In the last quarter of the twentieth century, in Western societies, mass production was no longer viewed as the only way – perhaps not even as the principal way – to maximize profits and accumulate wealth. For capitalism, too, the extension beyond mass production proved to be a necessity imposed by the requirement of profit as the possibilities opened up by that form of production, initially considered virtually infinite, seemed to reach their limits. While the standard form was not abandoned, the extension of capitalism entailed financialization and – in the realm of the production and/or commercialization of objects – the redrawing of geopolitical maps. Certain “emerging” countries took over responsibility for mass production as the primary path to enrichment (the accumulation of wealth), while some countries that had been among the powerhouses of world capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries concentrated on finance and on developing high-tech goods in order to retain power – from a distance – over the manufacturing of the most common goods, insofar as these were products derived from technological innovations. However, the latter countries also turned toward a much more intensive commodification of domains that had long remained more or less on the margins of capitalism.
The geographic expansion of capitalism redistributed – toward countries in which the labor force was abundant and ill-organized and in which wages were therefore low – a number of standard production sites, although the conception and sales of the objects produced remained for the most part under the control of companies headquartered in Western countries, which were still at the heart of world capitalism. Among other effects, these transfers accelerated the deindustrialization of Western Europe. Deindustrialization in the first decade of the twenty-first century is a well-studied phenomenon affecting Western economies, France’s in particular.1 Industrial employment reached a peak in 1974, with more than 5,900,000 salaried workers. In the early 2010s, this sector lost a little more than 40 percent of its personnel. During the same period, what statisticians define more broadly as the “productive sphere” decreased from 48 percent of all jobs to 35 percent.2 This drop affected almost all areas: mining, metallurgy, machinery, ship-building, textiles, and so on, excluding only certain high-tech sectors such as aeronautics and the nuclear, pharmaceutical, and weapons industries.3 The sectors that included intermediate goods and common consumer products were particularly affected. Their decline, which began as early as the 1960s and 1970s in the textile and leather-working areas, went on to affect manufacturing as a whole.
By “deindustrialization,” however, we do not mean the shift to a “post-industrial” society that was often predicted by sociologists in the 1960s.4 That prophecy has not been fulfilled on a global scale. On the one hand, many domains that had long remained on the margins of the industrial world – such as small businesses, education, health, and personal services – are run today (even those that do not depend on the private sector but are under state control) according to management methods that originated in the major worldwide companies and are subject to accounting norms developed in industry, a development that has been facilitated by the spread of computer technologies. But, above all, European societies make more use than ever of products of industrial origin – mobile phones, for example, or personal computers – that now count among the most common household appliances. The commodities in circulation are more numerous than ever before, but they are manufactured elsewhere. During the same period, in France, internal consumption almost doubled in global added value, as did commercial services, while the industrial sector declined by nearly two-thirds. Among economists, the explanations for this process of deindustrialization have been subject to intense debate. It is hard to determine how much importance to attribute, on the one hand, to the outsourcing of certain functions that had long been assumed by companies but were not directly productive and, on the other hand, to the increase in labor productivity. But it is quite probable that the most important factor is the importation of objects manufactured in countries with cheaper labor (depending on the sector, from 9 percent to 80 percent of the manufactured items sold in France are imported)5 and in which the workforce is neither well organized nor well protected. This is especially the case in Far Eastern countries such as China and Vietnam, but also in post-communist Eastern European countries, for example in Slovenia, Romania, and Bulgaria.
Industrial delocalization has been inscribed in the history of Western capitalism during the last fifty years, and it undoubtedly constitutes one of the paths adopted for getting out of the crisis that capitalism underwent from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, roughly speaking. Often analyzed in terms of a decline in productivity and an excess in productive capacities with respect to the demand among those who can afford to buy, and the resulting steady erosion in profits from the production of manufactured goods,6 the delocalization movement also has political roots. For the big companies, it has been a way to escape from the fiscal constraints of nation-states, and it has also constituted a response to the mobilization of the European proletariat, particularly during the decade following the upheavals of May 1968. One of the consequences of this process, but perhaps also one of its unacknowledged objectives, has been to pacify or even suppress a working class that, in the 1960s and 1970s, had proved particularly combative, especially in France and Italy. Nevertheless, the delocalization movement could not have occurred at the same pace or to the same degree without the measures of financial deregulation adopted in the 1970s and 1980s, measures that favored transfers of capital from the old industrial countries toward the so-called emerging countries, thus stimulating the creation, in countries with low wage scales, of subcontracting firms that were largely dependent on orders from companies based in the major European or North American cities.
In France, the loss of industrial jobs chiefly affected areas in which industry was the main source of wealth, thus especially the northern and northeastern regions,7 precisely the areas in which, as numerous studies attempting to connect regional geography, economics, and political science have shown, the extreme right is achieving its best electoral results. Still, other regions where industry had played a less important role at the beginning of the period in question have become wealthy even though they have not escaped deindustrialization. This phenomenon is all the more troubling in that it is found in many rural regions that had already suffered from a weakening of the agricultural sector during the 1960s: the collapse of small farming had also led to the decline of small and medium-sized cities, leading to virtual desertification in some areas. But it is as though these regions had profited from the increased commodification of domains previously deemed marginal, as if they had reoriented themselves toward exploitation of new strata of resources: to their benefit, a number of objects, places, and even experiences that had for a long time played only a background role with respect to the primordial interests of capitalism were transformed into sources of potential wealth.
Economic geography does not allow a direct approach to this second movement because, in the absence of categories dedicated to the analysis of the process, it cannot turn to statistical data as solidly established as those for industry. Nevertheless, the field has a particularly relevant contribution to make to our research. As has been shown by Vincent Hecquet, who began with a statistical approach, and Laurent Davezies,8 who focused on geography, the wealth of the various regions in France does not depend exclusively on the degree of development of the productive sphere – far from it; thus “the new economic geography” can separate “the territories’ contribution to growth” from “the territories’ social development.”9 The decline of the industrial regions in fact contrasts sharply with the growing prosperity of regions situated especially along the coasts, in the west or in the south, where population growth has been pronounced and employment and wages have increased. These regions, with greater and greater commercial activity, are developing on a basis that, if we adopt the classification used by geographers, is not “productive” but “residential.”10 These same regions include a great many retirees (49 percent of all retirees in France) who are by and large better off financially than the average,11 large numbers of vacation homes (66 percent), intermittent or “shuttle” residents who work and live part of the time in large cities in France or elsewhere, and a number of persons who are unemployed and/or dependent on social services who find “odd jobs” in these areas, jobs roughly equivalent to work in private homes. According to Hecquet, Davezies, and others, these are “dynamic non-commercial territories” characterized by what they identify as “development without growth” based on “residential economies.” In these territories, which are among the most “dynamic” and most “attractive” in France (encompassing 44 percent of the population) and which offer “residential advantages,” tourism and the restaurant business are developing along with the maintenance of real-estate stock that had been in decline until recently. In the rural areas of these Atlantic and Mediterranean regions, the arrival of new residents has led to a significant increase in construction.12 Whereas the employment base is shrinking in the industrial regions, the development of these “residential” territories is creating many new jobs in domestic service, including manual laborers, but “in local sectors oriented toward local demands (sectors that are tied by and large to specific locales).”13
Movements of this sort have stimulated the coalescence and deployment of forms of valorization that, although they were not unknown and not negligible, had remained in an embryonic state, since they had not been sufficiently integrated into business practices. The enrichment economy is one component of a social world struggling with a form of capitalism that we characterize as integral, in the sense that various ways of creating value are integrated within it. In this social world, buying and selling mass-produced objects, and especially artifacts that incorporate a high level of technology, have continued to have primacy, for objects of this type account for the vast majority of commercial exchanges. But there are many indications attesting to the fact that commodification has also been oriented, more intensely and more visibly than before, in new directions. Unlike what was labeled “consumer society” and subjected to critique in the 1960s and 1970s, when buyers were often represented as “passive, manipulated, and impulsive,” one of the characteristics of integral capitalism is that it strongly stimulated and compensated commercial dexterity and had as its horizon the fact that everyone is not only a consumer but also a merchant. Following this perspective to its extreme limit, we shall deal thus with merchandise – commodities – without assuming that merchants need to be studied as a separate category.14
The extension of capitalism has been translated through the more pronounced and broadened role played by fashion effects, as attested, for example, by the importance attached to brands, and especially by what sociological literature often calls the culture of celebrity, whose social role has been examined in a number of studies starting in the 1960s,15 and whose economic dimension has recently received increased attention, facilitated in particular by the development of the Internet. Similarly, the commercial importance of cultural activities has taken on unprecedented salience, as exemplified for instance by the flurry of record-breaking prices at art auctions, a phenomenon that has been compared to the processes of financializing the economy. We ourselves, however, intend to stress the development of an economy of attention, which leads a growing number of persons to seek objects that are valued less for their direct utility than for their expressive charge and for the narratives that accompany their circulation. These things reveal themselves to the observer in what is specific about them – that is, in their differences as compared to other more or less similar things; in somewhat the same way, collectors accumulate and bring together objects that have a family resemblance to one another, as if to enjoy the tension between their similarity and their diversity.
