The Broken Ladder and the Stalled Elevator
The Destiny of Class Solidification in the UK and France
By Wei Cheng
The first time I met Isabelle Feng was at Reading Gaol in the UK.
Reading Gaol was abandoned in 2014, but a small number of people are allowed to visit. It was extremely hot that day, probably the hottest day of the third heatwave in the British summer this year. We walked out of the cell where the British writer Oscar Wilde was imprisoned and stopped in front of that famous graffiti.
The painting clung quietly to the outer wall of the prison, like a wound bleached by the sun. It was the work of the famous British graffiti artist Banksy. An escapee grasped a long rope made of torn bedsheets, climbing over the high wall of the prison. Tied to the end of the rope was an old-fashioned typewriter — heavy, clumsy, yet seemingly the only freedom he could take with him. Banksy probably hid the shadow of Wilde, who wrote using a typewriter, in this fugitive.
Isabelle and I remained silent, gazing at the graffiti for a long time, trying to figure out its symbolic meaning.
Isabelle comes from mainland China. She went to Paris to study after graduating from Wuhan University at the end of the last century, and has lived in France for nearly 30 years since. She is now the Vice President of the Asia Centre, a French think tank, and a researcher at the Perelman Centre for Legal Philosophy at the Free University of Brussels.
The UK that Keeps the Old House and France that Tears Down and Rebuilds
After the UK broadcast the final episode of Seven Up! (70 Up), I wrote a review titled “Why Are Rags-to-Riches Stories So Rare in Britain?”. When analyzing the reasons for the solidification of British social classes, I wrote: The UK lacks a social revolution, that is, a social revolution that overthrows the old elite class like the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution. As for which is superior or inferior between the British model, the French model, and the Russian model, that is a topic for another article.
I was just mentioning it in passing, but after posting the article in my WeChat alumni group, someone urged me to write “another article.”
I had to force myself to do it. The UK and Russia are too different and hard to compare, but the UK and France, separated only by a body of water and belonging to the Western European cultural circle, seem more worthy of comparison.
The UK and France are probably one of the few pairs of neighboring countries on our planet with similar natures but divergent habits. Geographically separated only by the English Channel, they have historically influenced each other for a long time, and their modern social structures are highly similar. But at critical historical junctures, the two countries took entirely different paths: the UK chose gradual reform, while France chose radical revolution. The two paths shaped two political cultures and also shaped two sources of legitimacy for their class structures.
The English Channel is not wide; on a clear day, looking across from the White Cliffs of Dover in the UK, one can faintly see the outline of the opposite shore. Yet this narrow channel has driven the development models of the two countries further apart over the past few centuries. British history seems to have been turned over by a steady hand: dynastic changes, parliamentary expansion of power, and the industrial revolution all slowly shifted within the framework of the old system, like replacing the beams of an old house without tearing down the walls or moving the foundation. French history, on the other hand, is like being battered by a sudden downpour: the old system was too rigid, the royal power too heavy, and the aristocracy too deeply rooted. When the pressure built up to an unbearable point, they could only blast it with a cannon and tear the whole house down to rebuild. The British are used to bargaining within the system, while the French are used to taking things to the extreme on the streets; British politics relies on compromise, French politics relies on rupture; British order relies on continuity, French order relies on restarting. Both countries have reached modernity, but through completely different paths.
Indeed, the UK has only experienced political revolutions, not a thorough social revolution. In 1649, King Charles I was beheaded; in 1660, the monarchy was restored; in 1688, the Glorious Revolution was essentially the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie teaming up to change a king, rather than eliminating the aristocracy. The British landed aristocracy system has continued all the way from the Middle Ages to today and has never truly been uprooted.
Before the Glorious Revolution, the transmission tools of the British elite were land and aristocratic titles; after the Glorious Revolution, the importance of land and titles gradually gave way to capital, law, and financial assets; reaching the 20th century, the elite education system of private schools plus Oxbridge (Oxford and Cambridge) further took over the baton of transmitting elite status. The carrier is changing, but the intergenerational persistence coefficient (b value) measured by some scholars has barely moved over three hundred years. This is perhaps the most precise meaning of the phrase “did not experience a thorough social revolution” — it does not mean that this society is completely static, but rather that the machine responsible for passing advantages from one generation to the next has never truly been dismantled; it just constantly changes its outer shell.
The 70-year life trajectories of all participants in Seven Up! also visually show that modern British society still largely retains the core characteristics of class solidification. Although this solidification no longer manifests simply as the aristocratic privileges of the old era, but has transformed into invisible cultural capital, the fragmentation of educational resources, and the accumulation of real estate wealth, compared with major global economies, the UK is still a society with low vertical mobility where one’s background strongly dictates their life trajectory.
