Tune up your French: A timely warning for city hipsters

Book review: France d’en Haut — a timely warning on hipsters

​More below.

This is what the Internet has been up to since the late 1990s when it first began by destroying the Travel booking industry. The bo-bo's seem to think that because they work in industries like banking, investment banking, finance, government, etc, that they will be immune to these changes. They will not be, and the Internet stalks for them as well. The progress of this is pretty understandable, if there is a money imbalance which can be shifted by the end user performing a bit more work, or an intermediary picking up some slack, the Internet aggressively attacks this reducing costs, and using automated Internet connections to simplify the problem. So today we have automated airline ticket buying over the Internet. We also have Amazon sucking up all of the middleman slack in the retail industry by creating simple highly integrated, highly customer centric model with 2-day free shipping for subscribers. 

How the hidebound, costly, slow, cumbersome banking industry has survived this long is a testament to how government regulation of an industry, and financial form can prolong something far beyond its sell by date. All of these industries have highly concentrated wealth, and are obvious targets for the Internet to adjust. It's just a matter of time, and American ingenuity, but someone will think of a way around the laws, the rules, the regulations, the red tape, and then cheap, easy replacements will suddenly spring into existence, and the participants will be shocked. 

The rest of us will be thrilled that costs are lower, and that we no longer have to deal with bankers. Lawyers are you listening? No other group could be run out of town to such fanfare as lawyers. And how about insurance salesmen? 

Really, the list is endless. 

I am guessing one half year of French in 4th grade will not suffice me to peruse this book responsibly, if you do, and are willing to offer a review, let me know. 

If lucky, perhaps some of the bo-bos can make it to the ferry like Frodo? And maybe not. Somehow I doubt middle America will have much sympathy when the rider, er, Internet, comes for the bo-bos.

The article:

""You live in a large city. You have a university degree, a decent job, consider yourself a liberal on social issues and a humanist. You believe in a tolerant society and perhaps live in an ethnically diverse area. You are also a pushy parent because you want the best for your children. In short, you are what sociologists call a hipster and meet the definition of what the French call a “bohemian-bourgeois”.

If this describes you, beware. This book by French geographer Christophe Guilluy will make you fret and question your moral integrity. French “bo-bos” are largely responsible for the dislocation of the country’s social and economic fabric, Guilluy asserts in Le Crépuscule de la France d’en haut (“The twilight of upper France”). His analysis, he says, applies to all western societies.

Widening inequalities have favoured the emergence of a new bourgeoisie living in dynamic urban centres, at the expense of smaller towns, suburbs and the countryside. According to Guilluy, these economic disparities help explain the populist wave that has materialised in the election of Donald Trump as US president and the UK’s Brexit vote. In France, Marine Le Pen, the far-right National Front leader, is predicted to qualify for the presidential runoff next year.

“The globalised system has erected its citadels” in the large cities, Mr Guilluy writes. “Protected by the wall of money and a desire to stay among themselves, the upper classes can enjoy the advantages of globalisation fully — all the more so that, far from peripheral France, they have forgotten about the existence of a French working class.”

In previous books, published in 2004 and 2010, Guilluy gathered data showing how large swaths of France have fallen behind. Outside the 15 or so thriving cities, these regions tend to have higher levels of poverty, unemployment, temporary jobs and poor infrastructure. This is where the losers from globalisation live — blue-collar workers in labour intensive industries — while the likes of Paris and Bordeaux attract graduates, high-earning service jobs and start-ups.

This has given way to a sense of industrial and cultural decline, according to the author. In these disenfranchised corners of France, an increasing number of residents abstain from voting or are tempted by Ms Le Pen’s protectionist, anti-immigration rhetoric.

Guilluy wonders why “peripheral France”, which he estimates is 60 per cent of the population, has not forced the elites to put the brakes on globalisation or limit its negative effects. His answer is that the elites have been supported by the “bo-bos”.

“The system does not rely on the elites only but also on an important part of the population, a new bourgeoisie, that resides in large cities and that supported all the economic choices of the elite for 30 years,” he writes. The novelty is that these new bourgeois have “seized power” by enunciating “morally superior” principles: they back globalisation in the name of tolerance, openness and multiculturalism, describing critics as “backward-looking” or “racists.” In effect, they have allowed a system to thrive that only works for them. Indirectly, Guilluy says, they have contributed to wrecking old industrial bastions.


They — we? — are hypocrites: they advocate ethnic and social diversity, but send their children to private school. They are in cahoots with a traditional rightwing bourgeoisie in agreeing globalisation is a good thing.

What next? Guilluy predicts a revolution. The “citadels” could be besieged. “Paradoxically, it is at a time when they [upper, or bourgeois, France] are prevailing, by occupying the political, academic and media space that they are losing their legitimacy within the working classes, which form the majority.”

The author’s anti-capitalist leanings are clear: and no solution is outlined. The book has been criticised for its lack of original data-gathering and analysis. Some of the anti-establishment lines read like FN slogans.

But Guilluy’s description of Parisian hipsters is spot on and his warning strikes a chord. What if western societies are on the verge of changing paradigms on globalisation, free trade, free movement of people and democracy? It is time to listen to the dissenting voices."