France’s blue collar workers, junior white-collar staff, the unemployed and the retired make up a lower class that is also the majority among the country’s electorate. Hit hardest by the current economic crisis, and largely ignored by the traditional Left, there are consistent indicators that a significant proportion is being won over by the Far Right Front National party presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen. In this interview with Mediapart, social geographer Christophe Guilluy (1) offers an insight into an economic and social groundshift in France that has produced an abandoned and despairing category of the population, what he calls “a new lower class which the Left does not really understand”.
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Mediapart: How do you interpret what Marine Le Pen is saying about the "forgotten" and "invisible" members of French society?
Christophe Guilluy: She must have read Le Monde, which used the term "the invisible" recently. She has already appropriated left-wing ideas, so now she reads left-wing newspapers. She must be a real left-wing candidate if she reads Le Monde and defends the lower classes and secularism!
Seriously though, what we are seeing is the party’s line being adapted to its electoral base. In the 1980s, the Front National’s electorate was made up of a Far Right which tended to be Catholic and upper middle class, with a base of shopkeepers and tradesmen. This electorate still exists but it is numerically less significant than the lower class electorate.
When you look at voting in Paris, the FN would win votes in the [Editor’s note: affluent] 16th arrondissement but not at all in the [non-affluent] 20th arrondissement. This was reversed during the 1990s.
The working class fell into [Marine’s father Jean-Marie] Le Pen’s lap without him even looking for it. I think it was a surprise for him. He is not a Marxist, nor does he see French society through the prism of class analysis, but he went for it.
So in 1995 the FN became the biggest working-class party in France, and its line gradually adjusted to that. It used to be really a very free-market, anti-public sector, anti-state party, but it has adapted.
These days Marine Le Pen is the candidate who has made the best job of adjusting the party line to her electorate by changing the FN’s positions. She attracts not only an abandoned working class but also [lower-level] white collar employees.
She has adapted policies to the new social geography. She represents a real diagnosis of what French society has become, and it renders the moral position against voting for the FN futile.
In fact the PS [Socialist Party] has a similar reasoning. It has understood that the lower classes are important for this election, simply because the presidential election is the last remaining election in which they still turn out to vote.
They no longer turn out for parliamentary elections, regional elections or European elections. This is in fact the Left’s dilemma. It only wins elections in which the lower classes don’t vote!
The PS’s electorate used to have a left-wing sociological bias and included workers and low-income earners. From the 1980s it became much more made up of university graduates and ‘bobos’, while keeping its base among public sector employees. This electoral sociology influences the PS’s line.
So, even though the party believes that to win elections it needs to win over the lower classes, the reality is that for the past 20 years it is not the lower classes that have helped it to win elections, but the electorate in the biggest cities.
So how do you address the lower classes without turning off ‘boboland’? It’s incredibly complicated. They have understood that this is a real problem but they don’t have a solution.
Mediapart: What has not been understood in this new social geography you have studied?
CG: The lower classes no longer consist only of workers in big factories. This is in fact [radical Left candidate] Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s entire problem. He thinks workers are still like Jean Gabin on his train in [the French film] La Bête Humaine.(1).
A worker in 2012 works in small production units with a temporary contract and is not unionised. Social geography shows that there is a new lower class which the Left does not really understand. Even though workers and employees still represent 55% to 60% of the economically active population, as they did in the 1970s, they no longer have the same expectations.
They also account for the majority of pensioners, and in 2007 Sarkozy captured their vote, which is numerically significant because there are a lot of these low-income pensioners of working class origin, and they turn out to vote frequently.
Sociologically, if you take the economically active population and add in the unemployed and pensioners, those who still massively structure this country are the lower classes.
But the Left has a major problem in representing them. They still see it as being all about a declining working class, renewal coming solely from the underprivileged city suburbs, and the idea that the middle classes structure the country.
So they still think that things are broadly going well and that most people benefit from globalisation. But that is untrue.
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1: Christophe Guilluy is the director of MAPS, a geographic and urban studies agency, and an independent advisor on social geography issues for local and national government. He is the author of Atlas des nouvelles fractures françaises, published by Autrement, and Fractures françaises, published by François Bourin.
2: The Human Beast, a 1938 film by Jean Renoir based on the eponymous 1890 novel by Emile Zola.
Mediapart: Isn’t the very idea of a middle class a myth that is in the process of collapsing?
CG: The middle classes represent a reality dating from the ‘Trente Glorieuses’ [the term commonly used to describe the 30 years of economic prosperity in France following World War II]. The lower classes represent today’s reality. Social geography shows this.
In all periods of economic change, a social class and a new social landscape emerge. Before the Industrial Revolution, France was rural, with rural landscapes and a peasantry. Then the working class emerged and landscapes changed, with the establishment of industrial regions and working class neighbourhoods.
During the 30 years after the war, we saw an ‘averaging’ of French society, with a landscape based on the social reality of urban expansion, a France full of the little houses of white collar workers who were rising up the social scale.
For every era there is a dominant social class and landscape. In the 1980s it was the emergence of suburban ghettos, which were covered extensively in the media – practically too much, because no one saw what was going on elsewhere.
Nowadays people act as if globalisation and the new economic organisation on the ground had no effect on sociology and the social landscape. Yet there is a restructuring in progress on the ground in which the contours of a new social geography are being formed, opposing a ‘metropolitan France’ which is compatible with globalisation to a ‘marginal France’ which suffers from its effects.
Metropolitan areas are affected by two dynamics: gentrification and immigration. Gentrification of the big cities goes hand in hand with an increase in immigration in districts with social housing or dilapidated private housing.
