1 week ago
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Throughout Roger Thiberville’s long life, he never once visited the Normandy town that gave him his last name. Descended from a family of vineyard owners, he inherited property in Paris from his parents and worked as a meteorologist.
But when he died in August at the age of 91 leaving no descendants, the mayor of Thiberville (population 1,773) received a phone call. Thiberville the man had left Thiberville the town most of his estimated €10m fortune.
Guy Paris, the mayor of Thiberville, said astonished and delighted locals and officials were now considering how to spend the unexpected windfall, which is five times the municipality’s annual budget. “It’s an exceptional sum of money. Obviously the amount is beyond imagination,” Paris told the local radio station, France Bleu. “We don’t yet know what we will do with it.
“We’re not going to spend it all. We’re going to manage this dowry as we’ve always done with our municipal budget – with prudence and responsibility.”
The French commune is now looking to pay off a bank loan of more than €400,000 used to build a new primary school. Because the town is a public body it will not have to pay any inheritance tax.
Paris said it appeared Thiberville’s only link with the town was his name and that he understood the town’s benefactor had lived “humbly in Paris”, where he owned four apartments in the city’s south-eastern 15th arrondissement. Perhaps surprisingly, there are no known photographs of him. Thiberville’s only stated wish was for his ashes to be placed in a memorial in the commune’s cemetery.
“Monsieur Thiberville did not demand anything in return for his legacy, but we owe him at least that,” the mayor said.
Thiberville is an unremarkable town boasting a late-19th-century château and a former ribbon factory, but little else to mark it out from other Norman communes.
The nearest major attraction is the grand Basilica at Lisieux – 16km to the west – constructed in honour of Saint Thérèse and opened in the 1950s.
Paris said: “We have projects: a public garden with a play area, a boules ground with solar panels that will serve as shade, the renovation of the elementary school, a synthetic football pitch…”
While Thiberville celebrated its good fortune, the neighbouring villages of Le Planquay and La Chapelle-Hareng may be regretting a decision not to merge with the town in order to receive subsidies reserved for communes with more than 2,000 inhabitants. The plan was rejected by neighbouring councillors, meaning Thiberville will not be sharing its inheritance.
