The wildfires devastating the south of France do not only destroy hectares of forest: they implicitly expose a financialized economy’s dependence on farmers, firefighters, and volunteers whom it has long looked down upon.
The Brutal Return of “Ordinary People”
In an op-ed published by Le Figaro, historian Pierre Vermeren observes that the fires are putting back at the center of the national stage categories of the population that the service-oriented and financialized economy has grown accustomed to ignoring, if not despising. Firefighters, farmers, foresters, volunteers: they are the ones who, in emergencies, keep the country standing—while the circuits of financial added value produce neither water, nor firebreaks, nor rescues.
This observation is by no means anecdotal. It touches on the question of who, concretely, produces national resilience when nature or disaster reclaims its rights.
An “Economic Shockwave”
The economic aspect of the crisis was quick to force its way into the public debate. Questioned about the consequences of the fires, the Minister Delegate for Industry, Roland Lescure, spoke of a true “economic shockwave,” according to France 24. The phrase says it all: what the productive and financial apparatus considered mere scenery—the rural, forest, and coastal worlds—is proving to be a vital link whose destruction is paid for in cash, through agricultural, tourism, and real estate losses.
“An economic shockwave” — Roland Lescure, Minister Delegate for Industry, regarding the summer fires.
Growing Exposure, Peripheral France on the Front Line
Available data shows that fire risk is not an isolated accident but a structural trend hitting territories already weakened by deindustrialization and the exodus of public services. According to the key figures on natural risks from the Ministry of Ecological Transition:
- in 2022, 6,870 municipalities were declared exposed to forest fire risk by prefects, or about one in five municipalities;
- three-quarters of these municipalities are located in the south of France;
- five regions account for 90% of the exposed municipalities: Occitanie, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, and Corsica;
- in 2022, 62,000 ha of forests and 10,000 ha of other vegetation burned, including more than 36,000 ha in the Southwest alone, across 2,653 fires;
- the Landiras fire (Gironde) alone destroyed nearly 20,000 ha; the La Teste-de-Buch fire wiped out nearly 6,000 ha, forced the evacuation of 22,000 people, and 90% destroyed five campsites;
- along the Mediterranean rim, 118,000 fire outbreaks have burned nearly 942,000 ha over 49 years.
These territories—Landes, Corsica, the Alpine and Pyrenean foothills, the Mediterranean coast—are precisely those that metropolization and the concentration of service sector activities have progressively emptied of their services and active population. Yet they are the ones absorbing the shock.
Who Actually Puts Out the Fire?
The French Forest Observatory points out that nine out of ten fires in France are caused by humans—a figure that highlights how crucial prevention, forest management, and local vigilance (by farmers, foresters, and residents) are. These are concrete skills and physical presences, anchored in a territory, that neither financial algorithms nor international economic governance forums could ever replicate.
The contrast is striking:
- on one hand, an economy of offices, platforms, and financial flows, largely disconnected from the physical constraints of the land;
- on the other, professions and volunteer commitments that require a continuous presence on the ground, a deep knowledge of the terrain, the climate, and the pathways.
When fire breaks out, it is this second economy—usually undervalued—that overnight becomes indispensable to collective survival.
The Disconnect Between Elites and Territories
What both Pierre Vermeren’s op-ed and Roland Lescure’s warning document is a structural disconnect: a France of metropolises and financial services steering major macroeconomic balances, and a rural and peripheral France that concretely absorbs climatic and material shocks—without its real contribution to the country’s security and sovereignty always being recognized at its true value, including in budgetary terms.
This observation ties into a broader question about the distribution of efforts and respect between the categories that produce financial value and those that produce, in the most literal sense, the country’s capacity to withstand crises.
What the Crisis Reveals
The summer’s wildfires invented nothing: they simply made visible, for a few weeks, an inverted hierarchy compared to the one usually enshrined in economic rankings and technocratic discourse. It remains to be seen whether this situational recognition—lasting only as long as a fire, an evacuation, or a statistical report—will leave a lasting mark on how France thinks about its dependence on its territories and those who sustain them.
