The Dispossessed

Recent decades have witnessed protests that are unlike many of the social movements of previous centuries. They are not led by any party, union or leader, but by ordinary people. Their deep roots are existential rather than material.

These protests are not driven by class consciousness or ideology but by the sense that people have been abandoned, stripped of their rights and shunted out to the peripheries of social and economic life. This is the movement of the dispossessed – of a mass of ordinary people who have gained a will of their own and are no longer content to comply with the directives of elites who want to tell them how to live and behave. The high-profile political events of recent years – Brexit, the election of Trump, the rise of right-wing parties – are merely surface tremors of a much deeper tectonic shift caused by the slow displacement of a forgotten continent.

In this book Christophe Guilluy uncovers this forgotten continent of the dispossessed and shows how ordinary people are rising up and responding to their programmed disappearance by forging an alternative to a doomed model. Introduction


Part 1: The sea


Chapter 1. Access to the sea
Back to square one
The ‘unbowed’ bourgeoisie and the sense of heritage


Chapter 2. The forbidden city
Urban cloning
The cemetery of the political left
The forbidden city


Chapter 3. The social imprint
Ecologically responsible, socially irresponsible
The peril of social distancing


Part 2. The fog


Chapter 4. Cinema
From narrative to cinema
Their cinema
The transclass, an Oscar-worthy role
The realm of whiners


Chapter 5. ‘There is no majority’
The language that renders people invisible
The parent company is Netflix
The utopia of a new people
Coming out of one’s reserve


Chapter 6. Apocalypse Now
Act I: Enter the Prince of Darkness
Act II: The announcement of dark times


Part 3. The horizon


Chapter 7. The radical nature of ordinary life
The survival instinct
The electoral hard discount and abstention


Chapter 8. Not against but elsewhere
A dialogue of the deaf
And what about a summit conference on living conditions?


Chapter 9. Return to the centre
The Idiot
The West doesn’t need anyone else’s help to decline
It’s now okay to be pragmatic


Epilogue


Notes

"The dissident geographer Christophe Guilluy was the very first writer to describe the front lines of the class war globalization unleashed. He did it before Trump, before Brexit, before any university intellectual even recognized there was a conflict – and his account remains the best. The Dispossessed is the story of a working class bamboozled out of the civilization it helped build."
Christopher Caldwell, author of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

"A bracing polemic about the gap between the political class narrative and the reality of ordinary lives. Christophe Guilluy is the scourge of progressive, metropolitan hypocrisy."
David Goodhart, author of The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics

"a persuasive analysis of what he believes has gone wrong in France and why"
Jason Cowley, The Sunday Times Christophe Guilluy is a French geographer and the author of several books, including The Twilight of the Elites.