The real-estate market in
any sophisticated city reflects deep aspirations and fears. If you had a feel
for its ups and downs—if you understood, say, why young parents were picking
this neighborhood and drunks wound up relegated to that one—you could make a
killing in property, but you also might be able to pronounce on how society was
evolving more generally. In 2016, a real-estate developer even sought—and
won—the presidency of the United States.
In France, a real-estate
expert has done something almost as improbable. Christophe Guilluy calls
himself a geographer. But he has spent decades as a housing consultant in
various rapidly changing neighborhoods north of Paris, studying gentrification,
among other things. And he has crafted a convincing narrative tying together
France’s various social problems—immigration tensions, inequality,
deindustrialization, economic decline, ethnic conflict, and the rise of
populist parties. Such an analysis had previously eluded the Parisian caste of
philosophers, political scientists, literary journalists, government-funded
researchers, and party ideologues.
Guilluy is none of these. Yet in a French political system that is
as polarized as the American, both the outgoing Socialist president François
Hollande and his Gaullist predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy sought his counsel.
Marine Le Pen, whose National Front dismisses both major parties as part of a
corrupt establishment, is equally enthusiastic about his work. Guilluy has
published three books, as yet untranslated, since 2010, with the newest, Le crépuscule de la France d’en
haut (roughly:
“The Twilight of the French Elite”), arriving in bookstores last fall. The
volumes focus closely on French circumstances, institutions, and laws, so they
might not be translated anytime soon. But they give the best ground-level look
available at the economic, residential, and democratic consequences of
globalization in France. They also give an explanation for the rise of the
National Front that goes beyond the usual imputation of stupidity or bigotry to
its voters. Guilluy’s work thus tells us something important about British
voters’ decision to withdraw from the European Union and the astonishing rise
of Donald Trump—two phenomena that have drawn on similar grievances.
At
the heart of Guilluy’s inquiry is globalization. Internationalizing the
division of labor has brought significant economic efficiencies. But it has
also brought inequalities unseen for a century, demographic upheaval, and
cultural disruption. Now we face the question of what—if anything—we should do
about it.
A process that Guilluy calls métropolisation has cut French society in two. In 16
dynamic urban areas (Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Aix-en-Provence, Toulouse, Lille,
Bordeaux, Nice, Nantes, Strasbourg, Grenoble, Rennes, Rouen, Toulon,
Douai-Lens, and Montpellier), the world’s resources have proved a profitable
complement to those found in France. These urban areas are home to all the
country’s educational and financial institutions, as well as almost all its
corporations and the many well-paying jobs that go with them. Here, too, are
the individuals—the entrepreneurs and engineers and CEOs, the fashion designers
and models, the film directors and chefs and other “symbolic analysts,” as
Robert Reich once called them—who shape the country’s tastes, form its
opinions, and renew its prestige. Cheap labor, tariff-free consumer goods, and
new markets of billions of people have made globalization a windfall for such
prosperous places. But globalization has had no such galvanizing effect on the
rest of France. Cities that were lively for hundreds of years—Tarbes, Agen,
Albi, Béziers—are now, to use Guilluy’s word, “desertified,” haunted by the
empty storefronts and blighted downtowns that Rust Belt Americans know well.
Guilluy doubts that
anyplace exists in France’s new economy for working people as we’ve
traditionally understood them. Paris offers the most striking case. As it has
prospered, the City of Light has stratified, resembling, in this regard, London
or American cities such as New York and San Francisco. It’s a place for
millionaires, immigrants, tourists, and the young, with no room for the median
Frenchman. Paris now drives out the people once thought of as synonymous with
the city.
Yet economic opportunities for those unable to prosper in Paris
are lacking elsewhere in France. Journalists and politicians assume that the
stratification of France’s flourishing metropoles results from a glitch in the
workings of globalization. Somehow, the rich parts of France have failed to impart
their magical formula to the poor ones. Fixing the problem, at least for
certain politicians and policy experts, involves coming up with a clever
shortcut: perhaps, say, if Romorantin had free wireless, its citizens would
soon find themselves wealthy, too. Guilluy disagrees. For him, there’s no
reason to expect that Paris (and France’s other dynamic spots) will generate a
new middle class or to assume that broad-based prosperity will develop
elsewhere in the country (which happens to be where the majority of the
population live). If he is right, we can understand why every major Western
country has seen the rise of political movements taking aim at the present
system.
