It is the France that does not look like France. Or at least, it doesn’t look like the image of France that we have in our heads. You drive into a shopping area, with its huge parking lot and hypermarkets, or you 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 United States and in many other Western countries. It is not the France of the baguet and the Eiffel tower. Not even that of the little town with its bell tower, its charming Town Hall, its café on the corner, its delicatessen with local products and its monument to the dead of World War I. Ugly France, they call it, 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 more humane. More beautiful, too.
The objectives are laudable. The chances of achieving it are slim. Ugly France is too deep-rooted to disappear. Flaubert already glimpsed it in the mid-19th century: “Industrialism has developed the ugly to gigantic proportions.” If great literature reflects, in each era, the soul of a country, today ugly France is an authentic landscape, and even a literary character.
The journalist Carla Mascia remembered it in EL PAÍS, who explained how, in the work of Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux, shopping areas seemed like the space where “the unconscious is molded”, “thoughts are born”, “emotions” , “memories”. They are the neighborhoods of semi-detached and single-family houses where more than half of French people live, the large stores where even more people go to shop, instead of the center of the town or the city. If the 1,500 commercial areas in France were combined, they would add up to an area equivalent to five times that of Paris. A megapolis or a small country.
And, like every nation, this imaginary Republic of Ugly France has its bards. One is Annie Ernaux. The other is Michel Houellebecq. In the novel Serotonina designated what could be his capital: Niort, “one of the ugliest cities I have ever seen.” In Niort they were outraged. Houellebecq had theorized this before, in the essay Approaches to Bewilderment, where he advocated a literature that “rummages through the trash” and “licks the wounds of unhappiness.” He added: “A paradoxical poetry of anguish and oppression has been able to be born in the midst of hypermarkets and office buildings.”
A hyperreal image
It could be believed that we are talking about non-places, those “that offer themselves to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, to the provisional and to 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 what places. All the times that, when leaving Paris to do a report, finding myself in one of these indistinct peripheries, no longer knowing if I was in the south or the north, the east or the west, because everything has become indistinct, observing the French with their shopping cart in the hypermarket or with the family in the fast food restaurant, in all these excursions to ugly France I have not been able to stop thinking that there is no better observatory to unravel the French mystery. It may never be a beautiful France, but it is a very real France. Hyperreal.
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