{"id":12404,"date":"2013-12-19T10:03:00","date_gmt":"2013-12-19T10:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/praag.org\/?p=12404"},"modified":"2013-12-19T10:03:00","modified_gmt":"2013-12-19T10:03:00","slug":"french-lawmaker-walks-6000-km-finds-unashamed-racism-everywhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praag.org\/?p=12404","title":{"rendered":"French lawmaker walks 6000 km, finds ‘unashamed racism’ everywhere"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jean<\/a>
Jean Lassalle, photographed during his walk<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A French lawmaker who spent eight months walking a 6,000km \u201cTour de France\u201d takes his last symbolic steps in Paris on Sunday. He returns to the capital to report on a country that has \u201clittle hope for the future\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverywhere I went I witnessed a crisis in the standard of living, a loss of identity and the loss of a sense of a common destiny,\u201d Jean Lassalle, National Assembly member for the Pyr\u00e9n\u00e9es-Atlantiques region in southwest France, told Europe 1 radio.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople would tell me: \u2018look at the state you have left our country in\u2019,\u201d he added. \u201cThere is no more industry, farming is in crisis, just one in ten children of farmers grudgingly says they want to carry on in agriculture.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe countryside has lost its perspective, and it isn\u2019t any better in the cities. We all know the state of France\u2019s suburbs, even those that have been rebuilt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lassalle, 58, set out in April and walked an almost uninterrupted route clockwise around France, flying only from Marseille in the south to northern Corsica, and again from Bordeaux in the southwest to Nantes in the northwest.<\/p>\n

He said he \u201cneeded to get a feeling\u201d for the country, and wrote on his personal blog that he was impressed by peoples\u2019 willingness to speak frankly with him.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce they knew what I was doing, I felt a strong sense that they were expressing themselves as a civic duty, choosing their words carefully,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThere was a solemnity and a dignity about it, despite everything they had to say.\u201d<\/p>\n

Confusion and racism<\/p>\n

And what he found was a France confused about its position in a shrinking world, an uncertainty as to the long-term effects of globalisation and a distrust for politicians who, people told him, \u201cdo not listen to us at all\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe live in a world that is changing out of all recognition,\u201d he told Europe 1. \u201cWe [the government] have failed to find ways of explaining to the citizens of this country exactly what this change means.\u201d<\/p>\n

Worryingly, he also encountered \u201clatent racism\u201d almost everywhere, \u201ceven in the smallest villages\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is racism that seems totally unashamed,\u201d he told Le Monde on Friday. \u201cIt is a wholescale rejection of \u2018the other\u2019 and often expressed with excessive aggression.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lassalle told Le Monde that he was particularly worried about a return of \u201canti-Semitic rhetoric\u201d that was particularly \u201clinked to wealth\u201d.<\/p>\n

On Saturday, Lassalle will walk his final steps, from Place de la Concorde over the River Seine to the National Assembly building in central Paris.<\/p>\n

Hundreds of people he met on his walk are expected to accompany him, and to enter the assembly to start a two-day debate on France\u2019s future.<\/p>\n

\u201cI will then prepare a parliamentary report on what I learned on my walk, which I will submit to the president at the end of February,\u201d he wrote in his blog. \u201cMeeting people around the country was a deliberate act as an elected member of France\u2019s parliament, as a resistant [to changes that have eclipsed the lives of ordinary people], and a bid to raise awareness of the issues faced by our citizens.<\/p>\n

\u201cThings cannot stay the way they are now.\u201d – France24.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A French lawmaker who spent eight months walking a 6,000km \u201cTour de France\u201d takes his last symbolic steps in Paris on Sunday. He returns to the capital to report on a country that has \u201clittle hope for the future\u201d. \u201cEverywhere I went I witnessed a crisis in the standard of living, a loss of identity … Continue reading “French lawmaker walks 6000 km, finds ‘unashamed racism’ everywhere”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":12408,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49,3],"tags":[534,7860,7859,157,7858],"class_list":["post-12404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe","category-news","tag-france","tag-jean-lassalle","tag-politician","tag-racism","tag-walk"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/jean-lassalle.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12404"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12409,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12404\/revisions\/12409"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}