France is different: the 1789 Revolution not only beheaded the king but also abolished feudal privileges and rent obligations, forcefully dividing and distributing the vast lands of the church and exiled aristocrats to peasants — this was a social revolution that truly touched the structure of land ownership. This probably also explains why data shows that social mobility in modern France is better than in the UK, even though both are old European powers and both experienced imperial expansion.
Data released by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2018 showed that the intergenerational income elasticity was about 0.50 for the UK, about 0.41 for France, and about 0.20 for Denmark. The higher the elasticity, the more solidified the classes.
Perhaps dry data struggles to reflect vivid life. So, what is real life in France like?
I thought of Isabelle. She has lived in France for nearly 30 years and has deeply integrated into French society. I called her.
Isabelle frequently comes to the UK for work and travel, and she also understands the situation in the UK quite well. She said that social mobility in France is quite different compared to the UK. From an educational perspective, she said, private schools in France are very different from those in the UK. The quality of education in French private schools is not the best; in other words, French private schools are not elite schools like British private schools. She noted that apart from a few famous private Catholic schools (such as Franklin in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, or Stanislas in the 6th arrondissement), the good schools in France are all public schools. Moreover, unlike the UK, French public schools do not have grammar schools that admit students based on exam scores; they all enroll students based on proximity. She also mentioned that universities in France are almost all public, and the tuition fee is only a few hundred euros a year, which is close to free. The same goes for the so-called “elite universities” (Grandes Ecoles), which contrasts sharply with British universities, where tuition often reaches nearly ten thousand pounds.
Isabelle stated that although France does have many government officials from prominent families, compared to the UK, there are more stories in France of people struggling from the bottom to the top. She gave a few examples: the mother of Gerald Darmanin, the former Minister of the Interior and current Minister of Justice, was once a concierge and cleaner; the mother of Eric Dupond-Moretti, the former Minister of Justice, was also a cleaner, and his father was a metalworker. Both are typical examples of ordinary people from the bottom succeeding through education. The current female Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, was born in Spain and moved to France with her parents at the age of two; her father was an electrician and her mother a seamstress. She became a labor inspector through the public education system and eventually the first female Mayor of Paris. Another woman, Rachida Dati, who lost to Hidalgo in the 2020 Paris mayoral election, was born into a poor immigrant family; her father was a Moroccan bricklayer and her mother was Algerian. Growing up in low-rent housing, she worked as a night-shift nursing assistant to pay for her tuition and later served as Minister of Justice in Sarkozy’s cabinet and Minister of Culture in Macron’s cabinet. The current Prime Minister, Sebastien Lecornu, did not attend any elite schools either, graduating from an ordinary public university; his grandfather was a butcher, his maternal grandfather a farmer, his father a mechanic, and his mother a secretary.
The Stalled Social Elevator and the Universal Gravitation of Class Reproduction
A social revolution that overthrows the old elite class brings many consequences; some are positive, and some are negative. Promoting social mobility is one of the positive consequences of such a social revolution, but this consequence also experiences diminishing returns over time, a phenomenon I call the law of diminishing revolutionary returns. Therefore, the previously discussed rule that “the closer one is to a social revolution/elite reset event, the higher the social mobility” needs to be supplemented with a dimension of time decay to be complete: the revolution or reset itself only clears the chessboard and reshuffles the deck, but as long as the economic and political games continue, the new elites will inevitably begin to re-precipitate and solidify their advantages in the next generation.
This law of diminishing revolutionary returns has already appeared in many countries that experienced fierce social revolutions centuries or even decades ago.
The essence of the French model is an attempt to forcibly reset the social structure through a thorough social revolution. The 1789 Revolution not only chopped off the head of Louis XVI but also attempted to flatten the class divide between the aristocracy and the commoners. In the short term, this indeed brought about an earth-shattering reshuffling of classes. However, as the French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville perceived as early as 1856 in his book “The Old Regime and the Revolution”, although the Revolution destroyed old aristocratic privileges, it fully inherited and strengthened the centralization of the old regime.
As the great wheel of history rolled into the 20th century, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu further revealed the cruel truth of social mobility in 20th-century France. In his book “The State Nobility”, Bourdieu pointed out that although France physically and institutionally eliminated the bloodline aristocracy, it established a new class of “State Nobility” through an elite education system represented by Sciences Po and the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA). This system appears on the surface to be an absolute meritocracy, but the elite class ensures that their children hold a relative advantage in the brutal exam competition through the hidden intergenerational transmission of cultural capital. Social mobility in France, after undergoing a bloody reset, has once again solidified into elite reproduction endorsed by the education system.
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Depressing, isn’t it?
Today, 237 years after the outbreak of the French Revolution, an “Oxbridge”-like system that locks in class solidification, similar to that in the UK, has also grown in France. The “elite universities” represented by Sciences Po and ENA, which are widely criticized in France today, have in some sense become the French version of the “Oxbridge club.”
