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The French, Coming Apart
BLUF: [City Journal] A process that Guilluy calls métropolisation has cut French society in two. In 16 dynamic urban areas (Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Aix-en-Provence, Toulouse, Lille, Bordeaux, Nice, Nantes, Strasbourg, Grenoble, Rennes, Rouen, Toulon, Douai-Lens, and Montpellier), the world’s resources have proved a profitable complement to those found in France. These urban areas are home to all the country’s educational and financial institutions, as well as almost all its corporations and the many well-paying jobs that go with them. Here, too, are the individuals--the entrepreneurs and engineers and CEOs, the fashion designers and models, the film directors and chefs and other "symbolic analysts," as Robert Reich once called them--who shape the country’s tastes, form its opinions, and renew its prestige. Cheap labor, tariff-free consumer goods, and new markets of billions of people have made globalization a windfall for such prosperous places. But globalization has had no such galvanizing effect on the rest of France. Cities that were lively for hundreds of years--Tarbes, Agen, Albi, Béziers--are now, to use Guilluy’s word, "desertified," haunted by the empty storefronts and blighted downtowns that Rust Belt Americans know well. Posted by: Besoeker 2017-04-21 |
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