Book. In his new essay, Christophe Guilluy makes the effort to wait for page 116 to refer to the famous note from Terra Nova, published in 2011, which advised the left to abandon the working classes who had moved to the right, in favor of graduates. , minorities and women. The essayist who made himself the herald of “Peripheral France” largely owes his literary career to this document, to which he has a hatred that he constantly revisits in each of his books.
In his fight against liberal society, he found coherence in the evil he denounces: « Netflix, Gaumont, More beautiful life, the big schools or Terra Nova feed the same narrative, they have the same objective. » Bigger! A perfect synchronization would therefore exist between all these things yet so different from each other. The project thus pursued on all sides would consist of “the creation of a new company, if possible deconstructed into panels and therefore compatible with market requirements”. To achieve this, the past would be erased “to the rhythm of the invisibilization of the ordinary majority”, writes Christophe Guilluy. “The winners of the economic model, distant heirs of an enlightened bourgeoisie, are abandoning the values which, even in the last century, constituted the cement of a coherent society”he continues, seized with a nostalgia full of resentment.
An elitist view of the world
The injustices suffered by popular circles persist and worsen. The essayist is indignant and blames a straw man, the indestructible bobo, who can just as easily be a researcher in the public sector as the CEO of a multinational. The title of this book, The Dispossessedcould have led people to believe that it was precisely about the working classes, but it is in truth a book which concentrates almost exclusively on the highest strata of society.
Christophe Guilluy talks briefly about these Bretons, Corsicans or Catalans who, feeling driven from their homes, revolted against Airbnb and the rise in real estate prices caused by the influx of city dwellers who came to buy a second home. He also talks about Brexit, the “yellow vests” and Donald Trump. He affirms, finally, that the popular categories not only share a class consciousness, but “something more powerful which is their common destiny”. But he says nothing about this becoming, thus participating in what he criticizes: the exclusion of ordinary people from the narrative made up of our time. Putting them back in the center, as he wishes, would require practicing the field, recounting what he saw there and putting aside for a moment his fear of “cool new bourgeoisie”. This almost exclusive attention for this stratum of society betrays a deeply elitist vision of the world: change only comes from above, only the decadence of the better off counts.
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