I was introduced to the work of the French geographer and author Christophe Guilluy in 2017 when I was a guest at a dinner hosted by Labour Together, the informal network which later became a well-funded think tank and the vehicle through which Keir Starmer won the leadership of the party. An essay by the journalist Christopher Caldwell about Guilluy, published in the City Journal, a quarterly American magazine, was circulated among some of the guests who wanted to understand better why so many working-class voters loathed the progressive liberal left and had voted for Brexit. I liked the essay so much I republished it in the New Statesman.

Long before Donald Trump’s first presidential victory and the vote for Brexit, in several influential books, Guilluy had analysed how globalisation had enriched a hypermobile transnational elite while leaving many of those who lived in what he calls “peripheral France”, far from the “new citadels” of globalised wealth, feeling isolated and dispossessed. Peripheral France was where Marine Le Penn’s Front National (since renamed Rassemblement National, or National Rally) was gaining support, including among former supporters of the once-powerful French Communist Party.

Guilluy, once close to the communists but today politically non-aligned, had worked as a consultant on housing projects in Paris and observed how the old working class could no longer afford to live in the culturally diverse capital city - or other metropolitan centres such as Lyon or Bordeaux. The old class structures had been supplanted by something new and much closer to America – France as a country of “winners and losers, or insiders and outsiders”.

The formerly working-class districts of the great French cities were largely the preserve of a new bourgeois class who lived in loft conversions and remodelled mews houses, had studied at the same universities, frequented the same bars, clubs and restaurants and whose children went to the same schools. Guilluy called them bourgeois bohemians, or “bohos”, a neologism he borrowed from the New York Times columnist David Brooke’s book about New York’s upper-middle-class, Bohos in Paradise. The working-class presence in Paris was limited to the “last provision of the non-gentrified housing stock” in the low-income neighbourhoods of the outer perimeter of the city, the so-called banlieue, or suburbs, home to large immigrant populations.

In France, as in Britain and America, bohos formed a new hegemonic professional cultural class. They worked in the media, the creative industries, the law, advertising, tech and NGOs. They proselytised about diversity and multiculturalism but were utterly detached from the day-to-day lives of the working class. As Guilluy contemptuously writes in The Dispossessed, his latest and most polemical book which covers much of the same ground as previous work, they were the “winners of globalisation” but had closed shop on the working class “while pretending that the shop was still open”.

For Guilluy, back then, the situation was intolerable, and he knew there would be a backlash, as he wrote in his 2014 bestseller, Peripheral France and How We’ve Sold Out the Working Classes. In November 2018, the gilets jaunes protests erupted across car-dependent peripheral France. The protestors were angered about high petrol and fuel prices, as well as deepening inequalities more generally, and the movement was named after the high-vis jackets French motorists are required to keep in their vehicles. They lasted until the Covid lockdowns in 2020.

In The Dispossessed (originally published in France in 2023 but out here in an excellent translation by Andrew Brown) Guilluy praises the gilets jaunes movement as a working-class revolt and compares it to Brexit. Caricatured as a movement of “little whites” the gilets jaunes protestors in fact drew support from the “working classes of all origins”, racial and religious. During the demonstrations, they shouted “We exist!” – a forlorn demand for recognition.

In a speech, in June 2017, at the inauguration of Station F in Paris, the biggest business start-up campus in Europe, Emmanuel Macron spoke of “People who succeed and people who are nothing”. Guilluy returns repeatedly to this remark in The Dispossessed because for him it captures the elite disdain that characterises the Macron presidency. France, he writes, is a “country in which ordinary people are told that ‘they are nothing’, that they have no place”. The progressive bourgeoisies, right and left, “have abandoned everything that makes sense in a society: the common good, public service, secularism, the nation. The social impact is now clearly visible.”

Like all the best polemicists, Guilluy is prone to rhetorical exaggeration and here he offers no detailed solutions to the societal divisions he has anatomised so brilliantly for more than a decade. His work is admired by Marine Le Pen and her intellectual fellow travellers on the French new right, but the admiration is not reciprocal. He has no political programme or policy recommendations and endorses no party: he dislikes the radical left party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon just as much as he does Macronism. What he offers, in restrained, quasi-academic prose, is a persuasive analysis of what he believes has gone wrong in France and why.

Across Europe the mood of incipient revolt is growing, exemplified in this country by protests outside asylum hotels, and populist parties, adept at channelling and exploiting the sense of mass discontent, are rising accordingly. If there is hope for Guilluy it can be found in Denmark and Sweden where elites, including on the left, have after years of misrule “looked reality in the face”, calmed tensions and responded pragmatically to the “demands of ordinary people”. These people, like the dispossessed of peripheral France, are not searching for utopia – Sweden boasted of being a “moral superpower” until a policy of open borders resulted in widespread civil unrest of the kind we have seen in Epping, Essex – but for something grounded in the reality of their everyday lives. They are not nothing. They exist. And their grievances can no longer be ignored or dismissed without lethal consequences for the stability of the social order.