'It's a Fairy Tale': €50M Euromillions Winners Have Quietly Transformed Their French Town for 17 Years

An anonymous French family who won €50 million on EuroMillions in 2009 have spent 17 years using their jackpot to quietly support their small home town. Their generosity has ranged from clearing a nursing home's debts to, this September, funding a renovation of the local school's dining hall.

The family, from Saint-Michel in Charente, near Angoulême, scooped the jackpot, worth about £42.6 million at the time, without ever moving away or going public. Mayor Fabienne Godichaud, who has dealt directly with the family, described their impact on the town of roughly 3,200 people in stark terms.

'It's a bit like a fairy tale,' she told AFP. 'The entire community is actually benefiting from this windfall. These people could have chosen not to share it with their fellow citizens. It's a wonderful lesson in civic responsibility.'

How €50M Quietly Reshaped One French Town

The family's first major act of generosity came shortly after their win, when they paid off a local nursing home's debts and gave €400,000 to the town's 'Housing for All' scheme.

That sum was equivalent to a fifth of Saint-Michel's entire annual budget at the time.

Since then, they have quietly written an annual cheque of €80,000 to cover the cost of meals at the town's primary school. This has meant all 180 pupils have eaten for free for well over a decade.

That arrangement is now changing. From September, the family's contribution will instead fund a renovation of the school's ageing dining hall, including acoustics, air conditioning and what Godichaud called 'summer comfort', with families paying a symbolic €1.50 (£1.29) per meal in place of free lunches.

'Their wish has now translated into a capital investment, addressing a reality: our schools no longer meet current standards regarding acoustics, air conditioning, or, at the very least, summer comfort,' Godichaud told local outlet ICI La Rochelle.

Sandrine Pelletier, who now works as maintenance staff at the school she once attended, said the upgrade was overdue. 'It will be a welcome change, because the primary school dining hall, for instance, really needs it,' she said.

A Fortune Kept Quiet

What sets Saint-Michel's story apart is the family's insistence on staying out of view. They have never given an interview, never been named, and are understood to have kept largely the same routines they had before their win, dealing with the town only through the mayor's office.

Residents have tried to find ways to thank them regardless. A guestbook was set up at the town hall for messages to the unnamed benefactors. 'I explained to my children the beauty of your gesture and the fact that such generosity is the mark of people with huge hearts,' one mother wrote in it.

The scale of the family's win is not, in itself, unusual. Since EuroMillions launched in February 2004, there have been 603 jackpot-winning tickets across nine participating countries, with UK players claiming 137 and France 133.

What is unusual is what has happened next: 17 years on, the ticket is still quietly shaping decisions about school buildings and social housing in a town most people have never heard of.

Whether the family ever chooses to step into the open remains, for now, an open question. For Saint-Michel, it may not much matter. The cheques, according to the mayor, keep arriving all the same.