Spirits were low last Tuesday at the Dorothy, a café and community space in Paris named after Catholic American labor activist Dorothy Day. Two days earlier, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the left-wing France Insoumise, had finished third in the first round of France’s presidential election, a little over 400,000 votes shy of qualifying for the runoff. The reality was sinking in that on April 24, voters will again have to choose between Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron. The incumbent Macron and the slew of conservative candidates divided up some 68 percent of the first-round electorate, an unmistakable sign of the country’s lurch to the right.

With a keen eye for timing, the anti-capitalist, Christian-inflected magazine Limite chose this moment to host a public discussion with François Bégaudeau. A novelist, filmmaker, and essayist, Bégaudeau is one of the few great polymaths in contemporary French culture, a keen observer whose unpretentious novels channel a frank realism. His 2008 film The Class, on a teacher assigned to a difficult Paris school, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Festival and was nominated for Best Foreign Picture at the Academy Awards.

But it’s as a social critic that Bégaudeau has most distinguished himself. His controversial 2019 essay, The Story of Your Stupidity, pillories the moral pretensions of what Bégaudeau now calls the “cool bourgeoisie”: the upper-middle-class Macronists who go to such ends to distinguish themselves from crass reactionaries like the Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour ilk. When their interests depend on it, Bégaudeau argues, the hip side of the ruling classes shed their easygoing mystique and become indistinguishable from their stiffer cousins. The pressure to do so would only become more intense as capital struggles to sustain itself through the twenty-first century’s wave of social, economic and climate shocks. This is a fine description of the lopsided politics of the Macron era, and has made Bégaudeau one of its most lucid observers.