The French, Coming Apart
A social thinker illuminates his country’s populist divide.
Christopher Caldwell Spring 2017

https://www.city-journal.org/html/french-coming-apart-15125.html

Christophe Guilluy calls himself a geographer. 2010, with the newest, Le crépuscule de la France d’en haut (roughly: “The Twilight of the French Elite”

At the heart of Guilluy’s inquiry is globalization. Internationalizing the division of labor has brought significant economic efficiencies. But it has also brought inequalities unseen for a century, demographic upheaval, and cultural disruption. Now we face the question of what—if anything—we should do about it.

A process that Guilluy calls métropolisation has cut French society in two.

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,”