Deux générations dans la débine: enquête dans la pauvreté ouvrière by Jean-François Lae and Numa Murard (review)

In the late 1970s, Jean-François Laé and Numa Murard conducted a survey in Elbeuf, a working-class town in the Seine-Maritime département.⁽¹⁾ They were interested then in the lives of families settled in the temporary housing estate of Ecameaux,⁽²⁾ built in 1975 to rehouse people living in insalubrious conditions. It was assumed at the time that the last “pockets of poverty” still in existence toward the end of the 30-year economic boom known as the Trente Glorieuses would disappear as overall living conditions improved. But when the same researchers returned to the field in 1995⁽³⁾ and then again in 2010, what they found was a different, much grimmer reality. This work presents the epic story of a research undertaking that spans a period of over 30 years; it depicts the destiny of two generations of “poor workers” and a territory paralysed by de-industrialization.

The book is exceptional in several respects. First, for its methodology: few studies are conducted over such a long period or draw on such a variety of sources. The work is much more than an ethnographic study of inhabitants of the temporary housing estate; the authors also visited the different institutions its impoverished respondents had dealings with (courts, public reconciliation authorities, commissions for striking recipients from the unemployment rolls). The book is also remarkable for its colourful narrative style and well-suited tone; the authors show “from the inside” as it were how these people of working-class origin cope with unemployment, revealing attitudes, emotions and an atmosphere that usually remains in shadow.

The lives of this set of poor people are characterized first and foremost by residential instability and poor housing conditions. In the 1970s they moved from dilapidated buildings into the temporary housing estate; when it closed in 1987, most were resettled in state-subsidized housing units.⁽⁴⁾ But the housing the authors discovered in 2010 was once again in poor condition and some of the buildings were slotted for demolition – as if the problem had simply “moved house” with the respondents. This study of two generations forcefully demonstrates that poor people cannot break free of poor housing conditions. They seem caught in a circuit of “second-category” dwellings and pursued by demolition programmes: “Every ten years the washing machine turns and rinses away the dirt,” write the authors (p. 60). With every demolition, 20% of the building’s inhabitants disappear from the renters’ rolls.

The lives of these people, especially the men, were rife with the dangers and scars of the working-class condition: exposure to health risks, work accidents, the hazards of working on scaffolding, for example, or near a vat of acid. But the effects of massive unemployment in France are just as pernicious and they heavily impact on everyday social life. That life is now shaped not by work shifts but economic precarity; these people cannot leave on vacation, and particularly vulnerable individuals simply drop out, as attested by the men and women who gather around a supermarket where beer are relatively cheap or become drug addicts or end up in prison or a psychiatric hospital.

Though these people’s living spaces are unhealthy and segregate them from other people, they are nonetheless attached to them in both senses of the word: chained and emotionally attached. As several studies have shown, the territory can be a resource for the destitute. When they were living in the temporary housing estate, explain the authors, these people were almost a separate society and their poverty resulted less in “dis-affiliation” than excessive “affiliation”; that is, becoming deeply embedded in a tight network of relations. When the Ecameaux estate was demolished, its inhabitants were rehoused in different places to resolve the matter of “problem families...