Fourquet and Cassely set out to map contemporary France and found themselves reading it like a landscape — in retail parks, roundabouts, and the slow disappearance of the local butcher. What they found was a country that had quietly become two.

There is a methodology implicit in this book that deserves naming before its conclusions. Fourquet and Cassely are not primarily working from surveys or economic datasets, though those are present. They are reading France from its surface — from the spread of drive-throughs and commercial périphériques, from the geography of which towns got a Biocoop and which got a Lidl, from the architecture of new-build housing estates and the slow disappearance of the independent butcher and the local bank branch. They treat the physical and commercial landscape of the country as a document, and they read it with the patience and lateral attention of people who have learned to take ordinary things seriously.

What that method reveals is a country that has, over the past thirty years, quietly become two. One France thrives in the globalised economy — concentrated in prosperous metropolitan areas and in certain rural zones sustained by tourism, agriculture, and the industries of lifestyle. The other is defined by what it has lost: manufacturing employment, shrinking public services and the institutional fabric that once gave smaller towns and industrial regions a sense of connection to the national project. The dividing line between these two Frances is not simply economic. It runs through identity, aspiration, and the texture of daily life — through what is available locally and what requires a journey, through which futures feel plausible and which have quietly closed.

Authors acknowledge that this is not a new observation. Christophe Guilluy mapped the periphery; Emmanuel Todd traced the deeper structural patterns. What Fourquet and Cassely add is granularity and a particular kind of cultural attentiveness — the ability to read macro-transformation in micro-detail, to see in the layout of a rural commercial zone or the menu of a local café the trace of forces that no single resident would describe in those terms but all of them are living inside.

The rise of what they call urban servitude — low-wage, high-intensity work in the gig economy and service sector, concentrated in cities but spreading outward — sits alongside the celebrated success stories of the digital economy: the unicorns, the Doctolitbs, the platforms that are simultaneously genuine innovations and engines of the inequality they emerge from. The tension between these two registers of contemporary French life is one the book holds without resolving.

Agnès Varda and JR's film Faces Places, made four years earlier, arrives at the same territory from a completely direction. Fourquet and Cassely map France analytically — reading it from above, assembling patterns from accumulated detail — Varda and JR read it through encounter. They travel to the places, meet the people, make large-format portraits and paste them onto walls, silos, the sides of houses. The method is collaborative; the knowledge it produces is particular rather than general, felt rather than argued. The two Frances that the book identifies in aggregate, the film finds in specific faces: the dockworkers' wives whose portraits were pasted onto the sides of shipping containers before the tide came in and took them, the widow of a miner still living in a house scheduled for demolition, the goat farmer lamenting that no one hand-milks anymore.

Together, the book and the film make a stronger case than either does alone because they demonstrate that the same territory requires different instruments. Analytical mapping and attentive encounter are not competing methods. They are complementary ones, each revealing what the other cannot see.