Not long after François Ruffin was elected to the French parliament, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the charismatic leader of the far-left party La France Insoumise (Unbowed France), asked him where he would spend the national holiday. Ruffin, a member of Mélenchon’s party, replied that he would be in Abbeville, a small northern industrial town in the district he represents. Mélenchon advised him otherwise: “You should come to Paris. It’s great, you get to sit in the VIP stand on the Champs-Élysées,” Ruffin recalled in a recent book. Mélenchon then went on to describe how every time he was elected to a higher office, he got a better seat on Bastille Day. Ruffin was surprised. Surely Mélenchon was pulling his leg. Could the populist agitator really be as concerned, like some petty aristocrat, with where he would sit at a ceremony?
Though he is one French left’s more recognizable figures, Ruffin thinks of himself as an outsider. In many ways, he is. He was a latecomer to electoral politics. He began his career as a muckraking journalist. He became famous when he directed a documentary film, Merci Patron that eviscerated Bernard Arnault, the richest man in France, by focusing on the devastating social consequences of his business practices. Ruffin came to be known as “the French Michael Moore.” In parliament, he displayed a knack for media-savvy antics. For instance, he was sanctioned for wearing a football jersey in the parliament’s chambers, which he did to call attention to the plight of struggling local sports clubs.
Ruffin is also an outsider in another way. Though he has always identified with the left, he is also one of its fiercest critics. He denounced the Socialist Party for being neoliberalism’s handmaiden, which drew him to Mélenchon. In the past year, he has broken with Mélenchon, whose politics and personal vanity he now regards as suspect. But what makes him truly unacceptable to many on the left is his attitude to the far right, specifically Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (National Rally or RN). While most on the left condemn the RN as a moral abomination, a party of racists and fascists, Ruffin is a rare figure in emphasizing the need for the left to win back the voters it has lost to the populist right. In this quixotic role, Ruffin has assumed the role of a kind of cultural translator, someone who can explain working-class mindsets to a progressive class that finds them increasingly enigmatic.
“While he is frequently indignant, he is just as often wistful.”
Ruffin’s sense of being an outsider may be a result of the nostalgia that suffuses his politics. While he is frequently indignant, he is just as often wistful. One senses that he would have rather lived in different times, to have fought different battles. For Ruffin, the 1990s, the decade when he came of age, was a low, dishonest decade. He recalls: “The Berlin Wall fell, the working class was in pieces. The Maastricht Treaty, the GATT accords, the World Trade Organization: Globalization was in full swing, with its share of damages.” It was the age of the “global village,” which divided the world between, on the one hand, the modernizers and the multiculturalists, who “crossed borders” and were ethnically and culturally diverse, and, on the other hand, the closed-minded throwbacks, with their “shrunken lives” and “narrow outlooks.”
Ruffin grew up in Amiens, in northern France. The town is known for its magnificent cathedral, as well as for being the birthplace of Emmanuel Macron, whom Ruffin sees as embodying everything wrong with the globalized world. Ruffin is acutely aware of the parallel life he has lived alongside the French president, who is two years younger than he is. They attended the same private Catholic school. Compared to Macron, who fell in love with and later married one of the school’s teachers, Ruffin was a fairly typical student. He was born in 1975 to a bourgeois family. After high school, he studied literature at the local university, before a brief stint as an exchange student in Texas.
Ruffin came out of his shell of relative conformity in 1999, when he founded the alternative magazine, Fakir. Its tagline was: “A newspaper pissed off with everyone. Or almost everyone.” It declared that it had no ties to any “party, union, or institution.” Based in Amiens, its target, at least initially, was the mainstream press. As a student, Ruffin studied the way reporters trivialize politics by emphasizing personalities at the expense of deeper issues. An early fight that Ruffin picked was with journalists themselves. He was accepted at one of France’s top journalism schools, the Centre de formation des journalistes, in Paris. But he was quickly disenchanted with its sterile conception of reporting and his peers’ obsession with networking. Ruffin got his degree, as well as material for his first book. In Les petits soldats du journalisme (journalism’s little soldiers), he painted a withering portrait of the school, which he presented as a machine for creating media stars with little interest in the real issues shaping people’s lives.
Ruffin self-consciously set out on a different course. With Fakir, he wanted to “represent the popular classes”—the term frequently used in French to refer to the working classes, independent of their status as laborers—“to allow them to be seen, and above all to be heard.” Ruffin reported on citizens who were protesting a laboratory for stocking radioactive waste, and a group of small-town mayors who tried to block a religious meeting organized by Roma people. Ruffin’s reporting was irritating enough to local authorities that he was sued by Amiens’ mayor.
