Monasphere housing estate: “Towards an Americanization of French territories?”

Laurent Chalard is a geographer and works at the European Center for International Affairs.

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According to the regional daily

, in the small Rabelaisian town of Ile Bouchard in Indre-et-Loire, which smells of "Peripheral France" with its declining demography and its town center with advanced commercial desertification, a promoter, Monasphere, plans to carry out a housing estate intended primarily for a Catholic clientele - without being officially exclusively reserved for Christians - which is a great novelty in France. Indeed, until now, our country had escaped a very widespread fashion in the Anglo-Saxon world, where neighborhoods are built targeting a specific public, often in the form of closed communities, sometimes with extremely strict rules prohibiting access to anyone who does not meet the selection criteria. The only exception, but far from being generalized, concerns theemergence of real estate programs reserved for the elderly, through the concept of residences for seniors of the group Les Sénioriales, a subsidiary of Pierre & Vacances, which remains concentrated on the seaside coasts, a privileged land of welcome for these populations. Indeed, our elders, as long as they are not dependent, continue to appreciate in their great majority the districts mixing the generations.

Read alsoNo, there will be no neighborhood “reserved” for Christians in L’Île-Bouchard

This territorial compartmentalization is reflected on the political level by increasingly irreconcilable positions on a large number of social issues between populations who do not mix and therefore do not speak to each other, sharing diametrically opposed values.

All-out communitarianism ends up destroying national cohesion, membership in a “tribe” outweighing the sharing of collective values.

This is one of the explanatory factors, among others, of the deep division of American society, the pros and anti-Trumps living in different societies with divergent interests within the same state.

However, since the election of Emmanuel Macron as President of the Republic in 2017, we have seen a creeping Americanization of the French elites, with many Anglo-Saxon consulting firms, such as McKinsey, acting as eminence grise for leaders generally little cultured and without new ideas to offer. This situation leads to the development of a fragmented representation of French society and its territories, the quintessence of which is the model of "archipelization" theorized by the pollster Jérôme Fourquet. According to its promoters, there no longer really exists a national community, but a set of micro-communities with divergent and sometimes conflicting interests, to each of which a targeted marketing discourse must be addressed.This societal approach is also available on the territorial level, France now being considered as a geographical mosaic opposing city centers to suburbs and peri-urban space; metropolises to Peripheral France; the tourist rural to the isolated rural.

Let us contribute to the construction of a united France, on the societal and territorial levels, and not disunited, at the risk otherwise of seeing our identity vanish definitively between multiple communities tearing each other apart, which will only be the game of our enemies.

Laurent Chalard

This "archipelization", which risks giving the final blow to national cohesion already in very bad shape, does not therefore reflect the reality of current French society, which retains a certain number of shared identity traits despite the development of a multicultural society and the existence of "lost territories of the Republic". It is rather the revealer of the model of society to which the liberal elites formatted in the Anglo-Saxon schools seek to make us tender, showing their loss of confidence in the history and the culture of their country, which they control so badly! However, the logic of developing community housing, such as the L'Île-Bouchard project, is fully in line with this Americanized vision of the world.

If France does not want to follow the fate of the United States, where communitarianism almost degenerated into civil war, it would be better not to stupidly copy bad ideas from across the Atlantic.

Our country deserves better than to ape the society of the powerful of the moment, which does not bode well for the future if Xi Jinping's China ends up becoming the reference... Consequently, let us contribute to the construction of a united France, on societal and territorial plans, and not disunited, at the risk otherwise of seeing our identity vanish definitively between multiple communities tearing each other apart, which will only play into the hands of our enemies.