Groups of friends

Sociologists have already highlighted the importance of elective affiliations in working-class circles. In The local guysNicolas Renahy thus explains the persistence of relationships established in childhood or adolescence among young rural people surveyed by what the gang brings them, and first of all to be able to be recognized as people in their own right. Exposed to the negative judgment of the labor market, keeping their distance from the paternal working-class model, which they are unable to reproduce, these young people deprived of the material autonomy founding adulthood find recognition among their “buddies”. Benoît Coquard’s book also deals with young rural people and also insists on the role of groups of friends in the possibility of acquiring a positive self-image and a good reputation, at least on the scale of the micro-society of friends. At the same time, it offers a new perspective on these popular, young and masculine inner circles.

The other popular rural youth

“Those who remain” in the declining countryside of the Grand-Est studied by Benoît Coquard are far from being limited to those who are forced by destitution to what the author calls an “autochthony of precariousness”, that is, the withdrawal into the local space forced by economic deprivation and the weakness of educational and professional resources. This book is about another rural working-class youth: the young people who are at the heart of the study have a job and live as a couple, their income allows them to access property or otherwise to reasonably conceive of it, but also to have two cars, leisure activities and to go on vacation. Far from being isolated, they belong to groups of friends that can have several dozen members, including craftsmen and small bosses, the social heterogeneity of friendly acquaintances precisely characterizing the sociability of these men aged 20 to 30.

More often workers than employees, these young people stay in deprived rural areas because they do not need to leave. Unlike other young people who have to change places to find a job or continue their studies after the baccalaureate, they can take advantage of the local job offer and be satisfied with it. If they stay, it is also because they value the traditional working-class model, which they largely reproduce: short studies, early access to employment and to a couple, a taste for manual work, a virile relationship with the world of material and human things. Unlike young people from the cities, they display an autonomy in relation to the norm of long studies.

However, not everyone experiences their local roots in the same way. Those who are less integrated into employment and groups of friends feel it as a constraint or a handicap. Those who are most stigmatized locally are often candidates for emigration. Conversely, good professional integration and integration into friendship networks leads to valuing local belonging and making it a positive principle of classification. In the system of norms of young people from these stable rural working classes, the CAP or the vocational baccalaureate, more easily transferable on the local job market than a BTS or another university degree, direct knowledge of local employers, the ability to be recognized for one’s hard work are worth more than a high degree. And these young people consider themselves better off than those who have gone to the city: life is cheaper in the countryside, it is possible to build a house and to access valued consumer goods, such as a motorbike for men or a horse for women. The big city is also akin to a scam: everything is overpriced, and it also lacks the trust that these young rural people from the stable working classes say they find locally. While young people in precarious situations and with a bad reputation value Paris as a way to escape gossip, they say they prefer the countryside, reflecting their dominant position in the local social space.

Friend groups now make membership

The survey then takes us into the social circles of these young people who set the local tone. Two results emerge. On the one hand, locality no longer determines belonging or value, these now depending very closely on close registration in groups of friends. On the other hand, the function of friendly sociability is not only to provide symbolic resources in terms of self-esteem, it is also to protect against competition on the job market.

Benoît Coquard highlights the processes that have “undone” local belonging as the capital of autochthony defined by Nicolas Renahy as “the set of resources provided by belonging to networks of localized relationships”. Of course, sociabilities always include a local element: football clubs and other places of male leisure (hunting societies, motocross groups, darts clubs, etc.) remain located in a specific town or village. But the members of these circles are no longer limited to the space of these towns or villages. And belonging to these places is no longer as much of a provider of assets. These developments have already been highlighted: they are due, Benoît Coquard reminds us, to the reduction and dispersion of public services as much as to the transformations of work, with the disappearance of the single industry that locally fixed the working group and formerly structured the social life of villages and towns. In a more original way, Benoît Coquard shows how the accession to property of young working-class households contributes to the devitalization of the local space, these households moving away from local centers because of the price of land, and how these same centers are all the more avoided because staying there now threatens to give them a bad reputation. The declining rurality of the Grand-Est is not the touristy and attractive rurality. A large number of bistros have closed and local festivals, such as balls, which attracted several hundred people 20 or 30 years ago, are now deserted. Similarly, the fragmentation of workplaces in the countryside has emptied the streets and squares. In these conditions, “hanging around” in villages and towns becomes an indicator of non-employment, non-mobility, non-morality.

