Sans Papiers

If the issue of work has acquired a high political profile in France over recent decades, the question of the sans papiers, of undocumented migrants and their potential place within the Republic, has become equally highly politicised. However, these two issues are rarely seen as being intrinsically connected, protests in favour of the rights of the sans papiers typically being couched in humanitarian terms, with little reference to questions of political economy. This is equally true of many filmic representations of the sans papiers, which reinforce this notion of sans papiers as victims deserving of humanitarian aid, rather than as active agents. This chapter draws on Emmanuel Terray’s notion of ‘délocalisation sur place’ or ‘on-shore off-shoring’ to argue for a better understanding of the role the sans papiers play within the contemporary French jobs market, epitomising the logics of flexibility, modulation, and precarity that now characterise its functioning. Armed with this interpretative framework, it re-reads a number of films and novels featuring undocumented migrants, uncovering the insights concealed behind their overt humanitarianism, insights into the interrelationships between undocumented migration and the shifts in employment analysed in earlier chapters.

The Crisis of Fordism

This chapter offers an account of the crisis of Fordism in France from the 1970s on, identifying key developments at the global, national, and regional level, showing how these have affected corporate governance, so that by the 2000s the experience of work had radically altered. This will enable a clearer distinction between ‘post-Fordism’, a term we take in a general sense to refer to the unstable set of economic arrangements emerging from the crisis of Fordism, and ‘neo-liberalism’, understood as an ideological project that has exploited that crisis to push for welfare reductions and the liberalisation of global flows of goods, capital, and labour. This then leads into a critical review of a range of diagnoses of this situation, from those (Frédéric Lordon) who see it as the product of neo-liberalism as an exogenous ideological project, to those (Yann Moulier Boutang) who highlight its endogenous determinants within the contradictions of Fordism, to those (El Mouhoub Mouhoud and Dominique Plihon) who occupy a mid-point in these debates. The aim here is to begin sketching a new interpretative framework from a critical synthesis of these accounts.

Modulated Masculinities

The middle-aged male worker, bridling at the demands of the contemporary workplace has become a recurrent character type in recent French feature films and novels. Often, this male protagonist’s problems at work are mirrored by his difficulties at home retaining his authority as a paterfamilias. These films and novels hence offer a proliferation of narratives featuring middle-aged men struggling to modulate their professional identities and masculine roles in accordance with the demands of the contemporary workplace. As such, these narratives may also reflect the centrality of the male breadwinner and the patriarchal nuclear family to the French social model and hence may represent a series of conservative responses to perceived crises of masculinity and the nuclear family. The chapter shows that this kind of conservative response is epitomised by the novels of Houellebecq, in which laments at the loss of patriarchy are articulated to a critique of contemporary forms of immaterial labour in a particularly insistent fashion. The chapter then turns to a selection of films and novels that offer more nuanced representations of middle-aged male workers and their difficulties with work and family.

Introduction

The Introduction opens with evidence of the extent to which questions of employment, precarious and flexible labour have come to dominate the French political, cultural, and intellectual agenda since, broadly, the beginning of the new century. It then argues that this is itself evidence of the extent to which the shift to post-Fordist forms of accumulation is posing a fundamental challenge to established notions of French national identity and republican citizenship as these were institutionalised in the postwar compromise. A summary of the book’s content follows which clarifies how it seeks to probe more deeply into the precise nature of these phenomena and the diverse ways in which French filmmakers and authors have sought to represent them.

Modulating Work and Welfare

A range of French sociologists of work have argued that contemporary management practices manifest a shift away from disciplinary modes of governmentality towards what De Gaulejac terms ‘post-disciplinary’ forms, Brunel ‘pastoral’ modes of power, and Zarifian forms of Deleuzean ‘control’. This chapter seeks, first, to provide evidence of this shift in governmentality and, second, to show how this involves more modulated, precarious forms of subjectivity that challenge established notions of French republican citizenship. It employs Deleuze’s distinction between a disciplinary ‘mould’ and the ‘modulated’ forms of power typical of ‘societies of control’ as its overarching interpretative framework. The chapter examines recent changes in management practice alongside a representative sample of reforms to the legal regulation of work and welfare in France from 2000 on, reforms that draw on notions of ‘activation’ and ‘flexicurity’. It argues that these practices and legal reforms exemplify the shift from to more ‘modulated’ and precarious forms of subjectivity that challenge the tents of French republican citizenship.

Femmes Fortes

Today French women are more likely to be in salaried employment than their male counterparts, albeit being overrepresented in low-paid, part-time jobs. This chapter argues that one of the most striking cultural manifestations of these shifts in the relationship between sex and employment has been the emergence of the highly ambiguous figure of the femme forte, the strong working woman. Recent novels and films by Éric Reinhardt, Laurent Quintreau, Philippe Vasset, Alain Corneau, Natalie Kuperman, and Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar offer examples of one iteration of the femme forte – the calculating, manipulative, ruthless senior female executive whose pursuit of her career goals requires she abjure all her maternal instincts to become a particular kind of femme fatale, an updated version of Lady Macbeth or the Marquise de Meurteuil. The films, novels, and reportage of Medhi Charef, Florence Aubenas, François Bon, and Robert Guédiguian, meanwhile, offer a different, apparently more flattering iteration of the femme forte – the middle-aged working class woman who, in the face of the loss of stable male industrial employment, bravely struggles to keep family and community together, personifying an embattled tradition of working class struggle. The chapter analyses the ideological implications of these contrasting representations of the femme forte.

Conclusion

The Conclusion seeks to summarise the findings of the preceding chapters, showing how and why the shift to more precarious forms of post-Fordist employment have challenged established French Republican ideals and practices. It also considers possible future routes out of the impasses of post-Fordism.

Doomed Youth

The chapter opens by noting the recurrence of depictions of disillusioned young executives, products of France’s elite business schools, in films by Cantet, Moutout, Corneau and Kim Chapiron and in testimonial literature by Sophie Talneau, Jonathan Curiel, Alexandre des Isnards and Thomas Zuber. In their different ways, all of these texts depict France’s young academic elite as being doomed to disillusionment by the nature of the education they receive and the realities of the contemporary labour market. In this, these privileged individuals betray an unexpected similarity with what might seem more obvious candidates for the moniker ‘doomed youth’, namely France’s ethnic minority banlieue inhabitants, whose fate is also understood to reflect problems in the interrelationships between education and employment. This chapter will therefore examine films and novels that seek to represent the ways in which shifts in the labour market have been mirrored in the adoption of post-disciplinary pedagogies and business-oriented curricula that challenge fundamental republican notions of meritocracy and social integration through education and employment.