In
our day, the urban real-estate market is a pitiless sorting machine. Rich
people and up-and-comers buy the private housing stock in desirable cities and
thereby bid up its cost. Guilluy notes that one real-estate agent on the Île
Saint-Louis in Paris now sells “lofts” of three square meters, or about 30
square feet, for €50,000. The situation resembles that in London, where,
according to Le Monde, the average monthly rent (£2,580) now
exceeds the average monthly salary (£2,300).
The laid-off, the less educated, the mistrained—all must rebuild
their lives in what Guilluy calls (in the title of his second book) La France périphérique. This is the key term in Guilluy’s
sociological vocabulary, and much misunderstood in France, so it is worth
clarifying: it is neither a synonym for the boondocks nor a measure of distance
from the city center. (Most of France’s small cities, in fact, are in la France périphérique.) Rather, the term measures distance from
the functioning parts of the global economy. France’s best-performing urban
nodes have arguably never been richer or better-stocked with cultural and
retail amenities. But too few such places exist to carry a national economy.
When France’s was a national economy, its median workers were well compensated
and well protected from illness, age, and other vicissitudes. In a knowledge
economy, these workers have largely been exiled from the places where the
economy still functions. They have been replaced by immigrants.
After the mid-twentieth century, the French state built a vast
stock—about 5 million units—of public housing, which now accounts for a sixth
of the country’s households. Much of it is hideous-looking, but it’s all more
or less affordable. Its purpose has changed, however. It is now used primarily
for billeting not native French workers, as once was the case, but immigrants
and their descendants, millions of whom arrived from North Africa starting in
the 1960s, with yet another wave of newcomers from sub-Saharan Africa and the
Middle East arriving today. In the rough northern suburb of Aubervilliers, for
instance, three-quarters of the young people are of immigrant background.
Again, Paris’s future seems visible in contemporary London. Between 2001 and
2011, the population of white Londoners fell by 600,000, even as the city grew
by 1 million people: from 58 percent white British at the turn of the century,
London is currently 45 percent white.
While rich Parisians may not miss the presence of the middle
class, they do need people to bus tables, trim shrubbery, watch babies, and
change bedpans. Immigrants—not native French workers—do most of these jobs. Why
this should be so is an economic controversy. Perhaps migrants will do certain
tasks that French people will not—at least not at the prevailing wage. Perhaps
employers don’t relish paying €10 an hour to a native Frenchman who, ten years
earlier, was making €20 in his old position and has resentments to match.
Perhaps the current situation is an example of the economic law named after the
eighteenth-century French economist Jean-Baptiste Say: a huge supply of menial
labor from the developing world has created its own demand.
“The young men living in the
northern Paris suburbs feel a burning solidarity with their Muslim brethren in
the Middle East.”
This is not Guilluy’s subject, though. He aims only to show that,
even if French people were willing to do the work that gets offered in these
prosperous urban centers, there’d be no way for them to do it, because there is
no longer any place for them to live. As a new bourgeoisie has taken over the
private housing stock, poor foreigners have taken over the public—which thus
serves the metropolitan rich as a kind of taxpayer-subsidized servants’
quarters. Public-housing inhabitants are almost never ethnically French; the
prevailing culture there nowadays is often heavily, intimidatingly Muslim.
At
the opening of his new book, Guilluy describes twenty-first-century France as
“an ‘American’ society like any other, unequal and multicultural.” It’s a
controversial premise—that inequality and racial diversity are linked as part
of the same (American-type) system and that they progress or decline together.
Though this premise has been confirmed in much of the West for half a century,
the assertion will shock many Americans, conditioned to place “inequality”
(bad) and “diversity” (good) at opposite poles of a Manichean moral order. This
disconnect is a key reason American political discussions have turned so
illogical and rancorous. Certain arguments—for instance, that raising the
incomes of American workers requires limiting immigration—can be cast as either
sensible or superstitious, legitimate or illegitimate, good or evil, depending
on whether the person making them is deemed to be doing so on the grounds of
economics or identity.
At a practical level, considerations of economics and ethnicity
are getting harder to disentangle. Guilluy has spent years in and out of
buildings in northern Paris (his sisters live in public housing), and he is
sensitive to the way this works in France. A public-housing development is a
community, yes, and one can wish that it be more diverse. But it is also an
economic resource that, more and more, is getting fought over tribally. An
ethnic Frenchman moving into a heavily North African housing project finds
himself threatening a piece of property that members of “the community” think
of as theirs. Guilluy speaks of a “battle of the eyes” fought in the lobbies of
apartment buildings across France every day, in which one person or the
other—the ethnic Frenchman or the immigrant’s son—will drop his gaze to the
floor first.