As a provisional indication of a change in the attention paid to things, we can single out the importance of the practice of collecting over the last few decades. The growing diffusion and internalization of a type of attention to things associated with the ethos of collecting cannot be evaluated solely by taking into account the number of modest collections and collectors. The schemas on which the practice of collecting rests, often described in cognitive and affective terms, also have a particular economic dimension that is especially evident if we turn to the transactions to which the exceptional items sought by a well-to-do public give rise – transactions involving, for example, art objects or antiquities, luxury goods, houses associated with artists or architects, and so on. Now, objects of this type, and the arrangements that make it possible to attach value to them, are at the heart of an enrichment economy. In this regard, we may wonder whether collecting, less as a specific practice than as a generative form involving a certain way of being with things, might not constitute a sort of operator making it possible to establish a relationship between the various realms of commercial activities on which the enrichment economy is based.
For an initial characterization of these realms, we shall focus chiefly on the case of France, which constitutes a privileged vantage point from which to observe phenomena whose presence is attested in numerous places around the world. Like the industrial economy, the enrichment economy is very unevenly distributed in spatial terms: it occupies large territories in certain countries, but it can be reduced to the scale of a quarter of a big city in other places where intensive agriculture, industry, or service activities predominate. In this sense, the spatial distribution of the enrichment economy must be conceived in terms of density rather than in terms of national boundaries, for nations are apt to evolve; as we know, such a shift occurred in the case of large-scale industrial production, which started in a few counties of rural England and ended up conquering many regions of the world. Just as we might speak of an industrial basin, we can speak of an enrichment basin, a space that is often established by drawing on a concentration of religious buildings (such as the Romanesque or Gothic churches in many Italian cities or, in Japan, the temples in Kyoto).
The fields within which the enrichment economy is deployed are hard to describe synthetically, because their substantive diversity is not reduced by their inclusion in a broad category that would allow us to bring out their connections and designate them with a single term or formula. The semantic, legal, and statistical frameworks on which description of the economic and social world relies have been forged in order to give authorities a grip on an economy that is principally industrial. Thus at present there are no categorial arrangements or accounting frameworks that would allow us to determine with relative precision either the economic importance taken on by the nebulous phenomenon whose contours we are seeking to sketch here or the number of persons whose primary activity is connected with that phenomenon. This is the case in particular because the phenomenon brings together sectors (such as art and tourism), activities (as diverse as heading museums and manufacturing alligator handbags), statuses (such as short-term worker, stable wage-earner, government employee, or person of private means), and professions that are dispersed in statistical nomenclatures among sets constructed according to different logical principles, more in accordance with the old classifications of the industrial world.16
In addition, the existing frameworks deal with employment using two approaches whose results are difficult to put together, for some researchers look at individually declared professions, while others examine the economic sectors taken into account by national statistics; this makes it hard to analyze the indirect and induced effects of each type of activity and/or profession. As a result, we lack statistical data in support of generalizations that would allow us to highlight and follow the specific processes at the heart of this evolution. This is why, in contemporary economic literature, presentation of the economic reorientation toward the wealthy is distributed among various domains; these are apprehended according to diverse accounting forms that often rely on inconsistent definitions and categories, making an overall grasp quite difficult. The absence of an accounting framework and of categories unifying the enrichment economy is not accidental, nor does it stem from a delay in the systematic institutional registration of changes in reality; it will be understood, at the end of our analysis, as one of the conditions that make this economy profitable.
In order to indicate how the sphere of the enrichment economy is constituted so that readers will be able to follow us while relying on their ordinary sense of social reality, we must begin by turning to the objects themselves. A first indication will hold our attention: the growing visibility given to objects that are exchanged at high or very high prices in comparison with the prevailing norms. This visibility is most pronounced in major metropolitan centers, but it can also be found in a number of restored and protected sites or villages whose activity had been primarily industrial. It is prominent as well, for example, in media targeting an audience that, although fairly well-to-do, is not sufficiently wealthy, on average, to acquire many of the things that are on display not only in advertisements but also in the content presented.
In France and elsewhere, the principal organs of the daily or weekly press – whose readership is increasingly limited – offer supplements on the same themes so as to draw funds from the luxury industry that will allow at least some of these economically threatened publications to continue to exist. Among these, we find How to Spend It, put out in London by the Financial Times; T Magazine of the New York Times; and the weekly M Le magazine of the French newspaper of record Le Monde. These leisure-oriented magazines are aimed at a public with fuzzy contours but whose members, finding themselves mirrored in the magazines’ pages, can see themselves appreciatively as both cultivated and wealthy. Airline magazines are another case in point: for example, Air France Magazine, published by Gallimard, is offered to the airline’s clients free of charge. Publications like these have the advantage, for our purposes, of displaying advertisements for luxury items (watches, perfumes, clothing, real estate, upscale hotels, and the like) in close proximity to articles discussing trendy, vintage, or “design” objects, sites whose ancestral and historical values are highlighted, works of art, exhibits, and artists, and (especially in France) high-level gastronomy construed as part of the country’s “non-material heritage.” In these magazines, the various topics presented in ads and articles are treated without distinction, as if they were inseparable components of one and the same universe.
These media present objects chosen not so much for their usefulness or their sturdiness, as would be the case for common industrial items, as for their intrinsic preciousness, or simply for their difference, and also, inevitably, for their price. These objects are often associated with national or regional markers of identity that are supposed to guarantee their authenticity (even if their manufacture can be discreetly outsourced, as happens with ordinary objects, to countries with low wages). The fascination that these objects are meant to exercise is thought to depend on a sort of aura that surrounds them, conferring on them a touch of exceptionality that destines them to be appreciated by an elite. The objects may be antiques or items produced by luxury firms; they are often presented as handmade. They are linked to the fashion sector in many instances (watches, jewelry, handbags, and clothing), but they also may be outstanding wines or food items produced in identified and protected terroirs or contemporary artworks presented in galleries, at art fairs, or at auctions that attract attention through their cultural and economic dimensions alike.17
In these presentations, increasing importance is attributed not only to the objects themselves but also to the universes in which the objects are conceived and in which they circulate – and above all to the human beings surrounding them, whether these be “creators,” such as designers, dressmakers, cooks, antique dealers, hairdressers, collectors, exhibit organizers, and so on, or “personalities,” noteworthy in themselves, who associate their names and images with these exceptional items (this is the case for example with the “inspirers” of haute couture or perfumes). All of these “actors” behind “fashion, culture, and taste” are mentioned very frequently and depicted in portraits in which they rub shoulders with artists in the classic sense of the term, such as painters or sculptors. Attention is thus drawn directly toward a relatively heteroclite set of objects treated as though they occupied the same plane (a “plane of immanence,” as Deleuze might say): these can be items of apparel, furniture, decorative objects, vintage items, or works of ancient or contemporary art.
