LA CHAPELLE-EN-JUGER, FRANCE (NYTIMES) – The lights inside the village bakery used to come on before dawn, an hour or so before the smell of baking bread would waft into neighbours’ homes.

The storefront door would soon be heard, opening and closing, the rhythm as predictable as the life stirring awake across the French countryside. But everything changes.

“Without bread, there is no more life,” said Mr Gerard Vigot, standing in his driveway across the street from the now shuttered bakery. “This is a dead village.”

Two years ago, the 650 residents of La Chapelle-en-Juger lost their bakery, the last local business where they could meet one another, chitchat and gossip while waiting in line for their daily baguette or their weekend eclairs.

For the community, the closing of the bakery was “un drame”, as one newspaper put it, or a tragedy, one that is being repeated in countless French villages.

Young people are no longer drawn to the long hours of the traditional bakers who live above their store. Shopping malls have taken root on the periphery of rural areas, drawing in people who are content to buy at supermarkets or chains. Customers, especially the young, are not eating as much bread.

Travelling in rural France these days means spotting closed bakeries, the faded paint on old windows and doors giving an indication of when the lights went out. It means encountering people mentioning with visible relief that their village still has one.

Like in La Chapelle-en-Juger, the bakery is very often the one business that clings on after the disappearance of the butcher shop, the grocer or cafe.

Given the centrality of bread in France, and its links to its religious practices and political history, the vanishing of traditional bakeries has also come to symbolise the waning of the country’s rich village life – one with the kinds of characters and stories that yielded the material for novels like Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”, set in a fictional village in Normandy, where La Chapelle-en-Juger is.

La Chapelle-en-Juger lies in the coastal department of Manche, where American flags can often be seen flying to commemorate the Allied invasion of World War Two. Since the start of the decade, about 50 traditional bakeries have closed in Manche, leaving about 370, and 20 more are expected to disappear in the next year, according to the Chamber of Trades and Crafts in the department.

“An unprecedented wave of bakery closures,” one local newspaper said with alarm. But a quick scan of the headlines in local newspapers reveals similar “tragedies” in many corners. Vending machines have sometimes popped up in towns where bakeries have closed.

In Gratot in north-western France, a red machine sat in a quiet carpark on a recent morning. A few miles away, on the side of a busy country road in La Vendelée, Mr Vincent Lenoir’s daughter hopped out of their minivan to get a pre-made baguette from a machine that resembled a telephone booth.

“It’s the best,” Mr Lenoir said of the bread’s taste. But the vanishing bakeries, he added, are “killing our villages”. Without a bakery, La Chapelle-en-Juger was turning into a lifeless bedroom town, some residents said.

“Our little village is dying,” said Ms Helene Collard, whose family has lived in the village for four generations. “We’re no longer in contact with the other inhabitants. It was the only meeting point left.”

Between 30 and 40 residents of La Chapelle-en-Juger now buy their bread at Jeannot and Valerie Culeron’s bakery in Marigny-le-Lozon. Despite the positive effects on his business, Mr Culeron, 48, who began his career as an apprentice at age 15, worries about the overall trends.

“When villages lose their bakery, they cry, ‘What a tragedy!'” Mr Culeron said. “But they have to be willing to walk the talk.”

Many now go to their local bakery only on weekends, he said, while they used to shop every day. Customers were more loyal, he said, in part because bakers played an important role in celebrating major life events.

“We were there for baptisms, communions, weddings, and we made their yule logs,” Mr Culeron said.

When the couple who had owned the bakery for nearly two decades called it quits in late 2017, Ms Nelly Villedieu, the mayor since 2001, sprang into action.

In the country where bread shortages helped trigger a revolution, Ms Villedieu was aware of bread’s sensitivities: She herself had never purchased bread outside La Chapelle-en-Juger.

“Politically, it wasn’t possible,” she said.

A worker was hired, at 30 hours a week, to deliver bread to the village where it was sold between 8.30am and 12.30pm. The service was discontinued a year later because of the cost and criticism that the hours were inconvenient.

The municipality spent 130,000 euros (S$194, 722) to buy the building that had once housed the bakery. Now it is considering loans of as much as 40,000 euros for the purchase of a used oven and other baking equipment, Ms Villedieu said, as well as low rent.

Without public assistance, a bakery would not be viable in such a small village, the mayor said. But La Chapelle-en-Juger is still studying the feasibility of the project, conscious that many other villages had spent money to resurrect bakeries only to see them rapidly wither away.

“It’s a gamble for us,” Villedieu said. But it was a gamble that she felt she had to take. “In the French spirit, for a long time, we had to provide bread,” Ms Villedieu said of elected officials.

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