France: A divided country

Le Monde reported that “in the poorest sector, 6 out of 10 newly settled households have a person born abroad,” noted the daily.

Peripheral France – small towns, suburbs and rural areas – is separated from the globalised metropolis of the “bourgeois Bohemians”, or “bobos” as they are called.

The French élites live in sheltered enclaves, and likely have little understanding of the everyday impact of failed mass immigration and multiculturalism.

A recent European poll reflected these “two Frances that do not cross or speak to each other”, observed Sylvain Crepon of the University of Tours, in analyzing the success of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party in the recent European Parliament election.

Le Pen and President Emmanuel Macron, the two winners in the election, appeal to completely different sociological groups. In the Paris suburbs of Aulnay-sous-Bois, Sevran, Villepinte and Seine-Saint-Denis, the National Rally has been experiencing a meteoric rise.

In the cities, Le Pen is lagging behind. Her party finished fifth in Paris, third in Lille and fourth in Lyon. According to Crepon: “[T]hese cities will be protected from the National Rally’s vote by their sociological structuring. It gives credit to the populist notion that has diagnosed a disconnected elite. This [view] backs the idea of ​​a sociological break, which is not completely faulty.”

Towns such as Dreux has been described by Valeurs Actuelles as “the city that prefigures the France of tomorrow”:

“On one side, a royal city […]; on the other, suburbs imbued with [drug] trafficking and Islam. The bourgeois of the city center vote for Macron, the ‘little whites’ for Le Pen”.

Paris is much the same. “All the metropolises of the world know the same fate. This is where wealth flows and where the alliance between the ‘winners of globalisation’ and their ‘servants’, immigrants who have come to serve the new masters of the world, keep their children, bring their pizzas or work in their restaurants”, writes social commentator Èric Zemmour in Le Figaro. “Paris is a global city, not really a French city”.

The globalised, “bobo-ized [bourgeois Bohemian] upper classes”, according to one of France’s most respected authors. Christophe Guilluy, are filling the “new citadels” and are voting en masse for Macron.

But the reality is one of a nation subjected to severe stress and strain because of the fable “of a kind and welcoming society”. Guilluy has been deeply criticised by the French media for decsribing this reality.

According to Guilluy, it is a “social and cultural shock” resulting in Le Pen’s party winning more than twice as many electoral department as Macron, especially in the depressed and deindustrialized areas of northern, south-central and eastern France.

“Since moving to France in 2002, I’ve watched the country complete a cultural revolution”, Simon Kuper recently wrote in the Financial Times.

“Catholicism has almost died out (only 6 per cent of French people now habitually attend mass), though not as thoroughly as its longtime rival ‘church’, communism. The non-white population has kept growing”.

Muslims represent 13 percent of the population of France’s large cities, more than double the national average.

Four out of ten boys in Seine-Saint-Denis have Arab-Muslim first names and pollster Jérôme Fourquet revealed in a new study that “18 percent of newborn babies in France have an Arab-Muslim name”.