The French, Coming Apart
city-journal.org
city-journal.org
As a old Frenchman I would say two things that are self contradictory, first I think this guy makes a good diagnostic of the current situation, second: Things are not that simple, the last time France was a pleasant utopia was before WWII. After that it had continously been a mess:
De Gaulle made a coup to get the power in 1958, Paratroopers were sent to Paris[0], Corsica was briefly taken under military rules[0] and the IV republic died quietly without blood bath. The 70" were nice but the 80" were horrible economically speaking. After that it was the rise of Europe, which closed plants but did not created jobs. Most of the economy is now controlled by the state (56%).
Since 2008 we have lost most of the freedom that citizens enjoy under democracy: Our parliament has no right, there are moral laws as in 1984, generalized spying on citizens and soldiers in arms are everywhere in public spaces.
> The 70" were nice but the 80" were horrible economically speaking.
That's basically how it went for many countries in the Western world. The 1970s weren't bad, but the 1980s saw income inequality start to spike completely out of control. Income for the average person stagnated, and in all honestly has never really recovered.
France is a peculiar institution with a wild, tangled history, but it's not immune to global trends.
1980s: Economy is doing alright but only for the 1%. Everyone else is stuck in the shitty 1970s.
My takeaway is that globalization has winners and losers. The winners get to keep the spoils and write the history books. The losers are debased and then ignored.
It's things like this that make me wish I knew another language so I could peer across that barrier and into another microcosm more often.
And the spoken French has incredibly changed in the last decades. Most young people would have problem to understand the spoken French of 1900.
That said, French (like English in GB, or German) spread a lot thanks to TV in the 50'/60'. When I was young there was still old people speaking the local language of their tiny part of Brittany.
Paris is getting evermore expensive and people are driven away. Just like every major city in the world. The people who already got a property are golden, while everyone else will never manage to afford one.
Same issue with all the major cities: London, Paris, Geneva, Zurich, New York, SF, Tokyo, Hong Kong...
Now as you say, the middle class who made every efforts to get the magical "Master in something", still do not have access to state sponsored housing and do not either find any of the highly qualified jobs that were promised by countless politicians.
The citizens whose parents emigrated decades here ago, are very angry toward the state, even if they live in state social housing, because they have no jobs either and they live constant harassment by police forces.