It’s the France that doesn’t look like France. At least it doesn’t look like the image of France we have in our minds. You drive into a shopping area with huge parking lots and hypermarkets or sit down at McDonald’s and think, “I’m in France, but I could be anywhere else.”
Because this landscape – that of the commercial and industrial zones on the urban peripheries – can be found today in France, but also in Spain or the USA and in many other western countries. It is not the France of the baguet and the Eiffel Tower. Not even that of the small town with its bell tower, its charming town hall, its corner café, its deli with local products and its memorial to the dead of the First World War. They call it ugly France, and the French government wants to clean it up.
In September, Bercy – the super-ministry of economy, finance and industrial and digital sovereignty – presented a plan to beautify commercial areas and make them more environmentally friendly and humane. Also nicer.
The goals are laudable. The chances of achieving it are slim. Ugly France is too deeply rooted to disappear. Flaubert already sensed it in the middle of the 19th century: “Industrialism has developed the ugly to gigantic proportions.” If great literature in every era reflects the soul of a country, ugly France is now an authentic landscape and even a literary character.
This was recalled in EL PAÍS by journalist Carla Mascia, who explained how, in the work of Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux, shopping areas seemed like the space in which “the unconscious is formed,” “thoughts are born,” “emotions,” and “memories.” “. It is the neighborhoods with semi-detached and single-family homes where more than half of the French live, the large stores where even more people go shopping than in the city center. If you were to combine the 1,500 commercial areas in France, you would get one Area equivalent to five times the area of Paris. A megapolis or a small country.
And like every nation, this imaginary republic of ugly France has its bards. One of them is Annie Ernaux. The other is Michel Houellebecq. In the novel, Serotonina referred to her possible capital: Niort, “one of the ugliest cities I have ever seen.” In Niort they were outraged. Houellebecq had previously theorized this in the essay “Approaches to Bewilderment,” in which he advocated a literature that “roots in the trash” and “licks the wounds of misfortune.” He added: “In the midst of hypermarkets and office buildings, a paradoxical poetry of fear and oppression could emerge.”
A hyperreal image
One might assume that these are non-places, those “that offer themselves to solitary individuality, the fleeting, the provisional and the ephemeral,” as the anthropologist Marc Augé wrote in his classic essay “No-Places.”
But they are not non-places. Or not alone. They are places. And which places. All the times when, when I left Paris to write a report, I found myself in one of those indistinct peripheries and no longer knew whether I was in the south or the north, in the east or in the west, because everything had become indistinct was when I watched the French with the shopping cart in the supermarket or with the family in the fast food restaurant, with all those trips to ugly France I couldn’t stop thinking that there is no better observatory to unravel the French secret . It may never be a beautiful France, but it is a very real France. Hyperreal.
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