Most places where migrant and native French cultures mix, Guilluy
expects, will evolve as did the northern Paris suburbs where he works. Twenty
years ago, these neighborhoods remained a hub of Parisian Jewish life;
nowadays, they’re heavily Arab. The young men living in them feel a burning
solidarity with their Muslim brethren in the Middle East and often a loathing
for Israel. Jews have faced steady intimidation in northern Paris at least
since 2002, when the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks overlapped with the
Palestinian “second intifada.” Violence is rising. July 2014 saw a wave of attacks
on Jewish businesses and synagogues in the suburb of Sarcelles. Jews have
evacuated some municipalities north of Paris, where, until recently, they were
an integral part: Saint-Denis, La Courneuve, Aubervilliers, Stains,
Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, Trappes, Aulnay-sous-Bois, and Le Blanc-Mesnil. Many
Jews still live safely and well in France, of course, but they cluster together
in a smaller number of secure neighborhoods, several of them on Paris’s western
edge. Departures of French Jews to Israel run to about 7,000 a year, according
to the Jewish Agency of France. Others go to the U.S. and Canada. The leavers
are disproportionately young.
Guilluy has written much about how little contact the abstract
doctrines of “diversity” and “multiculturalism” make with this morally complex
world. In the neighborhoods, well-meaning people of all backgrounds “need to
manage, day in, day out, a thousand and one ethno-cultural questions while
trying not to get caught up in hatred and violence.” Last winter, he told the magazine Causeur:
Unlike our
parents in the 1960s, we live in a multicultural society, a society in which
“the other” doesn’t become “somebody like yourself.” And when “the other”
doesn’t become “somebody like yourself,” you constantly need to ask yourself how
many of the other there are—whether in your neighborhood or your apartment
building. Because nobody wants to be a minority.
Thus, when 70 percent of Frenchmen tell pollsters, as they have
for years now, that “too many foreigners” live in France, they’re not
necessarily being racist; but they’re not necessarily not being racist, either. It’s a complicated
sentiment, and identifying “good” and “bad” strands of it—the better to draw
them apart—is getting harder to do.
France’s
most dangerous political battles play out against this backdrop. The central
fact is the 70 percent that we just spoke of: they oppose immigration and are
worried, we can safely assume, about the prospects for a multiethnic society.
Their wishes are consistent, their passions high; and a democracy is supposed
to translate the wishes and passions of the people into government action. Yet
that hasn’t happened in France.
Guilluy breaks down public opinion on immigration by class. Top
executives (at 54 percent) are content with the current number of migrants in
France. But only 38 percent of mid-level professionals, 27 percent of laborers,
and 23 percent of clerical workers feel similarly. As for the migrants
themselves (whose views are seldom taken into account in French immigration
discussions), living in Paris instead of Boumako is a windfall even under the
worst of circumstances. In certain respects, migrants actually have it better
than natives, Guilluy stresses. He is not referring to affirmative action.
Inhabitants of government-designated “sensitive urban zones” (ZUS) do receive
special benefits these days. But since the French cherish equality of
citizenship as a political ideal, racial preferences in hiring and education
took much longer to be imposed than in other countries. They’ve been
operational for little more than a decade. A more important advantage, as
geographer Guilluy sees it, is that immigrants living in the urban slums,
despite appearances, remain “in the arena.” They are near public
transportation, schools, and a real job market that might have hundreds of
thousands of vacancies. At a time when rural France is getting more sedentary,
the ZUS are the places in France that enjoy the most residential mobility: it’s
better in the banlieues.
In France, the Parti Socialiste, like the Democratic Party in the
U.S. or Labour in Britain, has remade itself based on a recognition of this new
demographic and political reality. François Hollande built his 2012
presidential victory on a strategy outlined in October 2011 by Bruno Jeanbart
and the late Olivier Ferrand of the Socialist think tank Terra Nova. Largely
because of cultural questions, the authors warned, the working class no longer
voted for the Left. The consultants suggested a replacement coalition of ethnic
minorities, people with advanced degrees (usually prospering in new-economy
jobs), women, youths, and non-Catholics—a French version of the Obama bloc. It
did not make up, in itself, an electoral majority, but it possessed sufficient
cultural power to attract one.
