The Geometry of Emptiness: A Journey Through France’s ‘Diagonale du Vide’

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.

Sharing the responsibilities of driving the pair navigated this ‘ghost’ France, as Belhaj Kacem calls it. In the writer’s view this is the France that is home to the underrepresented, the politically expendable. This is the France to which the birthing and powering of the nation’s ongoing anti-government gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protests are attributed. Those protests, which started in late 2018 – initially in protest at rising petrol taxes, and continue today across the country. 

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.

D’Agata will – alongside Sohrab Hura – be leading a London workshop on alternative approaches to photography in June. More information can be found here.  

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.

The diagonal du vide, only a very vague concept before our visit, is so-called with good reason. We found what we were looking for. Everywhere we go, we engage with a France that, so to say, does not exist. A France abandoned, dehumanised, desertified. The first day of the journey there is a fog such as I have never seen before in my life, blanketing everything and lasting until early afternoon. It seems a foreboding sign, or omen, of the many industrial hells that we are going to come across: abandoned factories, huge sanatoriums left deserted for years and seemingly made for horror movie sets, shuttered gas stations, and bloodless hangars. For days, with the exception of the gilets jaunes, the biggest human congregations we come across will be at McDonald’s. Everywhere else, not a soul.

There are what I call “road-towns”: houses strung along streets which seem empty despite being inhabited, where one asks oneself how their tenants manage to escape depression, alcoholism or madness. We lean over a lake where a serial killer once dropped the corpses of his victims: paradoxically, it is as if the spirits of these underaged martyrs were charging the place with a bit of soul. We also come across two roadside prostitutes who, by their presence, enliven the technological desert in which the human being seems not to even have a minor role anymore. Stopping at a roadside restaurant, I tell myself that technology is really no longer serving the human being, but the human being technology. The lorry drivers are serving the lorries and not the lorries their drivers. The same goes for the whole society. “La société se croit seule mais il y a quelqu’un.” [Society believes that it is alone, but that there is someone], wrote Antonin Artaud (Marx could have said the same thing). But no, there is nobody.

The extreme art of d’Agata, wary and resentful of any stratification of representation, was required to make pictures of this haunted France. Workers on strike or unemployed, poor and miserable, mad: these ghosts of civil society, these beings whose spectral president says that they are nothing. These entities, neglected by the media and robbed of political representation are like a huge deafened scream that I could hear throughout our trip.

For me, the journey’s highlight was the gigantic abandoned sanatorium: I could hear the voices of the thousands of mad people who had lived in this place. Madness is nothing more than a political fact. They want us to believe that one is born mad when actually, one becomes mad. I dream of an organisation that would make madness the central part of its discourse. There is no other madness than the current organisation of society. Our leaders do not seem to want to cure it. The rags of the Capital wearing their yellow vests come to groan at the ears of those robots, but they do not hear anything. Hearing is a prerogative of life, which has deserted this France, which we are crossing like ghosts ourselves. The coming and going of ghosts, the living dead of society.