The photo was displayed four by three on billboards in La Baule, and displayed as a double page in the town’s news magazine. It represents an office meeting on a beach, that is to say that a carton, a table, armchairs, shelves and a potted palm tree have been placed on the sand still wet from the ebb tide. Five characters “brainstorm” there, happy, in shirtsleeves, with in the distance, the white buildings characteristic of the La Baule coast. The scene literally depicts what telework now makes possible figuratively, and that the slogan associated with the photo proclaims loud and clear: “La Baule: living and working in vacation country!”
There is something of a watchword of the time in this punchline of Loire-Atlantique. First, it consecrates the new frontiers of telework, largely redefined during confinement. Formerly reluctant – even wary – of working from home, many employers made good deals against bad luck and, on the return of the Covid, reduced the surface area of their premises, counting on two, three, four days of teleworking per week. week for part of their troops (essentially: executives and intellectual professions). Thus, companies using telework now use it on average 3.6 days a week, compared to 1.6 days at the end of 2019 (1). After well-to-do retirees and the liberal professions, it is therefore the turn of tertiary executives to be able to flee the metropolises, cramped apartments, and public transport, to settle all year round with a view of the azure infinity. . Because if at the end of the confinement we had seen blooming articles predicting the “revenge of the medium-sized cities” and a harmonious demographic rebalancing of the territory, our teleworker executives were not cheerful everywhere. They favored towns served by the TGV and preferably located by the sea (rather the Atlantic than the Mediterranean, due to global warming).
The Skype exodus
Sign among others of this “race to the sea”, the town of Pornichet, neighboring La Baule, had to go from 12 to 14 primary classes at the end of the confinement, a whole part of the “Covid refugees” having obviously decided not to return to the big cities. The crowds at Gare Montparnasse on Thursday lunchtimes (and no longer Friday afternoons) concretely illustrate the adoption of bi-residentiality by thousands of families recently settled in the western towns served from Montparnasse, and whose one of the members now commutes, the presence in the capital being reduced from Tuesday morning to Thursday noon, the rest of the week taking place in telework. If the SNCF fills its TGV Atlantique, the RATP has noted an 18% drop in attendance on Fridays compared to the volume of traffic on Tuesdays. We used to know rush hours, now obviously there are also “peak days”…
This “Skype exodus”, added to the already existing problem of second homes, and the rise of Airbnb, has precipitated the surge in real estate prices on the most coveted coasts., created a new situation everywhere, between the welcome arrival of capital and the resentment of the less well-off “locals”. For lack of resources to pay the rent, the latter can often no longer live where they were born, and are pushed back into the land, where they become melancholic. We thus see on the Atlantic coast that if Emmanuel Macron came first in the first round in the “triple A municipalities” with a view of the sea, the RN vote gains in intensity as one moves away from the coast. , Marine Le Pen taking the ascendancy on average 30 kilometers from the coast. The bitter, which we see swelling, too far from the clear gulfs…
© / Art Press
It is, moreover, all the irony of the slogan “Living and working in the land of vacations”. Some will perhaps have recognized the diversion of an old Cedtist slogan of the 1970s: “Live and work in the country”. At the time, it was a question of demanding an industrial development of the territory which would allow workers to work where they were born, particularly in the south of France (“Volem viure al pais!”, “I want to live in the country !”, proclaimed the Occitan regionalists). At the time, employees were not very mobile and it was up to the work to establish itself where the available labor was. Today, the same words encourage executives and intellectual professions, made mobile by teleworking and the TGV, to settle with a view of the sea… even if it means chasing away, sometimes, what is left of workers or of CSP-. From the top of this diverted slogan, thirty years of deindustrialization contemplate you…
But there is a second dimension in this “Living and working in vacation country”: the imperious advent of “kiffance” and the loss of the centrality of work in our lives and our imaginations. The promise of a leisure king, which now manages to submit the constraint of work. “The West ends in Bermuda shorts”, predicted the essayist Philippe Muray. We dare not imagine what he would have thought of the “zoom meeting” on the beach. It’s time for Mondays in the sun. The civilization of kif, which affects all social backgrounds. In 1990, 60% of French people felt that work was “very important” in their lives. Today, they are only 24% (2). At the same time, the leisure curve has followed an opposite trajectory (with a proportion of “very important” answers increasing in thirty years from 31% to 41%).
If unlike other less desirable territories, La Baule has no difficulty in attracting doctors, Franck Louvrier, mayor of this prestigious seaside resort, recently confided that he was encountering another unanticipated difficulty: “For a doctor from the older generation who are retiring, I now need three to take care of their patients…” Young practitioners settling in La Baule no longer have the same relationship to work as former family doctors. From now on, Friday is golf, and Thursday afternoon kite-surfing if it’s windy…
(1) IFOP survey for Malakoff Médéric Humanis.
(2) IFOP survey for the Jean-Jaurès Foundation.