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One summer in the early 1950s, when Christian Liaigre first set foot on Île de Ré for a family holiday, he encountered a place for “peasants and fishermen, not tourists,” he says. The windswept barrier island, midway up France’s Atlantic coast, has a hard-bitten beauty shaped by centuries of conquest and rural resilience. Blessed with natural salt marshes and a strategic location near the mouth of the Dordogne River, it passed between British and Continental hands for more than 500 years before settling into subsistence farming and fishing under the French, and streets are lined with row upon row of anonymous white seamen’s…