The property market in any sophis\u00adticated city reflects deep aspirations and fears. If you had a feel for its ups and downs \u2013 if you understood, say, why young parents were picking this neighbourhood and drunks wound up relegated to that one \u2013 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 \u2013 and won \u2013 the presidency of the United States.<\/p>\n
In France, a property 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 neighbourhoods north of Paris, studying gentrification, among other things. And he has crafted a convincing narrative tying together France\u2019s various social problems \u2013 immigration tensions, inequality, deindustrialisation, 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.<\/p>\n
Guilluy is none of these. Yet in a French political system that is as polarised as the American, both the outgoing Socialist president, Fran\u00e7ois Hollande, and his Gaullist predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy sought his counsel. Marine Le Pen, whose Front National dismisses both major parties as part of a corrupt establishment, is equally enthusiastic about his work.<\/p>\n
Guilluy has published three books, as yet\u00a0untranslated, since 2010, with the newest,\u00a0Le cr\u00e9puscule de la France d\u2019en haut<\/em>\u00a0(roughly: \u201cTwilight of the French Elite<\/em>\u201d), \u00adarriving in bookshops last autumn. The volumes focus closely on French circumstances, institutions and laws, so they might not\u00a0be translated any time soon. But they give the best ground-level look available at\u00a0the economic, residential and democratic consequences of globalisation in France. They also give an explanation for the rise of the Front National that goes beyond the\u00a0usual imputation of stupidity or bigotry to its voters.<\/p>\n Guilluy\u2019s work thus tells us something important about British voters\u2019 decision to\u00a0withdraw from the European Union and\u00a0the astonishing rise of Donald Trump\u00a0\u2013 two phenomena that have drawn on similar\u00a0grievances.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n At the heart of Guilluy\u2019s inquiry is globalisation. Internationalising the division of labour 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 \u2013 if\u00a0anything \u2013 we should do about it.<\/p>\n A process that Guilluy calls\u00a0m\u00e9tropolisation<\/em>\u00a0has cut French society in two. In 16\u00a0dynamic urban areas (Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, Aix-en-Provence, Toulouse, Lille, Bordeaux, Nice, Nantes, Strasbourg, Grenoble, Rennes, Rouen, Toulon, Douai-Lens and Montpellier), the world\u2019s resources have proved a profitable complement to those found in France. These urban areas are home to all the country\u2019s leading 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 \u2013 the entrepreneurs and engineers and CEOs, the fashion designers and models, the film directors and chefs and other \u201csymbolic analysts\u201d, as Robert Reich once called them \u2013 who shape the country\u2019s tastes, form its opinions and renew its prestige.<\/p>\n Cheap labour, tariff-free consumer goods and new markets of billions of people have made globalisation a windfall for such \u00adprosperous places. But globalisation has had no such galvanising effect on the rest of France. Cities that were lively for hundreds of years\u00a0\u2013 Tarbes, Agen, Albi, B\u00e9ziers\u00a0\u2013 are now, to use Guilluy\u2019s word, \u201cdesertified\u201d, haunted by the empty shopfronts and blighted downtowns that Rust Belt Americans know well.<\/p>\n Guilluy doubts that any place exists in France\u2019s new economy for working people as we\u2019ve previously 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Yet economic opportunities for those unable to prosper in Paris are lacking elsewhere in France. Journalists and politicians assume that the stratification of France\u2019s flourishing metropoles results from a glitch in the workings of globalisation. 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 short cut: perhaps, say, if Romorantin had free wifi, its citizens would soon find themselves wealthy, too. Guilluy disagrees. For him, there is no reason to expect that Paris (and France\u2019s other dynamic spots) will generate a new middle class, or to assume that broad-based \u00adprosperity 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.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n In our day, the urban property 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 estate agent on the \u00cele Saint-Louis in Paris now sells \u201clofts\u201d of three square metres, or about 30 square feet, for \u20ac50,000 (\u00a342,000). The situation resembles that in London, where, according to\u00a0Le Monde<\/em>, the average monthly rent (\u00a32,580) now exceeds the average monthly salary (\u00a32,300).