The grandeur and decadence of the suburbs Looking back on three decades of analysis of social and political change

“One fine morning, the French woke up to discover that a baobab tree had grown in their garden”. Following the last presidential election, in 2012, this was the sentence that opened an article in Le Monde describing the sudden arrival of periurban areas under the media spotlight as a result of the growing electoral success of the Front National (FN; the French National Front). Although this phenomenon is indeed something of a sensation in a journalistic field governed by a constant search for something new, can this type of analysis of urban contexts really be said to be new in the field of French research? This is the question that we shall address in this article; however, our aim is not to conduct an exhaustive examination, but rather to try to identify, through the most emblematic research, some key tendencies and themes in the way periurban areas are considered. We shall focus in particular on changes in the social make-up of these spaces, as well as on the question of how electoral dynamics are analysed. In the process, we shall leave aside certain important areas of study – such as the land-tenure and environmental issues resulting from urban sprawl, commuting, and other day-to-day movements that punctuate the lives of periurban households – in order to underline the fact that scholarly representations of residential spaces are dependent on the social and political categories used to define the people who live there. Following numerous socio-historical changes in French society, the image of periurban areas has been forged in particular according to the way in which the “middle classes” have been considered from a social and political standpoint; conversely, the image of the middle classes has also been influenced by research into their residential spaces, especially in suburban and periurban areas. Recent interpretations of the situation of the periurban middle classes, however, differ greatly from those that prevailed up to the 1980s (Bacqué and Vermeersch 2008): beyond the close link between the middle classes and periurban areas, there are significant factors of social differentiation even within the middle classes, as within the working classes. It is therefore only by endeavouring to