The kind of profound mutation at issue here is embodied in a single building in Turin. A big Fiat factory opened in the Lingotto district there in 1922; it closed in 1982. Since then, the building has been converted into galleries featuring shops, hotels, restaurants, and a conference center. As the high point of what was one of the emblematic sites in the world of labor, the Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli was inaugurated in 2002, designed by the star Italian architect Renzo Piano, who already had many museums to his credit, including the Pompidou Center in Paris. In the white raised gallery of the Pinacoteca, viewers now crowd around to admire works from the collection of paintings of a former leader of Italy. How have we come from mass production of standard automobiles and the heated workers’ struggles associated with the site to the silent and respectful contemplation of works of art acquired by the CEO?
The luxury industry lies at the heart of this nebulous phenomenon. In France, organized around a very dynamic professional association (the Comité Colbert), the industry experienced particularly strong growth in the early 2000s, especially in exports, with increases ranging from 6 percent to 20 percent per year depending on the product.18 Worldwide exports of high-end consumer goods virtually doubled between 2000 and 2011; threequarters of these originated in Western Europe, especially in France and Italy (where clothing, leather goods, and shoes account for at least one-third of high-end exports). Jewelry and fine watches came especially from Switzerland, while luxury automobiles were sold under German brand names (they won 19 percent to 29 percent of market share during the 2000s before the drop in luxury auto sales after the 2008 financial crisis). France, the leader in this sector, held 11.2 percent of the world market in luxury goods (with an annual growth rate of 9.8 percent).19 These exports are oriented chiefly toward the developed countries (70 percent), which include the highest proportion of wealthy individuals, but the emergent countries (China in particular) are also important markets where consumption has greatly increased, from 21 percent in 2000 to 39 percent in 2011.20 Along with the Gulf states, the emergent countries are now the chief importers.21
These luxury products include, among others, great wines and spirits or brand-name clothing,22 perfumes, and cosmetics. Increasingly, some of these goods are produced in part offshore, in countries with cheap labor, but they are generally assembled and labeled in the country from which they purport to come;23 the gap between the country of manufacture and the country of labeling and display, generally kept secret so as to avoid devaluing the exceptional object and allowing it to be categorized as just another ordinary product, is marked at most by the distinction between “made in” and “made by” or “designed in.”24 These “made in X” goods can then be sold under a brand name whose marketing emphasizes a national identity; this gives them added value and also often plays on the supposedly artisanal, “old-style” character of their manufacture, which is intended to single them out and support their claim to exceptionality. But in a period during which outsourcing and its role in increased domestic unemployment have been subject to numerous critiques, the label “made in France” can also invoke “ethical commitment and social responsibility on the part of the luxury firms,”25 and these qualities too can boost the value added to the product.
The luxury industry also supports the contemporary art market, privileging connections between famous artists and brand-name items treated as “one of a kind” handmade objects (Hermès handbags, for instance, or Vuitton luggage). The history of the Kering group (which includes such brands as Gucci, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, and Alexander McQueen) offers a good example of the way one firm has flourished since the 2000s by relinquishing the industrial products to which it had been devoted earlier in favor of embracing the luxury sector.26 Displacement effects of this sort have repercussions even in elite French graduate schools such as HEC (an international business school) or Sciences Po (a research university specializing in political science), many of whose graduates gravitate toward management or marketing and incorporate training in contemporary art into their programs. The director of one of these schools justifies its success by noting that “the students see very clearly that luxury brands are associated with contemporary art, that people such as Pinault or Arnault invest in artworks, that the major executives of the period are philanthropists. Now, those brands are their future employers.”27
In this high-end universe, “gastronomic luxury” is doing exceptionally well: according to the geographer Vincent Marcilhac, this domain “represents several hundred thousand jobs and several tens of billions of euros in profits. It constitutes one of France’s strong points on the level of commercial profits, and it plays an important role in France’s image or ‘brand’ on the international level.”28 From the last third of the nineteenth century to roughly the middle of the twentieth, statements by producers’ organizations or public authorities concerning food products were oriented mainly toward homogenizing and certifying them, while at the same time combating fraud through a series of measures addressing issues of hygiene and food safety (especially regarding milk and wine, two products about which doctors had particularly strong health and safety concerns).29 Over the last few decades, however, the search for improvement in product quality has taken a new tack, placing more and more emphasis on “authenticity.”30 As part of this change, the meaning of the term “quality” has shifted: initially applied to products deemed stable, homogeneous, and safe – and whose improvement depended on the application of norms that implied standardization or even industrialization, thus implying lower prices as well – the term has come to designate foods deemed exceptional, unquestionably non-standard, and significantly more expensive.
This tendency is particularly evident in the case of wine, which has been studied in detail by Marie-France Garcia-Parpet. The southern and southwestern regions of France in particular have seen a shift away from massive production, in “wine factories,” of inexpensive red table wine destined for domestic consumption by a broad public; instead, production began to be focused on “original” products with “character,” associated with a high level of oenological culture and destined for export. This transformation has proceeded in parallel with the highlighting of terroirs – zones whose soil is defined not only by specific mineral properties and climatic conditions but also by reactivated or invented traditions (such as the “Confrérie de Chinon”), by the creation of labels, and by the use of historical references to famous people who purportedly lived in proximity to certain vineyards (such as Rabelais for the wines of the Loire Valley), and also by administrative measures intended to limit and regulate production.31 One result of these maneuvers has clearly been to create effects of scarcity that can be invoked to justify price increases.
More generally, the “production of local cultural singularities” has made it possible to constitute “monopoly revenues”;32 the process of localization around terroirs, which we have seen in relation to wines, has been imitated for a large number of other products of more or less local origins, such as truffles, certain mushrooms (cèpes), beef (from Aubrac), or fowl (capons or pullets from Bresse), but also for products that are made from imported raw materials (such as chocolate) but that supposedly benefit from a form of processing associated with a local tradition. The deep roots of tradition are called upon in particular in response to economic or moral critiques, as in the case of foie gras, viewed as a national emblem – a phenomenon that Michaela DeSoucey has called “gastronationalism.”33 This attribution of local roots to luxury food items, dispersed over a multiplicity of terroirs each of which is presumed to present special characteristics unlike any other, has accompanied a growing economic concentration in the sector of luxury foods, a sector partly absorbed by the broader French luxury industry. This is attested, for example, by the fusion of the Moët Hennessy group with the Louis Vuitton group (LVMH), or by François Pinault’s purchase of Château Latour in 1993 and Bernard Arnault’s acquisition (for LVMH) of Château d’Yquem in 1998 and then of Château Cheval Blanc in 1999. International groups with headquarters in other countries have acquired similarly prestigious properties; Garcia-Parpet highlights “an increasing share of large groups (banks, insurance companies, management and finance companies, and so on) for which investments in French luxury foods constitute a financial investment first and foremost.”34 The development of luxury foods is thus both a factor in the expansion of world capitalism and a “tool of territorial development,” because it supports local agricultural activity. It also plays a major role in showcasing two other domains that we shall now examine: tourism, increasingly focused on food, wine, and ecological concerns,35 and heritage creation, which profits from the historical enrichment of sites, terroirs, and cities associated with gastronomic traditions.
