French geographer, Christophe Guilluy describes in 5 chapters the fissures within French society.
His main arguments are that globalization transformed the non-elite french people into’ losers’. The elites often pose as new leftist ‘boho’, who live in the big cities and disingenuously disenfranchise the real working class. The working class has been pushed out to the periphery and made invisible. As a result this working class has enough.
The economic misery of the non-profiting classes pushed them to the populists and into more and more protests. So far so good and it lets the reader understand why so many people are so angry in France ( see Yellow vests)
Where the book disappoints is the continuous stacking of arguments without or with too little support. Also, the definition of elite is woefully inadequate. At times the language was too demagogic for a social science book. It gives a glance why some French citizens are upset but that is all.

The author's painstaking research and attention to detail is obvious in the writing of this book. There were many facts that I only discovered after reading this!

Twilight of the Elites tries to elucidate the growing discontent of the French working class toward the status quo, i.e. globalisation and its corollary 'metropolisation'. Guilluy argues that globalisation has fundamentally changed France, turning it into an 'American' or 'Anglo-Saxon' society, which is to say an unequal one. Not only has globalisation changed the fortunes of France's working class, but metropolisation, a concomitant phenomenon, has led to a more vibrant job market in cities, not in small towns or rural areas. Guilluy believes that France's major political parties - whether left- or right-wing - are effectively the same in terms of policy. Per Guilluy, the ruling class (yes, even the supposed Socialists like Hollande) are all in favour of globalisation, because they reap the rewards. Furthermore, he extensively discusses immigration in relation to globalisation and states that it is a tool to suppress the wages of the locals (the 'white' French in peripheral France and long-standing immigrants). The ruling class, in denying the dispossession of the working classes, is fomenting discontent and anger in peripheral France. This pushes the people of peripheral France to vote for the National Front, which is the only party championing an end to immigration (which is viewed as a solution to declining wages).

It is indisputable that globalisation has had a negative impact on workers whose jobs have been exported to Asia and Eastern Europe, but the horse is now out of the barn. It is a waste of time to debate the validity of globalisation when gov'ts ought to find ways to mitigate the negative impacts it has on the working/lower classes. To his credit, Guilluy does mention the flawed methodology used by INSEAD to classify economic regions and how this reductive analysis can lead to ineffective policy-making. However, I think that Guilluy tries too hard to apply the 'Anglo-Saxon' paradigm on France. In many ways, the French working-class is better off than their counterparts in the U..S and U.K. and this comes across as more of a polemic. The metropolisation phenomenon decried as a product of globalisation has always existed in France, a centralised country. It's important to divorce (if possible) centralisation from metropolisation. The former may have exacerbated the latter, but they shouldn't be conflated in order to make an argument against globalisation. If there is no existing infrastructure, development or jobs in a particular region, it makes perfect sense that people would relocate to a centre.

I initially found Twilight of the Elites tough to read, but I pushed myself to finish it in order to make sure that it wasn't my centrist and pro-globalisation views that made me recoil. Moreover, this book, while originally published in 2016, captures the zeitgeist of France today. It is worth reading to understand the rise of the 'gilets jaunes' and increasingly unpopular President Macron (who is viewed as a corporatist shill by many). In addition, this pattern has been seen in the U.K. (Brexit) and the U..S (Trump, to some extent). Though I don't share Guilluy's views, I did better understand the rise of fascist and anti-immigrant political movements buttressed by the 'native' working class who see their fortunes diminished in a changing world.

I am fluent in French and have been to France - and not just Paris - over five times in the past few years. I am an 'Anglo-Saxon' albeit one who is familiar with France and French people, so I like to think my understanding of this book is not far off the mark. Given France's current political climate, I would highly recommend Twilight of the Elites to better understand its most recent protests against immigration, globalisation and the increased cost of living.

Thank you to NetGalley, Yale University Press and Christophe Guilluy for allowing me to read an advance copy of this title.

