Professor emeritus and former director of studies at EHESS, the sociologist believes in “Le temps des passions tristes” that, if our society is going through a deep crisis, our country is doing better than it thinks. Interview.
Paris Match. Three years after the yellow vests movement, what has he revealed in French society?
Francois Dubet. It was a very powerful movement of anger, but in which everyone had their own demands. He shed light on their individualization. Today, we all have a good reason to be angry, because we are young or old, whether we live in the countryside or in the city, whether we are a woman or a man, immigrant or born in France, boss or unemployed … Inequalities are sometimes less severe than yesterday, but they have multiplied and everyone sees them as a personal injustice. There are as many reasons for anger as there are anger.
Is this a break up ?
For a century, we lived in an industrial society where inequalities were organized around fairly homogeneous social classes – workers, traders, peasants, employees, executives… – with relatively structured protests. For twenty years, this world with its unions, its parties, its left, its right … is fractured and no longer frames the lives of individuals. The demands are no longer contained and they explode with a common rhetoric: France from below against that from above, the people against the elites, us against the foreigner … But inside, this people is divided, atomized, precisely by this multiplication of indignation. So much so that the movement of yellow vests has refused any common demand, any spokesperson … For proof, each time that one or the other has tried, he or she was liquidated …
How do you explain it?
France is changing in a very profound way. And if some take the train of globalization, others feel abandoned, ignored. For a long time, our social life was organized around collective categories. Now it is an individual experience. When I do sociological surveys, people always say “I, I”. In the 1970s, it was “us, the workers”, “us, the Catholics”, “us, the Communists”, “us, the people of the North”… These changes are also carried by social networks. Before, to demonstrate, you needed unions and rooms to meet. Today, representative organizations are in a state of extreme weakness and, with networks, everyone has the capacity to be heard. If the Internet can be, as such, a formidable democratic tool, it calls into question the authorities, the legitimate word, that of scholars, scientists … However, everyone cannot rewrite the history of France like that amused or invent his own theory of the epidemic.
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Difficult for a presidential candidate to sell a bright future
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How to explain that the good news – the 17 billion after the yellow vests, the Ségur of health, the historic budget of justice… – do not contain these anger?
In yesterday’s world, the unions would have returned with the 17 billion euros, congratulating themselves on their success. There, it’s the other way around! There is no political relay. Moreover, despite their efforts, neither La France insoumise nor the National Rally have succeeded in recovering the yellow vests. Everyone remains in his frustration, his feeling of being mistreated. We have to find a political form so that this anger can turn into demands, into programs … But that will not happen in three weeks.
The movement of yellow vests has however stopped …
The Covid crisis killed him. But tomorrow there will be other movements, even if the vests may not be yellow! Everywhere, there are sources of protests, struggles, even violence.
What has the health crisis changed?
It widened the inequalities and added others – such as between those forced to be behind their machine and those who telecommute. It created a feeling of exhaustion: three months ago, we thought we would get out of it, growth and employment were picking up, and here comes yet another wave. The Covid has obscured the horizon. Difficult for a presidential candidate to sell a bright future. The tendency is therefore to find scapegoats.
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The economic crisis, racism and anti-Semitism, all these give a common air with the 1930s
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Why only populism seems to succeed in capitalizing on this anger?
The left is liquidated, dispersed, and the right, despite Valérie Pécresse’s attempts to reconstitute a conservative bloc, remains in the minority compared to Eric Zemmour or Marine Le Pen. They try to federate anger by promising everything and its opposite. The extremes capitalize because they say in essence: “Unite our anger against the enemy. The nation against the foreigner, the workers against the exploiter… ”But this reunification is imaginary, because the people that we want to reunite remain a divided people. And that does not say either what will be their policy for health, employment, education …
Is this the end of ideologies?
This is the end of traditional ideologies, but we are witnessing an ideological identity explosion. Social problems have become identity problems: the French one, Islam… We no longer argue over that. However, social problems have not disappeared.
Have we known similar moments in history?
The economic crisis, racism and anti-Semitism, all this gives a common air with the 1930s. But the time especially resembles the beginnings of the Third Republic when the old couple who opposed the supporters of the Old Regime to the Republicans been replaced by that formed by the right and the left. It created populism and violence. It was, like today, a period when political categories no longer corresponded to society. It lasted from the 1890s, notably with the Dreyfus affair, to the start of the 1914 war.
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I make the assumption that the French are not stupid
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What are the solutions for rebuilding society?
Political parties, unions, the media, all those whose job is to give society a peaceful representation of itself, must invent a new political offer so that anger can find a place. Paradoxically, this crisis makes us rediscover the virtues of democracy: inequalities and conflicts must become objects of political negotiation, not objects of demagogic anger at the risk, if not, of reinforcing the evil they denounce. But we do not find political forms to regulate them.
Is the democratic system at its end?
I think with Churchill that he is the worst except all the others. But its operation is running out of steam, it needs to be redesigned, so that it is more representative. Today, less than 1% of deputies are workers. The divide between those who have succeeded and the others is very strong. In the next presidential election, abstention promises to be very high because, basically, for a certain number of people, what happens in the political space no longer has any connection with them. Our institutions, created to protect us from “the anarchy of the Fourth Republic”, must be rethought.
Are we taking the path?
I make the assumption that the French are not stupid. Today optimism is imperative. No society commits suicide, there will be solutions. Moreover, our country is united, associative life is very intense; at the local level, political life is calmer, more rational. The surveys say it: the French have the feeling of living in a society which is going extremely badly but, on an individual basis, they say they are getting better. Our country has more resources than we think! 
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