three - Guilty victims: social exclusion in contemporary France

Summary

And now they have invented this little placebo word, ‘exclusion’.… As society becomes more and more insane, language is given the task of concealing this insanity within a respectable vocabulary. (Pennac, 1995, my translation)

Let's delve into this insanity instead of believing – or pretending to believe – that a placebo is the way to cure it.

A short story about an empty box

‘Exclusion’ is not a concept rooted in the social sciences, but an empty box given by the French state to the social sciences in the late 1980s as a subject to study. It was exported to Brussels at the same time, and acknowledged by the EU in 1994 (the poverty programme being renamed Programme Against Exclusion). It was then re-exported to all the European countries. The empty box has since been filled with a huge number of pages, treatises and pictures, in varying degrees academic, popular, original and valuable.

Why has France been the centre of this invention? Because this country is at the centre of Europe, a transitional space between northern and southern countries. It suffers both types of social problems identified in the other countries. First, the weakening of primary social ties (family, neighbourhood, and so on), which have remained stronger in southern countries. Second, the weakening of secondary social networks (unions, volunteer organisations, and so on), which are stronger in northern countries (Ion, 1996).

Does this mean that the empty box is not in fact empty? It has to be admitted that it has been filled with so many things that it is impossible to turn back. And back to what? Before ‘exclusion’, the word ‘poverty’ was also a very weak notion, filled with very different things to denote la question sociale – the social question. That is, the issue of misfortune, the inability to survive, the inability to be autonomous, and also the political consequences of inability, the political risk of social disorder.

If ‘exclusion’ is a modern word for a very old issue, what is new (and insane) about it? In the French version, exclusion means, in latent or explicit terms, that several turning points have occurred in the management and thinking of social policies:

• 1. It means that the welfare state is no longer understood by local and central government as a way of reducing inequalities and promoting individuals.