Christophe Guilluy, who has just written a book about France, is not a political scientist but a geographer. Studying French society as a geographer led him to discover an important rupture that had escaped most of the political observers: that between the French metropolitans and those he calls “peripheral France.” He wrote a fascinating essay about La France périphérique in 2014 whose thesis was that the country is divided between globalization's winners (upper class French who mostly live in the 16 main French metropolises) and its losers, languishing in the boonies, their jobs being “outsourced” to Eastern Europe or Asia, and their traditional place in society at risk due to the influx of immigrants.
This essay raised a huge debate in France, and Guilluy has expanded it into several books including his latest, Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France, initially published as Le crépuscule de la France d'en haut in 2016, and now by Yale University Press with a translation by Malcolm DeBevoise. This strange expression, “France d'en haut,” means “elites” but comes from the political speech of the era of Jacques Chirac. President Chirac himself decried “social fracturing” during his 1995 campaign for France's presidency, and in 2002, the then-Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin distinguished “France d'en haut” (the upper class) and “France d'en bas” (the lower class).
The author's expanded thesis is that the openness and opportunities touted by the vast majority of French politicians, intellectuals, and journalists is but a smoke screen behind which we can easily see new citadels of privilege. This thesis is both iconoclastic and perfectly true. It's hard for the chattering classes to admit that lowering France's national borders implies raising local walls in order to protect wealthy places and wealthy people from contact with poor people—and especially with immigrants. More precisely, there are some contacts between wealthy people and immigrants, but these are not contacts between citizens. They are contacts of service, the new arrivals having replaced the French working at the service of the upper class. This has left “peripheral France,” generally speaking, in isolation from the elites, these open-minded people who are at the same time the beneficiaries of a new slave class.
Of course, we can discuss the provocative and exaggerated character of this analysis. Immigrants are not literally enslaved. But we cannot dismiss the fact of the fracture itself, nor of the elites' construction of new protective citadels.
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