History of a notion. “It’s not fools, the kids in the neighborhoods, that’s why they are veneral. They see that the social elevator, he is blocked in the basement and that he stinks.” By This doctor formula, the humorist Jamel Debbouze contributed in 2004 to popularize the notion of “social elevator”, which, until then, belonged rather to the lexicon of political science. A year later, Aziz Senni, an entrepreneur of Moroccan origin, launched a successful formula by titling a book The social elevator is broken… I took the staircase (the archipelago, 2005). Nicolas Sarkozy then Emmanuel Macron took over this image of the broken elevator that, long before them, the Liberal Alain Madelin proposed in 1995 to “repair”. Which, in his vision, meant to remove the obstacles to the freedom to undertake.
Since then, the expression has won the entire political spectrum, to designate the lack of ascending social mobility or the self-production of closed elites on themselves. Its use often has a part of “retrospective illusion”, explains Paul Pasquali, sociologist at the CNRS and specialist in these questions. Before the Second World War, the successes of children of peasant or workers’ families are extremely rare, the elites being perfectly endogamous and the socially very cleaved school.
The “Thirty Glorious Years”, from 1945 to 1975, required a nuanced analysis. Exceptional trajectories – magnified these days to cultivate the idea of a forgotten meritocracy – still exist, but in a framework where social promotions are then more numerous. They proceed, from the end of the 1960s, of a first stage of school expansion and the opening of higher education, combined with economic growth which, stimulated by the State, massively creates positions of employees, executives and intermediate professions. Full-employment ensures decent wages for people with little or no graduate and promotes, in companies, internal promotions. However, tempers Paul Pasquali, these developments intervene on a background which, mainly, remains that of social reproduction: “Everyone finds themselves roughly in the same socio -professional group as their parents, even if it is never identical: A qualified worker can hope to become foreman, and a foreman get to supervision. “
anxiety of downgrading
At this period, which was not lasted thirty years but rather fifteen, from 1960 to 1975, succeeded the surge of unemployment and precariousness, and simultaneously the school massification, with the objective of the 80 % of a Generation at the baccalaureate launched in 1985 by Jean-Pierre Chevènement (and reached since 2012). If access to higher education becomes the standard of the middle classes, the trivialization of university securities decreases their relative value even though, for access to high positions, the weight of selective sectors is strengthened. Today, the French school system, which must be remembered that it does not determine the state of the labor market, is regularly pointed out in international studies like that where social origin weighs most on results. “The success of a few helps to buy the failure of all those who remain on the tile,” deplores the sociologist specializing in the Agnès Van Zanten school. A study study Published in 2018 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) affirms that, since the 1990s, ascending social mobility “has marked the step” in the countries of its jurisdiction, where four and a half generations would be On average necessary so that children of the 10 % of the poorest families rise to the average income level. The OECD negatively distinguishes France and Germany, where it would take six generations to achieve it, against five in the United Kingdom, four in Spain and only two in Denmark.
You have 23.91% of this article to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.