Macron et les Gilets jaunes ont ouvert une page nouvelle de l'histoire de France, qui mêle retour des luttes sociales et apathie politique, sursaut révolutionnaire et résignation devant les dégâts de l'euro, regain démocratique et menace autoritaire. Pour la comprendre, Emmanuel Todd examine, scrupuleusement et sans a priori, l'évolution rapide de notre société depuis le début des années 1990 : démographie, inégalités, niveau de vie, structure de classe, performance éducative, place des femmes, immigration, religion, suicide, consommation d'antidépresseurs, etc. Les faits surprendront. Les interprétations que propose l'auteur doivent, quant à elles, beaucoup à Marx, mais à un Marx mis "sous surveillance statistique". À gauche, comme à droite, elles paraîtront à beaucoup étonnantes, amusantes, contrariantes, ou angoissantes. Cet empirisme sans concession conduit même Emmanuel Todd à réviser radicalement certaines de ses analyses antérieures. À la lecture de ce livre riche, stimulant, provocateur, la vie politique des années 1992-2019 prend tout son sens : une longue comédie politique où s'invitent les classes sociales. Bienvenue donc dans cette France du XXIe siècle, paralysée mais vivante, où se côtoient et s'affrontent des dominés qui se croient dominants, des étatistes qui se croient libéraux, des individus égarés qui célèbrent encore l'individu-roi, avant l'inéluctable retour de la lutte des classes.

Pourquoi les peuples européens semblent-ils impuissants à défendre les acquis démocratiques et sociaux qu'ils avaient arrachés de hautes luttes durant le siècle précédent ? Et comment pourraient-ils reprendre l'offensive ? Répondre à cette interrogation implique de revenir sur la question même des classes, sur la façon dont la classe ouvrière est devenue un " sujet historique ", c'est-à-dire un acteur collectif capable de peser sur le cours de l'histoire, ainsi que sur les processus qui, après les années 1960/1970, ont entraîné le déclin de sa puissance. Cette implosion du projet de la gauche, dans une crise générale de la politique paralyse les forces visant à une transformation sociale de progrès humain. Cette question du " projet " est essentielle. L'avenir du mouvement émancipateur dépend en fin de compte de sa capacité " d'imagination politique ". De même que la " classe ouvrière " s'est construite en inventant la culture, les formes d'organisation et les stratégies politiques, " le peuple ", sujet par nature divers, doit imaginer celles qui lui permettront de devenir une force. Alors ce mouvement que Marx appelait prolétarien deviendra pour la première fois dans l'histoire celui de l'immense majorité en faveur de l'immense majorité.

This book focuses on the tension between the modernising thrust that places France on a trajectory of convergence with comparable liberal democracies and the defence of a national specificity that can act as a brake, complicating France’s relationship with its neighbours, its present and its past. This ambivalence in French political and social life stems from the conscious attempt to rebuild the nation after the trauma of Occupation during World War II and the new beginning provided by the Liberation. The government of the Fourth Republic embraced the pursuit of a modernisation that would enable it to regain its place among the world’s leading democratic states. However, this modernising ambition co-exists with the belief in a specific destiny and a unique sense of mission that are intrinsic to the emergence of a sense of nationhood after the revolution of 1789. Raymond defines a critical perspective that draws together historical, economic, social, and political issues into a coherent understanding of what makes France the way it is today. Written with both academic rigour and a highly accessible clarity of style, this volume is a valuable resource for students, educators, and researchers in French and European Studies.

An analysis of social mobility in contemporary French literature that offers a new perspective on figures who move between social classes. Social climbers have often been the core characters of novels. Their position between traditional tiers in society makes them touchstones for any political and literary moment, including our own. Morgane Cadieu's study looks at a certain kind of social climber in contemporary French literature whom she calls the parvenant. Taken from the French term parvenu, which refers to one who is newly arrived, a parvenant is a character who shuttles between social groups. A parvenant may become part of a new social class but devises literary ways to come back, constantly undoing any fixed idea of social affiliation. Focusing on recent French novels and autobiographies, On Both Sides of the Tracks speaks powerfully to issues of emancipation and class. Cadieu offers a fresh critical look at tales of social mobility in the work of Annie Ernaux, Kaoutar Harchi, Michel Houellebecq, Édouard Louis, and Marie NDiaye, among others, shedding fascinating light on upward mobility today as a formal, literary problem.

In the Footsteps of Flora Tristan is the first ever study devoted to Jules Puech (1879–1957), and is a double biography that examines his life’s work on Flora Tristan (1803–1844), feminist and socialist. It begins by examining newly found press reports of Flora Tristan during her lifetime and subsequently, then positions Puech’s discovery of her, as a postgraduate student in Paris in the 1900s. It continues with an account of how he embarked on the first in-depth biography published in 1925. Puech was unmatched in his expertise as a writer on Flora Tristan having discovered her papers through his numerous political connections and having become a historian of Proudhon’s legacy on the international aspirations of the labour movement. Together with his wife Marie-Louise Puech, née Milhau (1876-1966), suffragist feminist, he was a militant in the early twentieth-century pacifist movement that advocated international arbitration. His research on Flora Tristan was enriched by his other projects but was thwarted by the wars of 1914–1918 and 1940–1945. The circumstances of the long gestation of Puech's biography are drawn from his letters and papers, hitherto unseen. The correspondence curated brings a new understanding to the multi-faceted nature of Puech’s activism and rate of progress in the publication of his findings on his subject, Flora Tristan.