Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s followers barely had time to appreciate their champion’s progress in April’s presidential election before François Ruffin sounded the alarm in Libération: “Peripheral France, the France of the small towns, does not appear to be a priority. And when we look at the vote numbers, that’s where we’re losing.”

Ruffin — an MP for France Insoumise, representing a constituency in the Northern département of La Somme — reiterated the charge in Mediapart ahead of June’s legislative elections: “We’re hurting in the former industrial basins of the North and East, in once-red areas where the Left has fallen very low.” After his reelection with 61 percent of the vote, he hammered the point home in L’Obs: “Are we acknowledging, without saying it, that we are becoming the Left of Île-de-France [the region around Paris] and the metropolises?”

These interventions are reminiscent of now old controversies. First, the one stemming from a blog post published in 2011 by the think tank Terra Nova. It called for the Left to make up for its losses among working-class voters by seeking to pick up support among the middle classes and a series of social categories that supposedly share progressive cultural values. At the time, many intellectuals and political leaders were up in arms, criticizing the analytical errors and “class contempt” that shined through from the text.