The comfortable residents of France’s 16
prospering cities define the country’s tastes and form its opinions, while . .
. (CHRISTIAN VIERIG/GETTY IMAGES)
Guilluy
came to the attention of many French readers at the turn of the millennium, in
the pages of the leftist Paris daily Libération, where he promoted the American
journalist David Brooks’s book Bobos in Paradise. Guilluy was fascinated by the figure of
the “Bobo,” an acronym combining “bourgeois” and “Bohemian,” which described
the new sort of upper-middle-class person who had emerged in the late-nineties
tech-bubble economy. The word may have faded from the memory of
English-language readers, but it stuck in France. You can find Bobo in any good
French dictionary, alongside bébé, Dada, and tutu.
For Brooks, “Bobo” was a term of endearment. Our nouveaux riches
differed from those of yesteryear in being more sensitive and cultured, the
kind of folks who shopped at Restoration Hardware for the vintage 1950s
Christmas lights that reminded them of their childhoods. For Guilluy, as for
most French intellectuals, “Bobo” is a slur. These nouveaux riches differed
from their predecessors in being more predatory and less troubled by
conscience. They chased the working-class population from neighborhoods it had
spent years building up—and then expected the country to thank them.
In France, as in America, the Bobos were both cause and effect of
a huge cultural shift. The nation’s cultural institutions—from its universities
to its television studios to its comedy clubs to (this being France) its
government—remain where they were. But the sociology of the community that
surrounds them has been transformed. The culture industry now sits in territory
that is 100 percent occupied by the beneficiaries of globalization. No
equivalent exists any more of Madame Vauquer’s boardinghouse in Balzac’s Père Goriot, where the upwardly mobile Rastignac had
to rub shoulders with those who had few prospects of advancement. In most parts
of Paris, working-class Frenchmen are just gone, priced out of even the soccer
stadiums that were a bastion of French proledom until the country’s World Cup
victory in 1998. The national culture has changed.
So has French politics. Since the age of social democracy, we have
assumed that contentious political issues inevitably pit “the rich” against
“the poor” and that the fortunes of one group must be wrested from the other.
But the metropolitan bourgeoisie no longer lives cheek-by-jowl with native
French people of lesser means and different values. In Paris and other cities
of Guilluy’s fortunate France, one often encounters an appearance of civility,
even consensus, where once there was class conflict. But this is an illusion:
one side has been driven from the field.
The old bourgeoisie hasn’t been supplanted; it has been
supplemented by a second bourgeoisie that occupies the previously non-bourgeois
housing stock. For every old-economy banker in an inherited high-ceilinged
Second Empire apartment off the Champs-Élysées, there is a new-economy
television anchor or high-tech patent attorney living in some exorbitantly
remodeled mews house in the Marais. A New Yorker might see these two
bourgeoisies as analogous to residents of the Upper East and Upper West Sides.
They have arrived through different routes, and they might once have held
different political opinions, but they don’t now. Guilluy notes that the
conservative presidential candidate Alain Juppé, mayor of Bordeaux, and Gérard
Collomb, the Socialist running Lyon, pursue identical policies. As Paris has
become not just the richest city in France but the richest city in the history
of France, its residents have come to describe their politics as “on the
left”—a judgment that tomorrow’s historians might dispute. Most often,
Parisians mean what Guilluy calls la gauche hashtag, or what we might call the “glass-ceiling
Left,” preoccupied with redistribution among, not from, elites: we may have done nothing for
the poor, but we did appoint the first disabled lesbian parking commissioner.
Upwardly mobile urbanites, observes Guilluy, call Paris “the land
of possibilities,” the “ideapolis.” One is reminded of Richard Florida and
other extollers of the “Creative Class.” The good fortune of Creative Class
members appears (to them) to have nothing to do with any kind of capitalist
struggle. Never have conditions been more favorable for deluding a class of
fortunate people into thinking that they owe their privilege to being nicer, or
smarter, or more honest, than everyone else. Why would they think otherwise?
They never meet anyone who disagrees with them. The immigrants with whom the
creatives share the city are dazzlingly different, exotic, even frightening,
but on the central question of our time—whether the global economic system is
working or failing—they see eye to eye. “Our Immigrants, Our Strength,” was the
title of a New York Times op-ed signed by London mayor Sadiq Khan, New York mayor
Bill de Blasio, and Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo after September’s terrorist bomb
blasts in New York. This estrangement is why electoral results around the world
last year—from Brexit to the election of Donald Trump—proved so difficult to
anticipate. Those outside the city gates in la France périphérique are invisible, their wishes
incomprehensible. It’s as if they don’t exist. But they do.
