Whenever I collect English-speaking visitors from Toulon airport, they tend to be subdued in the first part of the journey by the spectacular scenery they are passing through. Later, though, they generally perk up at a roundabout where a sign indicates a turning towards an école bilingue. They invariably assume this to indicate a Franco-English school. Not so: the school in question, a primary school, teaches all subjects in both French and Provençal.

Many people, French as well as foreigners, regard it as eccentric that efforts are still made to preserve a language that nobody any longer learns from birth. Similar efforts are made in other parts of France to retain other variants of the ancient Langue d’Oc, the Basque tongue and Breton. They are encouraged to do so by an EU ruling in their favour, but with scant help from the national government.

Apart from the school I mentioned, Provençal is normally taught only in local specialised classes. I believe that there are studies in it at university level, but here only as a means to read the works of such as Frédéric Mistral, the Nobel literature laureate who was honoured expressly for his work in preserving the language. The analogy is with Old English, taught in British universities as an entrée to the works of Chaucer and his contemporaries.

All this raises the question of why we, or some of us, are so passionate to preserve relics of the past – the more so, it seems, when they are on the point of disappearance. Concern for one’s heritage – or for threatened species or unique areas – is understandable, but are there no limits to the urge to preserve?

A British friend of mine founded a body called the Ephemera Society, dedicated to preserving precisely those things that were not designed to be kept. They kept clear of things to which other groups were devoted, such as matchboxes, stamps and the like, However, they did feel it desirable to conserve such things as old toll notices, tickets for buses, trams, theatres and cinemas, and a host of public notices, playbills and posters. This, it always struck me, was the ultimate in preservation, where the mere fact that the items concerned were intended to be discarded was seen as a justification to retain them.

A peculiar French variant of this is the extent to which defunct currencies are cherished here. When decimalisation swept away British half-crowns and shillings, it caused little disturbance. Even places like the bar at Islington’s King’s Head theatre-pub, which kept their pricing in the old money, did so in easily translatable amounts, and this was seen as either a harmless eccentricity or a gimmick.

In contrast, for decades after the ancient franc was devalued, its usage persisted in odd ways. Marketers promoting their wares with prize competitions would offer a million francs, noted in small print as a million old francs. Years later, the owners of a house we were looking at, seeing us blench at the price, hurriedly said that that was, of course, in ancient francs. More recently, a friend was quoted a high price for some work and, when he said that was unaffordable, was offered the option of a much lower one in cash. Illegal, of course, but it does happen – all the time. When he came to pay, he was called back to be told he had paid far too much. ‘I always quote in francs,’ his supplier laughed, even though the euro had been France’s currency for some years.

Preservation and conservation today seem to have a higher profile than ever before. Historic monuments are a case in point. In Britain, they are largely in the hands of the National Trust, but churches and other religious buildings are generally left to the care of the faiths they serve – hence the ubiquitous appeals for funds to prop up tottering spires. In secular France, oddly enough, even church and cathedral preservation is regarded as a matter for the state. At least that used to be so: now, as part of its continuing process of devolution, the state is passing the heritage buck to the regions and departments – and, typically, devolving the responsibility without the equivalent funding.

When you think about it, it seems quite extraordinary that, at a time when hands are constantly wrung over the lack of interest shown by the younger generation in even current affairs, as witness low electoral turn-outs, so much effort is devoted to preservation of the past. Will they thank us for diverting money that might be spent on improving the lot of people in the banlieus and inner-city areas to such purposes, one may ask?

Perhaps the answer lies in part in the fact that Europeans, finding their centuries-old histories and experience disregarded by the dominant states of the modern world, take comfort in the physical continuity of emblems of their once illustrious past. The once great empires of Greece, Rome, Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands and Great Britain may have passed away, but evidence of their prowess remains.

Certainly, the jours de patrimoine in France and similar events elsewhere in Europe attract growing crowds every year and these include the young. It is also notable that visitors from the New World flock in greater numbers to the Louvre and Versailles, to the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey, than to Disneyland. Disneyland, too, in its own peculiar way, offers a form of history, with its sanitised castles and pirates.

When it comes to the point, does it matter that some people want to keep the flag of the Provençal language flying, against the odds? If it does to them, the answer has to be yes, even if it matters not a jot to anyone else. In the same way, the preservation of old traditions, ancient buildings and other aspects of heritage will continue to be important until future generations decide that it is not.. Even a seemingly careless generation will ultimately mature to appreciate their position in a long-standing local, regional, national or continental identity, and we owe it to them to permit then to do so.

Clearly a balance must be struck between the need to resolve present problems and the cause of preservation. I am not sure that the balance has not shifted too far in favour of the past. Just as no society can afford to abandon its heritage, one that clings to its past to the detriment of its present-day citizens may be doomed to decadence and decline.

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This article first appeared in the April 2007 issue of The Connexion, the newspaper for English-speakers in France. To order a free trial copy of The Connexion click here.