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Simon Kuper

France’s forgotten class

©Sandra Mehl

The Etats-Unis quarter was built in the 1930s as social housing

I

n the 1930s, when the Etats-Unis neighbourhood of Lyon went up, the early inhabitants were awestruck. True, the beautiful humanist-modernist flats — created by local architect Tony Garnier — didn’t have central heating or showers. But for peasants leaving the poor French countryside, “it was paradise”, recalls Renée Mignon. She and her sister Andrée Joyeux — now in their eighties — were among the first residents. Joyeux still remembers her parents’ joy at their new home: “To have light, to have toilets . . . ”

Joyeux returned to the neighbourhood after her husband died. When she looks out of the kitchen window now, in her mind’s eye she still sees the shantytown that stood across the road. A single tap served all its inhabitants; the children always had lice. Some of the shanty-dwellers were from Poland or Romania but “they adapted well”, she says. Nowadays the kids of north African and sub-Saharan immigrants hang out in rappers’ gear in her courtyard. “We don’t have the same way of living,” Joyeux comments mildly. Her sister grumbles about Islamic veils, and says: “They do what they like.”

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Many of the issues facing France come together in the Etats-Unis (“United States”) neighbourhood. Yet the people living here are seldom heard from. The neighbourhood is a mix of France’s two most marginalised groups: poor immigrants, and the poor indigenous white working class. Neither group has much of a voice in French public debate.

Whereas the immigrants are incessantly debated by others, poor whites around Europe are something of a forgotten class. The economic crisis hit them hard. In France, many white working-class people now support Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National, who has an outside shot at getting elected president in 2017. In Lyon’s eighth arrondissement, which includes the Etats-Unis, more than 18 per cent of voters backed the FN in last year’s municipal elections. Given Lyon’s lack of an FN tradition, this was a shock.

George Soros’s liberal Open Society Foundations has just produced reports on six white working-class neighbourhoods across western Europe. The OSF studied poor whites much as it had previously studied European Muslims: as a disempowered group that should be heard. (Disclosure: I am a former sub-board member of the OSF and was involved in the research.) The OSF believes its report on the Etats-Unis neighbourhood is “the only empirical study on the majority population that has been conducted in France”. The resulting portrait helps elucidate how this class lives and thinks.

"Poor whites around Europe are something of a forgotten class. The economic crisis hit them hard"

In May, I spent two days sitting at kitchen tables in the Etats-Unis, listening to people’s stories over endless cups of coffee. When I wrote about the OSF’s study of a white working-class Manchester neighbourhood last year, I found few inhabitants willing to speak. Most distrusted the British media, which they felt stigmatised their class as “white trash” or “chavs”. In Lyon, nobody seemed suspicious. Almost everyone brought a friend (or sister) along to the interview.

There were other contrasts with Manchester. Both neighbourhoods had excellent 1930s social housing. But in Manchester, much of it had been sold off. There were long waiting lists for the remaining homes. Poor whites in north Manchester lacked many other services, too: public transport was scanty and, with little state childcare or eldercare, lots of people were too busy looking after kids or grannies to take paid work.

Lionel Muller, concierge and carer. ‘Le Pen says, “If you vote for me it will go back to the old days”, but I think she’s not living in reality’

©Sandra Mehl

Andrée Joyeux (left) and Christian Fèvre (right), with neighbour Martine Sussl, have lived in the Etats-Unis since childhood

©Sandra Mehl

Martine Reboul can afford holidays in New York and helped fund her daughter’s nursing studies

©Sandra Mehl

The Etats-Unis’ still-handsome buildings

©Sandra Mehl

A local car wash

©Sandra Mehl

A lack of respect and ‘incivility’ is a common complaint around the Etats-Unis, although crime itself is not a big issue

©Sandra Mehl

Eduardo Tsimba with his friend Monique Lombard

©Sandra Mehl

Magalie Guyonnet, unemployed secretary. ‘I am competing with youngsters coming out of school aged 25!’

