France of the Little-Middles

Marie Cartier is Professor of Sociology at the University of Nantes, researcher at CENS (Nantes Sociology Center, CNRS-University of Nantes). She is a former Junior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She combines ethnography and history to study the transformations of the working-class through employment and living spaces.

“This splendid and nuanced volume provides long-needed corrections to images from literature, cinema, news, and social science that have reduced Parisian suburbs to a dystopian vision of crime-ridden towers and despairing immigrants… Given the rich, careful data, the complex analyses, and the sensitive evocations of families divided by place, decisions, and success, this book should stimulate vastly enriched, comparative examinations of metropolitan Paris in its global context. It is also a provocative read about class, place, education, aspiration, and anxiety for social scientists and citizens worldwide …Essential.” • Choice“Cartier et al.’s research is an important contribution to the anthropology of identity, as well as of the ways to protect it, in relation to alterity (which fluctuates between tolerance and stigmatization), and the possible ways of combating its prejudices. In other words, we strongly recommend the reading of these rich analyses to teachers, researchers, and students in different disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, geography, and political sciences.” • JRAI (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute)“Cartier, Coutant, Masclet, and Siblot have produced an important book. Their analysis not only shines light on an understudied swath of contemporary French society, but it also engages larger questions concerning how individuals understand, experience, and negotiate social stratification today in relation to where they live… Theoretically sophisticated, the book is also highly readable (translator Juliette Radcliffe Rogers did an excellent job). This makes it suitable for both graduate and undergraduate courses. More broadly, it should appeal to anyone interested in urban ethnography, urban development and sociality, immigration studies, the sociology of stratification, or the sociology of voting behavior. In short, this is a well-researched, persuasive work that engages productively with many different fields.” • French Politics, Culture and Society“[The volume] shows the value of investigating middle-class Western neighborhoods and especially of the historical changes in such sites. The study is a contribution to the anthropology of Europe as well as to urban anthropology and to the anthropology of class, and it usefully complicates and even debunks some preconceptions about suburban life, immigration, class, and politics.” • Anthropology Review Database

• Illustrations, Tables, and MapsAcknowledgementsIntroductionChapter 1. The “Good Old Days”Chapter 2. Children of the projects in quest of respectabilityChapter 3. Suburban YouthChapter 4. “They’re very nice, but…”: Encountering new foreign neighborsChapter 5. A vote of the white lower classes?AppendicesAppendix I: Interviews cited in the bookAppendix II: Documents and sourcesBibliographyIndex