<\/p>\n The laid-off, the less educated, the mistrained \u2013 all must rebuild their lives in what Guilluy calls (in the title of his second book)\u00a0la France p\u00e9riph\u00e9rique<\/em>. This is the key term\u00a0in Guilluy\u2019s sociological vocabulary, and is 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 centre. (Most of France\u2019s small cities, in fact, are in\u00a0la France p\u00e9riph\u00e9rique<\/em>.) Rather, the term measures distance from the functioning parts of the global economy. France\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n After the mid-20th century, the French state built a vast stock \u2013 about five million units \u2013 of public housing, which now \u00adaccounts for a sixth of the country\u2019s households. Much of it is hideous-looking, but it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 one\u00a0million: from 58 per cent white British at the turn of the century, London is currently 45 per cent white.<\/p>\n While rich Parisians may not miss the presence of the middle class, they do need people to serve tables, trim shrubbery, watch babies and change bedpans. Immi\u00adgrants \u2013 not native French workers \u2013 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 \u2013 at least not on the prevailing wage. Perhaps employers don\u2019t relish paying \u20ac10 an hour to a native Frenchman who, ten years earlier, was making \u20ac20 in his old position and has resentments to match. Perhaps the current situation is an example of the economic law named after the 18th-\/19th-century French economist Jean-Baptiste Say: a huge supply of menial labour from the developing world has created its own demand.<\/p>\n This is not Guilluy\u2019s 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 centres, there would be no way for them to do it, \u00adbecause 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 \u2013 which thus serves the metropolitan rich as a kind of taxpayer-subsidised servants\u2019 quarters. Public-housing inhabitants are almost never ethnically French; the prevailing culture there nowadays is often heavily, intimidatingly Muslim.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n At the opening of his new book, Guilluy describes 21st-century France as \u201can \u2018American\u2019 society like any other, unequal and multicultural\u201d. It\u2019s a controversial premise \u2013 that inequality and racial diversity\u00a0are 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 \u201cinequality\u201d (bad) and \u201cdiversity\u201d (good) at opposite poles of a Manichaean moral order. This disconnect is a key reason American political discussions have turned so illogical and rancorous. Certain arguments \u2013 for instance, that raising the incomes of American workers requires limiting immigration\u00a0\u2013 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cthe community\u201d think of as theirs. Guilluy speaks of a \u201cbattle of the eyes\u201d fought in the lobbies of apartment buildings across France every day, in which one person or the other \u2013 the ethnic Frenchman or the immigrant\u2019s son \u2013 will drop his gaze to the floor first.<\/p>\n 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 neighbourhoods remained a hub of Parisian Jewish life; nowadays, they\u2019re 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 since at least 2002, when the aftermath of the 9\/11 attacks overlapped with the Palestinian \u201csecond intifada\u201d.<\/p>\n 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 neighbourhoods, several of them on Paris\u2019s western edge. Departures of French Jews to Israel run to about 7,000 a year, according to the Jewish Agency of France. The leavers are disproportionately young.<\/p>\n Guilluy has written much about how little contact the abstract doctrines of \u201cdiversity\u201d and \u201cmulticulturalism\u201d make with this morally complex world. In the neighbourhoods, well-meaning people of all backgrounds \u201cneed to manage, day in, day out, a thousand and one ethnocultural questions while trying not to get caught up in hatred and violence\u201d. Last winter, he told the magazine\u00a0Causeur<\/em>:<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cUnlike our parents in the 1960s, we\u00a0live\u00a0in a multicultural society, a society in which \u2018the other\u2019 doesn\u2019t become \u2018somebody like yourself\u2019. And when \u2018the\u00a0other\u2019 doesn\u2019t become \u2018somebody like yourself\u2019, you constantly need to ask\u00a0yourself how many of the other there are \u2013 whether in your neighbourhood or your apartment building. Because nobody wants to be a minority.\u201d<\/p>\n \tThus, when 70 per cent of Frenchmen tell pollsters, as they have for years now, that \u201ctoo many foreigners\u201d live in France, they are not necessarily being racist; but they are not necessarily\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0being racist, either. It\u2019s a complicated sentiment, and identifying \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cbad\u201d strands of it \u2013 the better to draw them apart \u2013 is getting harder to do.