Urban Desertion: Chronicle of a National Weariness

This article was born from a departure, a breakup, but also from a clear-eyed look at a country beset by tensions, misunderstandings, and profound transformations. It is neither an indictment nor a manifesto, but rather the testimony of my friend Christian, who seeks to understand what he sees before him: a France that is changing faster than those who live there. Between weariness, anger, nostalgia, and a desire for peace, these lines recount an inner journey, that of a citizen drawn to the silence of the countryside after the tumult of the cities.

Louis Perez y Cid

“I thought my disgust with the world had reached its peak, but it has only grown. I can no longer even glance at the newspapers.” The stupidity, the cowardice, the malice on display make me wish for a new flood to engulf all these mediocre scoundrels. Only wild plants, mountains, the sky, and clouds are good.”
Alexandra David-Néel.

By Christian Morisot
For me, a new horizon is opening up after leaving Paris and its suburbs in the “93” (the infamous 93), where there are no problems for those who don’t live there… In fact, I hope to feel a little more at home in France. Here, the minds of young people, lacking direction, are too easily swayed by a pervasive discourse of hatred for the country where they live and where, for the vast majority of them, they were born.

Today, I'm tired of being outraged; I'm almost convinced of our powerlessness in the face of an adversity that has a name. I harbor a real anger that disturbs me when I watch one of the recent reports on the Trappes riots, sparked by the stop and search of a veiled woman, revealing a cancer that is imposing itself on our country as a deadly disease. In this forgotten corner of the Republic, foreigners are criticized for wanting restaurants and cafes open during Ramadan—a provocation? But above all, and this seems to me indicative of a future integration, the majority of the city's inhabitants are convinced that the authorities are conspiring to "whiten the city." One mother specifies: "that rents are going up to attract the 'bolos' (white people)." Here, more than anywhere else, social mixing is rejected, ghettos take root, and forbidden zones become entrenched, becoming twins of Marseille's "northern districts"... This is also, in a way, the consequence of my naive hope of finding a pitiful village, one of those where cafés and tobacconists are closing down, at a time when ancestral traditions are fading and eroding. I long to find myself retired in one of these small towns, in one of these regions known as the "soft underbelly" of France or the "diagonal of emptiness."

This is how I aspire to be part of this new population called "rurbanites," not truly urban and very little rural, who bring the city to the countryside. Those who no longer lean on the café counter, those who practice a life of balanced relationships between humankind, the land, and the animal world, for which the village was once the center of influence. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, the young are elsewhere; the countryside and the hills are the lands of old age. Thus, a few years into the last quarter of my life, I yearn for an anonymous living environment, for more space, silence, and serenity.

My whole life has been like that beach, relentlessly swept by high waves… calm always returned in the evening, reflecting what human existence should be. Today, I long for a calm sea, the kind that makes sailors' boats move too slowly during regattas. Rest assured, I know all too well that solitude is only good for the hermit, which could never be good for me, as isolation seems so horrible and painful. Imbued with these incorruptible decisions, I must, however, make a revealing confession and admit to an imperative need not to live too far from a large city. Man also exists through the weaknesses revealed by his own contradictions…

The whirlwind of another move is starting like a storm in a teacup. Having settled in the Paris region a year ago, I have so far encountered only closed, sullen faces, around me or in the street, with dull eyes that sometimes seem to awaken, giving the impression of searching into thoughts and hearts, but which, in fact, is only the reflection of an intimate thought and not a sudden interest in these invisible men they are observing…

Tickets for this, please; passes for that, please; control for everything. The France of large cities has become the land of sad men.

I return to Alexandra David-Neel, who said in 1926: “On the French Riviera, as in the Paris suburbs, you see housing development signs everywhere; it’s hideous… The mentality that must be developing in these shacks promises us a fine breed.”
Of course, the word “breed” remains to be defined, but your vision of the future, a harbinger of our present, could not be better defined, Madam…