Nowadays, it is at home and no longer at the café that men meet up with each other. This withdrawal into private space responds to the decline of places of collective living and to the risk of the bad reputation now attached to frequenting public spaces that are still accessible. It transforms the intimacy: the ways of being among friends, the words exchanged, the ways of drinking are redefined by the framework of the home serving as a new refuge for male sociability. Similarly, friendships appear socially much more selective: while at the café entry is free, the foyer is reserved for chosen friends. The “gang of friends” recruits according to affinity logics that are more detrimental than before to men who are unskilled or poorly qualified, who have little local seniority or who are only known by their surname as belonging to an unsavoury group.

The gang further reinforces inequalities between rural youth as its function has changed. It now aims to protect against competition for access to resources that have become rare, such as stable employment paid above the SMIC. Benoît Coquard calls the process deciding the choice of friends “friendly realism”: “real buddies” are temporarily available for those in the group, they are neither “personal” nor killjoys. They offer above all a kind of insurance in a context of economic insecurity. Integration into a group of friends allows you to defend your good reputation, but also to access information for a job, to work within small teams in “black” construction sites to improve your income at the end of the month. To be part of a group, moral qualities such as loyalty are therefore not enough, you must also be able to claim a useful difference: manual agility, technical know-how, contacts with small local bosses. Groups of friends thus operate in an informal way like local groups of artisans and traders: they provide social capital to young rural workers forced by the transformations of work to mobilize collectively to defend their employability. Belonging to a group of friends locally reinforces the personal and professional value of each person.

Exclusive solidarity

However, the groups formed by these young men are exclusive in more than one way. First, without being excluded from male social circles, women occupy a marginal position. They most often attend the impromptu and nevertheless frequently repeated “apéros” in silence. The male influence on the home is visible in the decoration of the living room decided by the spouses and dedicated to the best welcome of friends, as it is in the temporal organization of daily life, dependent on the visits of “buddies”. The strong influence of the group of friends is also observed on the nuptial and procreative calendar: several men have married or become fathers after one of the members of their group of friends took the plunge.

Women tolerate seeing their home given over to men’s amusements for fear of being seen as “the bore”, as one of them put it, that is, of having to take on the thankless role of asking for the festivities to stop. Furthermore, they are less connected to each other than men: they had to leave their childhood friends when they got together and the company of other women is not always pleasant for them, some of whom are their partner’s exes. They suffer more than men from the narrowness of the space for romantic relationships. They are also more materially dependent than men, their jobs being more often precarious and part-time.

Secondly, these men show solidarity within a radius limited to those closest to them. They exclude the most precarious and those with the worst reputations, going so far as to question their masculinity, like other young people who, like them, belong to the stable fractions of the rural working classes. Solidarity does not extend beyond the circle of “real friends”. On the one hand, these young people recognize the importance of uniting to better defend themselves, both against bosses and against the always-feared bad reputation. On the other hand, they are doomed to limit their alliances. Benoît Coquard identifies this closure in the expression “already, we” which frequently recurs in the comments of those surveyed. It testifies to a strength and a fragility. Strength of the mobilization of networks in the face of threats on the job market and the risk of friendly isolation in depopulated areas where collective life has shrunk. Fragility attested to by the distrust towards a union built more broadly on the basis of collective interests to be defended. It is therefore not surprising that the political offer identified by these young people as the closest to their vision of the world is that of the extreme right, which reserves solidarity only to the French according to this same logic of “already, us”. In the Grand-Est, the National Rally exceeds 40% in certain villages and towns.

Benoît Coquard’s book provides original and convincing keys to interpreting this vote, but also to rejecting any fatalism: these same campaigns in the Grand-Est have seen a strong mobilization of the Yellow Vests, notes the author, who, on the roundabouts, observed the coming together of men and women, young and old, precarious and stable. Solidarity in a small radius can therefore expand. But Benoît Coquard is too good a sociologist to predict in which direction.