If you look out to sea from the Christian Dior museum on the cliffs above Granville, you see the grey outline of what appears to be another part of the Norman coast.
It is. But it isn’t.
The island of Jersey, straggling along the horizon to the north-west, is one of the last fragments of the ancient dukedom of Normandy. Over there, 40 miles away, the people don’t speak French. Over there, the people are wealthier (twice as wealthy on average) as the people over here.
The great fashion designer Christian Dior was born in the grey, unglamorous town of Granville in 1905. He rapidly moved to Paris. His birthplace now lives from tourism and, for the time being, from fishing. If the Norman cousins over the water (and their millionaire-migrant fellow citizens) have their way, the town’s fishing industry is doomed.
“They want to take our fishing but what does fishing mean to them?” asked Baptiste Guenon, 34, the skipper of Cap Lyhan, which was one of 100 Norman and Breton boats that protested inside and outside St Helier harbour last Thursday. “It means 5% of their economy. What…