<\/p>\n France\u2019s most dangerous political battles play out against this backdrop. The central fact is the 70 per cent that we just spoke of: they oppose immigration and are worried, we can safely assume, about the prospects for a multi-ethnic society. Their wishes are consistent, their passions high; and a demo\u00adcracy is supposed to translate the wishes and passions of the people into government action. Yet that hasn\u2019t happened in France.<\/p>\n Guilluy breaks down public opinion on\u00a0immigration by class. Top executives (at\u00a054 per cent) are content with the current\u00a0number of migrants in France. But only 38 per cent of mid-level professionals, 27 per cent of labourers and 23 per cent of clerical workers feel similarly. As for the \u00admigrants themselves (whose views are seldom taken\u00a0into account in French immi\u00adgration discussions), living in Paris instead of Bamako is a windfall even under the worst of circumstances.<\/p>\n In certain respects, migrants actually have it better than natives, Guilluy stresses. He is not referring to affirmative action. Inhabitants of government-designated \u201csensitive urban zones\u201d (ZUSs) do receive special benefits these days. But because 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\u2019ve been operational for little more than a decade. A more important advantage, as the geographer Guilluy sees it, is that immigrants living in the urban slums, despite appearances, remain \u201cin the arena\u201d. They are near public transportation, schools, and a real job market that might have hundreds\u00a0of thousands of vacancies. At a time when rural France is \u00a0getting more sedentary, the ZUSs are the places in France that enjoy the most residential mobility: it\u2019s better in the\u00a0banlieue<\/em>.<\/p>\n In France, the Parti Socialiste (PS), like the Democratic Party in the US or Labour in Britain, has remade itself based on a recognition of this new demographic and political reality. Fran\u00e7ois 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 ***<\/p>\n Guilluy came to the attention of many French readers at the turn of the millennium, through the pages of the leftist Paris daily\u00a0Lib\u00e9ration<\/em>, where he promoted the American journalist David Brooks\u2019s book\u00a0Bobos in Paradise<\/em>. Guilluy was fascinated by the figure of the \u201cbobo<\/em>\u201d, an acronym combining \u201cbourgeois\u201d and \u201cbohemian\u201d, which described the new sort of upper-middle-class person who had emerged in the late-1990s tech-bubble economy. The word may have faded from the memory of English-language readers, but it stuck in France. You can find\u00a0bobo<\/em>\u00a0in any good French dictionary, alongside\u00a0b\u00e9b\u00e9<\/em>,\u00a0dada<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0tutu<\/em>.<\/p>\n For Brooks, \u201cBobo\u201d was a term of endearment. Our nouveaux riches differed from those of yesteryear in being more sensitive and cultured, the kind of folk who shopped at Restoration Hardware for the vintage 1950s Christmas lights that reminded them of their childhoods. For Guilluy, as for most French intellectuals, \u201cbobo<\/em>\u201d 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 In France, as in America, the\u00a0bobos<\/em>\u00a0were both cause and effect of a huge cultural shift. The nation\u2019s cultural institutions \u2013 from its universities to its television studios to its comedy clubs to (this being France) its government \u2013 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 per cent occupied by the beneficiaries of globalisation. No equivalent exists any\u00a0more\u00a0of\u00a0Madame Vauquer\u2019s boarding house in Balzac\u2019s\u00a0P\u00e8re Goriot<\/em>, 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 football stadiums that were a bastion of French proledom until the country\u2019s World Cup victory in 1998. The national culture has changed.<\/p>\n So has French politics. Since the age of \u00adsocial democracy, we have assumed that contentious political issues inevitably pit \u201cthe rich\u201d against \u201cthe poor\u201d and that the fortunes of one group must be wrested from\u00a0the other. But the metropolitan bourgeoisie no longer live cheek-by-jowl with native French people of lesser means and different values. In Paris and other cities of Guilluy\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The old bourgeoisie hasn\u2019t 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-\u00c9lys\u00e9es, there is a new-economy television anchor or hi-tech patent attorney living in some exorbitantly remodelled mews house in the Marais. A New Yorker might see these two bourgeoisies as\u00a0analogous 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\u2019t now. Guilluy notes that the conservative former French prime minister Alain Jupp\u00e9, now the mayor of Bordeaux, and G\u00e9rard Collomb, the Socialist running Lyons, 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 \u201con the left\u201d \u2013 a judgement that tomorrow\u2019s historians might dispute. Most often, Parisians mean what Guilluy calls\u00a0la\u00a0gauche hashtag<\/em>, or what we might call the\u00a0\u201cglass-ceiling left\u201d, preoccupied with redistribution among, not from, elites: \u201cWe may have done nothing for the poor, but we\u00a0did appoint the first disabled lesbian parking commissioner.