1.8 percent of the residences in the commune, or by tourists passing through, even though this sector has developed considerably (with a bottom line of 63 million euros in 2004). The number of employees in the tourism industry in the commune came to 812 salaried workers in 2004; jobs connected to tourist accommodation (6,414 beds, including camping facilities and bed-and-breakfast operations) represented 1.4 percent of the total in January, twice that in the summer.95 However, these domestic and seasonal activities did not compensate for the loss of jobs in industry and agriculture.
It was in this context, problematic for the city’s residents and for its budget (employment by the city rose from 635 in 1980 to 1,289 in 2000), that Maja Hoffmann chose Arles as the site for the Foundation for Contemporary Art that she created in 2004; she called it Luma, after her two children, Lucas and Marina.
Maja Hoffmann, who studied cinema at the New School for Social Research in New York, is the daughter of Luc Hoffmann, a part-time resident in Arles from the 1940s on; Luc was a founder of and major contributor to the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, which was officially established in 2010. This foundation, housed in the Hôtel Léautaud de Donines, a refurbished fifteenth-century mansion, displays works by Impressionist painters; it has ten Van Gogh paintings on loan from the Amsterdam Museum. Luc Hoffmann, an amateur ornithologist, had previously devoted much energy and a great deal of money to the ecological protection of the Camargue region. Father and daughter are among the heirs to the Swiss Hoffmann–La Roche laboratories. Some descendants of the Hoffmann family came together in 1948 in a stockholders’ pact to keep control of F. Hoffmann–La Roche SA, a pact that controls 45 percent of the company’s voting rights. In 2012, the family members’ fortune was estimated to be 16 to 17 billion in Swiss francs,96 which makes it one of the top fortunes in Switzerland. Maja Hoffmann, like her father and grandmother, has a lengthy track record as a collector and philanthropist in the realm of contemporary art. She actively supports the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Serpentine in London, and the Venice Biennale; she is president of the Zurich Kunsthalle and vice president of the Emanuel Hoffmann in Basel, a foundation created by her grandparents to hold their collection, which was later donated to Basel’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Like her father, Maja Hoffmann has for many years maintained a foothold in Arles, where she owns a home and a hotel; she also has a celebrated restaurant in the Camargue featuring organically produced ingredients.
The establishment of the Luma Foundation in Arles has been supported by the current mayor, Hervé Schiavetti, who is a member of the Communist Party. Drawn into regional administration after his studies in sociology at the University of Aix-en-Provence, he was elected mayor in 2001 and re-elected in both 2008 and 2014, despite the opposition of the Front de gauche, the anti-capitalist New Party, and Europe Écologie–Les Verts; these parties reproach him for being too close to the Socialists.
A first construction project initiated by Maja Hoffmann was rejected by the National Commission on Historical Monuments because it did not respect the perimeter of the heritage site. The current project, entrusted to the architect Frank Gehry – an aluminum tower 57 meters high – is under construction; the first stone was laid on 5 April 2015, and the museum, originally scheduled for completion in 2018, is now expected to open in 2020. The budget of 150 million euros is being financed entirely by Maja Hoffmann, in the largest private cultural investment in Europe. The tower is going up on the site of the old rail yards. Seven buildings from the complex (the former site of the Rencontres de la photographie) have been purchased by Hoffmann from the Provence–Alpes–Côte d’Azur region; they have been preserved and renovated. These old locomotive manufacturing and repair shops are located at the foot of the hill where the ancient city was established; the École supérieure Supinfocom, devoted to multimedia technologies, was opened in 2000, along with university residences, on about 27 acres of industrial wasteland partly owned by the city of Arles.
Maja Hoffmann’s ambition is to make Arles “a French Bilbao” by creating a foundation intended to support a museum, artists’ residences, and colloquia in synergy with other local cultural institutions; the project is designed to create “hundreds of jobs” and to give the city “international visibility,” according to a logic that deploys the various facets of the enrichment economy.
An economic reorientation toward the wealthy
As the foregoing observations suggest, the formation of an economic sphere of enrichment, often described in terms of comparative advantages, has been marked by a phenomenon particularly obvious in France but apparent in Western economies more generally: a reorientation toward offering goods capable of satisfying the demands of wealthy or ultra-wealthy clients throughout the world. The number of such people has risen considerably over the last twenty years. They are based chiefly in countries such as France and the United States, where huge fortunes transmitted by inheritance were already well established and where the increase in wealth has been particularly spectacular at the top of the income scale. But the number of wealthy and ultra-wealthy persons is also growing in emerging countries, where those with fortunes have either benefited from financial operations or taken advantage of the profits generated by industrialization in countries with cheap labor. In other words, the increase in the small number of wealthy and extremely wealthy people has accompanied the increase in inequality worldwide.
The bottom line of private financial fortunes (savings in bank accounts, financial instruments, or life insurance policies) does not represent the totality of accumulated fortunes, most notably because it does not include holdings in the form of material goods, including real estate. But since these latter goods are more difficult to identify and evaluate, the increase in the monetary total of fortunes can serve as an indicator allowing us to estimate private fortunes and the rise in inequalities on a global scale. As it happens, the total amount of money in financial fortunes increased by 14.6 percent in 2013. The wealthiest zones are the United States (50 trillion dollars) and Western Europe (38 trillion), followed by the Asian Pacific countries (37 trillion). The growth in private fortunes has kept pace with the growing number of millionaires (in American dollars), which went from 13.7 million in 2012 to 16.3 million in 2013. These millionaires, who represent 1.1 percent of households, are concentrated primarily in the United States (7.1 million households, which possess 63 percent of the private fortunes in America); their number has also gone up in China, reaching 2.4 million. The density of these millionaires in relation to the total number of households as permanent residents is highest in Qatar, Switzerland, and Singapore. In 2015, the number of millionaires continued to grow (by 6 percent), reaching a total of 18.5 million. This 1 percent holds 47 percent of the world’s financial wealth. Some portion of these private fortunes is held in offshore banks, whose holdings reached 8.9 trillion in 2013, an increase of 10.4 percent over the previous year. They are estimated to correspond to between 8 and 11 percent of the financial patrimony of households, and they were expected to reach 12.4 trillion in 2018. The most important offshore banks are in Switzerland, followed by Singapore and Hong Kong. In France, tax evasion probably totaled 17 billion euros in 2013.97
The economic reorientation of Western countries toward the wealthy has marked a break with the type of growth that had characterized the postwar decades. We can measure the scale of the change if we recall that postwar growth was driven by national production of standardized goods whose distribution, aimed at first toward the upper middle class, was later extended to the middle classes, and even to the lower classes in the case of goods such as household appliances and cars. This seemed to confirm the idea that enrichment of the elites would inevitably benefit even the destitute in the end (the trickle-down process). Often described at the time in terms of “democratization,” this economy was supposed to profit from an increase in buying power on the part of the most disadvantaged, a change to be stimulated by the redistribution of a portion of the benefits generated by increased productivity, as economists of the “regulation school” demonstrated.
One effect of this economic reorientation has been an intensification of the two-track consumption pattern, with a growing contrast between mass consumption of standardized products sold by companies with a wide distribution