©Sandra Mehl

Fanny Esnault had lived on the streets and still sees homelessness as an acute threat

©Sandra Mehl

A takeaway pizza stand in the Etats-Unis quarter

©Sandra Mehl

The Etats-Unis quarter was built in the 1930s as social housing

©Sandra Mehl

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By contrast, the Etats-Unis is something of a paradise. First, it’s in Lyon itself, not in one of France’s miserable distant suburbs. Second, the state is more present here than in Manchester. The French state swallows more than half of national income but gives a lot in return. In 2013, a gleaming new tramway opened on the Boulevard des Etats-Unis — “our TGV”, one proud resident called it. About 4,000-4,500 units of social housing are built in greater Lyon every year. The OSF report concludes: “Participants were satisfied with their experiences in health and social services and with living conditions.” The fact that poor people inhabit the magnificent Garnier flats is itself a strike for equality. France remains one of the world’s least unequal countries.

However, here too much is changing. The same wind blows in Lyon as in most of Europe. Christian Fèvre, a retired metalworker who still lives in his parents’ apartment where he was born, still amid their old furniture, still a tenant rather than a homeowner, worked for 35 years in a factory making transformers. “It was right next door,” he said. “I was happy.” When he started in 1974, the factory had more than 900 workers. Today it has 350 and falling, he said. Most other local factories have closed; one resident recalls the perfume factory literally exploding.

People in the Etats-Unis understand that most jobs nowadays require an education. Plumbers and mechanics are no longer respected, they complain. Many younger locals now continue their studies, aiming for office jobs. Magalie Guyonnet, a 37-year-old unemployed secretary, grumbled: “I am competing with youngsters coming out of school

aged 25!” When she was 22, having a secretarial diploma was quite something. Now she feels left behind. I met her with her friend Lionel Muller, and he chided: “You can always find work if you want to.” Muller works two jobs: concierge and carer of elderly people. She riposted: “You’re in manual, I’m in cerebral,” and they began to bicker.

 . . . 

For younger locals, schooling remains a problem. Barbara Ischinger, who heads the PISA programme on education at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, says: “Among OECD countries, France has the highest correlation between socio-economic upbringing and [school] results. The system is very inequitable and is becoming even more so . . . A child with a working-class background has lower chances of success now than in 2003. A child with an immigrant background has twice that risk.”

Corinne Devillaire, who teaches at a mostly immigrant lycée near the Etats-Unis, told me why that is. “In a middle-class school,” she said, “you are in the conditions of work: sit down, take your books out of your bag, work. That’s not true at schools in poorer areas. When they go home, they often aren’t in conditions of work either. Often they share a bedroom with multiple siblings. Often their parents don’t work, so they are the only ones at home who get up in the morning and go to work.” The problems were similar for native French and immigrant kids, Devillaire said, except that the latter often didn’t speak fluent French.

Some people in the Etats-Unis have joined the middle class. Martine Reboul, who works in client services at a big corporation, can afford holidays in New York and Mexico. She helped fund her daughter through a long nursing degree. The family has become middle-class while remaining in the Etats-Unis — their home, as they consider it.

But successful or not, most inhabitants have become more aware of the need for success. No longer is there a predictable local path to a low-paying but secure livelihood. Monique Lombard, a puppeteer who performs in schools and nurseries, told me she increasingly saw life as an escalator: from age two, you have to advance in the right direction, filling yourself with the right things at school, getting your diplomas. “Because everyone’s afraid now,” she said. “Parents above all. Our society doesn’t allow itself to breathe.”

"A child with a working-class background has lower chances of success now than in 2003"

- Barbara Ischinger, OECD education programme

One sunny afternoon I had drinks with Muller, Guyonnet and a disabled woman named Fanny Esnault on the terrace of the ugly local brasserie, and they began talking about homelessness. When Guyonnet was expelled from her flat after falling behind on the rent, her parents took her in. But both Muller and Esnault had lived on the streets. Muller, a plump man with an earring and the gentle air of a caregiver, had run away from home as a youngster because he was beaten, and had lived rough in the countryside. That had been OK, he said. It even seemed part of his identity, as it was for Esnault: they had survived life outside, so they were strong. Yet nowadays, when Muller sees older people living rough, he wonders if he could handle that. “It’s my greatest nightmare,” he said. Did he really see homelessness as an acute threat? “Oh yes!” all three of them chorused. It could happen to anyone. Perhaps that fear is part of what it means to be white working class in Europe today.

