French Flanders vs Wallonia

I already mentioned Bienvenue Chez Les Ch'tis, the French comedy about a guy from the provence who is transferred to the north of France and has some trouble 'adjusting'. It's a real blockbuster in France and French Speaking Belgium (Brussels and Wallonia), and from what I hear also in Canada. I thought the humor was pretty mediocre, but the movie did entertain me and it showed me an area of France, which is so close by, but which is as unknown to me as Wallonia: it's French Flanders!

Until the French revolution French Flanders was just part of the county of Flanders. After that it became French territory and when Belgium was created in 1830/1831 the French didn't want to give it back. The most important city of French Flanders is Lille, which we call Rijsel. The name may conjure up the image of a big, grey, ugly, boring industrial town. But the truth is that the city centre is actually quite charming: with lots of bars and Renaissance buildings and great shopping area's. Napoleon thought Rijsel (ter IJsel - on the island) sounded un-French, so he imposed the frenchified name Lille (L'isle - the island). And amazingly enough people from Antwerp or The Netherlands will already refer to the city as Lille and not Rijsel. Change that please! We don't call Prague Praha either. Other cities in the area also lost their original Flemish name, but most villages however kept their nomination. Hondschoote, Steenvoorde, Bollezeele, Volckerinkchove... Written in a 17th century Dutch!

The town that the main character of the movie is transferred to is Bergues, 45 minutes north of Lille/Rijsel, closer to the harbor of Dunkerque (Duinkerke in Dutch). That's the real French Flanders. The area around Lille/Rijsel is so frenchified that you can only notice its Flemish past by the dishes they serve in the restaurants, the architecture of the buildings, the many Flemish shoppers and the amount of students at the faculty of Germanic Languages that chose to learn Dutch. The area around Bergues however, is more Flemish. There's a joke in the movie were a character starts speaking the dialect of the north (the Ch'ti) and is misunderstood by the guy from the south and then continues talking in Flemish, which - as he explains - is the language of the older generation. And that's apparently still true. Most 75 y olds in that area can still speak (West-)Flemish. I've also recently seen a documentary on television on how there's a resurrection of Flemish in the north and that children in elementary school actually start learning to count and chitchat in Flemish. The cool thing about that is that the children learn West-Flemish (the dialect I speak) and not standard Dutch!

Now French Flanders has nothing to do with Wallonia. Wallonia is the south of Belgium. Most of Wallonia never belonged to the county of Flanders. It belonged to the duchy of Brabant, the county of Hainaut, the duchy of Luxemburg, the county of Namur, etc... Hell, even Antwerp and Brussels never belonged to the county of Flanders. But French Flanders did. And for that they can still call themselves La Flandre.

When I introduce myself in France as 'from Flanders', most people will automatically assume I'm from the area around Dunkerque. They will not think I'm from the Dutch speaking part of Belgium. French media somehow don't really refer to our region as Flanders, since they only use that word to refer to their most northern province. They just refer to us as Belgians. The majority of the French don't even know that the majority of the Belgians speak Dutch, since the only Belgians they ever hear of are French speaking and their media and schoolbooks just ignore the other 60 percent.

I've interacted with thousands more people from French Flanders than with people from Wallonia. They were the customers of my parents shop. They are the ones I meet when I bike in France or when I shop in Lille/Rijsel. But I really don't know them that well either. I just notice that I regard them differently even though some people (especially the French) think that they are the same. They are not. They may say that they are from La Flandre, but they feel French. They may speak some Flemish, but they feel French. So far, I still have to find one Walloon who feels French.