British author and longtime Paris resident Andrew Hussey was moved to write this chronicle of a troubled contemporary France after inadvertently getting caught up in the Yellow Vests protests in late 2018 and noticing that the contingent expressing its anger in a particularly violent way was older and apparently more respectable-looking than was usual for French riots.
The rise of the far right, fuelled by a sympathetic private media landscape, and a widening income gap, particularly between regions, are among phenomena that have created a country on edge, which France’s teetering economy potentially throws into greater peril still. Hussey, in a book that is half-analysis, half-memoir, tours the country (or some of it at least) to take the pulse of an increasingly sclerotic and dyspeptic nation.
Some of the ailments Hussey diagnoses in this highly enjoyable book are undeniable — the sense of abandonment felt in rural and de-industrialised regions, an overly rigid society where advancement and social mobility have become increasingly difficult, and a failure of governance, particularly in areas where the republic is most in retreat, such as Marseilles’ lawless, gang-ridden quartiers nord.
He is, however, given at times to pat resolutions; his politics might best be summarised as old left, and he reserves particular scorn for middle-class leftists, or “bobos”, as they are known in contemporary French parlance. The reality is bobos are an amorphous lot, encompassing a fairly wide tranche of social class, many of whom are less detached from the working class than Hussey claims, and whose voting patterns, loath as many of them might be to admit it, lurch more often than you might think towards the centre.
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There have been numerous books published, by both French and foreign authors, over the past few decades declaring France to be in a crisis, and yet France manages to stay afloat, its numerous problems notwithstanding. In fairness to Hussey, he does not predict disaster for France, but intimates it is a possibility. It is also possible that the “fracture” in his title might be read in a neutral sense, denoting a country that is a crazed collage of competing regions, classes and interests that the French state’s assiduous centralisation and the relatively recent phenomenon of mass domestic tourism have papered over. Perhaps it has always been so.
