The ObserverFranceFrench elite declare the Bobo extinct
With their political influence dwindling, France's trendy and privileged urbanites face a harsh new reality. Jason Burke reports from ParisFor nearly a decade the Bourgeois Bohemians - or Bobos - have been France's favourite hate figures. Urban, wealthy, left-wing, conscious of fashion and the environment, reviled by their compatriots, both courted and denigrated by politicians, their days are now numbered.
The last post was blown last week by news magazine's Le Point's article 'Requiem for the Bobos'. 'It's over. It's the final curtain. It's gone,' said Christophe Ono-Dit-Biot, the editor who wrote the headline. 'Now all that's left is the funeral.'
The article was inspired by the award of a major prize to a new cartoon book called Welcome to Boboland. Coming after films, documentaries, plays and novels that have all dissected the phenomenon, each page of Welcome to Boboland is a scathing, cruel and darkly funny attack on the youngish, educated, left-wing wealthy who now dominate central and eastern Paris - and a scattering of other French cities.
In the book, the Bobos work in media, advertising or music. They buy overpriced flats, blissfully unaware of the illegal immigrants who have just been evicted, before heading to the nearest organic food store. They holiday in Buenos Aires because it is 'the new Barcelona' while worrying about their carbon footprint. They have affairs with junior colleagues looking to get permanent jobs in their production companies and worry if their ex-wife will be able to find a creche for their young children.
For Philippe Dupuy, co-author of Welcome to Boboland, his subjects, observed on the streets around his home on the trendy Canal St Martin, are now experiencing a golden age. 'It is a bit like Rome,' he said. 'Now they are at the height of their power. Next will come the decadence and the decline.' He says he has watched his neighbourhood being transformed from 'a very mixed quartier with people from all walks of life' to one 'that even the lower middle classes can't afford'.
'Now it is just for the rich, but rich people who are stuffed with contradictions: they have money but they want to act as if they don't, they want to be green but love their new coffee machine which dumps empty aluminium capsules by the thousand,' he told The Observer
The cultural decline of the Bobos may be mirrored by a loss of political influence. They have been a key political constituency in urban France for some time. But analysts say their high watermark was the surge in the polls in last year's presidential election for François Bayrou, the centrist politician now in the political wilderness. Even then the massed ranks of the Bobos who switched to Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal for the second round of voting were unable to prevent the crushing victory of right-winger Nicolas Sarkozy.
Though widely credited with winning Paris for mayor Bertrand Delanoë in elections five years ago, their support was less decisive in this year's lacklustre poll. Even worse, the Bobos are breaking up. There is now talk of the hard-left Bobobo (Bourgeois Bohemian Bolsheviks), the more ecologically minded Bio-Bobo, and according to François-Xavier Bourmaud of Le Figaro newspaper, the 'Bobo-Lili' or 'Bourgeois Bohemian Libertarian Liberal'.
One possibility is that the Bobos are not dying off but merely turning into something else. For Pierre Merle, respected sociologist at the University of Brittany, the word Bobo has always been problematic.
'In sociological terms you are talking about the new middle class - journalistically labelled 'bourgeois bohemian' not because there is anything remotely bohemian about them but to mark them from off the traditional haute bourgeoisie. There are more and more of them; they are growing all the time; they are less and less uniform; and as they get richer it is far from certain that they will stay left-wing.'
One mark of a Bobo, everyone agrees, is that no one ever admits that they are one. Ono-Dit-Biot, who is 33, and a successful author living near Montmartre in northern Paris, says after a period as a Bobo he is now a Nono - Not Bourgeois, Not Bohemian either.
Outside Chez Prune yesterday, the chic and carefully scruffy cafe in the 10th arrondissement which is the headquarters of Parisian Bobo life, Jeremy, a 36-year-old video producer, admitted a sense of foreboding as he sipped his authentically working-class pastis and looked out through his designer shades at the couples pushing three-wheeled baby buggies along the banks of the Canal St Martin.
'I am not a Bobo but a lot of my friends are,' he said. 'They know their time is up.'
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