Therefore, a more precise formulation should be: if the revolution happens later and more thoroughly, and if a structural economic expansion is superimposed as an amplifier later, then the social mobility data will be better; but this effect will decay over time, unless there is sustained structural expansion or a new round of revolution to maintain it.
Isabelle also admits that class solidification has emerged in France over the past decade or so.
I noticed that during her chat with me, she repeatedly mentioned a term: the social elevator (ascenseur social in French). She said that in the 1990s and early 2000s, the social elevator in France was still operating relatively normally, but over the past decade or so, France has experienced a “social elevator breakdown” (panne de l’ascenseur social).
According to her analysis, although French public schools are free, the difference in quality is significant. Good public schools are mostly located in wealthy and middle-class residential areas. For example, the 5th arrondissement of Paris (the Latin Quarter), where Sorbonne University is located, is a typical enclave for the intellectual elite and middle class. The two public high schools there, Louis Le Grand and Henri IV, are the best high schools in all of France. She summarized that the class segregation in British primary and secondary education relies on tuition fees (children of the poor cannot afford private schools), while the class segregation in French primary and secondary education relies on housing prices and rent, which is another form of monetary segregation.
She said that the enrollment principle of French public schools is based on proximity. Some Chinese people in France move, buy, or rent houses to get their children into good public schools, but it is rare to see local French families move for their children’s education.
The UK does not have a direct idiom completely equivalent to the “social elevator,” nor does it even have a similar concept. The UK has the term “social ladder.” The metaphorical difference from “elevator” to “ladder” precisely reflects the huge divergence between the UK and France in historical traditions, the role of the state, and deep-seated social psychology.
In the French context, the “social elevator” is not merely a sociological term, but the core political contract of the French Republic; the term also implies the underlying responsibility of the state. Why do the French call it an elevator while the British call it a ladder? British society has subconsciously always defaulted to “class” as a naturally existing reality; a ladder is static, and climbing the ladder relies on personal physical strength, ambition, and struggle, with society only responsible for providing the ladder. But an elevator is a mechanical device; its construction, power supply, daily operation, and maintenance all require a massive and powerful operator, and this operator is the state. The French fundamentally believe that promoting social fairness and class mobility is an undeniable responsibility of the state. When you enter the elevator and press the button, the state system is supposed to take you to the corresponding floor.
However, the French have been talking about the “stalled social elevator” more and more frequently in recent years, which reflects the anxiety of contemporary French society. A large amount of data and sociological research show that today it is increasingly difficult for children from the French working class to enter top universities, and the elite class has achieved self-solidification through cultural capital and wealth. Because the French hold an almost religious republican belief in this “elevator,” once they find out the elevator is broken, the sense of betrayal and anger generated among the public is extremely strong. This sense of disillusionment is the deep psychological motivation behind the frequent social protests (such as the Yellow Vests movement) that have erupted in France in recent years.
Data shows that the previously gradually reforming British model and the radically revolutionary French model, reaching today, are seeing their social mobility situations become increasingly convergent.
The report “A Broken Social Elevator? How to Promote Social Mobility” released by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2018 pointed out that in both the UK and France, a child born into a family in the bottom 20% of income needs to go through a full six generations (about 150 years) before their family income can reach the national average. In contrast, in Nordic countries with better social mobility, such as Denmark, this process only takes two generations. The historical data in French economist Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” also proves this point: whether in France, which has experienced multiple republics and restorations, or in the UK, which has maintained a conservative tradition, the concentration of wealth in the 21st century is showing a trend of returning to the patrimonial capitalism of the 19th century.
France attempted to burn down the old order with the violent fire of revolution, while the UK attempted to graft a new civilization onto the vines of the old order. However, human society seems to possess a “universal gravitation” that transcends political systems. Those who control resources, whether through noble bloodlines or outstanding exam scores, always tend to and have the ability to pass their advantages on to the next generation. Overthrowing the bodies of the old elites often merely makes room for the rise of the new elites; and when the new elites sit firmly in power, new barriers are quietly built.
Clearly, social mobility can never be solved once and for all through a single bloody revolution or a single charter.
Outsourced Violence and the Metaphor of Two Prisons
However, the social turmoil that lasted for nearly a century after the French Revolution, experiencing revolution, counter-revolution, restoration, and anti-restoration, involved bloodshed on more than one occasion. Today, the social mobility situation in France continues to increasingly converge with that of the UK. Does this mean that the blood of the French was shed in vain? That the heads at the guillotine were chopped off for nothing? That nearly a century of upheaval was all just “futile tossing about”?