Lyon is historically an immobile town: even more than elsewhere in France, many locals stay put all their lives. Increasingly, however, the young are migrating to find work. Joyeux, who has barely ever set foot abroad, told me in bafflement that she had one grandchild in Chile, and another (whom she thought was an aeronautical engineer) in Montreal. Before, she said, “It was like a village here.” That quality is being lost. To older residents, the Etats-Unis feels more atomised now. Some even said they liked it when the lifts broke down, because then they chatted to neighbours on the staircase like in the old days.

Atomisation is increased by the other great change in the neighbourhood: immigration. What worries locals most, says the OSF report, is “incivility”. This is something short of crime, which most people don’t feel is a major issue. Indeed, in 2012 the Rhône department, of which Lyon was then part, reported just six homicides for a population of 1.76 million. That same year, the slightly smaller US city Philadelphia had 149 murders.

Incivility in the Etats-Unis, especially for older residents, meant immigrant youths riding motorbikes and scooters on the pavements, holding drag races in cars along the boulevard, or smoking pot and staging noisy barbecues in the courtyards at night. One early morning, Muller had asked a group to pipe down and a kid had thrown stones at his blinds. There was no respect any more, Muller and several other residents lamented. They wanted more police on the streets — a demand heard in almost every European neighbourhood the OSF studied.

 . . . 

Muller was the person I met who was most outspoken about immigrants. He felt they were pushing French people out of their own country. At times he sounded like an FN pamphlet. But then he remarked: “Marine Le Pen says, ‘If you vote for me it will go back to the old days’, but I think she’s not living in reality.”

"Youths scare older people simply through their aura and presence"

- Monique Lombard

Nobody I met expressed support for the FN. In part, that’s because doing so is somewhat taboo in France: most FN voters are shy. But the Etats-Unis isn’t an FN hotbed. While some disaffected people here voted for Le Pen, more have simply abandoned politics. In last year’s municipal elections, the abstention rate in the Etats-Unis was 50-60 per cent, compared with 36.5 per cent nationally.

After Muller had lengthily castigated immigrants, he said something that surprised me: “My son is a half-caste.” It turned out the son’s mother was of Algerian origin. Later, Muller had married another Algerian woman but left her, he said, because her 80-a-day cigarette habit had worsened his health problems. “She used to light one cigarette with another,” he recalled.

His story pointed to a striking fact about the Etats-Unis: the neighbourhood is both ethnically tense and extraordinarily mixed. Olivier Roy, a French scholar of Islam, once told me that poorer French suburbs are often very mixed. Many poor whites marry Muslims, or convert to Islam. In Roy’s words: “Mixité [ethnic mixing] is a fact.” Here are some vignettes of mixité in the Etats-Unis:

•Fèvre, the retired metalworker, said: “I have blacks next door, they come from Africa. They have three little boys, super-nice. They are evangelicals, so they sing on Sunday, which is noisy. We get on well.” Fèvre also had the key to the Moroccan lady’s flat downstairs: he watered her plants, and she brought him couscous. Once a month he ate in a cheap restaurant with former co-workers, some of them north Africans — “good people”, he said.

•Mignon said her grandchildren were “friends with everyone: ‘My friend is Samir, my friend is Abdelkarim.’ If the people are correct, that is OK.” Her sister Joyeux recounted serving cake to her grandchildren’s immigrant friends.

•Guyonnet had had north African pals at school. She and Muller agreed that north Africans of their own generation were fine. It was the young ones who were “barbarians”, he said.

•Esnault had had a north African partner who had abused her horribly. But she couldn’t say the abuse was in his “culture”, because his family had been very kind to her.

•The OSF report mentions a young man in one focus group “who was working as a pork butcher’s apprentice and living with his half-brother who was a Muslim, with no problems whatsoever.

All the people in the focus group approved and said that such cohabitation was normal and a good thing.” In fact, some people of north African origin had registered for the focus groups insisting they were “majority French”.

"We become delinquents without being so"

- Eduardo Tsimba

Perhaps the best example of mixité, and the best insight I got into ethnic issues in the Etats-Unis, came from an odd couple I met: the sixtysomething puppeteer Lombard and her pal, the twentysomething Angolan immigrant Eduardo Tsimba. When I walked into Lombard’s kitchen, Tsimba was sitting in a corner typing his CV on her computer. They launched into an unstoppable two-hour discourse on race and ethnicity. Each had clearly spent years thinking about the topic. Now it poured out of them. Each was of their own tribe but also able to stand outside it and reflect on it like an anthropologist.