On the other hand, from the deprived suburbs we see a marginal France emerging, to which the majority of the population belong, and particularly the bulk of the lower classes. These places on the urban fringe, in rural or industrial areas, in small or medium-sized towns, exist outside the big metropolises.
This is where the lower classes are emerging. Workers, employees, the self-employed and small-scale farmers, who share not a class consciousness but a common perception of globalisation and the growth of metropolises. They share a feeling of being outside metropolitan development and of suffering from economic changes.
You find the most vulnerable jobs in those areas. Here the productive sphere – industrial and residential, such as tradesmen and retailing – is characterised by low wages, and those in it see themselves as being in direct competition with, for example, the Chinese worker.
This is also the France of redundancy plans and with numerous public sector jobs, which explains why people in these regions are so attached to public services. You have here the territories where the Sarkozy vote was the strongest, and they also vote for the FN.
Even so, it is not true to say that this electorate is moving to the Right. People in these areas remain very much in favour of the government and public services, in principle on an egalitarian basis, and to the values of the French Republic and a strong state.
If you see the FN vote as a replay of the 1930s with its Fascist leagues, you are making a mistake. It is first and foremost the expression of a desire for protection.
These areas and these categories of the population have objectively experienced social insecurity. They have known salary deflation and part-time work, which dominates in the urban fringes and rural areas. For 20 years they have been told that in the end, globalisation will benefit them.
To tell these people that they are being taken in by an anti-globalisation rant is absurd, because they suffer very concretely from the effects of economic policies over the past three decades. With as a corollary, an end to the hope of their children rising up the social ladder and property values that exclude any return to the city.
And even when people talk about positive discrimination, it doesn’t mean them. Sciences-Po [an elite political sciences school in Paris] is now taking candidates from ‘sensitive urban areas’. But why not from deepest Mayenne [a rural département, equivalent to a county, in north-western France]?
What is striking is that they are not even seen, because the social cleavage is also a geographical cleavage. During the industrial period, workers lived in towns. They were there where things were happening, close to economic, political or cultural power bases, even if they remained on the margins. They were politically integrated, notably thanks to the PC [Communist Party].
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Mediapart: So is the answer de-globalisation, protectionism, a ‘de-metropolitanisation’ of France?
CG: I think ‘de-metropolitanisation’ would be difficult. You cannot go back to the industrial France of the 1960s and draw a line under the most advanced economic sectors.
On the other hand, and this is the whole challenge of protectionism, we must think about how to protect industrial employment. The share of industrial employment lost because of free trade is probably one million (1). This is huge.
The logic of free trade really has caused delocalisation of jobs. For this reason the lower classes are no longer integrated, either socially or economically. Therefore they are not politically integrated either, and that leads to voting for the FN. If people are not integrated socially, they will not be integrated politically.
When I have discussions with the PS [Socialist Party], they ask me: ‘But what can we say to them?’ I can only reply that it requires a bit of sincerity, that this electorate does not believe in electoral marketing thrown together in three months. It is not true that you can say: ‘I won’t touch free trade and border protection, and at the same time I want to protect you.’
Mediapart: Right now we have protectionist theories espoused by politicians as different as Arnaud Montebourg [PS], Jean-Luc Mélenchon [radical Left], or Marine Le Pen [FN]. That was not the case in previous elections.
CG: When you talked about protectionism 10 years ago you were taken for a crazy nationalist. Today it is becoming a bit more rational. You cannot say you want to protect people and not regulate the economy.
Should protectionism be European, national or both? All that is debateable. But in any case, it is the real issue. It has not been resolved and it represents an ideological fracture in the parties, on the Right and on the Left.
There is a card to play about protectionism in the [presidential election] campaign. Will it be [Nicolas] Sarkozy or [François] Hollande who will do it? If Sarkozy sees that he is struggling in the opinion polls and Le Pen is too high, he will perhaps utter the word ‘protectionism’, which would be an enormous cultural shock.
Sarkozy the neoliberal was elected on a semi-sovereignist (2) campaign by people who demanded protection from globalisation. It was a quite a coup. But now we are in another phase, and he may need to send a clearer signal.
It’s the same on the Left. Hollande has become aware of the existence of the lower classes, but is that enough? Because on that score, the FN is several steps ahead.
The debate still needs to be clarified, but the Socialist [Party] primaries already decided on part of the debate, since even though Montebourg achieved a small breakthrough, he is still very much in a minority in the party. Even so, you do get the feeling that things are starting to move, but will Hollande go as far as saying the word, saying that protectionism could be a solution?
Mediapart: But the Socialist Party and other parties of the French Left champion the defence of public services.
CG: It is very important to reaffirm the need for a strong state in the areas where people are tempted to vote FN. But you cannot defend that and neoliberal policies at the same time. If you are still in that kind of neoliberal economic logic, how do you send a signal to the lower classes?
Urban sprawl also has a very negative connotation. These areas with little detached houses are seen as yobbish, ugly and un-ecological. But such views on urban centres are very metro-centric. Why should cities only be densely populated metropolises? There may be other ways of conceiving urban centres. This is the whole problem with the Greens’ policies. How do you think people in deepest Picardy [rural northern France] perceive their line on cars?
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1: According to the French finance ministry’s Treasury and Economic Policy Unit (DGTPE), 45% of the loss of two million industrial jobs that disappeared between 1980 and 2007 was due to international trade.
2: French "souverainistes" (sovereignists, or sovereigntists, in English) put France above all other allegiances, in particular the European Union in the current context.
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English version: Sue Landau (Editing by Graham Tearse)
This is an abridged translation of an interview published on Mediapart's French pages (click here).