We set the scene. France has just experienced a major catastrophe -pandemic, explosion of a nuclear power plant, disruption of food supplies…-, hordes of violent individuals come to loot the cities to survive and impose their domination. It’s chaos. In this context of zombie apocalypse – even if we are not talking about “real” zombies as in The Walking Dead-, where should one take refuge in France to hope to get out of it? This is the question that arose Rentolaa rental housing platform, in its study “Best and worst French departments where to survive a zombie apocalypse” published in mid-June.
Based on five criteria – vulnerability, hiding places, supplies, mobility and security – it has produced a ranking of the safest departments in the event of a major crisis. If the study lacks a little transparency as to the criterion which caused the average of Seine-Saint-Denis, last in the ranking, to fall, or which favored the Bouches-du-Rhône, the big winner, we jumped on the opportunity to address this sensitive issue. Where should we move to be safe in the event of a societal collapse?
We reassure you, you have little chance of coming across a group of brain-eating living dead. The apocalyptic imagination uses the figure of the zombie because it is protean, it represents a diffuse anguish and the fear of the other. “They are not really zombies but dangerous men. This is what we find in popular fiction madmax », Explains Bertrand Vidal, sociologist, lecturer at Paul-Valéry Montpellier-3 University and author of Survivalism, are you ready for the end of the world (Arkhé, 2018). “Survivalism has become a market because we are in fear of collapse. We experienced the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, there is the climate threat, the war in Ukraine…”, he lists.
“The zombies are here, no need to invent a fiction”
The idea that society is in danger of collapsing seems more and more realistic. The survivalist mentality is taking hold in our culture, it is fueled by the series (Yellowjackets, The Last of Us), video games, literature and even television with Koh Lanta. “It feeds the idea that everything can collapse and that we would have to return to primitive skills to get out of it,” notes Bertrand Vidal. But the fears are many. For some, water shortage is a source of anxiety, others focus on nuclear power plants, forest fires, pollution. Rather, Rentola saw in this reading grid an opportunity to observe the territory in a somewhat unprecedented way as part of the study of the rental market. Difficult to advise to go in such or such department in this context. Especially since the zombies are already well established on French territory.
“The Larousse defines the zombie as a” person who looks absent, who is devoid of any will”, points out Alexandre Boisson, co-founder of SOS Maires, which promotes the resilience and autonomy of municipalities. I invite our fellow citizens to ask their mayor if the Dicrim (municipal information document on major risks) is up to date. You tell this person that several alerts have been given by ANSSI, the National Information Systems Security Agency, on the risks of cyberattacks on supply chains”, points out the public security specialist. Concretely, the food found in shops depends on the Internet. If a hacker is having fun hacking food supply chains, stores will quickly run empty. “You quickly realize that your interlocutor is absent and devoid of any will. The zombies are there, no need to invent a fiction”, he quips.
Analyzing the territory from the angle of supermarkets, pharmacies, population density, weapons in circulation, as this study does, responds perfectly to the current survivalist atmosphere. “Population density is a trope in the survivalist imagination from the 1960s and 1970s,” resumes Bertrand Vidal. At that time, the Cold War context in the United States raised fears of an attack by the USSR and a nuclear winter. By following this ideology, big cities were more likely to be targeted. “You have to go to areas where the population is the least dense. But, according to this scenario, ten years after the great apocalypse, the population of the cities is tearing itself apart, hordes of barbarians are breaking into the countryside. You have to think about a place with a low population density but where you can rebuild a community. Rather than the cliché of the isolated bunker, you have to imagine communities of resilience”, describes the specialist in the survivalist imagination who puts this idea of generalized looting into perspective. “Studies show that we do not necessarily return to a state of savagery when society collapses, it is in the imagination”, insists the sociologist.
“Local producers are not able to feed everyone”
After the devastating passage of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, the media describe a territory bruised by armed gangs. Subsequent studies, including those conducted by the University of Delaware Disaster Research Center, showed the opposite. “People don’t suddenly switch to anti-social behavior. They will rather help their neighbors, come to the aid of strangers, ”notes Tricia Wachtendorf, a researcher at the University of Delaware, in a sequence of Towards an altruistic world by Sylvie Gilman and Thierry de Lestrade (2015) quoted in Telerama.
SO ? We forget the bunkers and we count on our neighbors to overcome the zombie wave? Alexandre Boisson does not really believe in it. “Local producers are not able to feed everyone. In Ile-de-France, with 12 million people looking for food, shared gardens would be devastated, insists the specialist in food resilience. In a context where France has 12 million weapons in circulation, if we arrive at an uncontrolled situation of rupture of normality with little food resilience and armed people, we are in a chaotic situation”. After a month of blockage and shortages, it is, according to him, a situation that no one is able to manage. Moral of this study by Rentola: the zombie menace is a more serious matter than one might think. We are safe nowhere.