on the other hand.98 These latter products are exemplified in the realm of food by items presented as artisanal or organic and guaranteed by a brand name or, in other realms, by personal objects (knives, for instance) presumed to have been made according to ancestral practices, with traces of the makers on display. Such products are typically guaranteed by an assertion that the items have not been produced in a series of assembly lines operated by countless anonymous workers but, rather, that they have been handcrafted by a single individual who “made them with love.”
By contrast with mass production, which was legitimized in democratic terms, the enrichment economy aims to exploit the buying power of those who can afford exceptional goods. This is why the comparison between the wealthy and the rest allows us to understand the dynamics of the enrichment economy better than we would by referring specifically to social classes differentiated by their income levels and by what they can leave their heirs; the categories of rich and poor function in a relative logic of opposition rather than as categories with clear boundaries. While the enrichment economy is addressed first of all to the rich and the very rich, it has the peculiar feature of addressing the others too, as if they were rich, or, at the very least, richer than they are.
Notes
1 1. For a synthesis, see Lilas Demmou, “La désindustrialisation en France,” working document, Direction Générale du Trésor, nos. 2010–11 (June 2010).
2 2. Vincent Hecquet, “Emploi et territoires de 1975 à 2009: tertiarisation et rétrécissement de la sphère productive,” Économie et statistique, nos. 462–3 (2013): 25–68.
3 3. Martin Fortes, “Spécialisation à l’exportation de la France et de quatre grands pays de l’Union européenne entre 1990 et 2009,” Trésor-Éco, no. 98 (February 2012).
4 4. See Alain Touraine, The Post-Industrial Society: Tomorrow’s Social History, Classes, Conflicts and Culture in the Programmed Society (New York: Random House, [1969] 1971), and Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973). For a critique of the relevance of the notion of post-industrial society for characterizing contemporary European societies, see Aurélien Berlan, La fabrique des derniers hommes: retour sur Tönnies, Simmel et Weber (Paris: La Découverte, 2012), pp. 317–22.
5 5. Demmou, “La désindustrialisation en France.”
6 6. See Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy (London: Verso, 2003).
7 7. Hecquet, “Emploi et territoires.”
8 8. Laurent Davezies, La crise qui vient: la nouvelle fracture territoriale (Paris: Seuil, 2012).
9 9. Laurent Davezies, La République et ses territoires: la circulation invisible des richesses (Paris: Seuil, 2008), p. 50.
10 10. Ibid., pp. 58–9.
11 11. In one-third of French households, the head of the household is retired. For a statistical analysis of the distribution of retirees, see Jean-François Léger, “La répartition géographique des retraités: les six France,” Population & Avenir, no. 716 (January–February 2014): 4–7. In France, the greatest proportion of retired workers or salaried employees with low incomes is found in the former industrial regions in the northeast. As for retired white-collar workers, found in particularly high numbers in the large urban centers, they are also increasingly numerous in the less urbanized territories in the coastal and southern regions owing to “very selective migratory and economic population flows (retirees with high incomes)”; see also Jean-Marc Zaninetti, “Les retraités en France: des migrations pas comme les autres,” Population & Avenir, no. 703 (May–June 2011): 4–20.
12 12. Gwendoline Volat, “L’habitat rural entre 1999 et 2009: des évolutions contrastées,” Le Point sur, Commissariat général au développement durable, no. 179 (December 2013).
13 13. Davezies, La République et ses territoires, p. 68.
14 14. This horizon of integral capitalism in which everyone is expected to become a merchant contrasts with that of merchants doing business abroad; see in the eighteenth century, as described by Francesca Trivellato in The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). Trivellato depicts merchants as a distinct category (focusing here on Sephardic Jews from Livorno in Tuscany) and connects them with their merchandise (especially coral and diamonds). See also Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).
15 15. For literature in French, see especially Nathalie Heinich, De la visibilité: excellence et singularité en régime médiatique (Paris: Gallimard, 2012).
16 16. See Alain Desrosières and Laurent Thévenot, Les catégories socio-professionnelles (Paris: La Découverte, 1988), and, for a recent update, Thomas Amossé, “La nomenclature socio-professionnelle: une histoire revisitée,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 68/4 (2013): 1039–75. The population that interests us can be sought here by relying on surveys by INSEE (the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies). But, given the structure of the surveys and the nomenclatures they use, it is hard to come up with reliable figures, and the findings can always be challenged.
17 17. In L’esthétisation du monde: vivre à l’âge du capitalisme artiste (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy propose to approach different things from the perspective of aestheticization as a “systematic incorporation of the creative and imaginary dimension in the sectors of commodity consumption.” Considered especially in terms of its current development, the “aestheticization of the world triggered by capitalism was to appear,” according to the authors, “starting in the second half of the nineteenth century” (p. 39). The idea of “aesthetic capitalism” is also defended by Gernot Böhme, Ästhetischer Kapitalismus (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016).
18 18. The Comité Colbert, created in 1954, brings together representatives from the luxury industry and French cultural institutions. See Christian Blanckaert, Les 100 mots du luxe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010). (Blanckaert has served as director of Hermès international and as presiding delegate of the Colbert Committee.)
19 19. Romain Sautard, Valérie Duchateau, and Jeannot Rasolofoarison, “Les biens haut de gamme, un avantage comparatif européen,” Trésor Éco, no. 118 (September 2013). Of 270 prestigious brands surveyed in the world, 130 are French (Benjamin Leperchey, “Le Comité stratégique de filière (CSF) des industries de la mode et du luxe,” Annales des Mines –Réalités industrielles, no. 4 (2013): 14–19.
20 20. According to the Ministry of Economy, the “luxury industries” (including fashion, the culinary arts, and outstanding food products, especially wines and spirits, but excluding tourism) employ 170,000 people in France, for a bottom line of 43 billion euros.
21 21. Sautard et al., “Les biens haut de gamme.”
22 22. In France, the thirty leading brands in the fashion sector have cumulative sales amounting to 15 billion euros, of which 85 percent come from exports; see Leperchey, “Le Comité stratégique.”
23 23. Kenzo and Givenchy moved part of their operations to Poland, Vuitton to Romania; Hermès relied on Nigerian or Madagascan subcontractors. Italian brands did similar things: Prada moved part of its leather goods production to Turkey; Dolce & Gabbana outsourced some of its ready-to-wear apparel to Egypt; and so on. When the product is assembled in the brand’s home country, the components subcontracted to a country with low wages are those requiring the most hours of work –