People
used to think of the economy as congruent with society—it was the
earning-and-spending aspect of the nation just living its life. All citizens
inhabited the same economic system (which isn’t to say that all took an equal
share from it). As Guilluy describes it, the new economy is more like a private
utility: it provides money and goods the way, say, the power company provides
electricity. If you’ve always had electricity in your house, what’s the worry?
But it’s quite possible to get cut off.
For those cut off from France’s new-economy citadels, the
misfortunes are serious. They’re stuck economically. Three years after
finishing their studies, three-quarters of French university graduates are
living on their own; by contrast, three-quarters of their contemporaries
without university degrees still live with their parents. And they’re dying
early. In January 2016, the national statistical institute Insée announced that
life expectancy had fallen for both sexes in France for the first time since
World War II, and it’s the native French working class that is likely driving
the decline. In fact, the French outsiders are looking a lot like the poor
Americans Charles Murray described in Coming Apart, failing not just in income and longevity
but also in family formation, mental health, and education. Their political
alienation is striking. Fewer than 2 percent of legislators in France’s
National Assembly today come from the working class, as opposed to 20 percent
just after World War II.
Unlike their parents in Cold War France, the excluded have lost
faith in efforts to distribute society’s goods more equitably. Political plans
still abound to fight the “system,” ranging from the 2017 Socialist
presidential candidate Benoît Hamon’s proposals for a guaranteed minimum income
to those of his rival, former economics minister Emmanuel Macron, to make labor
markets more flexible. But these programs are seen by their intended
beneficiaries as further proof of a rigged system. The welfare state is now
distrusted by those whom it is meant to help. France’s expenditure on the
heavily immigrant banlieues is already vast, on this view; to provide
yet more public housing would be to widen the invitation to unwanted
immigrants. To build any large public-works project is to do the same. To
invest in education, in turn, is to offer more advantages to the rich, who’re
best positioned to benefit from it. In a society divided as Guilluy describes,
traditional politics can find no purchase.
The two traditional French parties—the Republicans, who once
followed a conservative program elaborated by Charles de Gaulle; and the
Socialists, who once followed socialism—still compete for votes, but along an
ever-narrowing spectrum of issues. The real divide is no longer between the
“Right” and the “Left” but between the metropoles and the peripheries. The
traditional parties thrive in the former. The National Front (FN) is the party
of the outside.
Indeed, with its opposition to free trade, open immigration, and
the European Union, the FN has established itself as the main voice of the
anti-globalizers. At regional elections in 2015, it took 55 percent of workers’
votes. The Socialists, Republicans, Greens, and the hard Left took 18 percent
among them. In an effort to ward off the FN, the traditional parties now
collude as often as they compete. In the second round of those regional
elections, the Socialists withdrew in favor of their Republican rivals, seeking
to create a barrage républicain against the FN. The banding together of
establishment parties to defend the system against anti-system parties is
happening all over the world. Germany has a “grand coalition” of its two
largest parties, and Spain may have one soon. In the U.S., the Trump and the
Sanders candidacies both gained much of their support from voters worried that
the two major parties were offering essentially the same package.
Guilluy has tried to clarify French politics with an original
theory of political correctness. The dominance of metropolitan elites has made
it hard even to describe the most important conflicts in France, except in
terms that conform to their way of viewing the world. In the last decade of the
twentieth century, Western statesmen sang the praises of the free market. In
our own time, they defend the “open society”—a wider concept that embraces not
just the free market but also the welcoming and promotion of people of
different races, religions, and sexualities. The result, in terms of policy, is
a number of what Guilluy calls “top-down social movements.” He doesn’t specify
them, but they would surely include the Hollande government’s legalization of
gay marriage, which in 2013 and 2014 brought millions of protesters opposing
the measure onto the streets of Paris—the largest demonstrations in the country
since World War II.
