In his 1995 presidential campaign, the Gaullist politician Jacques Chirac vowed that his government would heal the fractures sociales that plagued France. On the power of that diagnosis, and the promise to cure the problems it denoted – unemployment, racial tension and social fragmentation – Chirac won that year’s election.
Thirty years later, those fractures are deepening. Not only did Chirac fail to mend them during two terms in office; nor did his successors on the right (Nicolas Sarkozy), the left (François Hollande) and the centre (Emmanuel Macron). Yet Chirac did succeed in making the “fractured” label stick – so well, in fact, that it has turned into a cliché, used and abused by politicians and pundits.
The symptoms identified by the phrase remain all too real, however. Last year, the pollster Ipsos released its 12th annual survey of Les fractures françaises. Never has France seemed so divided. Whether it is deepening national pessimism – almost nine out of ten believe France is a nation in decline – or festering distrust of the political class (78 per cent believe democracy doesn’t work) growing numbers of French people feel more alienated and anxious than ever before.
The cortège of recent events seems to confirm this sense of things falling apart, from the violence of the gilets jaunes demonstrations in late 2018 to the suburban riots of 2023, when youths of North African descent battled police and set the streets on fire. In the nation that gave the world the revolutionary trio of liberté, égalité, fraternité, these same values are crumbling.
Andrew Hussey’s new book, Fractured France: A Journey Through a Divided Nation could not be better timed, and few people are better qualified to take us on this journey. Hussey has long been a sharp-eyed observer of France, notably in this magazine. The breadth of his knowledge of French culture, both popular and literary, is impressive. The Game of War (2001), a biography of the enigmatic thinker Guy Debord, was masterful, while The French Intifada (2014) – in some senses, a prequel to this book – was a provocative and prescient account of the fraught relationship between France and the children of immigrants from former North African colonies.
Introducing his book, Hussey describes his method as “always casting a look backwards, towards my own history here, and to the larger and deeper history of the country”. But this history is, at times, slanted. Hussey claims that, ever since the revolution of 1789, France has “always been held together, sometimes tenuously, by a universalist culture”. This is not quite true. For much of this time, Paris struggled to impose this culture, more nationalist than universalist, on the nation it was trying to create. Indeed, Hussey’s accounts of his travels to cities as far flung as Roubaix, near the Belgian border, and Marseille, on the south coast, reflect the persistence of regional particularism in France. The book suffers from its lack of a larger account of the effort of the French Third Republic, in the latter half of the 19th century, to transform, in the American historian Eugen Weber’s felicitous phrase, “peasants into Frenchmen”.
It was in this republic’s interest to teach French, the language of universal values, to the countless children who spoke dozens of regional languages instead, ranging from Basque and Breton to Italian and Corsican. It was no less in the republic’s interest to convince these same children, regardless of their actual ancestry, that their forebears were the Gauls. In her moving memoir about growing up in Brittany, the historian Mona Ozouf recalls studying Ernest Lavisse’s history primer, which famously began with the pronouncement, “Nos ancêtres, les Gaulois…”: our ancestors, the Gauls. How puzzling, she felt, because “they taught the same thing to Tunisian and Moroccan children, who had their own ancestors”.
Despite the efforts of generations of primary school instituteurs to insinuate Frenchness into their young wards’ minds, it was not until the universalising experience of total war in 1914 that the lessons on how to be French were learned, at least by those peasants who had not been turned into corpses pour la gloire de la France. Even so, long after the war, as the French historian Gérard Noriel has revealed in his work on immigrants and citizenship in 20th-century France – which invoke the metaphor of “le creuset”, the crucible or melting pot – this process of “becoming French” has remained, well, undercooked.
Deeper history gets shunted aside amid Hussey’s narrative detours – digressions that are mostly personal and often picturesque, but which might surprise readers who expect a book about France and the French, not about France and the author.
