Some people are asking themselves today: how did we get here? Others have been trying to document it for many years. This is the case of the essayist Christophe Guilluy, who has been digging for French fractures (Françoise Bourin, 2010) and Peripheral France (Flammarion, 2014) the new cultural, social, geographical and political partition that is plaguing modern Western societies. In twenty years, his reading grid has become known in many countries, to the point of being hailed as the most relevant by the famous editorialist of the Financial Times Christopher Caldwell. On the day after a historic election, Christophe Guilluy explores for L’Express an aspect of the divide that we probably don’t think about enough: is public conversation disconnected from what is said, observed, and debated among ordinary French people?
L’Express: When it invented democracy, ancient Greece made the agora of Athens its beating heart. Today, it is in the media that this public conversation is organized – fueled by politicians, journalists, trade unionists, intellectuals, etc. Does it play its role of representing points of view?
Christophe Guilluy: “Public conversation” only makes sense if there is a cultural connection between the bottom and the top of society. This connection is essential, vital for democracy. I am sometimes caricatured as an anti-elite essayist, but that is wrong: as long as they play their role, political, intellectual, media, etc. elites carry out an indispensable mission in society. However, for this to work, the elites must recognize that there is a culture and a complexity produced by ordinary people that they must feed on in the same way that they claim to feed and enlighten the rest of society. This recognition of a mutual contribution works more or less well depending on the era; today, it is completely broken.
When did it work well?
The strength of the West after the war was very largely that of a majority middle and working class, which had found its economic and cultural place, which could look at itself without blushing in the mirror of positive representations in the world of cinema, in the media world, etc. I like to cite the example of The Human Beast, Renoir’s film adapted from Zola’s novel. The hero of this film – directed by a wealthy bourgeois – is a railway worker, played by Jean Gabin, who, despite the complexity and the dark side of his character, clearly shows something to be proud of. Where have these representations gone that are neither overbearing nor miserabilist? Politically, we could also talk about the Gaullist-Communist elites, who made the link… It was really the strength of the West to give a dignified place to the middle and working classes.
When did this cultural connection break?
In the 1980s, the tertiarization of the French economy led to wealth being increasingly concentrated in the metropolises, which led, by a domino effect, to a geographical division of the territory by the price per square meter. Now, the 20% of French people belonging to the upper sociocultural categories live mainly in these citadel cities, where they neither hear nor see the concerns of “ordinary people” – of all colors, origins, or faiths. These elites, sure of their intellectual superiority (thanks to their diploma in particular) and their moral superiority (thanks to their discourse turned towards “the Other”), find it hard to bear being told to what extent, in reality, they are locked into a fragmented and selfish vision of things. To what extent they have abandoned the common good. Their daily lives almost never intersect with those of the working classes, except when they call on them to deliver their meals, or to look after the children. The real otherness is social otherness. And today we don’t mix at all anymore. We’re not even “neighbors” anymore.
In your opinion, how do we measure the disconnection of “public conversation” from the state of mind of ordinary French people? What are the markers?
Today’s public conversation is largely a mediated transposition of the 19th-century Parisian salon. Its function is, in a way, to preserve the social status of the bourgeoisie by highlighting its moral superiority and its virtues, which are necessary for society. Each “salon” is backed by the morality of its time. Today, we find a certain number of totems and taboos there: misguided anti-racism, misguided feminism, misguided ecology, etc. The less the economic model works – that is to say, the more obvious it is that it excludes a majority of citizens from the great banquet of growth and culture – the more the political, media, artistic and academic elite adds to the moralizing. The progressive bourgeoisie defends its position by endlessly producing a new morality, a new starry sky. But it doesn’t work anymore. All the less so, moreover, since there is a great deal of hypocrisy among those I call the Dorian Grays of progressivism.
The Dorian Gray of progressivism?
In Oscar Wilde’s famous novel, the main character can retain his adolescent beauty because his portrait, himself, becomes uglier over the years, through his misdeeds and cruelty. In the same way, some paragons of progressivism – usually the most zealous – can make statements like “you can’t be more feminist than me” while hiding the behavior of rapists or stalkers. People are tired of being lectured by such hypocrites.
Some will retort that there are media with different sensibilities, even opinion media. Moreover, even in the most “mainstream” media, some voices make other points of view heard, right?
Yes. With, sometimes, a status of heretics, whom we take care to invite, in a minority position: we cannot give in to the inner circle 100%!
Did you ever feel like you were invited to play this role?
It could have happened to me. [Rires.] I notice that, in this case, the inviting power takes care to mark a distance. They say: “the controversial essayist”; I am asked questions like “your ‘theses’ are taken up by the extreme right”… Nice! Forgetting to say that peripheral France is not a “thesis”, but a photograph of reality and that this concept is in fact taken up by the entire political class, academics and pollsters, who now speak every day of a France of the countryside, of the peri-urban, of small towns, of medium-sized towns, that is to say the definition that I have been giving for twenty years of peripheral France.
But in debates, weak signals are enough to indicate to the audience that “he’s not good, not part of the establishment.” Generally speaking, dissenting voices are discouraged from being too sincere in their diagnosis.
How ?
The “bad buzz”, the denunciation platforms, in short, the disqualification mechanisms intimidate psychologically, but also professionally. Because behind it all there is a stake in positions and business. For example, to get a position at the university – where it works by co-optation – it is better to avoid ending up with the “sulphurous” label. To be able to give conferences, to obtain missions, it is the same. Even researchers need to finance themselves, and this financing can come from conferences in companies, missions given by local authorities, etc., which constitute a restricted market. So some use the dominant ideology and morality to disqualify the competition. Personally, I have always tried to fight with the weapons I had, that is to say books and a thought. I thought it was diagnosis against diagnosis. I realized that it did not work like that at all.
Do these mechanisms of intimidation limit sincere expression in public conversation?
It’s obvious. A thousand times I’ve been told: “Your problem is that you say and write what you think.” It’s true: not only do I say what I think, but I report what I see. Otherwise, I might as well change jobs. When I do field surveys with middle-class or working-class French people, they talk to me about immigration. Not just the “little whites,” as they are contemptuously called. French people of all origins talk to me about the concerns that demographic changes in their neighborhood, or in the big city nearby, can raise. But this simple diagnosis is “sulphurous.” For the “salon,” the concern about migratory flows is at best an invention of the extreme right, at worst proof that the French people are racist. What is most revolting in all this is that a calm debate is prevented by hypocrites who, in real life, behave like perfect social and ethnic secessionists. Many of these people lie. Blatantly. Which speaks volumes about their abandonment of the common good. Caring about the common good necessarily requires honesty: you cannot connect with the other if you lie.
What is the democratic damage of all this? What does this dysmorphia of public conversation lead to compared to the conversations of millions of ordinary French people?
The role of public conversation is existential. Vital. It is to bring out all the contradictory representations of a society, of all social groups. A coherent democracy must be able to produce positive representations of some and others, not just a positive representation of some and a negative representation of others. Today, we are paying for thirty years of negative representation of the ordinary majority. It is obvious that this cannot last. We cannot keep a society alive if public conversation is rigged, if it becomes a theater from A to Z. Otherwise, it is called the USSR. And even in the USSR people continued to talk among themselves. In whispers. I believe that we are truly at the end of this road. Awareness is inevitable.
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