French elites have convinced themselves that their social
supremacy rests not on their economic might but on their common decency. Doing
so allows them to “present the losers of globalization as embittered people who
have problems with diversity,” says Guilluy. It’s not our privilege that the
French deplorables resent, the elites claim; it’s the color of some of our
employees’ skin. French elites have a thesaurus full of colorful vocabulary for
those who resist the open society: repli (“reaction”), crispation identitaire (“ethnic tension”), and populisme (an accusation equivalent to fascism, which somehow does
not require an equivalent level of proof). One need not say anything racist or
hateful to be denounced as a member of “white, xenophobic France,” or even as a
“fascist.” To express mere discontent with the political system is dangerous
enough. It is to faire le jeu de (“play the game of”) the National Front.
. . . residents of its “desertified”
cities simmer with anger. (ADAM NOSSITER/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX)
No
American will read Guilluy’s survey of contemporary France without seeing
parallels to the United States. In one respect, France’s difficulties are, for
now, more serious. When Guilluy writes of the “criminalization of criticism of
the dominant model,” he is not speaking metaphorically. France’s antiracist
Pleven law, which can punish speech, passed in 1972. In 1990, the Gayssot law
criminalized denial or “minimization” of the Holocaust and repealed parts of
France’s Law of July 29, 1881, on Freedom of the Press. Both laws are landmarks
in Europe’s retreat from defending free speech. Suits against novelists,
philosophers, and historians have proliferated.
In France, political correctness is more than a ridiculous set of
opinions; it’s also—and primarily—a tool of government coercion. Not only does
it tilt any political discussion in favor of one set of arguments; it also
gives the ruling class a doubt-expelling myth that provides a constant boost to
morale and esprit de corps, much as class systems did in the days before
democracy. People tend to snicker when the question of political correctness is
raised: its practitioners because no one wants to be thought politically
correct; and its targets because no one wants to admit to being coerced. But it
determines the current polarity in French politics. Where you stand depends
largely on whether you believe that antiracism is a sincere response to a
genuine upsurge of public hatred or an opportunistic posture for elites seeking
to justify their rule.
Guilluy is ambivalent on the question. He sees deep historical and
economic processes at work behind the evolution of France’s residential spaces.
“There has been no plan to ‘expel the poor,’ no conspiracy,” he writes. “Just a
strict application of market principles.” But he is moving toward a more
politically engaged view that the rhetoric of an “open society” is “a
smokescreen meant to hide the emergence of a closed society, walled off for the
benefit of the upper classes.”
It would be wrong, though, to see Guilluy as the partisan of any
political project, let alone “playing the game” of one. Ideologically and
intellectually, he is difficult to place. Sometimes he sounds like the English
radical Paul Mason, author of the 2016 book Post-Capitalism. That is, he looks at the destruction of
working-class sources of power (from trade unions to industrial jobs) not as
unfortunate collateral damage of the last 30 years of economic policy but as
the overarching goal of it. His perspective on political change will remind City Journal readers of Joel Kotkin, in that he is more
interested in how people act (where they move, the jobs they take, the way they
form families) than in the opinions they spout. In a French context, he would
be seen as among those in left-wing circles on whom certain civilizational
truths once considered “conservative” have dawned. These include the novelist
Michel Houellebecq, the philosopher Michel Onfray, and the political
philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa, who has been heavily influenced by American
historian Christopher Lasch. Guilluy, too, acknowledges Lasch’s influence, and
one hears it when he writes, in La France périphérique, of family and community as constituting
“the capital of the poor.”
Like much in French intellectual life, Guilluy’s newest book is
intelligent, original, and rather slapdash. Its maps, while brilliantly
conceived, are poorly explained. Its forays into social science are
mis-designed—Guilluy’s “indices of fragility” are based on redundant, highly
correlated factors that exaggerate the points he means to make. The book has been
assembled sloppily and, it seems, hastily. Long prose passages turn up twice on
the same page, as if the editor spilled a cup of coffee while cutting and
pasting.
Still, Guilluy’s work is the most successful attempt to tow French
political sociology out of the rut that it has been mired in since the Cold War
and to direct it toward the pressing matters of our day. The “American” society
that Guilluy describes—unequal and multicultural—can appear quite stable, but
signs abound that it is in crisis. For one thing, it requires for its own
replication a growing economy.
Since Tocqueville, we have understood that our democratic
societies are emulative. Nobody wants to be thought a bigot if the membership
board of the country club takes pride in its multiculturalism. But as the
prospect of rising in the world is hampered or extinguished, the inducements to
ideological conformism weaken. Dissent appears. Political correctness grows
more draconian. Finally the ruling class reaches a dangerous stage, in which it
begins to lose not only its legitimacy but also a sense of what its legitimacy
rested on in the first place.
