The Guardian view on Europe's growing wealth divide: back to the world of Balzac

The Guardian

15-05-2025

In a recent study picked up in the French press, the academic Mélanie Plouviez cites one of her country's best-loved novelists to make a damning point. The power of inherited and unearned wealth in the France of 2025, she argues, replicates the social injustices found in Honoré de Balzac's 19th-century chronicles of ambition and despair. As in the 1820s, she writes, 'Who now could buy a place in Paris relying only on their wage and without family help? With the resurgence of inherited wealth, a gulf between what work allows and inheritance allows has also returned.'
The problem is a sadly familiar one across Europe, and the same observation could be made of Britain, Germany or Italy. The economist Thomas Piketty has laid bare the extent to which booming stock markets and property prices have turbocharged asset wealth in western liberal democracies, at the expense of those reliant solely on a wage. Since the 1980s, regressive tax changes have empowered the wealthy to keep more of their money and pass more of it on to their sons and daughters. In advanced economies, the amount of inherited wealth has more or less doubled as a proportion of GDP, compared with the middle of the last century.
The collapse of trust in politics can, in part, be attributed to this emergence of a two-tier society that offers only limited opportunities to the assetless young and undermines the basis of the social contract. France is at the sharp end of this loss of faith. On Wednesday evening, during a marathon primetime television interrogation, Emmanuel Macron was accused of having become a 'president for the rentier class'. Mr Macron, who made the reduction of taxes on wealth a priority of his first term, batted away the question with airy talk of promoting equal opportunities.
Yet as the French president refuses to contemplate a more redistributive approach, his unpopular prime minister, François Bayrou, is seeking backing for an austerity budget that would impose €40bn in spending cuts. This, Mr Bayrou has blithely stated, 'will demand efforts from everybody, and given its scale, it cannot succeed unless the French people support it'. Across the Rhine in Germany, the new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is pushing a similar message of collective sacrifice. Germans, Mr Merz said this week, must 'work more, and above all more efficiently' to get a stagnating economy back on track.
Prof Plouviez's work is the latest to highlight why such exhortations to solidarity and hard work ring so hollow for so many. As populist parties surf on social discontent, governments are shamelessly echoing their rhetoric and approach towards immigration. But confronting the manner in which a self-reproducing wealth divide is corroding social bonds and undermining a politics of the common good remains taboo. Presidential elections in Romania and Poland this weekend are likely to showcase voters' deepening disillusionment with the political mainstream, and the continuing rise of the far right.
As Balzac was writing the final volumes of his La Comédie Humaine in the 1840s, the future British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli published Sybil, his fictional indictment of the great wealth divide in Victorian England. Two centuries on, facing a darkening political horizon, Europe's current crop of leaders could usefully dust down a copy and learn from its insights before it is too late.