Behind The Shuttered Facades

One of the things that strikes us time and again driving through France, is that provincial villages often appear deserted, the façades all shuttered, and we have often wondered where all the people have gone. We were particularly struck recently by this in the area around Bray sur Seine where the villages have not been restored as they would have been in the South or Burgundy. We were transported back to the 1940s by the street scene as if wandering through a film set. The unrestored façades in this area are fantastic archives of bygone advertising, and vignettes of a lost world, an old France that lives in our collective black and white imagination.