Twilight of the Elites by Christophe Guilluy review – France and a new class conflict

Nearly a decade before the gilets jaunes rose up in their high-vis vests to shake France and grab global headlines, the French social geographer Christophe Guilluy foresaw their arrival in an essay called Fractures Françaises. In 2014 he developed his theory further in La France périphérique, or Peripheral France, earning himself national fame (Libération, the left-leaning daily, devoted its cover and two full pages to the work), unprecedented sales (13,000 copies in a fortnight) of a geography book and an audience with Elysée palace advisers. His argument is not especially complicated. France, an ostensibly unified country, is in fact divided in two, between globalised, culturally vibrant cities such as Paris, Bordeaux and Lyon – where careers, investment and wealth are concentrated – and all the rest.

This vast, depressed, “peripheral” France of small and medium-sized towns, un-chic suburbs, post-industrial wasteland and the all but forgotten countryside now encompasses, he reckons, roughly 60% of the country’s population. Prospects, living standards and public infrastructure have eroded, unemployment, poverty and insecurity have soared, and many feel disconnected from the politics of their big-city peers – increasingly choosing either to abstain, or embrace the rightwing populist, protectionist, anti-immigration message of Marine Le Pen.

Guilluy argued that peripheral France should be seen as a bigger concern than the country’s troubled, immigration-heavy banlieues, traditionally seen as its major social problem, because of the sheer numbers of people struggling to make ends meet and their relative isolation from dynamic economic centres. If nothing changed, he warned, the French Socialist party, the historical defender of the underprivileged, would collapse, Le Pen’s far-right Front National – now renamed Rassemblement National (National Rally) – would soar, and France risked a popular uprising the likes of which it had not witnessed in decades, if not centuries.

In the 2017 presidential and parliamentary elections the Socialist party, which under François Hollande held the Elysée palace, parliament, senate and a majority of France’s regions in 2012, finished fifth in the race for the Elysée and crashed from 280 MPs to 30, winning only a humiliating 7.4% of the vote. Le Pen, meanwhile, swept through to the second round run-off of the presidential poll, recording her party’s highest ever score in the process, and managed to return eight MPs – also a record number under France’s current electoral system – to the national assembly. Then last year the gilets jaunes, a social-media based insurrection of the underpaid and over-taxed of peripheral France, with no structure, no recognised leader and no party or union backing, erupted on to the streets, demanding everything from better living standards to direct democracy and the demise of the president.

Guilluy, whose work is not universally admired in France, particularly by academic geographers and many on the left, seems to have seen it all coming. So there will be considerable interest in his latest work, published in French as Le Crépuscule de la France d’en haut in 2016 and now, by Yale. In a further development of his now-familiar argument, he tackles head on – and with great virulence – the flip side of La France périphérique, those he considers largely responsible for the country’s profound social, economic and political dislocation: hipsters, who the French call bourgeois-bohèmes or bobos.

It is not so much “big capital” that is to blame for the divide, Guilluy writes, as when “previous generations of the bourgeoisie lusted nakedly after power or money”, but the “laid-back, unostentatious dominance … without hatred or violence” of the “bobo-ised upper classes” in what he calls the “new citadels”. They have “supported the economic policies of the upper class for 30 years now” (policies which only really work for them) and developed “a single way of talking and thinking … that allows the dominant classes to substitute for the reality of a nation subject to severe stress and strain the fable of a kind and welcoming society”. Because hipsters are also hypocrites, Guilluy argues: they denounce globalisation, but never challenge it because it serves them so well; they preach diversity, but send their children to private schools; they love the “authenticity” of living in working-class areas, but contribute to their destruction through rising property prices.

The revolution is coming, he warns: “The existing order will finally break down not as the result of some decisive event, but as the result of a slow process of social and cultural disaffiliation of the working class.” It has already brought us Brexit in Britain and Trump in the US; “a new form of class conflict” is upon us, and a “modern slave rebellion” is on its way.

It’s angry, compelling stuff, if all perhaps a bit too seamless. In France, Guilluy is often accused of being selective with his data and simplistic in his science, of delivering, as Libération put it, “a big dose of ideology and some attention-grabbing one-liners, dressed up in a thin veneer of theory”. Yet the paradigms are, quite plainly, shifting. The “peripherals” of the western world “have no choice but to take back control of their own lives”, Guilluy concludes. “They are rising up against the economic, social and cultural constraints under which they have been forced to live.” Elites, in turn, “realise they have lost control of the least well-off, and the panic is perceptible”. The new world will be made “not by the fine speeches of the politicians, but by the social insecurity, sedentarisation and separatism imposed by the daily existence of the working class”. The gilets jaunes are not going away any time soon.