YoIt is fashionable to contrast a “France of the cities” with a “France of the towers”. The former, associated with rural areas and considered the heir to the ideas of the National Rally, would be the guardian of the eternal values of a country threatened by globalisation and the “great changeover”. While the latter, made up of working-class neighbourhoods supposedly populated by predominantly uncivil people, would contribute to this threat in a context of urban violence and “well-being”.
We fight against these caricatures. And we do not accept this method of dividing territories whose problems are more often common than contrary.
Certainly, there are specific challenges in peri-urban and rural areas, first of all, dependence on cars – and therefore on the price of petrol – and access to healthcare and quality public services. According to an analysis by the Department of Research, Studies, Evaluation and Statistics (DREES), published in March 2021, for every 100 children under 3 years of age, rural children have on average 8 places in daycare in less than 15 minutes, compared to 26 in urban areas.
They also live on average 25 minutes by car from a paediatrician compared to 7 minutes in an urban area. As for the so-called “priority neighbourhoods of the city” (QPV), the Borloo plan for the suburbs, presented in April 2018, recalled that 40% of them do not have a nursery and that their inhabitants “They are twice as likely to die before age 75 than residents of the wealthiest neighborhoods”.
“Everything is more difficult”
But are these difficulties so different? Don’t they together represent a France that has “lost” globalisation, despised by certain elites and which rebelled with the “yellow vests” in 2018, or after the deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré in 2005? This is implicitly what is affirmed in the preamble of the same Borloo report, which, following its lines on the obstacles encountered by the QPV, specifies that “If we add the abandoned rural areas and certain cities or areas in serious decline, as well as a significant part of our overseas territories, we are more than ten million compatriots who are far from the engine of success”. And to conclude that, “For this France, everything is more difficult”.
Yes, everything is more difficult! In Plomelin (Finistère), after seeing the post office and a bank branch disappear from the town, its inhabitants have to deal periodically with the closure of classes in schools. In the northern districts of Marseille, less than half of the working population is employed and almost one in two residents lives in a poor household. In the agglomeration of Guingamp-Paimpol (Côtes-d’Armor), there is a shortage of municipal doctors and the hospital’s maternity ward is under threat. in the 19thmy In this district of Paris, 17% of households are made up of single mothers, compared to 12% in France as a whole.
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