France is losing its soul, and the majority – the working class – is paying for it. Twilight of the Elites examines the differences between the cities and peripheral France. The cities are booming and buoyant and privileged – and totally out of reach of the majority. Christophe Guilluy says “A globalized society is a closed society in which the combined effects of class inbreeding, residential separatism, educational apartheid and a selfish determination to accumulate wealth and property have never been so powerful.” Twilight of the Elites is far more than a polemic. Guilluy uses the latest figures available from the OECD, INSEE and election results to back his claims and project trends. Globalization is killing traditional France.

Guilluy complains that the new so-called openness to multiculturalism is simple hypocrisy. The rich city dwellers praise it. They like seeing different races and nationalities in restaurants. But that’s about as far as integration goes. Meanwhile, poor immigrants don’t see any of the French Dream. They don’t get to go to the schools that result in jobs, they don’t get to live in apartments in town, and most will go no higher than minimum wage all their lives, assuming they can find work. If they do, it probably won’t be full time. They are not big consumers like white-collar city workers, so neoliberalism can just dispense with them.

This thinking led to leaders approving the free movement of workers throughout Europe, while allowing their employers to pay them at their home countries’ rates. So rather than pay a worker the 1300 euros a month minimum that France mandates, a Romanian worker in France gets 218. This callous, total abandonment of the working class does not sit well with French workers, and has caused them to vote massively for the National Rally (formerly National Front), despite, or perhaps because of its Trump-like simplicity and superficiality. The two centrist parties only offer more of the same – ie. nothing. As so-called socialist President Francois Hollande showed, they are simply two sides of the same coin.

The timing of the book is impeccable. The gilets jaunes (yellow vests) are in the news every day in France. They are a completely leaderless movement of the working class and working poor, who are fed up with all the new and improved taxes the government of Emmanuel Macron foists on them. They are so poor they can’t afford days or even hours off work. They can only come to Paris to demonstrate on Saturdays. They have had as much as 80% support throughout the country. So Guilluy’s prognosis (the original French edition was published in 2016) is beginning to play out.

This gilets jaunes movement plays directly to my own feelings. I had predicted that Emmanuel Macron was fooling everyone. He was not a man of the left, as everyone classified him, but someone who would simply create a new USA in France.

Guilluy says the mobility of the working class has been all but cut off. The ability to move to find a new job no longer applies to the lower classes (nearly 60% of the population). They cling to their areas of birth, because that is where they find support of family and friends in times of need and no money. They cannot chance a move. This is exactly what has happened in the USA, where mobility is now only for the well-off. It is capital that is mobile now, not labor.

The working class has been shut out of the (15) major cities in France. The closest they can get is the immigrant banlieues (subsidized suburbs) where they are unwelcome, not to mention fearful. The cost of living in French cities has become so unattainable that only the managerial class can afford it. Instead, laborers must remain in village and rural France, where jobs are few and closures many. In the vicious circle this has produced, government removes its local offices and services because of lower populations, leaving even fewer jobs, or hope for a middle class life.

Meanwhile, cities like Paris have contorted into totally unnatural places. They are filled with the empty apartments of rich foreigners, the private schools of the well off, and the lack of mixture that used to make great cities great. The produce markets are white middle class affairs, and tradespeople are impossible to find, because they can’t live there any more. The top universities are filled by favors and connections, Guilluy says, keeping them white and well-off. Their graduates go straight into lifetime career jobs, making the circle even tighter.

The things that make France France are going away. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity are just nice sentiments now. Solidarity has been split by the cities vs the periphery dichotomy. The country is as unequal as the USA, Guilluy says. The services that local communes provided have gone away because the central government has simply withheld funding. And given it to the cities. The concept of a job for life, the main employment contract used in France, is being shunted aside for an American-style right to work regime, where workers can be fired at will. The French are finding themselves forced into the ugly gig economy, pioneered by the USA. People have trouble putting aside even a hundred euros a month, making them insecure. The very fabric of France is simply becoming American. It is not an improvement.

David Wineberg