Peripheral France under the magnifying glass of writers

It took time, in the 1970th century, for the industry to gain recognition for the novel in France. More is needed for the charmless commercial zones and infrastructures that have sprung up on the outskirts of small and medium-sized towns since the XNUMXs to arrive.

Michel Houellebecq admitted it in 2017 on television: "the second France you are talking about, peripheral France, which hesitates between Marine Le Pen and nothing, I realized that I did not understand it, I did not see it, and that I had lost contact. And that, when you want to write novels, I find that it's a pretty serious professional mistake."

He makes up for it in “Sérotonine”, in 2019. Here we are in the suburbs of Caen: “passing the northern ring road, then going along the CHU, I realized that we were entering a sinister ZAC, mainly made up of low buildings, made of sheet metal wavy gray; the environment wasn't even hostile, it was just frighteningly neutral."

The protagonist speaks of a "hardcore peri-urban environment", the fleeting setting of this novel.

As the literature of “ugly France” does not really exist, neither do its experts. Timo Obergöker, a German professor of French literature at the University of Chester (Great Britain), was interested in a notion that is frequently associated with him: peripheral France.

“Not very salesy”

“The term as such is not very salesy,” he points out to AFP. “We rarely go to a bookstore and say to ourselves: I’m going to buy a book about peripheral France.”

This is how the press read Nicolas Mathieu, 2018 Goncourt Prize for “Their children after them”. However, this author would never describe France where he grew up, deindustrialized Lorraine, as ugly.

When a factory becomes a wasteland, "it's quite beautiful, twilight; sinister too", he declared to Le Figaro in 2019. "In these places, people are happy to be there (...) They were born there , have their habits there, they hang out with the people they like there.”

Rare writer to dare this expression of “ugly France”: Danièle Sallenave, from the Académie française.

In "Jojo, the Yellow Vest" in 2019, she notes, among the cultural elite, "the ambiguous denunciation of 'ugly France', of its pavilions with their cedar hedges and their diesel cars lined up in front".

The characters of contemporary French literature who sometimes cross this France stop there as little as possible. Few work there like the narrator of “En salle” (2022) by Claire Baglin, an employee of a McDonald's.

That these characters do their shopping there seems too prosaic to be told... except for Annie Ernaux. When the novelist described the daily life of a hypermarket (Auchan, in Cergy) in 2014 in “Look at the lights, my love”, this short book is one of her least read.

“We could certainly write life stories through popular shopping malls. They are part of the childhood landscape of everyone under the age of fifty,” says the Nobel Prize winner.

Place of relegation?

More typical scene: in the romance “I'll Steal Your Heart at Christmas” by Emily Blaine, in 2023, the heroine gets lost in ugly France. “I fiddled with the GPS, trying not to get lost in the soulless streets of the shopping area.”

Risk of offending sensitivities too? Depicting this “ugly” France implies situating it, and therefore stigmatizing it. Houellebecq shocked an entire city by making the protagonist of “Sérotonine” say, in one sentence, that he was arriving “in Niort, one of the ugliest towns I have ever seen”.

In 2022, another star of French literature, Éric Reinhardt, signs the plea: “Ugly France, the France that I adore”.

He claims to be from there, in the Paris suburbs. In Télérama he praises the work of two photographers, Eric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier, on "France in what is immediate, modest, sometimes funny (…) not the France that is machine-gunned by tourists' cameras" .

But Reinhardt does not endear her in the novel he published the following year, “Susanne, Sarah and the Writer”.

The heroine, after leaving her husband the beautiful family apartment in Dijon, finds herself in the suburbs, in Longvic. She was depressed there: "its windows overlooked a gloomy row of garages and a rudimentary garden that went down to the canal, beyond which loomed an oil depot." Its rebirth will involve a return to beautiful neighborhoods.