The journalist/writer Adam Nossitier recently published an essay in the New York Times that is incendiary to anyone who loves rural France. The title states his case well enough: “As France’s Towns Wither, Fears of a Decline in ‘Frenchness’”. Nossitier focuses particularly on the town of Albi, which has a population of 49,000 and is located in the département of Tarn about an hour northeast of Toulouse. It is a beautiful town. The historic center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, home to the grandiose Sainte-Cécile Cathedral and also the well-done Toulouse-Lautrec museum. Such attractions make Albi a prime tourist destination. But attracting tourists is not Albi’s main issue, according to Nossitier.
Nossitier describes its “withering” as the continuous closure of businesses in its historic center. He had been to Albi decades before and found it thriving, but upon his return this January, he found it to be “withering”. While clothing stores and shops selling tourist goods remain open, bakeries, grocers, butcher shops and cafes have closed in the town center. It is these closures, which Nossitier argues indicate a declining ‘Frenchness’. These shops acted as spaces for people to meet and exchange gossip. Vacant stores and dwellings further corrode community ties and the ‘vitality’ of the town is lost in these processes of “devitalization”.
Albi is not the only town “withering”, according to Nossitier, but many other “provincial” towns throughout France are experiencing the same phenomenon. He makes the bolder claim that this “withering” makes voters in such places all the more willing to support the extreme-right Front National party and its candidate Marine Le Pen in the upcoming election even when they previously voted for left-wing or centrist candidates. He says that Le Pen claims that she can defend not only France, but “Frenchness”. Such appeals by Le Pen to some static notion of “Frenchness” are troubling. For Americans, we can hear some echoes of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” with a French twist. Each make campaign promises not to diverse groups of people living in large urban centers, but people in smaller towns with predominantly white populations that have faced long-term economic decline and yet fear change like immigration.
Nossitier argues that the opening of big box stores spurred processes of “devitalization” in Albi, which began during France’s Trente Glorieuses (a period of peak economic vitality and prosperity from 1945-1975). Instead of supporting downtown local grocers and other businesses, people used their increasing incomes to shop instead at chain big box stores that offered more choices at lower prices but little in the way of community. Competition from these suburban big boxes drained downtown businesses of their customers in Albi and similar French towns. The havoc that Wal-Mart has wrought on many American small towns is not dissimilar.
The same broad narrative fits the town of Cahors, which is a small provincial capital an hour north of Toulouse and an hour and a half from Albi, where Lili and I have been living in France. There is a street filled with former merchants’ buildings where at best 20% of the businesses remain open. In other parts of old town Cahors there are still are bakeries, butcher shops, cafes and grocers. The city only really comes alive on Wednesday and Saturday markets. Even if it has fared better than Albi as it has multiple bakeries and butcher shops, Cahors can appear to be “withering”, especially on Sundays and Mondays.
While clearly business closures and the sprouting up of chain big box stores are not favorable trends for Cahors or Albi, and should be combatted, the concept of “devitalization” is a lot more complicated than Nossitier claims. Again Cahors is vital on market days. Many businesses depend on these days for their earnings. Business is also highly seasonal. Shops seem to make their entire year during the summer. Therefore on a market day in August, Cahors is anything but “devitalized”. Business cycles are far more varied than in large cities like Paris.
Nositier fits all of this talk of “withering” and “devitalization” in the context of a potential rightward political swerve for such places.The big questions this article raises for France in an election year is if one must choose between this kind of “withering” “Frenchness” of today or that of the “vital” past. Yet such a choice is unrealistic, just as unrealistic as returning the America the great to the 1950s as Trump wishes. Nossitier nostalgically wishes that Albi could return to the city as it was on his first visit, vital in the midst of its economic “glorious years” before chain stores and suburbanization. If only this is the sole inflexible version of “Frenchness”, then there is no doubt why it is “withering”. There seems to be little political possibilities in such a narrow definition of Frenchness that wants to turn back the clock. Few if any places are still experiencing such rapid economic growth or are free of suburbanization or chain stores. Rolling back such sustained macro-economic trends is ambitious and admirable as a continued political project, but likely of little electoral practicality in the short-term.
Instead of hoping for the return of some ideal “Frenchness” that is “withering”, change is not so simple or somehow resoundingly negative. No doubt “Frenchness” may be in part composed of artisanal bakeries, local butcher shops and locally-owned cafes all located in a walkable, historic city center. As well, it is an increasingly multicultural society in large urban areas, just as it is in the housing blocks outside small and large French cities where people have comparatively fewer opportunities and higher rates of employment than in old town Albi.
Yet “Frenchness” is even more than that. It can be a life organized around twice weekly market days, alternating with days without shopping. It is the land of the 35 hour work week that people have fought to defend as well as their universal socialized medicine. Firing and hiring people is complicated. France has half as many people living below the poverty line than in the US but double the unemployment. France provides its citizens with relative stability compared to the US, a quality of life that is likely far better than having more diverse shopping outlets that have extended hours.
The kind of pessimism and obsession with a “withering” national identity as expressed by Nossitier, Le Pen and Trump seems to be running rampant. Politicians need to censure Marine Le Pen’s race-baiting, and instead demand equality that brings the aforementioned benefits to all French people in large cities as well as in the provinces. It is a glorious country that does not need ‘defending’ from outsiders nor is it in some state of imminent “withering”. There is work to be done to be sure, but there is so much that is glorious and thriving even in places like Albi and Cahors. Instead of falling under the spell of a Le Pen that France is in need of some kind of anti-Europe savoir, there are viable left-wing candidates with a far more vision and expansive ideas of “Frenchness”. France would far more likely to be “devitalized” the more narrow “Frenchness” is defined and the more people are convinced their wonderful country is in an inexorable state of “withering”.
No comments:
Post a Comment