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`Baby losers' fight back

Jason Burke

THEY CALL them the `baby losers', the lost generation, `sacrificed' for the pleasure and leisure of their parents. And now, led by an unlikely alliance of economists, sociologists, angry thirty-something commentators and a few turncoats from the ranks of the `baby boomers' themselves, they are striking back.

They claim to be aiming to halt a widening gap between generations in France. Their enemies say they are trying to rob those who have worked hard all their lives of the fruits of their labours. The problem is simple. While those in their sixties, such as President Jacques Chirac or actress Catherine Deneuve enjoy a quality of life that is the envy of much of Europe, the generations born after them can expect no such privileges. According to Louis Chauvel, sociologist at the National Foundations for Political Science, for the first time in recent history French citizens between the age of 20 and 40 can expect a lower standard of living than the one before, largely because the previous generation has decided not to share. "Some talk of a war between the generations but we are not there yet," said Mr. Chauvel. "But the reality has been a massive pillaging of the resources of one generation by another."

The problem is most acute among the French middle-classes. Mr. Chauvel, born in 1967, quotes rafts of statistics: in 1973, only six per cent of recent university leavers were unemployed, now the rate is 25 to 30 per cent; salaries have stagnated for 20 years while property prices have doubled or trebled; though the overall proportion of French citizens suffering in poverty has not changed, where in the 1960s the poor were predominantly the old, now they are the young; in 1970, salaries for 50 year olds were only 15 per cent higher than those for workers aged 30, the gap now is 40 per cent. "Most young people in France are not even conscious of what's going on," Mr. Chauvel said.

The truth is that the generation that profited from the rapid economic growth and the expansion of the state and public industries in the decades between 1960 and 1990 — and from the new levels of meritocracy and social mobility won by the student revolts of 1968 — is now ageing. "The problem is that the older generation has not passed on the relay to the younger generation," said Nicholas Charbonneau, author of Generation 69, a book on the phenomenon. "There is no place for the young in this country. All our politicians are older than those overseas, there is not a senior editor of a newspaper or magazine who is under 55. France is becoming a museum ... a very beautiful museum, but a museum all the same." —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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