For those who believe in symbols, this one is eloquent: the builder Maisons Phénix, incarnation of the French suburban dream and the accession to property of the middle classes in the post-war period, object of study for the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, put the key under the door, the 1is July. The Covid-19 pandemic, the inflation of the price of raw materials… and also, perhaps, the end of a certain golden age for the middle classes, this France of the middle, the heart of a powerful mythology which still structures the collective imagination today.
The anguish of purchasing power, the rest to live on and the end of the month made difficult by the return of inflation has revived the question of the middle classes and that of their supposed decline. The latter would always be those who “toast”, suffocated by compulsory levies that are too high but too rich to receive state subsidies. Globalization, by favoring the rise of a middle class of consumers in emerging countries, would also have wiped out these categories in our regions. The civilization inherited from the “thirty glorious years”, this wage-earning society with faith in social mobility, growth and progress, would it be threatened?
Books announcing the death of the middle classes appear at regular intervals – predicting a “hourglass society”according to former MEP Alain Lipietz, or “drifting middle classes”, like the sociologist Louis Chauvel. The subject is nonetheless highly debated: more comfortable talking about low-income or very well-off households, sociologists, economists or geographers struggle to understand the transformations at work in the middle of the income pyramid. .
“Part of the middle classes considers that it has lost its feathers and is no longer part of itexplains political scientist Jérôme Fourquet, director of the opinion and business strategies department of the IFOP polling institute. We can discuss the figures, but the fact that she feels that is a major political and social fact. »
Economic insecurity
Between the two fringes, the middle classes, the bedrock of democracies, are, in fact, deemed to form a bulwark against the extremes. The German philosopher Georg Simmel saw it as the pillar of modern societies, making it possible to avoid the confrontation between capitalists and proletarians wanted by Karl Marx. The crises have shown that when the middle classes become impoverished, they switch to a vote of anger: it is, in part, the white middle classes impoverished by the effects of deindustrialization that enabled Donald Trump to win in 2016 the UNITED STATES.
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