Andrew Hussey, formerly dean of the University of London Institute in Paris, has had a long and distinguished career in France. In his 2014 book, The French Intifada, he predicted that France was on the verge of war with its growing North African immigrant population. Today he admits that this prediction was premature. Instead, the unexpected arrival of Emmanuel Macron in 2017 gave people a brief hope that the country could be effectively governed from the political centre. 

Eight years later, Macron is scoring record levels of unpopularity. Hussey now claims that, throughout France, ‘a kind of angry despair’ is felt by ordinary people on both the Left and the Right. It is provoked by a general contempt for politicians and by worsening class divisions that separate a privileged minority from the rest of the population. These are driven, he asserts, by the success and greed of les Bobos, the tribe of entitled left-liberal professionals led by Macron who run almost everything but do nothing to help the growing numbers facing ‘low wages, job insecurity and poor social housing’. Les Bobos (an abbreviation of ‘bourgeois bohemians’) congregate in ‘the new citadels’ such as Bordeaux, Lyon and Paris. They received a severe correction in 2018 with the populist revolt of the gilets jaunes (‘yellow vests’), which started as a peaceful demonstration against fuel tax rises but devolved into countrywide violent protests. The gilets jaunes movement was only ended by the Covid lockdown of 2020. It never developed a leadership or grew into a political party. It was uninterested in policy; its members were quite simply contre.

Hussey believes that the French are even angrier today. To test his theory, he travels the length of France, starting in the abandoned industrial areas in the north and ending, via Reims and Lyon, in Provence.  

Setting out from Roubaix, Hussey finds an abandoned region of white working-class people