Jan-Maat’s Reviews > Als Roth in Frankrijk: Een literaire reis door le Midi > Status Update

Jérôme Fourquet "l'archipel français" - idea that there are few common reference point, therefore one cannot speak of a french society. Strikes me as an interesting idea, but hardly one that is unique to France. Maybe the issue is the assumption under the idea, of Eugene Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen, that a nation should have a unifing ideas and a single common culture?

Beaucaire geeft me het gevoel dat ik hier niet met de trein ben gekommen, maar met een tijdmachine.

-shush, don't let SNCF hear that, they will charge extra!

Arles. She describes that a railway repair centre, paper manufacturing, rice processing and metal industry have all left the town since the 1980s leading to a push to tourism (and rising house prices). However she quites Roth who visted in the 1930s before those industries arrived and the town was decrepit and poor. Is deindustrialisation then the problem? Or rather unsustainable development?

Nîmes - bullfighting as regional identity in opposition to national uniformity.

I thought this was a bit ofd because the old Roman arena they use for the fights was only cleared out in the 19th century and indeed bullfight spanish style was introduced into France during the 2nd empire when Napoleon III married Princess Eugenie of Spain.

The saga of Maurice the cockerel, here as epitomising the divide between new and long term rural residents.