A key feature of the luxury industry is its reliance on brands. Brands can be purchased by groups as non-material agents for the prestige they carry, even in cases where their products do not bring in profits and have to be offset by other products from the same group, or, in cases where the brands belong to businesses that have ceased all activity, their names can be purchased and put back into circulation in association with a narrative about the past. The prestige of a brand name is enhanced by its identification with a country such as Italy or France, political entities that are themselves treated as brands; their worth depends in a circular fashion on the exceptional items they produce and on the “art of living” they purportedly exemplify. The idea of building the image of a country as one would do for a commercial brand is relatively recent,36 having developed in parallel with the enrichment economy. The national image may find support in any statement (or “stereotype”) that is generally associated positively with the country being promoted. In the case of France, the historical and heritage dimensions associated with its monuments, landscapes, arts, foods, and perfumes can all be foregrounded (for example Versailles, Camembert, Veuve Clicquot, Chanel no. 5, Saint Laurent). But this insistence on the past has to be associated with the idea of creation and thus with “surprise and life,” so it won’t be “perceived as conservative.”37
This introjection of the past into the present – positing a sort of equivalence between a past considered from the vantage point of the present and a present considered from the vantage point of the future (that is, already viewed as past) – is the operation that traces the outline of “eternal France.”38 The promotion of the brand “France” presupposes close collaboration between “public authorities” and commercial brands – that is, between “the corporate competence of the State” and the businesses or groups that have an international base. This collaboration is manifested, for example, through operations such as “Christian Lacroix providing furnishings for TGV [high-speed train] lines” or “exporting the Louvre to Abu Dhabi,” in which the creation of the building was entrusted to the architect Jean Nouvel, who was charged with “updating our heritage.” As for the “targets,” they include above all “opinion leaders, business circles, experts in specific sectors, and journalists,” not to mention the “public at large” and especially (for “not all publics are equal”) “graduates of major institutions of higher education in the leading countries.”39 One of the principal aims of those who promote the “France” brand is to “influence the rankings” so as to maintain France’s place in “international comparisons,” in keeping with the requirements that stem from the generalization of benchmarking.40
In addition to interest in exceptional items, a second factor in the creation of wealth is currently growing in importance. This factor is linked to various processes that can be called processes of heritage creation.41 While they affect real estate in particular, they can also be extended to other types of goods. Examples can be found in apartments situated in the historical center of a large city, in residences located close to monuments or sites viewed as exceptional (“the loveliest villages in France”), or in housing near zones categorized as “parks” that have been subjected to “protective” measures after an administrative process of selection. Such measures typically require that they be maintained “as before” – often after the location in question has been subjected to an attempt to reconstitute a more or less fictional past. This process has a significant economic impact, since wherever it occurs it leads to major price increases in the associated lands and property, and it has important repercussions for tourism as well. For example, in the historic districts of major cities one now finds real-estate agencies advertising themselves as specialists in “collectable properties.”
A concomitant phenomenon is what might be called made-to-order heritage creation. The patrimonial effect is triggered in this case when new establishments such as museums or cultural centers are created in a given locale or when local events (festivals, commemorations, and so on) are inaugurated. In addition, there are many cases in which some part of the built environment previously deemed lacking in interest and destined to be razed – often a former site of industrial production – is rehabilitated in view of housing artistic or cultural activities that are apt to give rise to “events” or “happenings.” Heritage creation, whether made to order or not, can be achieved without regard to the venerability of the site or the building; indeed, these may have been entirely reconstructed, reconfigured, or even newly created, for heritage creation is based primarily on a narrative that inscribes a place within a genealogy.
One example of direct heritage creation, now classic and widely imitated, is that of Bilbao, an industrial city in decline whose luster has been restored by the addition of a Guggenheim museum designed by Frank Gehry. This operation was part of a broader project undertaken in the late 1980s at the initiative of the Guggenheim board in New York: its aim was to set up a “global museum” housed at various sites, chiefly in order to extend and diversify the existing exhibit spaces, which the acquisition of new collections had rendered inadequate. The plan included the establishment of a vast museum devoted to conceptual and minimalist art in North Adams, a small Massachusetts industrial town in decline. But that project ran up against the tension between the local authorities’ insistence on highlighting local identity and honoring the workers in the former factory and the Guggenheim’s wish to promote worldwide art.42 Many similar cases can be found in France: for example, the efforts made by the authorities in Nantes to enhance the image of the city by reorienting its activities toward art and culture. Among other measures, the former site of the LU cookie factory has been transformed into a national theater, the Lieu Unique (Unique Place); an “artistic itinerary” has been set up along the Loire estuary, including a series of “installations” created by well-known artists; “events” such as exhibits or festivals have proliferated; and the establishment of luxury shops has been encouraged.43 An example resembling that of Bilbao even more closely is the Luma Foundation in Arles, which called upon the same famous architect, Frank Gehry, to build a museum on the site of former train repair workshops (closed in 1984) for the purpose of developing increased tourism.
In more general terms, heritage creation has become a technique of “territorial development,” with its experts in “local development strategies” who know how to “reveal” the “territorial agents” and to highlight their hidden “potential.” The instrument of choice is “relaunching,” which transforms a dormant legacy into an active heritage by stimulating the capacity of the actors to “appropriate history for themselves, even if that means transforming it.” The case of chestnuts in the Cévennes, once associated with poverty, is a good example: producers have taken steps to orient their product toward gastronomy and to protect the crop legally by a Protected Designation of Origin (Appellation d’origine contrôlée). These “heirs of history” use history with the goal of adding value to the goods and services they provide, so as to “specify” and to “differentiate products and services with respect to their competitors.” This systematic exploitation of the past via “relaunching” is what French experts call “patrimonial innovation.”44 This form of innovation often relies, as we have seen in the case of vineyards, on the reactivation of an ancestral figure whose ties with the site being highlighted may be more or less tenuous; the choice of a central figure and the way he or she is (re)invented play a major role in the success of the business, as Stéphane Gerson has shown in the case of Salon-de-Provence. This small city, a residential suburb of the industrial zone of Fos-sur-Mer, had little to attract tourists; owing to the decline of the petrochemical industry, it sought to give itself new luster, starting around 1975, by reactivating the only historical figure associated with its past: Nostradamus. The effort ultimately failed, quite probably because the local “great man”45 has never been the glorified subject – whether hero or villain – of a work of art or fiction that could have attracted interest – unlike Count Dracula, for example, whose presumed castle in the Carpathian Mountains draws visitors thanks to Bram Stoker’s novel and its numerous televised and film versions (such as Roman Polanski’s Dance of the Vampires).
