In early 2019, French Magnum photographer Antoine d’Agata and French-Tunisian author, philosopher, and actor Mehdi Belhaj Kacem drove through the region known in France as the diagonal du vide, or ‘empty diagonal’. Stretching across the nation – from the Belgian border in the north-east to the Pyrenees in the south-west – the disparate geographies of the area are unified by a low-density of industry, population and media coverage.
What follows is a selection of d’Agata’s images from the 339 towns, villages and hamlets the pair passed through, accompanied by Belhaj Kacem’s essay on the diagonale and it’s role – and that of areas like it – in France’s current political face-off.
The diagonal du vide, or ‘diagonal of emptiness’, refers to a series of places which are among the most underprivileged in French territory. With Antoine d’Agata, we draw a road map, a plan to visit these places. We want to feel the pulse of the France that has given rise to the now-famous gilets jaunes. We want to visit Ghost France. The title of a movie that marked me long ago comes back to my mind: Ghosts of the Civil Dead.
The confrontation between the French government and the gilets jaunes has pitted two types of ghost against one another: the sovereign French Gods – the “Jupiterian” entity of big finance in its twilight years, whose decadence has nothing on the decline of Ludwig II of Bavaria; versus this unrepresented France. The latter, popularised as understood by the Situationists, comes behind the former in all respects. The dialogue between these two entities is a dialogue of the deaf. The France whose representation is non-existent fails to make itself heard by the France that only exists within in itself, or in its own eyes.