History of a concept. Politically, it is the martingale and even an electoral Holy Grail. The reconquest of the working classes is a political objective, a strategic question, but also an ideological challenge that is being fought over on both sides of the National Assembly. On the right, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, claims to defend the “ordinary people who do not have a second home” and who have “need for security”. On the left, the “rebellious” François Ruffin has worked for many years on the social condition of the peri-urban working classes and warns of the importance of not abandoning them to nationalist parties. Thus the deputy for the Somme perceived in the analyzes of the economists Julia Cagé and Thomas Piketty who, in A history of political conflict (Threshold, 864 pages, 27 euros), assert that “the reconquest of the rural popular vote” must become the “absolute priority for the social-ecological bloc”, a scientific confirmation of his empirical intuitions.
But who are the working classes? “Two criteria seem essentialreplies historian Gérard Noiriel, the level of resources and the level of studies. » that’s why “we can say that workers and employees are the main components today”, continues the author ofA popular history of France (Agone, 2018). And where do the working classes come from? Because these have not always existed under this name. Until the 1970s, in fact, social sciences and left-wing parties spoke of the “working class” or “working classes”. However, deindustrialization has happened there. And it became difficult to use this term about employees and service workers, within populations often affected by mass unemployment.
The expression “working classes” thus seemed more “adequate”recalled, in 2011, the sociologist Olivier Schwartz, since it presented the advantage of “designate the entire range of the least endowed categories of a society” : citizens with modest incomes, but also dominated by the “new capital”said Pierre Bourdieu, that, social, academic and cultural, which is implicitly transmitted in wealthy and literate families.
However, “the face of the populations that make up the working classes has changed”notes sociologist Etienne Penissat, who signs Class (Anamosa, 109 pages, 9 euros). Home help or childminders, for example, are located “at the intersection of economic, but also racial and gender discrimination”, he observes. We often contrast the former white working class of deindustrialized regions with the multicultural class of city employees, rural France with that of the suburbs. However, these representations lead to “locking the working classes into identity oppositions”continues the CNRS researcher, convinced that a “intersectional class struggle” would be able to“expand the “we” of the class to marginalized fractions”particularly from former French colonies.
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