Yellow Vest demonstrators in Bourges, France, January 12, 2019. ANDBZ/Press Association. All rights reserved.
My wife and I used to live in West Brittany. Like Connemara it’s a beautiful place if you can afford it. After the effects of the 2008 crisis began to be felt, my work as an independent educator dried up. Banks and institutions put contracts on a two-year hold. After an expensive eighteen months of wait-and-see, we moved to Nantes. Five years on we consider ourselves lucky to have escaped peripheral isolation and financial suffocation[i].
Peripherality is about spatial distance from work and social services. 75% of home-work trips daily in France are by car with an average distance of 50 kms. Without secure work, family ties or welfare protection you won’t make ends meet in Peripheral France. This was why we supported the first protests of the Gilets-Jaunes.