The processes of heritage creation have affected not only ancient cities and buildings deemed historical, moreover, but also rural areas, especially those in which the passage from an economy of agricultural production toward a residential economy has been most pronounced and most advanced.46 These processes have involved villages, sites, and even entire regions. In these cases, things from the past, often falling into ruin, are – on the same basis as collectable objects – selected, rehabilitated, and associated with historical narratives designed to orient their interpretation and enhance their value. In contrast, unlike mobile objects, these entities cannot be moved; thus associating them with other entities and inserting them in a series can be achieved only at a distance, by getting them added – often with the support of a public organization – to a list modeled on UNESCO’s repertory of worldwide heritage sites.47 By means of such lists, these entities can be represented as equivalent or in a hierarchical relation to one another (for example through attribution of Michelin-type stars). The listings, which are reversible, are generally associated with commitments – especially financial – on the part of the local authorities responsible for preserving the entities in question. This type of heritage creation has given new life to regions – in France, especially mountainous ones – threatened with depopulation beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, owing to the industrialization of European agriculture that had marked the postwar decades and the resultant decline in small family farms. Such rural regions were in a position to benefit from a sort of aesthetic heritage because their “traditional” character and their geographic specificities were already anchored in the minds of a broad public, having been highlighted by writers, landscape painters, and local scholars during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.48 It is in these regions in particular that the remaining farmers have been encouraged to take part in the “conversion of agricultural space to landscape,” a process in which the regional parks were a driving force. Under way since the mid-1980s, this trend benefited from the support of European institutions; justified above all by ecological considerations, it has been coordinated in France by a government agency devoted to “nature and landscape” under the auspices of the ministry responsible for environmental issues. It has also provided a way of facing up to the problem posed by European agricultural surpluses and, especially, a way of stimulating the attractiveness of rural areas, sought for their qualities as landscapes and increasingly for their value from a residential standpoint. The Landscape Law of 1993 extended to all such spaces a “landscape-oriented attention” that had previously been concentrated on exceptional sites. Animal breeders and farmers have thus found themselves involved in agro-environmental measures and encouraged to contribute to the “common good” by supplying an “environmental service” that turns them, sometimes against their will, into landscapers.49
A third factor in the creation of wealth is tourism, especially upscale tourism; unfortunately, the available statistical studies do not make it easy to circumscribe this sector in depth.50 Tourism has undergone considerable development over the last several decades. In 2012, international tourism (counted in terms of the number of arrivals) reached the figure of 1,035 million (compared to 25 million in 1950, 278 million in 1980, and 528 million in 1995),51 and it has more than doubled during the last twenty years.52 More than half the tourist flow is concentrated in Europe, and France remains the premier destination worldwide: 25 million foreign tourists arrived in 2015,53 and the yearly total is expected to reach 100 million between now and 2030.54 This amounts to approximately 1.3 billion nights (a night is the unit of measure for tourism). On average, tourists in France spent 80 euros a day in 2005; thus “tourist expenditure is equivalent to the income of 8 million average French citizens.” “Commercial net revenues from tourism came to some 90 billion euros in 2005 … roughly equivalent to the net revenues in the automobile and aeronautics industries.”55 Tourism represented 7.4 percent of France’s gross domestic product in 2013;56 it employed around 1.3 million people directly and generated a million supplementary jobs indirectly.57 The development of national and especially international tourism has been facilitated by a reduction in transportation costs, an increase in the absolute number of wealthy individuals, especially in the so-called emerging countries58 (associated with an increase in inequalities), and financing that associates European and local support with international enterprises, especially in the hotel and transportation sectors.59
Tourism has stimulated the luxury industry, and specialists in tourism marketing in France emphasize the interactions between tourism and luxury, considering that “tourism creates an affinity for France, and more generally toward all of its products, everything that can be labeled ‘made in France,’” along with an affinity for “luxury,” “the great pillar of the image of our country in the world,” a pillar that underlies one of the principal motives for visits by foreign tourists: the French art de vivre, the “art of living” well. Tourism is thus viewed as a “lever for exportations that occur on French territory.”60 Most luxury products are identified with the country that is presumed to be the one in which they have been conceived and manufactured. Thus they are frequently purchased at tourist destination sites (as if that made them more “authentic”), or in airports, often as gifts, or, when they are bought in their countries of origin, in “exotic” shops frequented chiefly by tourists. Thus highlighting the national culture, promoting luxury products, and exploiting the tourist business go hand in hand; this is attested, for example, by the transformation of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Fifty years ago, this district in the heart of Paris embodied an intellectual Bohemia; now it is a high point of international luxury that exploits the history of this Bohemia and the “existentialism” with which it has been associated.
The increase in the number of tourists, both French and foreign, has played an important role in exacerbating regional inequalities in development. Indeed, outside of Paris, only the Côte d’Azur and Alps regions are widely known internationally and meet the expectations of a wealthy clientele, welcoming them in palatial lodgings that are lacking in the surrounding areas. The regions in which a “residential economy” has developed have experienced growth in the number of jobs available (often in the domestic service sector), stimulated by population increases in the territory. And this latter growth has benefited not only from increased numbers of second homes but also from increased tourism, involving both people just passing through and those whose presence is intermittent but regular. By contrast, certain other areas have more difficulty attracting tourists – areas that are saddled with former or still active industrial spaces, for instance – because they do not fit the description of regions that public authorities seek to promote.
Tourism is the point of intersection among the various domains we have mentioned. Favorable to the increase in luxury commerce, the expansion of tourism during the last twenty years has also been one of the most important factors in heritage creation in France. High-end tourism benefits from the transformation of an ever-increasing number of buildings into historical monuments and of spaces into “sites of memory.” This transformation, which could be called “staging for tourism,” takes place through a shift from “raw” places to places endowed with a story, one that is usually developed by professional historians and that offers visitors an “experience”61 as soon as it is staged; digital technologies help to produce an “augmented reality.” The effectiveness of these stories makes it possible to attract tourists to spaces that may not be intrinsically very attractive, not well endowed with either monuments or sunshine, but that are, for example, sites of former battlegrounds, especially those from the First World War.
In this spirit, many studies in the field of tourist management seek to highlight the “cultural assets” of a country such as France, where tourist facilities are expensive, so as to distinguish their own country from less expensive ones: not only those of the southern hemisphere, which are reputed, according to this marketing logic, to have “nothing to offer but sea and sun,” but also those of Southern Europe, which can boast of both cultural offerings and an attractive climate.62 To “mass tourism,” which has undergone a process of standardization inspired by industrial norms, marketing agencies thus contrast “cultural tourism,” associated with the definition of “world heritage,” whose conception and promotion have benefited from the interest of major international organizations – for example, UNESCO, the World Tourism Organization, and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) – and which has been associated with the definition of “world heritage.”63 Constructed in opposition to “mass tourism,” which is denigrated on the basis of its indifference to “cultural” properties and the fact that, given a favorable climate, its touristic offerings can be realized almost anywhere provided sufficient investments are made, “cultural tourism” is supposed to add to the features generally associated with tourism – comfort, availability, and security – personal involvement and experience, a sense of adventure, surprises, unexpected encounters, and so on, characteristics that have nourished the imagery of “travel” since the Romantic era.64 Initially organized around the “cult” of “historical monuments,” seen as concentrations of culture, the notion of cultural tourism has been extended to a much broader range of places by the use of the term “culture” in a sense close to the one it has in ethnology and folklore studies. According to that logic, attested by the Cultural Tourism Charter developed by ICOMOS in 1999 (replacing the 1976 charter focused on monumentality), cultural tourism is linked to an expansive definition of patrimony, so that it now includes “all aspects considered proper to a society and an environment,” with a stress on the themes of diversity (including biodiversity) and identity.65
The marketing of cultural tourism has closely followed this institutional turn, and it is no longer oriented exclusively toward officially recognized sites or “monuments”; while these have the advantage of making it less possible to substitute other products for those on offer and thus limiting the competition, they are relatively few in number. Tourist agencies have definitively expanded the term “culture.” Thus, in a brochure published by the Malaga Chamber of Commerce designed to promote cultural tourism in the Mediterranean region, we find this definition: “Cultural tourism means traveling to places that are different from one’s usual residence, motivated by the desire to know, understand, and study other cultures: a voyage rich in experiences through cultural activities.”66 In the case of international tourism, one of the goals of cultural tourism is to increase the proportion of profits that go to service providers from the destination country in relation to the proportion destined for the companies – generally based in the country of origin – that organize the trip or the visit. While a tourist staying in a vacation camp or traveling entirely under the auspices of an international tourism company contributes little to the destination country, tourists seeking “authentic” cultural experiences must move about in a more autonomous fashion, so that their expenses will be distributed throughout the territory they visit.
Seen in this context, ordinary objects can take on value and arouse interest among tourists, all the more so if their “traditional” production is on display during visits to workshops or businesses; this then becomes “craft tourism,” promoted in France by the Association pour la visite d’entreprise (Association for Visits to Businesses).67 This process of valorization is appropriated more and more often by community members who adopt for themselves the perspective initially brought to bear on them by external observers and make an effort to shape their everyday practices and objects accordingly. They may revert to making things in the ancestral manner, both to affirm a reconstructed identity68 and to sell their products to tourists; the latter, in search of authenticity and exoticism, are looking for objects that can be brought home and added to collections.69 Hence the trend in lesser-known or quite unexpected places toward “greeters,” who offer tourists individualized visits in which the greeters’ personal stories and the community’s history are merged.