Tsimba, who spoke with a rapper’s vigorous hand gestures, said, “I had a very bad experience of adolescence in Lyon. I always felt delayed: arriving here from Angola aged 10, not speaking French, not knowing to arrive on time, arriving late at work because of a problem on the Métro, not having a driving licence.”

He had a “team” of mates who called themselves “the Asphalt Pirates”. Most were young men of African origin, Christian and Muslim. But some were poor whites. Colour wasn’t the point, Tsimba said. “If you are lost, you are with us.”

He felt delayed but, in some ways, he also felt ahead of French people. “I’m from Angola, I went to school hearing bullets: tap, tap, tap. People here are children. They don’t know how to save themselves. I do. French people think, ‘If I don’t have a job, I’ll go to the job centre.’ In Africa, we don’t have that.”

Lombard, a kindly grey-haired woman, grew up in the nearby mining town of St Etienne, in a poor neighbourhood with many immigrants. “That’s why I chose the Etats-Unis,” she said. “It reminded me of that.” She had had “half- breed” children with a Syrian.

But she said most of her old white peers had a set complaint: “There are too many foreigners here, so France is now poor.” Whenever she sat next to an old lady on the bus, she waited for the standard lament to pour out: “Our poor France, oh là là là là!”

 . . . 

Lombard had thought hard about why this was. “For old people, the young people are like a different tribe. It’s like discovering the Zulus. The old talk as if they are not human: a race of youths.” Indeed, the immigrant youths I saw hanging out in the courtyards, with their baggy tracksuits and reversed baseball caps, bore zero resemblance to the older white locals. (I was particularly struck by a north African kid sitting rather formally on the remains of a broken swivel chair, his posse standing in attendance around him.) It wasn’t that the youths looked like Africans. Rather, they looked like American rappers, noted Erik Bleich, political scientist at Middlebury College in the US, who is spending his sabbatical year in Lyon and accompanied me to some of the interviews.

"The fact that poor people inhabit the magnificent Garnier flats is itself a strike for equality"

Their outfits designated a distinct worldview. Lombard had concluded that young and old people had different relationships to space and time. The old tended to feel at home in their apartments, and the youths in the courtyards. Because most youths didn’t work, they liked to gather at midnight.

The youths hanging around outside scared older people simply through their aura and presence, said Lombard. Tsimba, listening intently, agreed: “We become delinquents without being so.” Lombard told him: “I have the sense that older people defend their territory, and younger people defend their identity.” Tsimba exclaimed, “Exactly!”

Moreover, they both agreed, new technology had deepened the generation gap. Lombard told us about the Chinese baker downstairs. A traditionalist, he rose at 3am and baked real French bread, and the smell of his excellent croissants would waft through her building. Once, at 4am, an immigrant youth had tapped on the bakery window and asked, “Can you make me a sandwich?” The baker replied, “My bread hasn’t risen yet.” The youth was aghast, uncomprehending: “But you are a baker!”

The youth’s behaviour baffled Lombard. But Tsimba got it: “If the bread had been an app,” he tapped on his palm, “it would have been ready right away!”

Tsimba said that because his generation felt separate from older French people, it had developed its own mode of communication. “The young person communicates with violence. Not the violence of acts but the violence of words.” That’s why the young liked trash-talk and rap. When he had played a rap song to Lombard, she had said, “I like what you say, the lyrics, but I can’t listen to it, because of the form.” Tsimba accepted that. But to understand young people today, he insisted, you had to know how to decode them.

Lombard cited another source of generational conflict: when an older person and an immigrant youth quarrelled, the youth often accused the older person of racism. Tsimba agreed: “I can use the word racism to hurt. For instance: ‘Stop that noise!’ ‘You are a racist!’”

But he was losing interest in racism, he said. He thought the word was losing meaning. What counted increasingly were money and tech, not skin colour. “My vision is that in 10 years my little son will come up and introduce me to a robot: ‘Hi, I’m going out with a robot, it’s better than a woman.’” By then the people of the Etats-Unis — poor whites and immigrants alike — may have a completely new set of problems.

Simon Kuper is an FT Weekend Magazine columnist

Photographs: Sandra Mehl

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