Ruffin has always had two passions: his region and the working class. Ruffin wears his provincialism as a badge of honor. He is an enthusiastic booster of his native region, the northern region of Picardy, and takes personally the hardship it has endured during his own lifespan. Ruffin believes that deindustrialization played a pivotal point in the story of France’s national decline. The loss of France’s industrial base was a “great catastrophe.” In one of his books, he notes that when he was born, in 1975, textile production in Picardy had never been greater. He rattles off the names of northern industrial towns the way a bon vivant might list his favorite Tuscan villages: Ailly, Saint-Ouen, Flixecourt. These factory towns and the way of life they afforded were dealt a fatal blow in the 1970s, when the Multifiber Arrangement trade deal left them at the mercy of global markets. During the 1980s, one factory after another shut down, as plants relocated to North Africa and elsewhere. “After ten years,” Ruffin writes, “nothing remained of this world of textiles, spinning, jute, and felt.”
Ruffin’s infatuation with this world inspired the movie that secured his reputation. Merci Patron explores how a declining northern textile factory became a stepping-stone on an entrepreneur’s path to becoming a billionaire. Just as Roger & Me was premised on Michael Moore’s comical efforts to meet and understand the motivations of the General Motors CEO who closed factories in Moore’s hometown of Flint, Michigan, so Ruffin’s movie is centered on Bernard Arnault, the president of the luxury-goods company LVMH. Arnault’s estimated wealth of nearly $180 billion makes him the seventh richest person in the world. Yet Ruffin’s movie focuses less on Arnault’s career than on a desolate former factory town named Flixecourt. The town was the site of a successful textile factory run by the Boussac-Saint Frères company. In the early 1980s, Arnault bought out the company because it also owned Dior, the prestigious haute couture house and a crucial part of his plan to build a company specializing in high-end goods. Having acquired Dior, Arnault resold what was left of the parent company, which was finally liquidated in the early 2000s. The abandoned factory site is an image Ruffin lingers on. Flixecourt became known as the “valley of misery.”
Ruffin follows the plight of Serge and Jocelyn Klur, a couple laid off from the Flixecourt company that Arnaud gutted. In his thick Picard accent, Serge talks about how he has trouble finding work because the gas he needs for his car is too expensive. Sometimes he and his wife made ends meet by not eating. When they contemplate the worst-case scenario—losing their home—Serge confides to Ruffin the plan he devised from watching the finale of The Little House on the Prairie: he has acquired explosives so he can blow it up rather than surrender it. Most of the movie is focused on the clever way that Ruffin helps the Klurs shake down LVMH to get a decent financial settlement. A final scene shows them celebrating with glasses of Moët & Chandon, the Arnaud-owned luxury champagne that Ruffin requested be delivered with the cash. As gratifying as the film’s Robin Hood narrative may be, its emotional highlight is when Ruffin asks Serge to record a video that he can bring to the LVMH shareholders meeting he plans to crash. He isn’t angry or sarcastic, but humble and deferential. He tells “Monsieur Arnaud” that all he wants is a job, to work again and earn his keep.
Merci Patron! is suffused with class tensions—not only between the cast members and the hidden god that is Arnaud, but also between Ruffin and the Klurs. Like the Russian Populists, Ruffin decided to go to the people. He detects within himself an innate elitism that makes him feel superior to “people who play pétanque, vacation in RVs, watch soccer on TV.” But they offer something to him. He finds in their world a kind of authenticity. Ruffin adopts the trappings of working-class life, much as Russian intellectuals donned workers’ caps in Lenin’s day. He wears tee shirts, drinks beer, and munches on potato chips while driving. But even in this context, he is an outsider. The pranks they pull on Arnauld are all his ideas, byproducts of the resentment he bears against his own class. The Klurs are grateful and are happy to join Ruffin’s schemes. But they lack the intellectual’s need to stick it to the man. They are inclined to abide.
It is perhaps this self-consciousness that accounts for Ruffin’s bitterness towards the left. After all, sociologically speaking, the left resembles Ruffin—bourgeois, educated, and obsessed with politics—far more than it resembles the Klurs. Just as deindustrialization is personal for Ruffin, so is the story of the left’s betrayal of the working class. He recalls in his latest book how François Mitterrand, the socialist president, embraced economic liberalism in 1983 and did the right’s “dirty work.” He remembers how the socialist Lionel Jospin, after privatizing state companies as prime minister, refused to utter the word “worker” during his presidential campaign in 2002. And he recalls that François Hollande, a socialist who served as president from 2012 to 2017, remarked: “Losing workers is not that serious.”
