Announcer:

This could be any village in Spain, but it's not. It's Bayonne in southwest France and this is how the villagers have celebrated their annual festival for centuries. These are the Basque people who live in a country within a country. They want to be recognised as an exclusive region different from the rest of France and the central government's offer to Corsica has raised their hopes.

Agatha:

Everybody feels like it's a necessary here.

Reporter:

Do you think it will happen?

Agatha:

Why not?

Reporter:

It happened in Corsica.

Agatha:

Exactly.

Announcer:

And this could be any [Delegion] Island, but it's not. It's Lorient in northwest France where the Celtic tradition is an act of faith. Here they speak their own language, better understood by the Welsh than the French and for decades they too have been asking for special recognition within the uncompromising French system of government. They say their stark contrast to the rest of France underlines the need for change.

Hesgolda:

France's a point of view, it's a spiritual idea. It's not a country united.

Announcer:

And so cracks have started to appear in the French façade and the push for greater autonomy for the regions seems irreversible.

Dominique:

Somewhere we know that we will have to do it and we will have to start with the wrong case, Corsica, for the wrong reasons, but it will push us in the right direction.

Announcer:

The wrong reasons because peaceful persuasion didn't work for the Corsicans. This did. Hooded terrorism and an active violence a day, every day for 20 years. This is an every day occurrence on Corsica, whether in training or in reality. Special agents hunting down armed clandestine groups that have terrorised the island since 1976. A simple roadblock in search of weapons and explosives can be life threatening. Eight policemen have been shot dead by Nationalists in the past 20 years.

Police #1:

[foreign language] If the dog finds an explosive it will lay down next to the vehicle without it touching it due to the danger of the explosive.

Police #2:

[foreign language] Here in Corsica people do not have quite the same temperament or the same behaviour as on the continent. People here are Latin characters and hot blooded as we say here. They are quite a violent people.

Announcer:

For 20 years the central government fought against the Corsican Nationalists, politically and physically. [Eforall] lost his business when Special French agents came ashore one night and burned down his restaurant. An exercise that became known as Rainbow Warrior II. He was targeted merely on suspicion of collaborating with Corsican Nationalists.

Eforall:

[foreign language] I really hope Corsica will move on and that this did not happen for nothing.

Announcer:

The French government took the view that there was too much at stake nationwide to allow any one region to break away. International affairs expert, [Dominique Mosey] has studied the French character for decades and he says there is a popular view that the centralised system is the pillar of French society. Shake that and you threaten French identity.

Dominique:

I think the central point is really the French Revolution which still is present as the fundamental element to explain French character. At the time of the French Revolution, you had the [foreign language] which were for centralization were resisted the attempt by the [foreign language] to give power to the regions and the present Interior Minister of France, Jean Pierre Chevenement is a modern [foreign language], coming straight out of the French Revolution. "Don't touch my centralised state because if you do so you are unsettling, threatening my identity."

Announcer:

But the regions have their own identities. It just happens that on Corsica, it's an identity rooted in a history of violence. The festivals, the pageants celebrate a culture of conflict. These people we're constantly told live in clans, isolated from one another. There is no sense of harmony. The ratio of police to civilians is higher here than anywhere else in France and yet paradoxically it is a land of great beauty, spectacular coastline, impressive architecture. A paradise settled with one of the world's worst political cultures.

Speaker 9:

[foreign language] The image you use of beauty and blood is a terrible image. It is ever present in our minds, in everybody's minds obviously.

Announcer:

The violence is driven by a complex amalgam of extreme nationalists and the Mafia.

Dominique:

The power of Corsica is something very specific which is really about not the excess of the state, but the lack of the state who does not resist the power of local Mafias which are in fact reducing the role of the state.

Announcer:

So imagine the astonishment when the French government, tired of the bloodshed and conflict finally offered the Corsican Regional Assembly what it has long denied the other regions, limited autonomy. It would be a gradual transfer of power to the Assembly and the prospect of a constitutional amendment, giving Corsicans the right to adopt their own laws.

Dominique:

Public opinion is divided. Probably public opinion is more Jacobin than the elite because it is less aware of the realities of globalisation.

Announcer:

The Basque country of France in the southwest, just across the border from the Spanish basques whose push for independence has a much higher profile, largely because in the Spanish province, bombings and assassinations are routine. Here, the French basques have more modest ambitions, though they are nevertheless fiercely independent. This game of [collotte] is a measure of that independence. It is a major sport in the Basque region but nowhere else in France.

Athlete #1:

I really know when I was a little kid, I watch a game and I fell in love with it. I wanted to play it because I felt a basket we use, it's kind of magic that you can catch a ball that goes so fast and then you can throw it even faster.

