pages twice last week, and for all the wrong reasons. (Humphing over my shoulder, the Breton Mme Masstairmann has tetchily insisted that if the two incidents that follow did indeed attract so much attention, it was only because they were, by definition, absolutely unprecedented in these parts).

Anyway, the first concerned a junior league football match in Brest between Plourin-lès-Morlaix (no, I’d never even heard of the place, either) and the under-19s from the Post Office Sports and Social Club. So far so good, but 20 teenagers wearing balaclavas and wielding baseball bats, screwdrivers and tear gas turned up and set on the Plourin players, who fled to the changing room, but not before six of them had received injuries needing A&E treatment.
The police suspect a clash between rival gangs that had absolutely nothing to do with football or the two bemused clubs.

Meanwhile, rugby in Brittany is right up there with, well, British handball in terms of quality and prestige, and it’s a good spectator sport for our cardiacs, too, because the occasional mass brawl is often the liveliest part of generally rather humdrum encounters (the only lively part, in fact).

But the game between Bouguen and Brest Université Rugby Club (better known as BURC, perhaps?) smudged the chalky white touch-line between spectating and participating when, smack on the hour mark, Monsieur l’Arbitre had to order both teams back to the dressing rooms after several fans had rushed onto the pitch and waded into the flailing scrap as well.

Now, you might be feeling that, OK, you’d better just settle for a lazy little session of pastis and pétanque in the summer dust behind the Café des Sports next time you’re over, but be warned: the thunder rumbles even there. Yes, Monsieur Hyacinthe Richard (that really is the poor chap’s name, I’m afraid) is the self-proclaimed Mr Big of north Breton boules, but the Côtes d’Armor governing body kicked him out. Well, it’s bad enough being bullied, eh, but by some sort of lily, too? I mean, come on. So he set up a rival association and the Confédération des Jeux et Sports Traditionnels de Bretagne has just decided to give them official recognition and withdraw it from the other lot.

‘C’est une petite vengeance pour moi,’ he told the press, not ‘très fair-play’,
as they say here. Eh, oui! As I’ve had cause to mention in this column before, it’s ever so simple to have a complicated life in France, and ever so complicated if you want a simple one.

Kenavo!