\u201d<\/p>\n Upwardly mobile urbanites, observes Guilluy, call Paris \u201cthe land of possibilities\u201d, the \u201cideapolis\u201d. One is reminded of Richard Florida and other extollers of the \u201cCreative Class\u201d. 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 favourable 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 \u2013 whether the global economic system is working or failing \u2013 they see eye to eye. \u201cOur immigrants, our strength\u201d, was the \u00adtitle of a\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0op-ed signed by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, the mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, and the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, after September\u2019s terrorist bomb blasts in New York. This estrangement is why electoral results around the world last year \u2013 from Brexit to\u00a0the election of Donald Trump \u2013 proved so difficult to anticipate. Those outside the city gates in\u00a0la France p\u00e9riph\u00e9rique<\/em>\u00a0are invisible, their wishes incomprehensible. It\u2019s as if they didn\u2019t exist. But they do.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n People used to think of the economy as congruent with society \u2013 it was the earning-and-spending \u00adaspect of the nation just living its life. All citizens inhabited the same economic system (which isn\u2019t 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, a power company provides electricity. If you\u2019ve always had electricity in your house, what\u2019s the worry? But it\u2019s quite possible to get cut off.<\/p>\n For those cut off from France\u2019s new-economy citadels, the misfortunes are serious. They\u2019re 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\u2019re dying early. In January 2016, the national statistical institute Insee announced that life expectancy had fallen for both sexes in France for the first time since the Second World War, and it\u2019s the native French working class that is likely driving the decline. The French outsiders are failing not just in income and longevity but also in family formation, mental health and education. Their political alienation is striking. Less than 2 per cent of legislators in France\u2019s National Assembly today come from the working class, as opposed to 20 per cent just after the Second World War.<\/p>\n Unlike their parents in Cold War France, the excluded have lost faith in efforts to distribute society\u2019s goods more equitably. Political plans still abound to fight the \u201csystem\u201d, ranging from the 2017 Socialist presidential candidate Beno\u00eet Hamon\u2019s proposals for a guaranteed minimum income to those of his rival Emmanuel Macron, the former economics minister, to make labour markets more flexible. But these programmes 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\u2019s expenditure on the heavily immigrant\u00a0banlieue<\/em>\u00a0is already vast, in this view; to provide yet more public housing would be to widen the invitation to unwanted immigrants. To\u00a0build 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 are best positioned to benefit from it. In a society as divided as Guilluy describes, traditional politics can find no purchase.<\/p>\n With its opposition to free trade, open immigration and the European Union, the Front National has established itself as the main voice of the anti-globalisers. At regional elections in 2015, it took 55 per cent of workers\u2019 votes. The Socialists, R\u00e9publicains, Greens and the hard left took 18\u00a0per cent among them. In an effort to ward off the Front National, the traditional parties now collude as often as they compete. In the second round of those regional elections, the Socialists withdrew in favour of their R\u00e9publicains rivals, seeking to create a\u00a0barrage r\u00e9publicain<\/em>\u00a0against 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 \u201cgrand coalition\u201d of its two largest parties, and Spain may have one soon. In the US, the Trump and the Sanders candidacies both gained much of their support from voters worried that the two main parties were offering essentially the same package.