An internet poll to find France’s best-loved towns for a national Gallic version of Monopoly ended in fiasco yesterday when a small village with an embarrassing name won the vote to become the equivalent of Mayfair.

The decision to replace street names with towns and cities backfired on Hasbro, the US-based manufacturer, as tens of thousands of pranksters opted for the southwestern village of Montcuq.

Mention of the village brings a smile to French faces since it is often pronounced without the final “q”, and sounds like mon cul, or “my arse”.

It has been famous since a sketch in 1976 by the comedian Daniel Prévost, in which he said: “Today, for the first time on television, I’m going to show you Montcuq.”

The winner of the competition was to get the Mayfair space on the Monopoly board and the runner-up the Park Lane spot. The 22nd town would take the place of the Old Kent Road.

Montcuq residents quickly spotted a fresh opportunity to seize the limelight and began an internet campaign that rapidly caught the imagination. The village got 52,879 votes, almost double its nearest rival, Dunkirk, the Channel port best known for the evacuation of British troops in 1940.

“We saw what humour could do for the village and so we wanted to add to the phenomenon,” said Laurent Bazet, who started the campaign.

But Hasbro was not laughing as it sought to get its corporate image out of jail. The multinational toy company rewrote the rules and said that Montcuq would not feature on the French towns and cities version of its game.

Instead, the village would get a board of its own. The spaces in Monopoly Montcuq would be filled with the names of village streets and squares, Yves Cognard, the marketing manager for Hasbro France, said.

Internet users in France reacted angrily to the company’s U-turn, insisting that Montcuq should take the Mayfair slot on the towns and cities version. “They’re treating us like idiots,” one said. “They’re cheats,” another said.

Daniel Maury, the Mayor of Montcuq, said: “They probably didn’t think the name of Montcuq was dignified enough to feature on a Monopoly board.”

But Mr Cognard tried to downplay the row. “It’s only a game,” he said. “We accepted the bloggers’ humour but now we have to stick to our goal, which is to make products which meet commercial demand. We remain in charge.” When he began the competition in September, he had described the French towns and cities version of the game as a “shop window” for the country. But the result – even without Montcuq – appears incongruous. Paris, for instance, failed to get one of the 22 spaces on the board as the capital’s residents ignored the poll.

Dunkirk, which emerged as the winner after Montcuq’s elimination, will become the most coveted space on the board, but it is scarcely a wealthy town. House prices, for example, are three times less than in Paris. Rheims, in the heart of Champagne country in eastern France, came second, and Perpignan in the Pyrenees, was third.

An estimated 500,000 Monopoly boards are sold every year in France. Worldwide, about 500 million people are thought to have played the game since it was created in 1933. In a British vote, St Albans came first, Exeter second and Nottingham third.

Mayfairs of the world

For the new national Monopoly boards people could vote for which place occupied the top Mayfair spot

UK: St. Albans
Ireland: County Roscommon
USA: Times Square
Germany: Saarbrücken
Australia: Barossa Valley

Source: Hasbro

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