Those who favor the British model might say that the UK did not overthrow the old elite class but made the king a figurehead and the aristocracy an ornament during the subsequent process of gradual reform. This turned the country’s political system into a constitutional monarchy integrating modernity and tradition. Although the old elites have continued to profit, and although the poorer classes mostly find it difficult to achieve class upward mobility, society has still been able to progress slowly while avoiding large-scale bloodshed. Meanwhile, the economy has been able to achieve a great leap forward through the Industrial Revolution, overseas expansion, and empire building. This model of gradual reform is far superior to the French model of “flipping pancakes”.
In fact, the views of this school can be traced back to the 18th-century British conservative thinker Edmund Burke. In his book “Reflections on the Revolution in France” published in 1790, he pointed out that gradual reform preserves the “tacit knowledge” and institutional inertia upon which society relies to function, whereas radical revolution attempts to redesign the entire society at once with abstract rationality, and this arrogance of rationality inevitably leads to a reign of terror. When Burke wrote this book, the French Revolution had only just begun, and the Jacobin Reign of Terror had not yet occurred, yet Burke almost prophetically predicted the subsequent direction of France.
But I believe the notion that “the UK chose gradual reform, and France chose radical revolution” is a false proposition. History is not arbitrarily “chosen” by heroes or the people. Whether a country can avoid a social revolution depends on many factors, such as who ultimately wins the game between various political forces and social factions, whether the old elite class is brutally stubborn or adapts to change, whether the national character is mild or violent, and whether the mainstream ideology is dominated by radicalism or conservatism. Even if the game between various factions in France “unfortunately” resulted in nearly a century of bloodshed and turmoil, it cannot be said that the blood of the French was shed in vain.
First, if we only evaluate from the perspective of “cost” without asking “what was gained in exchange,” this judgment becomes dangerously flimsy. The violence of the French Revolution was not just to replace an old system with a new one; it was also to thoroughly deny the legitimacy of the old system on a symbolic level. The significance of the guillotine was not just physical slaughter, but a political declaration: the king is not “the mandate of heaven,” aristocrats are not “born superior,” and priests are not “God’s agents on earth.” This symbolic denial has been playing a role in the political culture for over two hundred years since the French Revolution. Even if the class structure has re-solidified, and even if the new elites reproduce themselves through “elite universities,” words like “equality,” “citizen,” and “republic” still possess strong moral tension and can still be used to question the ruling class. This is something the UK does not have.
Secondly, the premise that “the British model was bloodless” is itself untenable. The UK merely transferred the bloodshed overseas. Domestic social changes in the UK were indeed relatively mild, but on what did the UK rely to maintain social stability and capital accumulation during the same period? The Atlantic slave trade, the Great Famine in Ireland (where the British government’s policy inaction led to the deaths of over a million people), the multiple famines that occurred during British colonial rule in India (in the Churchill era alone, the Bengal famine starved millions to death), the Opium Wars, the UK’s collective exile of convicts to Australia, and so on. The UK’s “gradual reform” was largely an outsourcing of revolutionary violence to the colonies, so the domestic elites did not need to experience a French-style frontal conflict. If we look at the British Empire as a whole, this narrative that “the British model is more civilized and milder” is not so easy to establish.
I say all this not to deny the stability of the British model, but to emphasize the complexity of historical path dependence.
Writing this, I suddenly remembered Reading Gaol in the UK, which Isabelle and I visited together with others.
Even within the UK, and even in the judicial and penal systems that can no longer be “outsourced,” the maintenance of order is not so just and mild.
The most famous prisoner of Reading Gaol was Oscar Wilde. He was not an ordinary prisoner; he was a cultural elite of the Victorian era, a darling of the upper class, and a star of the London cultural circle. But he was sentenced for homosexuality and eventually died in poverty and exile. British class solidification is not only economic, educational, and cultural, but also moral. Wilde’s fall was not because of poverty, but because the moral order of British society refused to accommodate him.
In a sense, Reading Gaol is also a kind of symbol of the British model.
Across the English Channel, there is also a prison symbolizing the French model — the Bastille. On July 14, 1789, the citizens of Paris stormed the Bastille, thereby opening the prelude to the French Revolution. This day was later designated as the French National Day, also known as Bastille Day. The storming of the Bastille symbolized that the legitimacy of the old system was completely destroyed, and it also symbolized that French political culture had embarked on a completely different path from that of the UK from then on.
The walls of Reading Gaol are still there, while the walls of the Bastille have long since disappeared. Yet the class structures of both the UK and France have grown out of their respective prison walls in their own ways.
The Bastille symbolizes the destructive power of radical rupture, while Reading Gaol symbolizes the suffocating sense of gradual order; the French could physically storm the Bastille more than 200 years ago, while the British today can still only imagine escaping Reading Gaol like a piece of graffiti.
