En managing to make a slice of chorizo pass for a star in the eyes of thousands of Internet users, Etienne Klein had a great merit: encouraging us to strengthen our critical eye. The force of habit can indeed lead us to take, as soon as it is published by a physicist, an image of delicatessen for the snapshot of a telescope. It is the same force of habit, and the related cognitive biases, which underlie the analyzes conducted on French society for twenty years. They all share an underlying one: France is a middle class country. On this basis, they endeavor to measure their expectations, uneasiness or decline. From the announcement of the drift of the middle classes (Louis Chauvel, 2006) to that of the emergence of a “middle class” (Eric Maurin and Dominique Goux, 2012) until their “feeling of downgrading” (Lucas Chancel, 2022), the very relevance of the chosen prism is not questioned.
Admittedly, with regard to the economic definitions used to apprehend the middle classes, they will always exist in the income pyramid. However, it is not the most effective reading grid for analyzing French society in 2023. In reality, it prevents us from understanding its true dividing line. It is around the most unequally distributed social capacity that our society is structured and fractured today: the possibility of reacting to risks, uncertainties and crises. France is no longer a middle class society. It has become a society of frozen classes, stunned by injunctions to resilience, but deprived in practice of any capacity for adaptation other than acceptance of the deterioration of their situation.
Fixed classes are prevented classes. Impeded, first of all, in their relationship to work. The working conditions within the public services are a striking manifestation of this. At the hospital, caregivers are prevented from exercising their profession in correct conditions and do not have the means to stop the “slide towards abuse” that they denounce. At school, teachers express their powerlessness in the face of ” the inexorable deterioration of public education ». Frozen in their professional practice by the lack of consideration, time, means, they find themselves simultaneously trapped by their dizzying loss of purchasing power (25% in twenty years).
Two reforms are likely to accentuate the confinement of social classes, frozen in their relationship to work. The automatic reduction of the amount of allowances according to the unemployment rate will imprison job seekers a little more in a search mechanically complicated by the spiral of precariousness. The pension reform project closes the horizon for seniors, who are called upon to accumulate quarters in a labor market that does not consider them and hires them even less, when it does not irreversibly deteriorate their physical condition.
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