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Hussey visits the Provençal town of Manosque, known to foreigners as the home of L’Occitane, a pricey international perfume and soap brand, but to locals as home to generations of Harkis, native Algerians who fought alongside the French under colonial rule. They had no choice but to exile themselves from their resentful native country, but they were also never embraced by their equally resentful adopted country. Along with white French Algerians, known as pieds noirs, who also fled to France after Algerian independence in 1962, the Harkis have become fervent supporters of Marine Le Pen’s far-right political party, National Rally.
In a chapter running to nearly 40 pages, the Harkis themselves are given little more than a single page, in the form of three picnicking women Hussey bumps into in the town park. Hussey devotes his attentions instead to writers from the area, such as the novelist Jean Giono, and memories of his friend, the artist Ralph Rumney, an alcoholic Englishman associated with the social revolutionary group Situationist International. We are told much more about Hussey’s life in France than about the lives of the Harkis.
The same is true of Hussey’s chapter about Provence as a whole, which is really about Autoroute 7 – branded as L’Autoroute du Soleil, the Freeway to the Sun – which links Lyon and Marseille. It also happens to be the road taken 40 years ago by Hussey and friends, posing as mods, in search of sun and sex. We learn there was much of the former, none of the latter, and are left wondering how this relates to the fractures in France today.
The closest we get may be Hussey’s visit to Lourmarin, the village where the writer Albert Camus lived for a short while before his death in 1960. Thanks to his sudden wealth upon winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, Camus purchased a house which became a haven from his growing distress over the bloody war of independence in his native Algeria. Meeting Camus’s daughter Catherine, who still lives there, Hussey eloquently describes the philosopher’s tragic predicament, trapped between calls for independence by the native Arab and Berber population, and his fears over the future of his own pied noir community. “Algeria is stuck in my throat,” Camus once confessed to a friend, “and I cannot think of anything else.”
Camus, Hussey suggests, “clung on to his flimsy vision of a federal Algeria”, but in the novel The First Man Camus not only recounts in ravishing detail his childhood experiences in Algeria, but also acknowledges the justice of the demands for its independence. Camus was carrying the manuscript with him in the speeding sports car driven by his friend, the publisher Michel Gallimard, which in 1960 smashed into a tree, tragically killing them both. Catherine admirably oversaw the book’s publication.
For a diagnosis of what the fracturing of France might mean for the future, Hussey meets the geographer Christophe Guilluy, who since 2000 has published a regularly updated atlas of “fractures françaises”, as well as a book by the same title. In his bestselling treatise Peripheral France: How the Working Class Has Been Sacrificed (2014), Guilluy analysed the growing divide between an elite professional class hunkered down in cities dubbed “the new citadels”, and a working class scorned by this elite, under pressure from rising prices and declining opportunities, exiled to the geographical and social peripheries of France. While Guilluy’s analysis is compelling, his portrait at times borders on a caricature of a global capitalist conspiracy suppressing the lower classes.
When Hussey does focus on people and places, rather than turning to les intellos such as Guilluy – members of the very urban elite they lambast – the reader is richly rewarded, as in the brilliant chapter on Marseille. These passages alone are worth the price of admission to Hussey’s journey in search not just of his own past, but of the causes of present-day France’s travails. If Hussey had spent more time with the struggling and increasingly estranged men and women who are the subject of Guilluy’s analysis, the reader would have gained perhaps more vital insights into a fractured France.
Such perspectives seem all the more necessary given the turbulent moment France is now experiencing. The shaky centre-right coalition under the now former prime minister François Bayrou has fallen after losing a vote of no confidence, meaning that France will get its third PM this year. Given the deepening diplomatic crises abroad and burgeoning financial crisis at home, there could hardly be a worse time for a political crisis. The nine out of ten French who believe their country is in decline may soon be convinced that this is now irremediable.
Fractured France: A Journey Through a Divided Nation
Andrew Hussey
Granta, 336pp, £25
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This article appears in the 17 Sep 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Can Zohran Mamdani save the left?
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