Stand-up comic Ian Moore was living the Platonic ideal of a European life – travelling from the pastoral calm of his family home in rural France to weekly gigs in Britain – when the Brexit bombshell landed. In London for the 2016 referendum, "I made the decision literally the day after the vote, on the train back," he recalled. "I had to apply for French citizenship as soon as I possibly could." Six years on, the comedian is keen for another sort of vote: his first French presidential election.
Projecting to the April 10 first round, Moore has it all sussed out. "I'm going to get dressed up," the bespectacled funnyman declared, already dapper in a porkpie hat and brown ascot, speaking from his Loire Valley home. "I'm going to carry the tricolore flag. I'm going to do this properly," the 51-year-old writer and performer laughed.
Sartorial choices aside, Moore won't be alone. In the years before the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, few British nationals bothered applying for citizenship in France. After all, as EU passport-holders, Britons living in France had enjoyed nearly all the same rights as their French fellows (with voting for president a notable exception). Only about 300 obtained French nationality each year between 2009 and 2015, according to the country's national statistics office, Insee.
But 2016 was a turning point. In the post-referendum fog of uncertainty over what would come next, Britons like Moore were moved to take action tout de suite. Applications rose sharply. The long process culminated for Moore in 2018, when he (and 3,267 of his fellow Britons) became French citizens – the light at the end of a tunnel of paperwork and patience. The following year, 4,088 more of Her Majesty's British subjects became French, some 13 times the pre-referendum figure.
When the dust finally settled, and after years of feeling like unwitting pawns in a geopolitical chess match, it would turn out that British nationals could continue living and working in France after January 1, 2021, with a residency permit. But by then, legions had made the leap to cross-Channel dual citizenship and "sung the Marseillaise in public", as Moore puts it, in a chorus with fellow inductees at naturalisation ceremonies across France.
'A no-brainer'
That solemn anthem singsong wasn't a foregone conclusion for Moore in 2005, when he first settled in France with his Franco-British wife Natalie and their son, Samuel, then 4. "The joke I always use on stage is that we moved to France because it was the closest place to London where we could afford to buy a house – which isn't that inaccurate!" he laughed. Moore's stand-up career and the rise of budget airlines meant they "didn't have to mortgage ourselves to the hilt in the UK to live somewhere we didn't necessarily want to live," he explained. "At that point, everything was possible. So we just sold up and came over," he said. "It just seemed like a no-brainer, the obvious thing to try and do."
Their home ever since has been bucolic central France, an area historically known as Le Berry, nearly at the geographic centre of mainland France. They put down roots between the towns of Chabris and Selles-sur-Cher, famed for its goat cheese, where Natalie's grandparents lived. A vast garden is planted with poppies, roses and climbing wisteria. Moore makes jams and chutneys.
The couple's two younger boys were born in France and attend middle- and high school in towns nearby. Samuel, now 21, is away at university in Brighton. All three sons are "completely bilingual without an accent", Moore marvelled, "very English in their outlook" but completely integrated as French; as is Natalie, an English teacher at the local middle school. As for Moore, when his comedy career permits it, he runs a three-room bed & breakfast out of the family home. It even has a petting zoo, with dogs, cats, hens, a horse and goats born nearby at the area's top tourist draw, the ZooParc de Beauval. "So, yeah, it's a bit crazy at times," he mused.
Fear, family and football
After the Brexit vote, Moore explained, "The biggest thing for me was fear. Knowing the personalities involved with Brexit and knowing what they promised and how incompatible it was with what they were trying to do, I suddenly thought there would come a point where Europeans, EU citizens in the UK, would start not being allowed to live there."
"It just left me feeling really vulnerable to that potential family separation, in a sort of reciprocal act by Europe, if Britain behaved that way," he added. "So, immediately, I had to become French. Just for peace of mind, initially."
>> Flashback: A guide to becoming a French citizen in a post-Brexit world
Like nothing before it, the June 23, 2016, referendum result "forced the issue", Moore explained. "It made me reassess why I was here, what I liked about being here, why I felt European more than any specific nationality. It made me look at all those reasons, just why we'd moved here in the first place," he said, citing the importance France places on work-life balance, good meals and family.
"I wanted to be French. I felt incredibly let down by what had happened in Britain. With Brexit, I felt that it was not a country that represented my values, whereas the country I was living in did," he said. "The values of Europe are essentially the values of the Declaration of the Rights of Man by the French after the Revolution. So it all made sense to become French, in so many ways." Of course, there was an if-you-can't-beat-'em-join-'em bonus the year Moore joined the squad as a full-fledged Frenchman: "We won the football World Cup so, you know, there were many gains," he laughed.
