‘Twilight of the Elites’ Review: On the Outskirts of ‘Higher France’.

Unlike the urban elites, the working poor of la France périphérique have to live with large-scale immigration’s immediate consequences.

By Philip Delves Broughton, The Wallstreet Journal, January 29, 2019.

French in­tel­lec­tu­als love lit­tle more than pre­dict­ing rev­o­lu­tion and chaos from a boule­vard-side ta­ble groan­ing with red wine and fric­as­seed in­nards. A rea­son to take them se­ri­ously is their coun­try’s his­tory: the clat­ter of the tum­brel, the hiss of the guil­lo­tine blade, the thud of the aris­to­crat’s head into the bas­ket. The French know the dif­fer­ence be­tween real rev­o­lu­tion and a week­end punch-up with the riot po­lice.

Christophe Guil­luy is a ge­o­g­ra-pher, au­thor and pub­lic in­tel­lec­tual in France whose pars­ing of the coun­try’s chang­ing de­mo­graph­ics, in books and news­pa­per col­umns, has at­tracted the at­ten­tion of French politi­cians across the spec­trum. In “Twi­light of the Elites,” he ar­gues that France now has all the con­di­tions in place for a “slave re­bel­lion.” Orig­i­nally pub­lished in French in 2016—and here trans­lated by Mal­colm De­Bevoise—the polemic seems all the more pre­scient in light of the gilets jaunes pro­testers, who have caused havoc in Paris over the past few months to op­pose Pres­i­dent Em­manuel Macron’s eco­nomic re­forms. The au­thor be­lieves these protests are not a one-off. They are the start of an even more dra­matic, and per­haps even more vi­o­lent, re­sponse to years of eco­nomic goug­ing by the coun­try’s elites.

Many of the ar­gu­ments in Mr. Guil­luy’s book are fa­mil­iar, and quite pos­si­bly true. The French elites, he says, like elites in much of the de­vel­oped world, have will­fully blinded them­selves to many of the re­al­i­ties of the mod­ern econ­omy. The af­flu­ent, liv­ing in a hand­ful of cities, tell them­selves that they have worked hard to adapt to the needs of a tech­nol­ogy-dri­ven glob­al­ized econ­omy. They con­sider them­selves mer­i­to­cratic, lib­eral and de­cent, wel­com­ing to the im­mi­grants who live on the edges of their cities. They em­brace com­pe­tition, be­cause, most of the time, they win.

la France pé­riphérique, far re­moved from the few hubs of eco­nomic growth. They live in the smaller cities and towns, or in the coun­try, with lim­ited ac­cess to ed­u­ca­tional or em­ploy­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties. They are be­lit­tled by the elites for be­ing stu­pid, racist and fas­cist, for not mutely ac­cept­ing their steady loss of eco­nomic and so­cial sta­tus.

The ur­ban elites, Mr. Guil­luy writes, are far more tol­er­ant of the woes of im­mi­grants who live closer to them than those out of sight and mind in the pe­riph­ery. The rea­son is that the pe­riph­ery’s prob­lems have been caused by the very same sys­tem that is en­rich­ing to­day’s cap­i­tal­ist elites: the free move­ment of la­bor and cap­i­tal and the en­croach­ment of tech­nol­ogy on man­ual work. The elites would rather lam­baste the poor in the pe­riph­ery than ad­mit that they had a hand in im­pov­er­ish­ing them.

“The higher France,” says Mr. Guil­luy, “now lives undis­turbed in the safety of its new citadels.” This class reaps all the eco­nomic ben­e­fits while, for form’s sake, spout­ing crit­i­cism of fi­nance, bankers and tech­nol­ogy gi­ants. They have it every which way, ruth­less cap­i­tal­ists by day, yo­gis and lo­ca­vores by night. “Clev­erly dis­guised as hip­sters, un­trou­bled by the least moral qualm in the safety of their town­houses, to­day’s bour­geoisie forms the bul­wark of the hard­est and most un­pity­ing form of cap­i­tal­ism imag­in­able.” They em­brace a “dé­classé life­style, styl­ishly slum­ming it in for­merly work­ing-class neigh­bor­hoods and hang­ing out in bars and restau­rants that still re­tain some­thing of their old pro­le­tar­ian at­mosphere.”

Mr. Guil­luy’s aim is rather scat­ter­shot. French soc­cer sta­di-ums, he com­plains, have be­come “vast out­door tea­rooms” for the mid­dle class. Fine. But they weren’t all work­ing-class bon­homie when you had to run splash­ing through lakes of urine to es­cape the skin­heads. Still, of­ten enough, he lands his punch. The elites want to be “close to the im­mi­grant—but not too close.” They sup­port im­mi­gration, he writes, be­cause they don’t have to live with its im­me­di­ate con­se­quences. Mean­while, “the in­hab­i­tants of pub­lic hous­ing . . . know that in­te­gra­tion of the new ar­rivals . . . will ac­tu­ally take place in the build­ings and the schools of their neigh­bor­hoods, not in the bour­geois-bo­hemian neigh­bor-hoods of the city cen­ters. For them there is no shar­ing of wealth, only of poverty.

And yet if this poorer work­ing class ex­presses even the slight­est reser­va­tion about im­mi­gra­tion, they are im­me­di­ately as­sumed to be racist. If they com­plain about their eco­nomic con­di­tion, they are “pop­ulists” at best, “fas­cists” at worst. Oc­ca­sion­ally this los­ing class will kick back by vot­ing for the right-wing Na­tional Front (re­cently re­named Na­tional Rally), as vot­ers have done for Brexit in the U.K. or for Don­ald Trump in Amer­i­ca’s Rust Belt.

If you ever want to be re-minded of why a ma­jor­ity of Britons voted for Brexit, con­sider two French elit­ist re­ac­tions quoted by Mr. Guil­luy: Busi­nessman and po­lit­i­cal ad­viser Alain Minc claimed that Brexit “was the vic­tory of un­e­d­u­cated peo­ple over ed­u­cated peo­ple.” The philoso­pher Bernard-Henri Lévy, mean­while, saw it as the “vic­tory of the lit­tle over the great, of stu­pid­ity over the mind.” There is not the slight­est em­pa­thy or gen­eros­ity in those re­sponses. Not a flicker of in­ter­est in why peo­ple would feel so fed-up with the Eu­ropean Union—its un­de­mo­c­ra­tic na­ture, its tram­pling on na­tional im­mi­gra­tion pri­or­i­ties—that they might want to leave it. Just pure con­tempt. The fuel for a rev­o­lu­tion.

So what is to be done? Mr. Guil­luy’s pre­scrip­tion is thin. France might con­sider mov­ing some of its uni­ver­si­ties to the ail­ing cities of the pe­riph­ery. Or en­cour-age a “rev­o­lu­tion of prox­im­ity,” turn­ing the im­mo­bil­ity of the work­ing classes into an as­set. If they can’t move, be­cause the cities are too ex­pen­sive or they are un­qual­i­fied for jobs there, or they don’t want to move for love of fam­ily and home, then en­cour­age them to stay put. Have them take care of the el­derly or de­velop lo­cal tourism.

But start, at least, by rec­og­nizing the cri­sis, be­fore it bursts through your door, lust­ing for blood.

Mr. Delves Brough­ton is the au­thor of “The Art of the Sale: Learn­ing From the Mas­ters About the Busi­ness of Life.”