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CERET, France It's a picture-postcard scene of rural France.

A fountain trickles in a sun-dappled square surrounded by pastel-painted houses. Shaded by plane trees, customers at the little bistro peruse Le Figaro while a waitress who looks like she should be modeling for Dior brings their plats du jour with a carafe of local ros.

This town wasnt always so typically French.

"When I grew up there, everyone spoke Catalan," says Miquel Arnaudies. "I'm part of a generation where Catalan was dominant, now it's dying out."

Ceret is located in mainland France's southernmost region, the Pyrenees-Orientales, or as Arnaudies prefers to call it: Northern Catalonia.

"The Spanish were never able to assimilate the Catalans, but the French have done it very effectively," complains the 71-year-old artist, writer and defender of Catalan identity.

With Spain's Catalonia region preparing to vote on independence on Sunday, activists in France are hoping for a revival of Catalan consciousness on their side of the border as well.

"It will have an impact up here," says Arnaudies, president of the local Catalan Cultural Center. "It will create a new awareness of Catalan identity."

Northern Catalonia a triangle of land that runs from the Mediterranean coast through fertile vineyards to the high mountains of the Pyrenees was handed to France in 1659. A treaty ending a Franco-Spanish war split this Rhode Island-sized territory from the rest of Catalonia, which remained under Spanish rule.

Read more:
Catalan identity is reviving its French accent