Responding to the demand for security is a central concern for cultural tourism, for security is also a primordial economic requirement. The task has two principal aspects. The first, a more or less conventional aspect, consists in keeping the most heavily visited places free of deviants deemed potentially dangerous, unpleasant, or even morally disturbing – such figures as pickpockets and beggars, Roma, mentally ill persons, itinerants, drug addicts, or alcoholics. But, beyond that, more generally, places celebrated for their beauty, charm, or traditional character must keep at a distance everyone who might affect their quality, which is associated with a certain “lifestyle” and a certain “know-how”: poor foreigners need to be excluded, for example, and even the poor in general, at least when they are not “typical” of the locality. But security questions affect the workings of a tourist economy even more urgently when a country is threatened by terrorist acts such as those that occurred in London in 2005 and in Paris in 2015, in January and again in November.70 Such acts, as their name indicates, aim to leave people feeling terror-stricken and shell-shocked.71 And few groups are as susceptible to fear as tourists, on the one hand because they travel to other countries precisely in search of calm, luxury, sensuality, and even a peace that they do not always find in their home countries, and on the other hand because, without social ties in the country they are visiting, they are easily disoriented and led astray.
Another indicator that an economic sphere of enrichment is taking shape is the development of a particular domain that involves numerous activities generally brought together under the term “cultural.” These include the performing arts and artistic or graphic pursuits, but also publishing, ancient artifacts, museums, and organized special events, festivals, and salons. The fact that these cultural domains are in constant interaction with those we have just identified (luxury, heritage, tourism) helps make them hard to circumscribe. As we have seen, culture in the broad sense is understood as a major force for attracting tourists; at the same time, many cultural activities and sites are economically dependent on tourism. The extension of heritage creation in France is concentrated around sites and monuments that belong to the regional or national patrimony; their constitution and maintenance count as cultural activities. In addition, films and television series whose financing is partly conditioned on their localization in France promote an image of sites such as castles and landscapes associated with the most touristic regions.72 During the last twenty years, too, we have witnessed a rapid and significant growth in the connections – especially the financial ties – that unite the vast and fuzzy domain of culture with that of the luxury economy. Companies specializing in fashion and fashion accessories – those that make watches, jewelry, perfume, and so on, but also the hotel and restaurant industries – contribute considerably to highlighting a territory in view of attracting tourists, and these same companies, especially the major producers of luxury goods, play a growing role in financing cultural and artistic activities, injecting capital that compensates for the relative decrease in state funding and other public support. In exchange, these businesses benefit from an aesthetic authority that increases the prestige of their brands and augments the advantageous profit margins generated by the sale of their products.
Despite the blurring of boundaries and the absence of focused statistical studies, since the activities and professions considered as the heart of the vast and fuzzy domain of culture are overseen in France by an ad hoc government ministry, there are accounting frameworks that allow us to follow the most stabilized aspects of this domain and, in particular, its evolution over the last twenty years. As it happens, the statistics produced by this ministry show a significant increase in the economic role of culture in the global economy and in the number of persons employed in the cultural domain. And this is the case even though these studies unquestionably fail to take into account the entire set of activities that we have tried to characterize in a provisional way; in addition, the studies do not always focus on the same types of activity.73 Thus one study carried out at the request of the Ministry of Culture and Communication,74 designed to measure the added value of the entire cultural sphere in 2011, estimated it to be 57.8 billion euros, or 3.2 percent of overall added value in France – as much as the agricultural sphere when agrobusiness is included (and the amount rose to 44 billion euros in 2013, according to another source from the same ministry).75 And these figures do not take indirect economic benefits into account – for example, the benefits that accrue when cultural activities incite increased tourism. In terms of value added between 1995 and 2013, the growth in cultural activities was particularly significant in audiovisual productions, performing arts, visual arts, and heritage creation; growth in these sectors doubled or even tripled.
The domain of culture in France is divided between a commercial sector, which involves audiovisual productions in particular76 (39.4 percent of the value added in the production of cultural commodities in 2013), and a smaller non-commercial sector, under the aegis of central or regional government agencies; the role of this sector is especially pronounced in the performing arts and heritage sites (respectively 42.6 percent and 41.3 percent of the value added in non-commodity cultural products the same year).77 The non-commodity share in cultural activities could not have developed to such an extent without the support of the French government and, above all, of regional authorities. On the whole, this support remains at a high level, despite a certain stability or even a slight decrease in spending that reflects an effort to limit or lower public spending in general, especially since the 2008 economic crisis. In communes78 with more than 10,000 inhabitants, cultural expenses per inhabitant more than doubled between the early 1980s and the 2000s (reaching 8 percent of the budget), with an average increase of 1.7 percent per year, devoted mainly to investment. The commitment to culture was much larger in volume (about three times higher) in cities with populations of over 100,000, where cultural expenses accounted for nearly 10 percent of their budgets. Financial support came from a complex network of subsidies from overlapping territorial authorities (regions, departments, communes, groups of communes). Spending on culture in France was directed, in decreasing order, to local cultural activities, libraries, musical expression, museums,79 theater, and the maintenance of heritage sites. At the departmental level, spending on culture was particularly high in zones marked by the type of development geographers call “residential” along the western seaboard and in the southern region, to the detriment of the northern and northeastern industrial zones.80
The growth in the cultural sectors tracked by the Ministry of Culture and Communication is even more impressive if we consider it in terms of employment. According to the sources cited above, this sector employs around 700,000 people, or roughly 2.5 percent of the active workforce, and it has seen growth of more than 50 percent since the early 1990s (as contrasted with 16 percent for the workforce overall). This growth has been particularly apparent in the professions associated with theater and the other performing arts, stimulated by recent legislation governing intermittent employment (+95 percent), but it is also perceptible in the literary professions (+58 percent) and in the visual and graphic arts (+44 percent). In this last category, the increase in the number of people employed (+123 percent) has been very pronounced in the plastic arts, fashion, and the decorative arts (graphic artists, stylists, designers). But it is also noteworthy for painters (+21 percent) and photographers (+20 percent). In addition, the people employed in the various cultural sectors share basic characteristics that distinguish them clearly from the overall workforce averages. They are younger (47 percent are under forty, as compared with an overall average age of forty-four); they are more often employed in large cities, more often born in other European countries (an effect no doubt related in particular to the role of translators in the literary professions), and are generally from a much higher social class (49 percent have a father from a middle-class background). While these cultural professions employ increasing numbers of women (the proportion rose from 39 percent in the early 1990s to 43 percent in 2011), men remain dominant, especially in the fields of art and architecture, and the proportion of women is lower than in the workforce overall, where it has reached 48 percent. But it is especially in terms of educational level that the difference between people employed in cultural fields and the overall workforce, already considerable at the beginning of the period, has increased since 1991. In 2011, 44 percent of the employees in cultural fields had at least three years of post-baccalaureate education. Highest in the literary professions (66 percent), this quite elevated educational level is also often found in people working in professions to which access has long been less constrained in France by diploma requirements, for example actors (31 percent) and plastic artists (39 percent). Finally, we must point out one other defining characteristic of people working in the cultural realm, a characteristic having to do with their employment status. Nearly 30 percent have the status of independent (freelance) workers, triple the percentage of freelance workers in other fields, and even when workers in the cultural sector are salaried employees their positions are often precarious: 30 percent have short-term contracts – twice as many as the workforce average – and 26 percent work part-time, often less than half-time, and often with quite irregular work hours.81
In addition, the development of culture, unlike that of luxury and upscale goods, is not motivated primarily by export, because in most instances cultural commodities are not easily moved; they have to be consumed on site, as it were. This holds true of course for heritage sites, which cannot be moved, but also for a large number of activities – for example, the performing arts, art exhibits, and even literary activities – whose displacement is expensive in various respects, from transportation costs to the costs of insurance or translation. The most economical way to “export” such activities is therefore to import tourists.
