We are living in an era where the intertwining of security and property
ideologies reflects their respective good fortune. Traveling the roadsof the Boulogne hinterland, one is struck by the proliferation of these
housing developments, organized into residential areas that are all
identical and, let's face it, rather unsightly. Now, at the entrance to
these indolent communes, a sign alerts foreign visitors with its
bulging, scrutinizing eyeball: "Here, the neighbors are vigilant!"
According to the latest INSEE* estimates, 17.6 million French households
own their primary residence, a rate of 57.7%, of which 35% are still
repaying the mortgage they took out for this purpose. These figures
reflect the policy implemented by the state in the early 1970s,
countering a cycle of accumulation that began at the end of the Second
World War and was already reaching its limits.
Nevertheless, the ideological basis of this strategy preceded the plans
of Albin Chalandon, then Minister of Housing. In France, the property
ideal has its roots in the depths of the 1789 revolution, which
confirmed the triumph of the bourgeoisie over the orderly society. By
returning to Engels's famous text(1), we will see the permanence of this
issue, which has become increasingly complex over time...
The Property Ideology
Housing is one of the issues in the class struggle that the bourgeoisie
seized upon very early on to establish its control over the working
class throughout Europe. First evading the question, then fearing the
epidemics ravaging the industrial cities it had built, the bourgeoisie
responded in its own way, in other words, by charting a "new path to
defrauding the workers."(2)
By making them homeowners, the bourgeoisie imagined it was transforming
the working-class mentality, imagining that "the workers would lose
their proletarian character and become docile and spineless like their
ancestors, who also owned a house." It wanted "the bourgeoisie without
the proletariat," Engels mocked.(3)
This sleight of hand has enjoyed unfailing prosperity to this day. From
Dr. Sax's book, which Engels refers to throughout his own to expose "the
bourgeois way of dealing with the housing question," to Thatcher and
Sarkozy, including Reagan, access to property for the working classes
was one of those Trojan horses transfigured into a political program
that allowed bourgeois thought to pierce the defenses of the working
class. Moreover, it offered lucrative markets to developers while
slowing down, or even eliminating, programs for the construction of
collective and social housing.(4)
In 2007, the subprime mortgage crisis(5) resulted in the largest
financial collapse since 1929, throwing more than a million poor
Americans onto the streets, who saw their homes seized and never able to
repay them. The shockwaves would spread to all global economic
players... A century earlier, Engels warned: "In such a society, the
housing crisis is no accident, it is a necessary institution (...) a
society cannot exist without a housing crisis when the vast majority of
workers have at their disposal exclusively their wages, that is, the sum
of the means essential to their subsistence and reproduction."(6)
Now, let us recognize that the idealization of small individual property
has found a valuable ally in the model of collective housing that has
become established in large modern cities. The large workers' barracks,
as Engels called them, "even if their main defects are remedied by all
sorts of construction tricks," already served as a real deterrent in his
time. As for the Cottage, the model of the small house surrounded by its
small garden erected as a demonstration installation by a few
philanthropic industrialists to demonstrate the harmony of the interests
of Capital and Labor, Engels clearly points out its limitations: "Alas,
thrice alas, the cottage system is unfeasible precisely in the centers
where the crisis of high land prices is raging, and we can still
consider ourselves lucky if, instead of large barracks, we build houses
with four to six dwellings (...) these isolated experiments, by the
simple fact of being exceptions, demonstrate that their application on a
large scale is incompatible with the prevailing capitalist mode of
production."
Concluding the bankruptcy of the bourgeois solution, Engels sets out the
fundamental reason: it has come up against "the opposition between town
and country. To try to resolve the latter by maintaining large modern
cities is an absurdity. These large modern cities will only be
eliminated by the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, and
when this process is underway, it will be a matter of something quite
different from providing each worker with a small house of their own.
Social and employer control...
Certain experiments at the time demonstrated the workers' desire to
immediately resolve the housing issue by their own means. As early as
the 1920s, on the outskirts of Paris, self-built houses sprang up,
marking the edge of what would soon be called the suburbs. This model
would find its extension in a few rare alternatives, such as that of
Pessac(7), but quickly, manufacturers and public authorities propagated
the model of mass-produced housing built on an industrial scale.
The promotion of single-family homes among working-class communities
coincided with the saturation of spaces and the housing shortage,
amplified by speculation and land grabbing in the heart of large cities.
At the same time, the concentration of agricultural activity frees up
land on the outskirts of cities and opens up a market that banks are
opportunistically seizing.
Suburban irrigation is both disrupting rural areas and signaling the
passing of the baton from industrial employers to construction groups in
the service age. The old revolutionary aspiration to abolish the
separation between city and countryside is about to be realized in its
most degraded, most mutilated form. The pastiche utopia of the American
suburban model is imperceptibly turning into a nightmare (8).
to spectacular commercial surveillance
From the working-class city to the peri-urban housing estate, from
proximity to the workplace and social homogeneity to the remoteness and
individualism of the liberal cycle, the repercussions are profound, both
ideologically and politically. In 2008, manual workers represented 32%
of the working population in rural areas, compared to 6% for farmers.
They now outnumber rural workers in rural areas than in large urban areas...
Access to property therefore ties young households to repaying their
loans for several decades, placing them in a situation of increased
vulnerability, exacerbated by the crisis, unemployment, and rising
interest rates. Since the 1990s, defaults have increased amid a crisis
in the reproduction of the bourgeois family model, that of a married
couple with children (9). Gradually, the suburban dream, combining
family autonomy and individualism, is closing in on its own fenced-in
space, where debt and uncertainty about the future transform the desire
for freedom into an exacerbated drive for security...
The proliferation of schemes such as "Voisins Vigilantes" in these gray
areas, as well as the growing popularity of voting for the far right,
fuels a veritable economy of fear from which only merchants and
demagogues profit.
------------
*Report dated 2020.
(1) Friedrich Engels: The Housing Question. SHS EDITIONS. 2024
(2),(3),(6)
(4) While restoring old workers' housing, such as the courtyards in
Lille, transforming them into luxury housing or demolishing the towers
and blocks of the "estates"; In both cases, the original population is
invited to clear the way (their "life plan" if applicable).
(5) Financial crisis that hits the mortgage sector and spreads worldwide.
(7) The Cité Castors in Pessac is a popular self-build project.
(8) The subject provides veritable raw material for many American
fiction directors: Terrence Malick, Sofia Coppola, Larry Clark, Gus Van
Sant, etc.
(9) The bourgeois family model: a married couple with children who go
into very long-term debt for up to thirty years until recently, ends in
separation or divorce in 45% of cases in France - admittedly, more in
the city than in the countryside.
------------
Box:
Employee employment and electoral results
in some rural communes of Boulogne
Colembert:
- Permanent contracts and civil service: 85.9%. Source: INSEE 2023.
National Rally vote for the 2024 legislative elections: 45.66%
Le Wast:
- Permanent contracts and civil service: 85.4%. Source: INSEE 2023.
National Rally vote for the 2024 legislative elections: 54.64%
Conteville-lès-Boulogne:
* Permanent contracts and civil service: 82.1%. Source: INSEE 2023.
* National Rally vote for the 2024 legislative elections: 52.27%
Baincthun:
* Permanent contracts and civil service: 87.6%. Source: INSEE 2023.
* National Rally vote for the 2024 legislative elections: 52.27%
Wierre-Effroy:
* Permanent contracts and civil service: 85.8%. Source: INSEE 2023.
National Rally vote for the 2024 legislative elections: 54.64%
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