Since the start of Emmanuel Macron’s second five-year term, all attention seems to have been focused on these famous “middle classes”, difficult to define precisely, but whose members are said to be too poor to be able to live well on their salary, while being too rich to benefit from state aid. An IFOP survey, commissioned by the Jean-Jaurès Foundation and the public affairs consulting agency Bona fidé, provides valuable information on the situation and feelings of this category of the population, and on its evolution, thirteen years after a first study carried out in the midst of the financial crisis. Faced for months with the worst inflation since the 1980s, how is it doing today?
First lesson from this investigation that The world reveals exclusively: almost two thirds of respondents, to whom the IFOP asked to place themselves on the social scale (of “disadvantaged” has “well-off”), self-position themselves in this “large central block” to which Valéry Giscard d’Estaing – who had published Two out of three French people (Flammarion, 1984) – already wanted to contact. More precisely, 78% of CSP +, 76% of intermediate professions, 68% of retirees, but also 51% of popular categories fall spontaneously into this category.
“The middle class remains an attractive and rewarding definition for a large majority of French people”note the authors of this note entitled “Middle classes in tension, between daily renunciations and insufficient public aid”.
“A major sociological phenomenon”
But this vast central body is weakened and crossed by a feeling of downgrading, observe Jérôme Fourquet and Marie Gariazzo for the IFOP, and Samuel Jquier for Bona fidé. Compared to the 2010 survey, the proportion of French people making up the middle class “lower” progressed by nine points, when that constituting the middle class “true” – according to the distinction made by the IFOP, according to the income of the respondents – declines accordingly.
“Beyond the surface stability regarding the perimeter of the middle class, a significant fringe of [celle-ci] is therefore sucked downward, which constitutes a major sociological phenomenon”write the authors, while in total, 70% of French people declare that they belong to the disadvantaged and modest categories or to the lower middle class – a percentage increasing by 13 points compared to 2010.
Weakened economically, the latter are forced to adopt circumvention strategies. If they do not go into more debt, they save less: in 2010, 54% said they could save; there are only 44% today. To cope with new difficulties, more and more of them are enrolling in a “economy of resourcefulness”.
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