The development of the various cultural domains has been driven by a significant increase in internal demand, a consequence of the considerable increase in the participants’ educational level over the last four decades. Between 1991 and 2011, the proportion of the workforce with degrees representing three years of post-baccalaureate study has doubled (to 20 percent). The proportion of household expenses devoted to cultural goods and services (not including the purchase of equipment such as computers) reached 2.5 percent of total household consumption in 2007, which corresponds to an increase of 23.3 percent over cultural spending in 2000; this is especially apparent in the area of theater and the other performing arts.82 Similarly, a study undertaken by Olivier Donnat on “French cultural practices” during the 1990s shows a slight but regular increase in attendance at shows and in visits to museums, historical monuments, and libraries, going from 4 percent for holders of a technical certificate (CAP) to 41 percent for holders of more advanced degrees. The proportion of individuals who had visited a heritage site during the past twelve months was 37 percent for people with higher education and 20 percent for those with a CAP.83 As Donnat suggests, the growth in cultural consumption is related to the increase in amateur practices, especially in theater, where these practices grew considerably during the 1990s among young people aged fifteen to nineteen, corresponding to the rise in the level of schooling.
The figures we have just mentioned, whether they concern the added value of cultural activities, the number of persons employed, or the level of consumption in the cultural realm, may appear relatively modest. But, beyond the fact that, as we have seen, they by no means include the entire set of domains that contribute to the formation of an enrichment economy, they also fail to take into account either the indirect and induced effects of these activities or their capacity to attract participants. The tendencies that these figures reveal may be more important than their absolute value. If we compare these data with the data characterizing the industrial revolution (a comparison that we shall develop more fully later on), it is useful to recall that, in the first half of the nineteenth century, a vast proportion of the lower classes consisted of farmers, craftsmen, and servants (according to the historian Peter Laslett, at the end of the Old Regime in France, some 40 percent of adolescents in Western societies underwent the experience of domestic service);84 workers in large-scale industries were still only a small minority. This fact shows, retrospectively, the prescience of Karl Marx, whose analyses could be judged utopian in his day, compared to those of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, for example. The latter, as Pierre Ansart has shown, was in a sense the spokesman for the aspirations of craftsmen, who were still a driving force at the heart of the working class.85
There is probably no domain in which the commercial dimensions of cultural activities have given rise to more commentary since the beginning of the 2000s than that of contemporary art; trade in artworks has undergone changes that have attracted the attention of a growing number of art historians, critics, sociologists, and journalists. In this case, as in that of stars in the music business, in fashion, or in cinema, local cultural contributions to regional economies or to a region’s ability to attract residents has not seemed to interest the experts nearly as much as the global dimension of the phenomenon. This dimension entails what has been viewed as the formation of an art “market” unified from above, supported by a culture of celebrity on a worldwide scale – a market frequently described by journalists,86 art critics, and observers from the social sciences.87 The words used, especially in texts intended for a broad audience, evoke the vocabulary used to speak of “financial markets,” such as “trend,” “crisis,” “collapse,” “a killing” (as in the stock market), “boom” and “bust,” and “scene”88 (referring to a leading center of worldwide activity in the field). There is an emphasis on the “incredible” prices of certain works publicized by the media and, more generally, on the “colossal” sums that circulate in the upper spheres of the artistic world, as well as on the power in the hands of a small number of individuals on whom both the prices of the works and the reputation of their creators depend.
Three related phenomena, developed during the last few decades, play a pivotal role in these descriptions. First, the importance that has accrued to auctions of contemporary art conducted by the main art houses (such as Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Phillips, and, in France, Artcurial), and, more generally, the development of what is called the “secondary market” (to distinguish it from direct sales by galleries to collectors).89 Second, the multiplication of rankings: starting with the Kunstkompass, created in Germany in 1970, hierarchical listings of the principal artists worldwide (up to a hundred) are published regularly, awarding points to each artist according to varying criteria; these rankings are presumed to exercise considerable influence on collectors’ purchases (an assumption that is sometimes challenged). Other rankings have come along in the last ten years or so, claiming to classify “the most important players in the contemporary art world” on an international scale, “not in terms of fame, but in terms of influence and power”; alongside artists themselves, these lists feature critics, directors of public or private institutions and foundations, collectors, curators, journalists, and bloggers, the best known among the latter being Power 100, published by ArtReview, followed by other publications – for example Le Monde, with its supplement featuring “fifteen who make fashion.”90 Finally, a third phenomenon, already noted above: the relationships established between the art world and the business world, especially businesses devoted to luxury goods. Ties between the arts and business are hardly new, of course: they are attested, for example, in the numerous biographies of collectors who, from the nineteenth century on, have stood out both through their financial successes and through their roles as discoverers and patrons of artists. By contrast, what does seem new is the fact that these ties, once considered private in nature and taken as evidence of taste, ostentation, and profligate spending on the part of supremely wealthy individuals, modern embodiments of the sumptuous practices of the princes of yesteryear, have now largely become public,91 and they serve to support the publicity with which luxury brands surround themselves in order to increase their sales. Thus these brands are likely to be associated not with the register of sumptuary expenditures, which formerly underlay their worth, but with that of commercial utility.
We must note that, while in most of the social science texts we have consulted the contribution of cultural activities to the development of regional economies and their power to attract new residents is generally presented in a more or less positive manner, almost as a social cause worthy of support, the processes associated with the emergence of an international art market are often called out, sometimes implicitly, when they play on the public’s fascination with the rich and the powerful (which can easily turn into indignation), and sometimes in an openly critical way. From the 1920s to the 1980s, roughly speaking, the tendency to denounce the domination exercised by money over art and culture was associated with critiques of industrial society (we shall come back to this point); art, as an expression of the uniqueness of individuals, was viewed as the chief rampart against all-out standardization. Over the last few decades, this tendency seems to have shifted toward new schemas based on the increased proximity between art and finance.
This realignment of critical axes is particularly clear among artists themselves. Celebrity culture, highly publicized connections between famous artists and commercial brands, and the publication of rankings have established sharp lines between a handful of internationally successful artists, whose work is exhibited in museums of contemporary art and sold at the major art fairs, and everyone else. The latter continue to live – to subsist – for the most part by selling their works through galleries that have little or no access to the major fairs, by selling them directly or through local relationship networks (this is hardly a new practice), or else by taking advantage, like artists in the theater world, of efforts at cultural development undertaken at the initiative of local communities or on a regional level. The art world, like the worlds of popular music, cinema, and sports, has thus come to symbolize inequalities in earnings, contrasting a very small number of ultra-beneficiaries – the stars – with a very large number of rejects.92 To prove this claim, one would have to be able to juxtapose an accounting of the total wealth distributed with the total number of individuals active in a given sector who are presumed to be in competition for the stakes. But the relationship itself depends on the way these totals are constructed, especially on the geographical level. This is why the contribution of famous artists – those whose activities are global in scope – to an enrichment economy is generally envisaged in a positive light only when the entity considered is the entire economy of a nation in its competition with other nations; this presupposes treating artists, and “creators” more generally, like brands whose name and “headquarters,” so to speak, must retain a national character.
As we suggested earlier, the case of the city of Arles offers an emblematic example of the transition from an industrial economy to an enrichment economy. After the decline of the dominant local industry, Arles turned toward tourism by promoting its rich ancient and medieval heritage. This transition crossed a new threshold in the early 2010s, with a shift toward culture and particularly toward contemporary art.