“The left screwed the workers, then started calling them racists and fascists.”
Like many leftist critics of the left, Ruffin believes that there is a special place in hell for Terra Nova, a left-of-center think tank that, in 2011, declared that the working class had been lost once and for all to the far right and that henceforth the only viable left-leaning coalition was a blend of professionals, women, young people, and ethnic minorities. Ruffin’s complaint is not with reaching out to these groups, but with abandoning the working class. The left, he says, has a lot of nerve: It “created all the economic [and] material conditions for the far right to prosper.” It’s like killing your parents and then pleading sympathy for being an orphan. The left screwed the workers, then started calling them racists and fascists.
In the 2010s, as socialism drifted rightward, a new political space opened up on the left of the left. Its charismatic leader was Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a dissident socialist who opposed the European Union, was skeptical of free trade, and, most importantly of all, seemed to have an appetite for contestation that the left had not seen for years. In 2017, he founded a party whose name captured his attitude: La France Insoumise, or “Unbowed France.” That year, Ruffin was elected to parliament as a member of Mélenchon’s party. Ruffin admired Mélenchon’s apparent eagerness to win back workers who had gravitated towards the far right.
Yet within a few years, Ruffin concluded that Mélenchon was no better than the other leftists who had disappointed him. The problem was that Mélenchon went woke. By 2024 (if not earlier), Mélenchon concluded that the only viable electoral strategy for the far left was to appeal to what the French euphemistically call les quartiers—that is, the poor, often suburban public housing communities populated by ethnic minorities. Thinking he was not being recorded, Mélenchon declared: “We have to mobilize the youth and the quartiers. That’s where you find the masses who have an interest in leftist policies. Everyone else, forget about it.” This statement, and the strategy it was symptomatic of, led Ruffin to resign from La France Insoumise. He recovered his outsider status—while entering the most intriguing phase of his political career.
Ruffin’s journalism and political experience—particularly the feeling that he has been burned multiple times by the left—has led him to develop a pragmatic political philosophy that is primarily aimed at bringing the working class back to the left and, by the same token, returning the left to its true and genuine mission. His ideas can be expressed as a series of theses.
1. Don’t blame the victim—and yes, that means the white working class. For Ruffin, the problem is not that the left has lost the working class, but that the left has become the main critic of the working class—particularly the white working class. During the 2022 election cycle, Ruffin notes, the RN crushed the left among this demographic, particularly in rural areas. As one French politician recently remarked: “Wherever a factory shuts down, an RN office opens up.” Mélenchon’s reaction, by contrast, was essentially an exercise in sour grapes. As Ruffin recalls, the left’s champion disingenuously argued that the RN’s voters came from regions that had never embraced the French republic and even reminded his followers that it had taken 25 years to de-nazify Germany. For Ruffin, just because it is tragic that the white working class has thrown its lot with the far right does not mean that it does not have sound reasons for doing so.
2. Steer clear of the “racism of the intellect.” As a student, Ruffin recalls that he had an intellectual epiphany when he read the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s essay “The Racism of the Intellect.” Just as conventional racism can be used to justify one ethnic group’s domination of another, Weber argues, so can contempt for the uneducated be used to justify the privileges of the educated class. Racism of the intellect convinces elites of “their own inherent superiority.” This form of contempt now defines the left, in Ruffin’s view. By celebrating what Mélenchon calls the “new France,” the left demeans old, rural, working-class France, which it considers intolerant and reactionary.
3. Understand working class resentment. The left and the educated class feel that they have an intuitive handle on experiences like exploitation and oppression, which give rise to emotions like righteous indignation and cathartic anger. Yet they are uneasy with humiliation, shame, and resentment. Grappling with these sentiments comes far more naturally to the right and the working class. This is why, Ruffin believes, the left has such a difficult time understanding the appeal of figures like Le Pen and Donald Trump. “They’re frauds,” liberal intellectuals like to say. “And they don’t really care about the poor people who support them.” Yet Ruffin believes that these leaders’ appeal rests on an emotional logic that scrambles the leftist mindset. Referring to the work of the political scientist Patrick Lehingue, he argues that many in the working class see a “homology of position” between their social position and the disdain a Le Pen or a Trump faces from the political class. Ruffin writes: “what difference does it make… that [Le Pen] is a millionaire, that she lives in a castle: the contempt she experiences is their own”—particularly when it comes from a left that is “often super-educated, employing big words, with ‘ism’ in them.”