The painstaking citizenship process took two years. But the journey had moments of levity, too. "I do so much material about this on stage now because so much came out of it," Moore said. "It's such a process of banging your head against a brick wall." The comedian recalled law enforcement knocking at his Loire Valley door one evening for an impromptu identity check. "No one really understands what I do around here anyway, as a stand-up, since I disappear at the weekend. So armed police turning up at the door made me a kind of 'international man of mystery', which is great. It kind of oils the gears, socially," he laughed. "My kudos with my son's friends went up enormously!"
From armchair observer to rural voter
As a comic, Moore long exploited UK politics professionally, for its sheer comedy value. But now, with a second passport safely in pocket, he looks on aghast. "You just can't satirise this anymore," he said of the political spectacle north of the Channel. "Every time you think it can't sink any lower or become any more absurd, something else happens."
Not to suggest French politics is staid and businesslike. "I haven't decided yet whether Éric Zemmour is a serious candidate or a joke candidate, but he said (in February) that he models himself on Boris Johnson," Moore recounted, incredulous. "I just don't understand how that, to anybody with any level of sanity, is a vote-winner. Because I don't see Boris Johnson being hugely respected in France. So I don't see Zemmour's playbook at all. It's almost like he's gone out there to deliberately sabotage or become almost a caricature of a right-wing candidate and splitting the Marine Le Pen vote," Moore mused. "It all feels slightly odd."
Earning the right to vote for France's president naturally also deprives one of the relatively comfortable status of casual observer. It's different when you have to pick a side. Moore agreed. "It's sort of like being an armchair football fan and suddenly someone thrusts a scarf at you and you say, 'Well, I don't want to wear that one!'"
One thing is sure for the freshly minted Frenchman: he isn't likely to follow the crowd around his countryside home, where the xenophobic far-right has some neighbours' ear. "I know that the area around here tends to be populist. It tends to be Le Pen. But I'm the only immigrant, so I find that a bit insulting to be perfectly honest!" he quipped with a hearty laugh.
"My allegiance, for what it's worth, would be for Emmanuel Macron because I've seen how, rurally, things have transformed," Moore said. "I know he has had to work at that, and be pushed in that direction, because of the original Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vest) protests, but it has made a difference."
The Yellow Vest protests began in late 2018 as a motorists' revolt against rising petrol prices, with demonstrators donning the high-visibility gear French drivers are required to keep in their vehicles. They escalated from there into a full-blown, anti-government uprising that lasted months, a fiery reckoning on the daily struggles of a whole swath of society at the periphery of urban life.
Moore marvels at the changes for the better since in the little towns on his route to Vierzon, where he boards the train for Paris – villages forlorn just a few years ago, now breathing new life. "You'd drive through these small villages, about half a dozen, and they were dying. There were no shops. Some of them didn't have a boulangerie (bakery). There was nothing there, economically," he remarked. "But now, each small village has its own épicerie (grocer), its own boulangerie again. A couple of them have bars, a restaurant; a blues bar has opened up in another one. It's not massive, but there are signs that things are improving rurally," he said. "And that's because the economy's doing better than I think a lot of people will admit."
"I have seen concrete changes," Moore said. "For me, you've got to vote with what you see."
As for the bigger picture, he suggests that the incumbent Macron has more of the gravitas French voters like to see in their representative on the world stage than the far-right challengers display. "France, as much as any country, is so sensitive, I think, to how it's perceived around the world, in terms of its power and who wields it," Moore reflected.
'Monsieur So British'
Today, pressed closer to home by Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic and a longing to spend more time with his children than "with room service club sandwiches", the man his neighbours once nicknamed "Monsieur So British" is travelling less and writing more. "Death and Croissants", Moore's uproarious comic mystery novel debut about an expat Briton who runs a Loire Valley B&B when crime comes calling, was published last year. The sequel comes out in July.
With the Brexit-era bluster and fear behind him, it's all coming full circle for Moore – a sort of French dream come true. "When I first came to this area in 1990 with Natalie, we were 19 at the time. And I actually said on the first day we arrived – just the calmness about it – I said, 'All I want to do is retire here and write light undemanding comic novels. That's all I want to do,'" he recalled. "That's what I'm finally around to," he reflected. And well ahead of retirement age; booked for six novels, Moore has just finished writing the third.
Before Monsieur So British dusts off his Sunday best to cast a vote for France's next president in April, he is asked whether his new compatriots could ever betray him the way his native country did on that fateful day in 2016.
"If they voted in an extremist, if they left Europe, yeah. Zemmour, Le Pen, (far-leftist Jean-Luc) Mélenchon, any of that combination. I think it would feel like déjà vu, completely," Moore replied. "Because it's all populist ideals and saying that you're doing it for the working families and it's just not that: It's about lining pockets of other people. And I'd be really disappointed if the French fell for that."
"I don't know where I'd go next," the comic added, shuddering at the thought. "New Zealand looks attractive...."
This is the first installment in a FRANCE 24 series on first-time voters ahead of the 2022 French presidential election. Read all of our coverage here.
