Island off France fears an invasion

For decades this Atlantic island of whitewashed villages and healing salt air was a paradise that only the French, and a certain type of French at that, seemed to know about.

French guidebooks hardly mentioned this scrap of tranquillity off France’s west coast, as if part of a conspiracy to preserve the island’s endless supply of oysters fresh out of the beds and rose des dunes wine for the locals and for the chic Parisians who turned up on weekends to ride rusty bikes and dig for crabs.

The vacationers -- very BCBG, or bon chic bon genre, kind of French preppy -- blended easily with the fishermen at the street markets, and if a farmer had to sell off some land to pay taxes, invariably the new home that cropped up in the former potato field had green shutters, in keeping with the island’s style.

This is the kind of place where former French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin can play early morning tennis in an old Lacoste shirt and nobody bothers him and where French families keep a summer property for generations and where French writers retreat when they can’t finish a novel.

That’s what it’s been like here on the Ile de Re.

One late May morning 20 years ago, the ferry linking the island to the continent made its last journey and a new bridge was opened to traffic. Many say that 1.8-mile arc of concrete forever changed the way of life of the Retais, as the islanders are called.

At first it did for the better. It brought relief from hours of waiting for ferries and getting stranded after hours on either side, and while it also brought legions of campers and land speculators, the toll (now $25.44 round trip during high season) was enough of a disincentive to keep away, well, the riffraff and day-trippers, and to preserve paradise.

But this spring the islanders are fretting -- it’s all they can talk about! -- that in just a few years, passage across the bridge will be toll-free, when the loan for construction is paid off in 2012. They’re convinced it will bring an influx of crowds, especially from the middle-class towns on the other side of the bridge. And more campers. Ooh la la, not the campers!

Already the population swells to 200,000 from 17,000 during summer holidays, and the two main roads can’t handle the traffic. In May (a month during which French children rarely see a classroom) there were four-hour traffic jams that paralyzed the roads stretching along the 19-mile-long island.

“This has been a haven for my family and now, well, it’s becoming like St. Tropez,” sniffs Marcel Loupe, a retired bureaucrat from Paris who avoids the French Riviera at all costs because “Re is just more authentic.”

Loupe, 59, can describe in detail the island’s locales and their distinctive characters. (“Ars-en-Re is where Jospin goes -- very discreet and rich; St.-Martin-de-Re is the biggest and a little touristy but not so spoiled; and Trousse Chemise, at the end, ooh la la, it’s the beach from the movies!”)

Even in high season it’s not anything like the Hamptons on Memorial Day weekend, nor does it present the challenges of retreats such as Martha’s Vineyard, where the competition for a decent lobster roll is impossible in August.

Although the Ile de Re has a few too many fake Crocs and crepes for sale, it has yet to be infested with T-shirt and ice cream shops. You can still linger over langoustine and baby clams on a summer evening in a pristine town square and not go broke.

Probably the biggest boon to tourism was when three budget airlines opened routes between La Rochelle on the mainland and Britain and Ireland.

It now takes less time to get from London to the island than from Paris, even on the fast train.

“We call it the British invasion,” says Bernard Dorin, head of the venerable Friends of the Ile de Re association. “And we’re only half joking.”

His group and others are circulating a “save the island” petition, and local politicians are heatedly debating how to find a compromise to a toll-free bridge.

Mostly, they want the National Assembly, which makes such decisions, to maintain some sort of hefty summer tariff on the Pont de Re and for it to continue to include a tiny “eco” tax that finances the protection of the environment, including the salaries of two “eco-guards” who roam the cool pine woods and high-bluffed beaches on horseback.

“It’s a fragile territory,” says Patrice Raffarin, mayor of Rivedoux-Plage, the village closest to the bridge. “It can’t be overrun.”

Since the bridge opened, the number of vehicles making the crossing has doubled to 3 million a year, and every single one of them goes through Rivedoux-Plage -- and by Raffarin’s office window in Town Hall.

A couple of times this spring he tried to keep count, scratching a pencil mark for each car. But he gave up and pulled down the shade.

Still, Raffarin, a university professor, is trying to keep the debate aboveboard, so outsiders don’t get the idea that the Retais are snobbish and want to keep their neighbors from coming over in campers for a beach picnic on a Sunday. (Since 2004, the bridge has been free to the Retais, a point of resentment to neighbors across the bridge, who of course pay.)

Raffarin has proposed using funds generated by a post-2012 toll to develop a system of parking lots, buses and motor scooters. “Our motto needs to be ‘People, yes; cars, no,’ ” he said.

Concerns about the environment are usually the first line of defense of those insisting on traffic limits, but in this case they quite possibly hide a greater worry: the fear of real estate prices dropping if more -- and less desirable -- visitors flood in. An average house on the island now sells for about $755,000 and prices keep going up.

But the real estate boom has created disadvantages, insists Dorin, 72, who is a fifth-generation Retais.

“We are looked on as privileged people, but when our young want to buy a house here, they can’t even afford one anymore; they have to go live in La Rochelle, in the suburbs,” Dorin said.

He opposed building the bridge. He grew up here, he explains, and remembers a rustic life before there were cars on the island.

Tall and strapping, Dorin donned a French uniform for the filming of 1962’s “The Longest Day” when Darryl F. Zanuck was recruiting locals as extras.

Dorin has many memories, too, of his grandfather taking him fishing beyond the tidal flats on the northern tip of the island and the lessons he taught him about respecting the island’s gifts:

“If you lift a stone to find shrimp, you must put the stone back,” Dorin recalls. “The tourists don’t understand that. We must stop them.”

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geraldine.baum@latimes.com

Times staff writer Achrene Sicakyuz and special correspondent Rebecca Ruquist contributed to this report.