The Twilight of Elite France

The heart of the book is the argument that the metropolitan winners now function as a class in the full sense — a group with shared interests that it defends, whether or not its members would ever describe themselves that way. Guilluy borrows the old vocabulary of class analysis and turns it on people who are usually the ones doing the analysing. The higher professions, the managers, the cultural and media workers, the public-sector graduates: together they form what he treats as a new bourgeoisie, defined less by owning factories than by owning access to the productive city.

What makes this class distinctive, in his telling, is that it has largely stopped needing the rest of the country. The classic bourgeoisie depended on a domestic working class to staff its factories and buy its goods; that dependence created a bond, however unequal. The globalised metropolitan economy has weakened it. The high-value work can be sold abroad, the low-value work can be done by newcomers, and the declining industrial hinterland is no longer essential to the model. A class that does not need you has little reason to negotiate with you.

The metropolitan class, in Guilluy's account, does not defend its position with tanks or tariffs. It defends it with values. Openness, tolerance, mobility, diversity, a warm embrace of the wider world — these become the badges of belonging, the moral markers that separate the enlightened city from the fearful, closed-minded periphery. To be for openness is to be a good person; to hesitate is to be suspected of the worst. The debate is thereby settled before it begins.

The trick, as he sees it, is that these values happen to describe the interests of the people who profess them. Openness to the world is easy and pleasant when the world brings you cheaper services, exciting food and stimulating careers, and painful when it brings you factory closures and stagnant wages. The metropolitan class experiences globalisation as opportunity and calls that experience a moral stance. The peripheral classes experience it as loss and get called reactionary for saying so. The same phenomenon produces a virtue at the centre and a vice at the edge.

Step back from the specifics of France and the deeper claim of the book comes into view: that the most secure form of dominance is the kind that does not look like dominance at all. Guilluy's metropolitan class does not need to justify its advantages as advantages, because it has succeeded in redescribing them as merits and morals. This is an old idea — that ruling groups universalise their particular interests and present them as the general good — but he applies it to a group that prides itself on being the opposite of a ruling class, and that is what gives the argument its bite.

The book's real target, then, is a way of speaking. When the language of openness monopolises virtue, it does two things at once. It flatters the class that speaks it, and it disqualifies in advance anyone who might contest its position. You cannot argue with a value; you can only fail to hold it. A class that has captured the moral vocabulary of a society has captured something more valuable than any single policy, because it controls the terms on which every future argument will be judged.

Return, for a moment, to the couple in the renovated warehouse district. Guilluy's book asks us to see them not as villains but as a class doing what classes do — occupying the best ground, tending its own interests, and telling a story in which that occupation is a form of generosity. Whether or not one accepts every step of the argument, it changes how the ordinary scenery of a French city reads: the bilingual school, the flat white, the worried talk about the provinces, all rearranged as evidence of a settlement rather than a set of private choices.