The territorial big bang: which assessment about the territorial reform in France?

After a new and ambitious reform, referred to as the ‘Territorial Big Bang’, France was confronted, from the end of 2018, with the revolt of the yellow vests, often originating from the country’s most peripheral or troubled territories. These oppositions and contestations from the territories may seem all the more astonishing since the ambitious territorial reform initiated in 2015 and which took shape with the NOTRE and MAPTAM laws aimed precisely at repositioning the role of the territories at each scale. How and why have we arrived at the current result, which seems to revive the historical territorial divide between Paris and the provinces, transforming it into an opposition between the major cities and the rest of France? In this article, we show how the territorial reform of 2015 was a failure and we take stock of the fact that far from affirming a new stage of decentralization, it has consisted above all in favouring large structures and the search for economies of scale, and has left behind territories that don’t matter anymore for the public policies.