Détours en France

In the tradition of Tobias Smollet, Henry James, and Stendhal, Jean-Christophe Bailly's Le Dépaysement, Voyages en France (2011) ponders the essence of a nation in which the constant flux of progress belies a deeply rooted and cherished sense of history and place. Though Bailly moves around France in a seemingly fragmented and peripatetic way, the series of essays he writes come together to suggest a "certain idea" of contemporary France, one that resists the monumental and the epic in favor of a more offbeat and quotidian (but no less foundational) truth. In this article, I read Le Dépaysement alongside the work of photographer Raymond Depardon, whose 2010 exhibition, La France, shares a number of insightful affinities. Not only are Depardon's large-format pictures from around the Hexagon similar in scope to Bailly's literary détour en France, but each one offers a progressive view of a nation that is cognizant of its past as it evolves in an increasingly multicultural, globalized world. As such, both works serve as useful countermeasures to recent, decidedly bellicose claims about the decline and inevitable "deculturation" of France made by a few outspoken critics whose nostalgic yearning for a return to origins seems not only retrograde and chauvinistic, but dangerously reactionary

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