Fractured France: A Journey Through a Divided Nation

by Andrew Hussey

The old ideals that formed the French Republic have crumbled to a battleground of competing ideologies and cultures. Here, Hussey travels from the post-industrial north to the badlands of the south, speaking to commentators, writers, and politicians, talking with locals and walking the streets, to trace the social, political and economic fault-lines that are shaping the new France.

Genres: Nonfiction

336 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 11, 2025

Reviews

[B]

An unfair, if readable, survey of the most unsavoury sides of France. Hussey identifies protests, violence, gangs, unemployment, classism, and cultural balkanisation as existential problems for France.

Few of his criticisms seem unique to France. City slickers dismiss country bumpkins. De-industrialised towns lack jobs. Football hooligans are violent. There's nothing particularly French about this disorder.

Despite having lived in France most of adult life, Hussey constantly looks to English and American writers for insight about the places he visits. Although the impressions of Arthur Young, Henry Miller, and Ernest Hemmingway are interesting, it seems perverse to ignore what France's greatest writers have said about their country and it's contradictions.

[Mathilde]

Tosh and drivel. If I took one thing away from this book, it’s the inspiring revelation that perseverance will get you far. Why else anyone would publish or read Hussey’s writing is beyond me.

Hussey picks out the poorest towns in France to make floating remarks on the country’s state as a whole. He bases such remarks on interviews with (often far right) politicians, and long stints in local drinking holes. For an academic, we feel Hussey is astoundingly poorly read. Beyond his own cocky admittance that he used to pretend he’d understood books he was teaching university classes on (the disrespect for education speaks for itself), the only thing he can reliably be said to have read is Orwell’s review of other books.

Hussey is a frightful snob. While he has made a successful career for himself while coming from a working class background, one feels he is on a mission to tear down anyone else who might have such notions, with a healthy note of jealousy. His interviews with French, often gay authors who candidly speak on the difficulty of class transition are framed with contempt and baldly rude remarks on their weakness of character and lack of loyalty to their roots. Somehow Hussey manages to convey a complete lack of empathy for those closest to his own background, albeit in a French setting. Naturally, Hussey’s understanding of class is simply a transposition of the British system onto the French.
For a man purporting to write on France, it seems Hussey has only fractionally engaged with actual French people, mainly by having girlfriends who he derides for - you guessed it - their class. An ex from his youth, Sylvia, is lambasted for trying to get him into silk socks, and even her parents receive an undignified spanking. Pretty ungracious.
As Hussey travels around France, he often introduces places with the opinion of another English-speaker before him. We are getting a third hand outsider’s opinion before we’ve even started.

In a pretty inane attempt to create some kind of discourse to live up to his title, Hussey expresses pretty outlandish claims that classic comedies such as ‘Bienvenue chez Les ch’tis’ are clear examples of the snobbism of ‘citadels’ such as Paris and Lyon. Not only is no one in the film from such a city (the film is about a guy from the south visiting the north), but the film is also obviously a parody about overcoming lighthearted stereotypes.

Overall, I found this book rude, snobby and stupid. It makes no real effort to engage with French culture, but does so unwittingly, in that Hussey still clearly embodies the British colonial tourist stereotype, plopping himself down with a pint or twelve and quaintifying the locals with an unquestioning sense of imperial superiority. The author comes across as vain, and one really feels this is yet another ploy to justify his unfathomably successful career, all while taking digs as anyone he feels has outdone him, insecure as he is at his big age.

[Angela]

Andrew Hussey was born in Liverpool, but now lives in Paris, and his book takes the reader on a journey through the country from the industrial north through to the Mediterranean coast and the multi-cultural city of Marseille. We see the country in its many guises and experience its cultural changes through the eyes of a man who has lived in, studied, and observed his adopted country over many years.
The book is part memoir, part travel log, and part observation and assessment. With my well-used map easily to hand, I followed Hussey's journey from city to city. It was especially interesting to me to read his views on each location. I also found myself musing on his comments and conclusions, comparing them with my own thoughts and feelings about a country I have spent so much time in. The fissures he sees in French city society are there in rural France, too. Perhaps not quite so obviously, but the country is changing and has been for some time.
Hussey completes his journey in what he calls the 'wicked city' of Marseille before returning to his Paris bolthole. Marseille is one of the oldest cities in France and perhaps the most multi-cultural. I believe I once said that, in Marseille, 'you can eat in any one of a hundred different languages'. Having read Hussey's chapter on this 'wicked city', it is clear that this is still the case. It was here a few years ago that I came across the Gilets Jaunes and the riot police lining the street I had inadvertently strayed into. I scarpered quick sharp! Hussey aptly describes this massive conurbation as a city of 'perpetual comings and goings'. The vast port area brings in immigrants - some legal, a significant number not - freight, cruise and naval ships. The quartiers nord, with a population of almost 250,000, is still 'one of the poorest, most ethnically diverse and most dangerous parts of the city'. It clearly hasn't changed since I was last there.
This book is fascinating, but for those hoping for an easy and joyful read, I think you will be disappointed for the most part. This is an expose of a changing society across a large country. Whilst I could identify with some of the fissures highlighted by Hussey, I also mourned some aspects of Frenchness that were on the brink of disappearing. Regrettably, Hussey offers no solutions, but his keen-eyed observation and assessment still make this a thought-provoking read.

[Bill Perrin]

Not a book that encourages tourism.