Announcer:

It is a mediaeval form of squash. They say the fastest ball game in the world and the annual festival in Bayonne graphically demonstrates the community spirit of the Basque people. The whole town decks out in red and white and the central event is a reflection of their neighbours to the south. Hundreds of young men gather in the village square essentially to encourage cows to charge at them. Those who manage to get in the way are fated as heroes, but their approach to politics is far more peaceful.

Agatha:

We only want to do things democratically. In '81, 1981, Francois Mitterrand which was elected President with here at the south voices, the votes. He promised us department and since then nothing was done.

Announcer:

Agatha [Harrisby's] typical of the younger generation signing up to the various autonomous movements in the Basque region.

Agatha:

Actually what is proposed to Corsica by the French government is even further that what we can ask here. When we are asking for the department, Corsica is getting an autonomy, which is a step over the department.

Announcer:

But Agatha and her friends are more encouraged than angry, convinced that Corsica has finally broken the mould.

Dominique:

I do believe deeply that given the process of European unification, given the process of globalisation, France will have to adjust itself to a new relation with its regional.

Announcer:

For one week every year, Lorien in the northwest province of Brittany is the Celtic capital of the world. More than 400000 people visit the town at festival time and the visitors are not exclusively Celtic. They come from all over France.

Dominique:

When you see the great festival in Brittany, the bagpipes, the freedom, the liberty, the French like it, but up to a point. It is accepted as long as it is folklore. It is rejected if it is seen as threatening. The national identity of France.

Announcer:

[Hesgolda Afolga] met his wife at the festival nine years ago. He's now a festival coordinator and he says that the Breton determination to go there own way is partly driven by a passion to retain their own language. Something he and the rest of the Bretons stubbornly instil into their children.

Hesgolda:

They only speak Breton. In a few years they will start learning French, but at home I only speak Breton to them.

Announcer:

The fact that these people speak a Celtic language rather than French comes as no surprise when you visit the interior. It is a province of small hamlets, stone cottages and windswept moors. Everything about it is Celtic. Dominique Mosey says the French resist the use of any language other than French because they fear the ever increasing use of the English language.

Dominique:

If we are defending the French against the English on the outside, can we accept to be attacked from within by regional languages at the same time. This is anachronistic.

Announcer:

[Hesgali] has another theory as to why the central government is resisting local powers for Brittany.

Hesgolda:

France is afraid of Brittany which is a country which is size of an independent country.

Announcer:

Four million in fact against just 260000 in Corsica. Now here is one region in France that does have limited autonomy by default. The Elsas province was once part of Germany and it inherited Germany's federated system and the French have never been able to take it away from them. So for example, the run their own health services and they say they're the best in France, but journalist [Michelle Annul] says the region is anxious for even more control.

Speaker 11:

When you want to discuss about small things like water, practical things, you are obliged to go to Paris and ask Paris permission and the Germans don't have to ask Bonn or Berlin the permission and the Swedes don't have to ask the permission to Bjorn for their central power. They are authorised to sign and to negotiate their own things on a local basis.

Announcer:

This war memorial in a central park is a virtual monument to divided loyalties. A mother holding two boys looking in different directions.

Speaker 11:

It's a symbol of the younger generation who died under the French uniform and the one who died in the German uniform because during the Second World War the young generation were obliged to join the German army.

Reporter:

But they're holding hands.

Speaker 11:

Yeah, because they are brothers and they have the same mother but they have different story and they died on different fields but they were both Elsasian guys.

Announcer:

Here though the locals insist they want more local powers, but not autonomy.

Speaker 11:

Between the First World War and the Second World War there was a very, very strong autonomous movement in Elsas and that movement turned bad, joining the Nazi regime. Most of them turned to collaborate with the Nazi regime. So now, here when you say the word autonomy, everyone remind of sad period which is a very sad period for region. No they speak about regional power from local power more decentralizations. Any word you want except autonomy.

Announcer:

And in any case, this wealthy province, the least French of the French provinces long ago figured out there's another way, exploit the European union. Dubiousness not with Paris, but Brussels.

Speaker 11:

You can get money for your, even your village if you are small village and you have some problems and that your problems meets the criteria of some of the European problem or programme, you will get that money.

Announcer:

And that is the powerful second force at play against France's cherished second government and ultimately it could be a force even more powerful than the violence in Corsica.

Dominique:

Because the state, in the global age has become too small for the big problems and much too big for the small problems and in between you have the regions and you have the cities and this is the way of the future.

Announcer:

So the regions are raising their voices within a new framework of a hybrid Europe, a federated Europe, where the currency is no longer under the preserve of the individual countries. Tomorrow taxation and the economy. None of this is as dramatic as the French Revolution, but just the same, the French Neverlution is just as effectively stripping away more than 200 years of political tradition.