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The city of Nevers shows by far the image of sweet France a sweet and timeless France: the steeple of the cathedral, the small streets of the city center with its shops and restaurants, its vast
On the banks of the Loire, the idyllic profile of this city of 35,000 inhabitants, located 250 km south of Paris, can cause confusion. Nevers and its region are one of the places where the revolt of the yellow vests broke out, the French having enough to pay taxes and reduce the utilities.
– Look at this house in the distance. In her, she lives an elderly person. You have to drive miles to go shopping. Can you imagine how much fuel you are spending?
Unemployed six months ago, Michel is two weeks ago at a roundabout on the A-77 motorway. He wears a fluorescent yellow vest, a security item to wear on cars from France and other countries. The vest symbolizes the movement that erupted three weeks ago to protest the rise in taxes on gasoline, which must now be revoked, at least temporarily, by President Emmanuel Macron. However, they demand a lot more. Michel
Like many yellow jackets Michel wary of the press – being a foreign body makes it easier – and does not want to reveal his last name He and other activists have built a wooden cabin in the center of the roundabout. They control the pbadage of cars and trucks.
"I get an unemployment insurance of 900 euros [cerca de 3.900 reais] After having paid all the bills, there is nothing left," he says. "And I have two sons of six and three years old." He is 31 years old.
I worked as a gardener. Your wife does the housework. Unemployment insurance ends at the end of the year. Then you will receive social badistance 652 euros [2.840 reais] per month.
A sparsely populated territory. A precarious situation in which millions of French people are afraid of falling. A handful of Frenchmen angry at an improvised checkpoint
The movement of yellow wasps spreads across the country. These are small and medium-sized rural towns in France, where the car is a working tool and, for many, survival, and where the closure of a doctor's office and a train station is an ostracism. [19659002] There is a geopolitics of yellow vests. The department of Nièvre, of which Nevers is the capital, was November 17 – the first Saturday of the demonstrations – the highest density of yellow vests compared to the total population, according to the calculation of the demographer Hervé Le Bras, based on available data . The arm straddled the card of the yellow vests to the other two: that of the departments which lose the population and which reflects the distance which separates them from the services of the daily life.
The three maps coincide to draw a corridor that crosses France from north-east to south-west: departments with a high density of yellow vests, a population in decline and geographical isolation. The track coincides with what the geographer Roger Brunet called the diagonal of the vacuum of the 80s. Nièvre and Nevers are installed diagonally from the void – to empty France, to paraphrase and retake the title of the test of Sergio del Molino on depopulated Spain –
. For example, Nièvre has an unemployment rate of 7.7%, lower than the national average of 8.7%. And this department has not so far been a stronghold of the far-right National Front (FN) and its successor, the National Cluster, although they advance at every election.
"There are no doubt politicians in the movement, but neither the geography nor the frequency of yellow vests nor their slogans correspond to a political color," says Le Bras about yellow vests.
The ride from the roundabout of the A-77, where yellow vests protect, to the center of Nevers, is brief. Cars dressed in yellow vests run in front of the windshield. This is the sign of a solidarity that exceeds mobilized activists. It takes 15 minutes from the countryside to the old town. In the middle, roads interrupted by roundabouts and fast food restaurants, concessions, areas with shopping centers.
The landscape of the depths of France has a profound thing about America. With a substantial difference. It is one of the most egalitarian countries, with a social network that leaves few people without anything and disparities mitigated by redistributive policies. Neither France is the United States, nor is Nièvre the Midwest. And Nevers is not Detroit, although the magazine Paris Match to the indignation of many residents, gives as title of this week's report "Nevers, ghost town".
to Paris Match ] is part of an undeniable reality: the reduction of the population and the closing of companies. A walk in some of the main streets shows a succession of shops closed or in poor condition. A report from the Ministry of the Economy, published in 2016, ranked Nevers among the four medium-sized French cities with the largest number of closed stores, about 22% of the total. The migration of the 1970s to surrounding residential neighborhoods, along with the construction of Trade Points, is contributing to the decline.
"Nevers is in no way a dead city," says Jean-Luc Dechauffour, bookseller, president of professional badociation and tireless advocate of nearby stores instead of hypermarkets on the periphery. Déchauffour shares with others the feeling of injustice caused by the dark image that Paris sometimes presents of his city. He argues that the decline has been reversed. He speaks sitting in the chair of the hairdresser La Fabrique by cutting his hair. It could be a hairdresser in a hipster district of Paris or New York, the other facet of a France of equally dynamic provinces, in which there is no not only closed stores. Before this city and this department, they voted at the Socialists last time, at Macron, but for how long?
The Nièvre was a stronghold of François Mitterrand. Harold Blanot grew up under the Mitterrand myth in a village near Chateau Chinon, whose president was mayor from 1959 to 1981. He is now one of the heads of the department's national grouping. "Since the beginning of [o movimento de protesto] I have asked our constituents to participate, but without a flag," he explains. "The porosity between yellow vests and us is very strong." Every crisis is an opportunity.
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