Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France by Christophe Guilluy (review)

Since the publication of his Fractures françaises (Paris: François Bourin, 2010) and, in particular, La France périphérique: comment on a sacrifié les classes populaires (Paris: Flammarion, 2014), social geographer Christophe Guilluy has become an increasingly visible and outspoken commentator on class. Although first published in 2016 as Le Crépuscule de la France d’en haut (Paris: Flammarion), this translation offers the first opportunity for an English-speaking readership to acquaint themselves with Guilluy’s iconoclasm, and is timely, appearing in the midst of ongoing gilet jaune protests and pre-empting the winter 2019 strikes against President Macron’s pension reforms. Guilluy’s major thesis here is consistent with his earlier work and simple to express: the tensions that animate contemporary France are attributable to the efforts of the neoliberal administration to exploit yet deny the existence of the French working class. In La France périphérique, Guilluy sketched the emergence of a ‘peripheral’ France, often located far from the major French cities, ever more disenfranchised by a globalization that panders to the flows of global finance, weakening the Republican principles on which France is supposed to rest. The analysis of Twilight of the Elites broadens this to consider the role of the ‘new bourgeoisie’ (p. 6), comprised of the spheres of media and academia, whose structural role is to facilitate the incessant expansion of financial capital. While mainstream media discourses proffer to champion social and cultural diversity, this actually masks the effective and systematic sidelining of the poor, ‘native’ French. Guilluy’s finger here is most consistently pointed at the hypocritical ‘boboized upper classes’ for ushering in this state of affairs, at those who embody ‘cool’ capitalism (p. 13) and ‘the laid-back style of domination in the twenty-first century’ (p. 12). In this ‘Americanized’ society, the working classes are pushed towards an increasingly untenable position, with Guilluy suggesting a cynical stage management by the urban-based power to create a society which depends on the exploitation of low-paid immigrant labour, alienating the ‘natives’. To some extent, Guilluy’s arguments are also elucidated outside his work, not only by the 2019 street protests, but in contemporary creative work such as Michel Houellebecq’s Sérotonine (2019) and Édouard Louis’s Qui a tuémon père (2018). Guilluy’s points are made strongly, but with nuance lost at the expense of his polemical force. The analysis becomes most problematic when he considers French racism, Islamophobia, and, particularly, far-right politics and anti-fascism. His assertion, that demands for immigration control ‘are not motivated by racial hatred on the part of a particular ethnic, cultural, or religious group; they are a rational response by self-reliant low-income groups seeking to protect a precious fund of social and cultural capital that is being threatened by the relentless advance of globalization’ (p. 125), needs more unpacking than this slim volume allows. The book is equally light on what should happen next. His conclusion that ‘the existing order will finally break down [...] as the result of a slow process of social and cultural disaffiliation on the part of the working class’ (p. 3)feels weak in the light of the violence of recent street protests.