In October 2018, Andrew Hussey, the convivial and courageous observer and analyst of the political and social travails of modern France, was cycling back to his office after lunch through the rather staid and un-bohemian environs of the Boulevard Raspail on the Left Bank in Paris. To the ‘middle-aged man who already has a heart condition’, the scene into which he pedalled near the Montparnasse cemetery was terrifying, but to the veteran historian of the fractious Fifth Republic not particularly unusual.
Parisians were sitting on café terraces and queuing for ice cream while just around the corner ‘a mini-civil war’ was taking place. Sandwiched between a phalanx of armed police and a mob flinging freshly dislodged lumps of pavement, he felt his lungs tighten and his chest seized by a searing pain. He managed to kick the tear-gas canister back towards the surging riot shields and spun around on his bike. As he retreated through the crowd, the image that stuck in his mind was not the foreglimpse of his death but the appearance of the rioters – white, middle-class students and a respectable-looking man of his own age and social class expressing his hatred of the government’s pension reforms by hurling missiles at the forces of order.
The land that became France has been ‘fractured’ and pieced back together so many times since Caesar’s genocidal conquest of Gaul that no one can plausibly say what it actually is. In their daily performance of La Marseillaise, primary school children still call for the ‘furrows’ of the fatherland to be irrigated with the ‘impure blood’ of tyrants, but one citizen’s tyrant is another’s saviour. Foreign commentators are regularly bemused by the latest ‘unprecedented’ manifestation of class war, racial and religious hatred, regionalist rancour, economic discontent, political nostalgia or mass performance art.
Within each rebellion, there are proliferating complexities which make it practically impossible to reduce each protest movement to an encyclopedia entry. The nationwide and overseas gilets jaunes revolt was interpreted by much of the British and American press as an uprising of disgruntled petrolheads, when its primary focus was the soulless ‘peripheral’ France of rural-urban ‘villages’ cut off by car-obsessed planners from the ever-more exclusive cities.
As a student, teacher, historian and reporter, Hussey has spent far more of his life in France than in his native Liverpool. He now ‘can’t imagine living anywhere else’. His ‘journey through a divided nation’ is composed of several expeditions and interviews, most of which were undertaken between 2015 and 2023. He talks to politicians and writers, the famous and the obscure, the feckless young and the embittered old. He lends a friendly but critical ear to disenchanted Francophile hedonists and ranting Francophobe natives.
In Marseille, the multi-cultural pizza-kebab comes with an offer of a side dish of cannabis or cocaine
Though his sympathies lie with the comradely working class, he remains staunchly objective in the face of extremists of every hue. On the Place de la République, he listens to the social geographer Christophe Guilluy bemoaning the restrictions on private motor cars imposed by the Mayor of Paris. ‘Nobody ever arrives on time in Paris any more,’ the geographer seethes, counter-factually, waving his cigarette at the traffic on the square – ‘a heaving, bellowing and horribly polluted circus of death’.
This poignant, shocking, informative and funny book could be used as a guide to Where Not to Go in France. Hussey’s flat in Pernety, near Montparnasse, is burgled and someone tries to break into his office. He is accosted and publicly insulted. He interviews the daughter of Albert Camus in Provence but also the people who live near Camus’s uncommemorated childhood home in Algiers. A small crowd gathers: ‘Why should we care if a Frenchman once lived here?’ the neighbours ask angrily. ‘We don’t want them back. Ever. Not even tourists.’
Crucially for an on-the-ground social historian, Hussey walks and cycles, takes taxis and talks to people in the street. In restaurants and cafés, he fearlessly samples local indelicacies. There is something to eat, drink or smoke on almost every other page – meat flambé en pastis in Manosque, cervelle de canut (silk worker’s brains) in Lyon and practically anything lovingly served to locals from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, though even he quails at the ubiquitous urinous andouillette. Revisiting Marseille, he revels in the hot, greasy and ‘unbelievably tasty’ fast food. In the gangsterish ‘quartiers shit’ of north Marseille, the multi-cultural pizza-kebab comes with the offer of a side-dish of cannabis or cocaine.
Hussey’s previous book on the ‘divided nation’ was published shortly before the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan Theatre massacres of 2015. The French Intifada was a study of the various eruptions which began with the French invasion of Algeria in 1830. (Fearing Islamist reprisals, his French publisher insisted on the blander title Insurrections en France.) Fractured France – a title which echoes Guilluy’s Fractures françaises (2013) – is less incendiary in that it depicts a much broader crazed landscape of fluid and conflicting points of view. It shows a respectful fascination with ‘the long-standing French values of scepticism, irony and provocation’.
Hussey includes an early interview with the hilariously apocalyptic pessimist Michel Houellebecq. This was in 1996, when the novelist was trying to learn English ‘so I can finally speak the language of Donald Duck’. Over beer and fags on Houellebecq’s balcony, they talked about the ‘suicide’ of western civilisation and looked over at an opposite balcony where an out-of-shape woman in a Chicago Bears T-shirt was also drinking beer and puffing: ‘Look at her, look at us,’ said Houellebecq, ‘this is why France is finished… Our civilisation has gone.’
It is a testament to Hussey’s even-handedness that his French Intifada was well received by some of the right-wing press. Naturally, he found this ‘disquieting’. After being vetted in a series of seemingly casual questionings by unnamed individuals in a Paris bar, he was invited to a small private briefing by the leader of the Rassemblement National, Marine Le Pen. In France, serious ‘Anglo-Saxon’ writers are often treated as valuable sources of objective analysis, even if they seem misguided. Hussey could be invited to almost anyone’s press conference. There are no faux-ethnographic sketches here of French ‘eccentricities’, nor any of that ‘France is wasted on the French’ nonsense.
At the end of Fractured France, Hussey depicts himself at a café near his home in Pernety, watching the kaleidoscopic crowd. The local graffiti is anti-fascist, anti-Semitic, Islamist, Islamophobic and nearly useless as evidence of public moods and opinions. ‘There is not necessarily any link between one issue and another. If you are suspicious of immigration, this doesn’t always mean that you are a racist. If you are anti-capitalist, it does not follow that you are against investment in services and employment.’
Pernety is poor but still has all the elements of a healthy urban community – butchers, bakers, cafés, restaurants, a bookshop, jazz club and cinema within a few minutes’ stroll. The passers-by belong to ‘all classes and creeds’, yet are as unmistakably French as the sounds, the smells and the street furniture. Hussey thinks approvingly of the historian Fernand Braudel, who spent his life trying to define French identity and concluded that it was not a totality but ‘past and present locked together and forever reproducing’.
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