<\/p>\n 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 20th century, Western statesmen sang the praises of\u00a0the free market. In our own time, they defend the \u201copen society\u201d \u2013 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 \u201ctop-down social movements\u201d. He doesn\u2019t specify them, but they would surely include the Hollande government\u2019s legalisation of gay marriage, which in 2013 and 2014 brought millions of protesters opposing the measure on to the streets of Paris \u2013 one of the largest demonstrations in the country since the Second World War.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cpresent the losers of globalisation as embittered people who have problems with diversity\u201d, says Guilluy. It\u2019s not our privilege that the French \u201cdeplorables\u201d resent, the elites claim; it\u2019s the colour of some of our employees\u2019 skin. French elites have a thesaurus full of colourful vocabulary for those who resist the open society:\u00a0repli<\/em>\u00a0(\u201creaction\u201d),\u00a0crispation identitaire<\/em>\u00a0(\u201cethnic tension\u201d) and\u00a0populisme<\/em>\u00a0(an accusation\u00a0equivalent 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 \u201cwhite, xenophobic France\u201d or even as a \u201cfascist\u201d. To express mere discontent with the political system is dangerous enough. It is to\u00a0faire le jeu de<\/em>\u00a0(\u201cto play the game of\u201d) the Front National.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n In France, political correctness is more than a ridiculous set of opinions; it\u2019s also \u2013 and primarily \u2013 a tool of government coercion. Not only does it tilt any political discussion in favour of one set of arguments; it also gives the ruling class a doubt-expelling myth that provides a constant boost to morale and\u00a0esprit de corps<\/em>, 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\u00a0being coerced. But it determines the current polarity in French politics. Where you stand depends largely on whether you believe that anti-racism is a sincere response to a genuine upsurge of public hatred or an \u00adopportunistic posture for elites seeking to justify their rule.<\/p>\n Guilluy is ambivalent on the question. He sees deep historical and economic processes at work behind the evolution of France\u2019s residential spaces. \u201cThere has been no plan to \u2018expel the poor\u2019, no conspiracy,\u201d he writes. \u201cJust a strict application of market principles.\u201d But he is moving towards a more politically engaged view: that the rhetoric of an \u201copen society\u201d is \u201ca smokescreen meant to hide the emergence of a closed society, walled off for the benefit of the upper classes\u201d.<\/p>\n It would be wrong, though, to see Guilluy as the partisan of any political project, let alone \u201cplaying the game\u201d of one. Ideologically and intellectually, he is difficult to place. Sometimes he sounds like Paul Mason, author of the 2015 book\u00a0PostCapitalism<\/em>. 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 past thirty years of economic policy but as the overarching goal of it. 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 civilisational truths once considered \u201cconservative\u201d have dawned. These include the novelist Michel Houellebecq, the philosopher Michel Onfray and the political philosopher Jean-Claude Mich\u00e9a, who has been heavily influenced by the American historian Christopher Lasch. Guilluy, too, acknow\u00adledges Lasch\u2019s influence, and one hears it when he writes, in\u00a0La France p\u00e9riph\u00e9rique<\/em>, of family and community as constituting \u201cthe capital of the poor\u201d.<\/p>\n Guilluy\u2019s 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 towards the pressing matters of our day. The \u201cAmerican\u201d society that Guilluy describes \u2013 unequal and multicultural \u2013 can appear quite stable, but signs abound that it is in crisis. For one thing, it requires for its own replication a growing economy.<\/p>\n 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 Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at\u00a0the\u00a0Weekly Standard. This article was first\u00a0published in the quarterly magazine City Journal<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \n\tA social thinker illuminates his country’s populist divides.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9209,"featured_media":24334,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5078,29633],"class_list":["post-24333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-elections","category-long-reads"],"yoast_head":"\n
\njobs), women, youths and non-Catholics \u2013 a\u00a0French version of the Obama bloc. It did not make up, in itself, an electoral majority, but it possessed sufficient cultural power to\u00a0attract one.<\/p>\n
\nfrom neighbourhoods it had spent years building up \u2013 and then expected the country to thank them.<\/p>\n
\nlegitimacy, but also a sense of what its legitimacy rested on in the first place. l<\/p>\n