At the head of the retail group that bears his name, Michel-Edouard Leclerc is in a particular vantage point that allows him to map the sociological changes of consumers through the purchasing behavior of the French.
Can we define the middle classes by their consumption behavior?
No. I think the middle class concept is no longer operational. It may be for statisticians, but not for decision-makers like business leaders. As a trader, I no longer know what it means. Above all, our fellow citizens no longer identify with this terminology, and therefore no longer emit known behaviors or signals. However, I recognize that this concept inspired the objectives of entrepreneurs like my father, Edouard Leclerc, and even political parties like the PSU of Michel Rocard or the socio-democrats, who were interested in these sociological categories to define a political offer more central. At the time, social classes expressed known behaviors at work, in terms of consumption, tax claims, housing.
But today, the French do not fall into this category on their own, unless they are subjected to a strict questionnaire. Even those who identify with it almost always say they belong to the “below” category, never average. In the time of sociologists like Jean Fourastié or Alfred Sauvy, this concept made it possible to define social categories by income or profession: self-employed workers, tobacconists, nurses, executives… But because of the diversity, even the heterogeneity of cultural behaviors or consumption, what does this classification say today about the people thus mapped? It has become a catch-all concept.
Do you observe this disintegration of the middle classes highlighted by certain sociologists?
Yes, for me, there is a mismatch between the concept and the semantics with the feelings of the populations concerned. Above all, there is no geography in which all these people could position themselves or to which they could relate. What dominates in French society is more akin to a tribal feeling, belonging to multiple communities like what happens on social networks. It can form alliances of circumstance as during the episode of the “red caps” under François Hollande, who had brought together employees, small bosses, merchants of carriers… All saw themselves as “small” despite sometimes differences significant changes in income or consumption behavior. In reality, they fit together but do not look alike. We express ourselves more today by community of attachment, based on cultural, economic behavior or sharing of political opinion. We see the formation and undoing of communities born on social networks or around economic, sporting, militant interests… But these are changing categories.
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