4. Reclaim work as a leftist value. Ruffin is struck by how much the RN has become not only a working-class party, but the party identified with work. When meeting his working-class constituents over the years, he has become familiar with one of their main complaints: what the French call assistanat, meaning the condition of living entirely off state benefits. This is, moreover, one of the issues that has been pushed relentlessly by Le Pen. Ruffin does not deny this problem’s existence—most constituents can cite first-hand examples—so much as its centrality. The deeper issue is that the left is no longer seen as a champion of the dignity of work, as it once was, but of social transfers. Moreover, because work is the source of many people’s self-respect, it is important to see how it relates to identity as much as economic wellbeing. Ruffin cites the work of the political scientist Bruno Palier, who argues that resentment against politicians originates with the feeling of being powerless or disregarded in the workplace. At a time when work is primarily seen as a cost that must be cut and when management places little values in most workers’ expertise, workplace experiences are incubators for generalized disdain against the “system.” Ruffin believes that the left must make a concerted effort to prevent work from becoming fully coded as a rightwing issue.
5. Downplay radicalism and embrace moderation. Much of Ruffin’s political activism has been self-consciously disruptive. Yet he has, in recent years, started to see the limits of radicalism as a political brand. One of the lessons Ruffin has learned from serving with Mélenchon’s party—which always seemed intent on adopting the most confrontation line possible—is that radicalism is petty bourgeois. It arises from the educated class’s need to see themselves as champions of social justice. He argues that many people are exhausted with the economic and political disruption of recent years (including the pandemic). Even if they occasionally like sticking it to the man, they crave stability more than confrontation. Ruffin continues to believe that economic inequality must be the left’s priority, with all that this implies in terms of challenging entrenched interests. But he thinks the left must present itself as the party of common sense and sound values, rather than engaging in constant agitprop.
“For now, election results seem to support Mélenchon’s calculus rather than Ruffin’s.”
6. Unite racial minorities and the white working class. Ruffin may be irate with the left, but he remains a leftist in his heart and soul. Though he hates the way antiracist and anti-colonialist discourses have stigmatized segments of the working class, he fully recognizes the reality of racism and the way immigration has transformed the texture of French society. An early book, published in 2006, focused on the hard lives and bleak prospects of communities of immigrant origin in his hometown of Amiens. His conviction, quite simply, is that racial minorities and the white working class must join forces. Ruffin recalls the advice he received from the controversial demographer Emmanuel Todd (one of his intellectual heroes) on what to say to these two populations: “You are the two groups who are being screwed. You, the white proles, are being screwed by the RN. You, the non-white proles, are being screwed by [the left]. As long as you oppose each other, you’re done for. The two groups must fraternize.” For now, election results seem to support Mélenchon’s calculus rather than Ruffin’s.
Last June, Ruffin announced that he was planning to run for president in 2027. While he announced the creation of a new party, called Debout! (Stand up!)—which seeks to represent “the France that stinks a bit under the arms”—his immediate goal was to encourage the various left parties to participate in a cross-party primary that would select a common—and thus stronger—candidate. For now, however, the left’s two most popular candidates, the centrist Raphaël Glucksmann and Mélenchon, have declined. Ruffin may be seeking not so much to win (he currently polls around 5 percent) as to undermine Mélenchon, whom he now criticizes openly.
Ruffin, the eternal outsider, has sought to bear witness against the left, reminding it of what the left once was, in the hope of reclaiming an ideology and electorate that the left has too readily ceded to the right. Yet at times, Ruffin seems motivated more by nostalgia than by politics. His account of how the left lost the working class is particularly insightful. Merci Patron! is gripping social commentary. Yet at the end of the day, it is about an activist who causes a ruckus to strong-arm a company into giving a little extra money to a few former employees it treated badly. For all that he criticizes the socialists, this is not that far from their old MO: let capitalism run its course, but pressure it to pay a bit more for the damage it leaves in its wake. While he realizes that much of the French electorate might crave cooler heads, he also insists that the “class struggle” must be brought to the forefront of politics. This is not, needless to say, the language used by Le Pen (even if she sometimes comes tantalizingly close). Ruffin is more lucid about the state of the left than almost anyone in his camp. Yet he risks becoming the left’s version of a “golden oldies” station—a testament to better days that only dramatizes the bleakness of the present.