What future for French rural areas?[Quel avenir pour les territoires ruraux français ?]

This chapter addresses the question of the renewal of rural areas. Indeed, since the appearance of Covid19, there has been a lot of talk in the media about city dwellers who are leaving large urban centers to find more pleasant confinement spaces in the countryside. However, beyond this cyclical health crisis, this renewed interest in the French countryside and rurality corresponds to an older process of repopulation of rural areas observed from the end of the 1970s. , we remember for example the eponymous work by geographer Bernard Kayser published in 1989. After decades, sometimes a century, of demographic decline, the rural population curve begins to rise during this period. Rural areas are seeing the arrival of new inhabitants with projects. Market gardening, grocery store, bistro ... An economy that relies on sharing and solidarity, and revitalizes the municipalities. Today, 80% of French rural municipalities are experiencing population gain. They were only 15% in the years 1950-1960. According to an IFOP survey conducted in 2018 for Rural Families, even before the health crisis, 81% of French people would like to live in the countryside; and 60% of young people under 25 feel attracted too. This is not just a vague project, as 100,000 people take action every year. The population of the French countryside has thus returned to the same level today as in 1954. The desire for a garden, the fed up with traffic jams, but also the deployment of broadband, which allows independents or small businesses to go green. This trend reversal can also be seen in most industrialized countries from the 1970s. But this renewed interest in rurality is not without raising certain questions. Without claiming to be exhaustive, we will limit ourselves here to raising a few issues which outline a two-sided rural renaissance: a very positive facet of demographic recomposition, reception of new populations, attractiveness in terms of quality of life, but also a more negative facet with strong disparities according to the territories in the access to digital, less well provided services and sometimes difficult cohabitation between the neo-rural and the population already present in the countryside.