From the early decades of the twentieth century until around 1980, Arles was an industrial city. Its transformation from a provincial enclave began in the second half of the nineteenth century, when locomotive manufacturing facilities were set up for use on the lines linking Paris to Lyon and the Mediterranean; these shops came to play a major role in the city’s economy. By 1911, they employed 1,173 people; in the larger urban area, with some 30,000 residents, more than 5,000 made their living from the railroad. Forty-five locomotives were built in the region between 1908 and 1914. By 1920 there were 1,800 employees in the shops. Along with the railroad came industrial exploitation of salt: in nearby Salin-de-Giraud, the chemical company Solvay established a facility that manufactured soda from salt, chiefly for the soap factories in Marseille; it had 500 workers in 1925. Ship-building on the Rhône and metallurgy were also important in the region; machinery manufacturing sites in Barriol (a district in Arles) employed around 200 workers in the period between the world wars. In the 1930s, the metal-working company Constructions métalliques de Provence (CMP) set up shop in Arles and became one of the most important enterprises in town. In addition to these major businesses, there was a paper mill specializing in newsprint (most notably supplying the daily papers in Marseille), a shop that made cardboard packing boxes, and agribusiness factories that produced canned fruits and vegetables.
In the 1960s, 32 percent of the active members of the workforce were employed as laborers in industry (6,000 in 1962) or as employees in industries or businesses (2,000). In the 1960s, the proportion of middle-level managers and executives also rose (from 754 and 389, respectively, in 1954, to 1,075 and 616 in 1962). Conversely, handicrafts declined: there were fewer than 500 craftsmen in the early 1960s. The population grew owing to both increased birth rates and immigration: in 1962, there were 42,000 inhabitants, of whom 84 percent were “French by birth.” Immigrants from Italy, predominant in the first half of the twentieth century, came to work in industry; later, immigrants from Spain worked mainly in the rice fields in the Camargue. This workforce, chiefly laborers, was primarily male: in 1962, of 20,000 women, only 8,682 (24 percent) were employed, a proportion far below the national average.
The city’s industrial decline began in the second half of the 1970s, and factory closures multiplied in the 1980s. Most crucially, the railroad shops were shut down in 1984, and the metal-working factory CMP was downsized and renamed Constructions métalliques et préfabrication d’Arles: it maintained its boiler-making shops but had only sixty salaried workers. The local economy had already lost 2,000 jobs by the early 1980s, and the losses increased in the following decades (5,000 jobs lost between 1980 and 2000). For example, Rivoire et Carret-Lustucru, a rice-processing factory created in 1952 that had had 140 employees, ceased production after the floods of 2003.
This situation led to unemployment and poverty. In 2001, the number of recipients of financial aid from the government (in the form of “minimal revenue for insertion” into the economy, RMI) rose in the commune to 2,043, or 10.5 percent of the eligible population. With an unemployment rate of around 15 percent (the highest in the Provence–Alpes–Côte d’Azur region), for the most part, according to INSEE, “pockets of high economic insecurity” were concentrated in the city. Of the residents of Greater Arles, 27 percent lived in districts covered by “municipal policy”; these included large “sensitive urban zones” in which a third of the population had an average taxable income of 5,700 euros per household. The available jobs were primarily seasonal (in agriculture, especially rice and fruit harvesting, agribusiness, and tourism); they required little skill or training and offered very low wages. Economic inequality in Arles was quite pronounced, as tax data make clear: the gross earnings of the top 10 percent were seven times higher than those of the bottom 10 percent).93 In Arles, as in other regions, the industrial decline went hand in hand with the growth of the far right: Marine Le Pen won 25 percent of the votes in the 2012 presidential election.
In the face of this decline, the initial response was industrial, with noteworthy improvements to the port on the Rhône in the early 1990s, financed by the Compagnie nationale du Rhône: the goal was to provide harbor facilities that could accommodate 3,500-ton ships, and also to equip an industrial zone intended to support the installation of new enterprises on the site. However, only seven such businesses had been established by the early 2000s.
During the same period, the city of Arles sought to develop municipal activities in the arts, culture, and tourism. Hard hit by the departure of its principal industries, the city experienced major financial difficulties and had to find new resources. In the domains just mentioned, the city had what administrators call “assets” – masterpieces including ancient ruins (the amphitheater, the Roman theater, the Alyscamps necropolis) and religious buildings (the Saint-Trophime cloister dating in part from the twelfth century). Ninety-two sites from different periods have been included on the official list of historical monuments since 1976. But their power of attraction comes in part from the work of heritage creation that has been under way in Arles for more than a century. This work owes a great deal to the national recognition won by late nineteenth-century regionalist writers, especially Alphonse Daudet and Frédéric Mistral, who highlighted local traditions that had been revived in a spirit similar to the one that animated folkloric ethnography during the same period. These traditions were embodied most notably in the Félibrige association, which sought to preserve Provençal and establish it as a literary language. In this context, a number of folk festivals and events were brought back to life or invented. The heritage of which Arles can boast is thus constituted not only by ruins and monuments but also by the names of artists whose fame is associated with the city. Vincent Van Gogh, the most prominent among them, produced numerous paintings during his residency there in 1888 and 1889.
Bullfighting has also played an important role in the city’s heritage creation, not only because of the associated festivals whose folkloric dimensions are intensified by their organizers but also in that it has attracted intellectuals and artists; this was especially true from the 1930s through the 1960s, when writers and painters saw this entertainment as a pinnacle of popular art, at once savage and ancestral. While the folkloric preoccupations of regional writers (for example, Charles Maurras, who won the Félibrige prize for an elegy dedicated to the Provençal poet Théodore Aubanel) and regionalist painters (Yves Brayer, for one) made Arles an attractive destination for people with right-wing tendencies (when he visited Arles in 1940, Marshal Pétain mingled with the gardians, local herdsmen who symbolized the return to the land and to traditions), the folkloric aspects of the arena, with its bulls and bullfighters evoking Spain (and the Spanish Civil War), made Arles attractive to left-leaning visitors as well. The fact that the Confédération générale du travail (CGT, a major labor union) and the Communist Party have deep roots in Arles, and the fact that the city’s residents have generally voted on the left, at least until the 1980s, helped to draw artists such as Jean Lurçat and Ossip Zadkine (the Réattu Museum had exhibits of both painters in 1953), and especially Picasso, an aficionado of the feria (he was photographed in 1959 in the arena alongside Jean Cocteau and the bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín). Like Cocteau, Picasso stayed at the Nord-Pinus Hotel, which helped ensure the fame of that establishment. The photographer Lucien Clergue was a major factor in the “artification” of Arles: he made it a center for photography – a “middlebrow” art whose aesthetic worth has been increasingly recognized during the last several decades – first by ensuring the opening of a photography section in the Réattu Museum as early as 1965, then by setting up an international summer photography festival in the 1970s; these gatherings, now known as the Rencontres d’Arles, increased significantly in scope starting in 1982.
The city has invested in cultural facilities such as the Mediathèque in the Espace Van Gogh and the Musée de l’Arles antique, a major archeological museum; it also sponsors cultural events – among others, a festival devoted to popular music (Les Suds), another featuring harpists (Journées de la harpe), and readings in the Saint-Trophime cloister; along with the Rencontres d’Arles, these events draw around 300,000 visitors each year. With the city’s support, numerous cultural associations have been created, and their widely varied activities range from the protection of Arles’s heritage to the plastic arts and theater.94 One objective of these cultural associations is obviously to attract establishments and enterprises that can stimulate the city’s economic activity and create jobs. The publishing house Actes Sud set up shop in Arles in 1978, and the music publisher and distributor Harmonia Mundi did the same in 1983. A school for advanced study in photography opened in Arles in 1982 in a sumptuous private residence that the city had purchased from its owners in 1978. Similar stories can be told about PRIDES (a regional association that promotes collaborative economic development), subsidiaries of book and music publishing houses, and other industries promoting culture and heritage. The publishing and audiovisual sectors, along with the arts (including the performing arts), account for some 1,000 jobs. But these new positions, while they attract white-collar workers and managers, have not sufficed to bring unemployment down to a level equivalent to the regional average. The loss of jobs in industry has not been compensated either by second homes, a sector where there has been a significant increase compared to 1990 (+44 percent) and which represents 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.
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 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 network to the least wealthy buyers, on the one hand, and consumption of products that are defined precisely in opposition to standardized objects and are intended to satisfy the needs of wealthier buyers, 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.