Fractured France: A Journey Through a Divided Nation is Andrew Hussey’s latest exploration of French culture and history, published by Granta Books on 11 September. A patchwork of memoir, interviews, cultural references, historic context and actual observations, it is an engaging and informative read. Hussey’s narrative is peppered with references, insights and entertaining anecdotes. The tone is part barstool banter, part café conversation. Think travelogue meets cultural anthropology.
“In the past forty years, the French Republic, the child of the Great Revolution, has been slowly fractured, corroded in gradients, by social changes which directly challenged its very existence. The most significant of these changes has been the growth of many of the banlieues of France into something like mini-cities, with their codes, cultures, languages. They are usually at odds with mainstream France and the Republic, which in the form of the police is seen as an intrusive, oppressive presence (sometimes the word ‘colonialist’, with memories of the Algerian war, is used as a provocation).” [page 294]
Hussey walks, takes trains, cabs and cycles, telling human stories revealing social and economic fault lines as he goes. His road trip takes us through his adopted homeland in a state of flux: Roubaix (emblematic of France’s urban periphery where despair meets radicalism), Angers (a gilets jaunes hotspot), Reims (famous for its cathedral and champagne, boring to the people who live there), Dijon (gateway to the gastronomic heartland of Burgundy), Lyon (with its complex World War Two legacy, gastronomy is cultural shorthand for identity and resistance), Manosque (famous for its Provençal charm, and the writer Jean Giono), Marseille a city he has always loved (founded by Greek sailors from Phocaea around 600 BCE, it was cosmopolitan when Paris was still a swamp), ending up back home in Pernety — part of the 14th arrondissement near Montparnasse train station in Paris — where he lives.
He is inspired, in part, by British travellers — the agriculturist Arthur Young who journeyed through France in the 1780s, the historian Richard Cobb, food writer M F K Fisher, artist Ralph Rumney, among others. Hussey’s essential premise is based on the work of Christophe Guilluy who popularized the term France périphérique in his 2014 book of the same name, in that around 60% of the citizens of France mostly living in rural, suburban or small-town areas feel abandoned by globalisation which is beneficial to the hyper-urban elite and their urban-centric policies. Guilluy links this alienation to the rise of populism and the gilets jaunes movement, deepening social fractures.
La France périphérique
When the far-right National Rally were victorious in the European Parliament elections, President Macron dissolved the National Assembly and called snap legislative elections. The left-wing New Popular Front coalition won the most seats in the legislative elections, with Macron’s party trailing behind and the National Rally in third place. With no one having a majority, the National Assembly fractured into fractious blocks.
As civic ideals collapse, ideological conflict becomes entrenched. Strikes, demonstrations and open defiance of authority: protest is pretty much part of the national French DNA. Yet the widespread anger and level of vitriolic violence have startled even seasoned observers over recent years. Public trust has plummeted and disillusionment has soared. Discontent is no longer the preserve of the political fringe.
This week, the movement ‘Bloquons tout’ (Let’s block everything) which originated on social media – initially as a boycott and then to protest against the Bayrou government’s austerity plan valued at nearly €44 billion – promises to bring France to a standstill with rallies and demonstrations across France.
Add to this the fact that the French decolonisation process was, and continues to be, violent and traumatic, producing deep scars that still structure French politics. The republican model of universalism — everyone is ‘French’ under the Republic — suppresses rather than resolves post-colonial fractures. In practice, race and religion (especially Islam) are heavily politicised. Debates around laïcité (secularism) often overlap with anti-immigrant rhetoric — for example, wearing a hijab is not allowed in French state-run primary and secondary schools since conspicuous religious symbols are banned by law in public education. The descendants of North African immigrants in the banlieues have become targets for far-right politicians Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella and Éric Zenmour, and are routinely harassed by the police, sparking riots.
President Macron’s tactics to block the far right getting into power seem to be having the opposite effect, and are opening a path for Le Pen to achieve victory, despite her being found guilty of the embezzlement of European parliamentary funds through a fake jobs scam. France seems to have failed to learn lessons from World War Two by focusing on The Resistance and fighting against Nazi occupation, rather than the divisions within French society that contributed to the defeat and the rise of the collaborationist Vichy government. Real life in Occupied France described by women in literature is rare, Irène Némirovsky and Gael Elton Mayo are two writers who describe it in their novels. There are no leaders today of the calibre of General Charles de Gaulle, who led the Free French Resistance government from London.
Hussey holds up a cracked, unsparing mirror to modern France as he goes on his way, and chats with a wide range of people from the political far-left and far-right, writers (from Michel Houellebecq to Tahar Ben Jelloun), artists, thinkers, students, chefs, shopkeepers, hustlers, expat Brits, ex-girlfriends, among many others. Part travel diary, part cultural autopsy, Fractured France: A Journey Through a Divided Nation feels like a love letter to the idea of France.
Keep Calm and Carry On
As I read Fractured France, I found myself thinking back to 1998, when I was researching and editing XCiTés: The Flamingo Book of New French Writing. I and the French DJ featured in the anthology interviewed Marcel Desailly, a key figure in the French national team that would go on to win the World Cup that summer, and Euro 2000 two years later. Back then, there was hope. Today, that hope feels long gone.
Though daily life in France remains of high quality, thanks to its strong culinary traditions, healthy work-life balance, efficient healthcare system, affordable housing, more space with less urban sprawl and glorious, varied landscapes.
“One of the aspects of French life that I have always cherished is the high quality of everyday life – and here it is in the city with cafes, bakers, a butcher’s, greengrocers, a bookshop, an arthouse cinema, a jazz club, pharmacies, restaurants, all within a few minutes stroll of each other. This is one meaning I think of the word civilization – a model of city living which prizes local experience and local needs over the forces of global capital. Most French people of all social classes, political persuasions and racial origins, would agree that this way of living is an essential part of who they are.” [page 295]
Progress and Backlash
We are living through an era of profound transformation. The failures of capitalism, which does not meet human needs but exploits them with genocidal disregard, are clear to see. As the glue of shared prosperity dissolves, the cracks in the failing system become fault lines which ripple through politics, culture and society with people retreating into resentment, religion and nationalism.
In France and Britain the consequences are similar in certain aspects: the economic imbalance of the North-South divide, post-industrial decline and forgotten towns, social fragmentation, ethnic and cultural divides, generational divides, post-colonial reckoning, distrust in institutions and political polarisation, leading to a fractured national landscape with tensions rising between competing needs and identities.
In France and Britain the consequences are different in certain aspects: France’s fragmentation is about identity and ideology, whereas Britain’s fragmentation is about land and legacy as the monarchy remains the symbolic keystone of the British system underwriting a feudal culture of deference and hierarchy, lording it over a territorial patchwork quilt. French citizens stop believing their vote changes anything (abstention massive), while post-Brexit politics are a permanent civil war.
As someone who is both British and French, reconciling both cultures internally has meant weaving together languages, traditions and values to form a hybrid culture and identity that feels uniquely my own. Like many friends and others simply trying to get on with the business of living amid rising tensions and unrest in our increasingly toxic, materialistic societies, I hold tightly to the beliefs that ‘united we stand, divided we fall’ and that ‘human against human is so very wrong’. There must be alternative way to Surveillance Capitalism and Trumpism — one that has not yet emerged.
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