“Cities, small and medium-sized are those that today diverge towards political extremes”

DThe least populated – Château-Chinon (Nièvre), Jonzac (Charente-Maritime), Barcelonnette (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence), Confolens (Charente), Aubusson (Creuse), Le Marin (Martinique) – to the most important – Lorient (Morbihan), Calais (Pas-de-Calais), Béziers (Hérault), Le Havre (Seine-Maritime), Mulhouse (Haut-Rhin) – the sub-prefectural cities form vital centers of centrality.

These towns, small and medium-sized (with their intermunicipalities), mesh France; and with them, its inhabitants belonging to the middle classes. They are the ones that house high schools and colleges, cultural or sports facilities. They play a fundamental role in access to public and private services, healthcare, shopping and leisure. It is they who, today, diverge towards the extremes.

Deindustrialization and impoverishment

What remains of the State’s territorial network is most often organized on their scale. For more than twenty years, the construction and the rise of intermunicipalities have reinforced their role of animation of their living area. They constitute and must constitute “the masses of granite” (term which originally designates the institutions set up under the Consulate by Bonaparte) – with their sub-prefectures – on French soil.

Many of them have been hard hit for many years by deindustrialization. Overall, they have become impoverished through the relocation of economic activities, the withdrawal of State public services, integrating – at best – the sphere of attraction of the metropolises.

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It is indeed the largest cities that have driven French growth since the end of the 20th century.^e century, concentrating company headquarters, the supply of services and training, and more broadly activities with high added value. The very term “metropolis” is experienced as a factor of attractiveness by the large agglomerations which can acquire the status.

The framework of sub-prefectural towns has appeared in the recent period like that of peripheral France.

The abandonment of the regional planning policy, metropolitanization – seen as a condition of the competitiveness of “the French company” in globalization – seemed inevitable, going in a direction of history where small and medium-sized towns could at most take advantage of a position as the residential hinterland of the metropolises or, for those who were lucky enough to have tourist assets, resorts.

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