Antoine de Gabrielli is founder and director of Companieros, member of the 21st century Club and the Equality Laboratory. He has just published
S'emanciper à deux.
The couple, work and equality
, published by Éditions du Rocher.
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LE FIGARO. - Your book
Emancipate yourself as a couple.
The couple, work and equality
proposes to situate “dual-active” couples (when both have paid work) in the modern paradigm.
You thus raise the obstacles to the development of the couple and propose concrete avenues to emancipate what you call the “first form of social solidarity”.
Why did you choose to discuss this subject?
Antoine DE GABRIELLI. -
For around thirty years, I have studied work, and in particular the question of meaning at work.
I was interested in questions of professional inequalities between men and women, because they produce a destruction of meaning at work.
I saw that mothers were at the heart of inequalities, essentially because the world of work has not sufficiently integrated the reality of so-called “dual-earner” couples.
Especially when children are present, these couples are necessarily confronted with delicate trade-offs between professional and private life, which can become conflicting.
These couples are suffering, the figures clearly show it: very high divorce rate (nearly one in two couples), increasing loneliness (more than 50% of single people in 20 years), low birth rate, rising from 2.1 to 1.6 in 15 years - which does not only come from voluntary choices -, and single-parent families on the rise (one in four families today).
Until now, these facts have been considered to be a matter of couples' privacy without society in general, and the world of work in particular, considering it to have any responsibility.
My conviction is that they do have one, and that it is important.
The couple is the first unit of social solidarity, from which all forms of solidarity are conceived.
Its weakening reveals a society whose links are disintegrating, losing their roots, their substance and their dynamics.
The world of work, as we know it today, is primarily responsible for this weakening: it structurally generates couple conflicts.
Each spouse finds themselves in competition with the other regarding the time each has available for their professional commitment.
Women have emancipated themselves and now have “paid” work, a guarantee of social recognition. In your opinion, has this contributed to a parallel devaluation of the figure of the “stay-at-home mother”? Are these two phenomena necessarily linked?
It is true that working has become a way for women to participate in the world
“other than by reproducing it”
, in the words of Simone de Beauvoir.
From there, the possibility of social equality with men.
Staying at home could then appear as a sort of moral fault, a demeaning refusal of emancipation.
But the extension of the domain of commercial society is, in my opinion, even more responsible for this devaluation: it attributes no value to free work, which is the very essence of family work, and does not recognize those whose consumption of social signs are weak.
It effectively places stay-at-home mothers on the margins of visible society.
Why does modern work “finally emancipate women, but enslave men and women in the same nonsense,” as you write?
Work, in the financialized, globalized and digitalized economy, clearly no longer corresponds to the expectations of a majority of workers: they no longer find sufficient meaning in it.
In 40 years, we have gone from 80% of French people for whom work was very important in their lives to… 25%.
If 75% of workers and 90% of French employees declared in 2023 to be opposed to pension reform, it is because work and employment today have lost a lot of meaning.
The loss of the sacred can distance us from essential questions by centering us on a narcissistic quest for individual and material success.
Anthony of Gabrielli
Work is broken up, standardized, controlled, reported and managed: its meaning has become to achieve the profit rate promised to shareholders, a new modern slavery.
Loss of meaning also when work contributes to modern imbalances, pollution, the depletion of raw materials, environmental and climatic damage or economic predation.
Women have emancipated themselves through work, but for what work?
You raise professional obstacles to the development of private life (late hours, ultra-availability, busy and long days, etc.). How can we change our model to understand that our personal life deserves more investment? Is there not a philosophical rupture in our modern societies where the loss of the sacred and religiosity reinforces the pride of succeeding in one's professional life in order to “be someone”?
When work loses its meaning, the question of the place of work in life takes on its full meaning.
The question is very simple: is my life in the service of my work, or is my work in the service of my life?
Is the organization in which I work designed to help me flourish or does it function in its own interest?
Starting a relationship is one of the happiest moments in life.
Furthermore, being in a relationship in principle ensures the minimum solidarity that everyone needs: is a job worth putting this couple in danger?
Does the availability required by modern work deserve to come into conflict with the most traditional family or social responsibilities?
Yes, the loss of the sacred can distance us from essential questions by centering us on a narcissistic quest for individual and material success.
All modern, consumerist society seeks the satisfaction of individual desires when the first human need is social.
Has feminism participated in the destruction of the couple by refusing complementarity and forcing women to work, through the valorization of this act? In this sense, did feminism participate in the emergence of individualism?
We can understand feminist distrust of the notion of complementarity: this notion has too often assigned women to the family sphere.
On the other hand, equal rights between men and women does not mean identical functioning within a couple: every couple is based on complementarity.
In my opinion, it is not so much feminism which pushed women to work, as the development of the market economy, and specifically the tertiary sector, which generated an enormous need for female work: feminism accompanied this mutation but did not create it.
The economic growth of the last forty years has been largely generated by the increase in purchasing power among couples, obtained through the work of women.
In this race for emancipation and individualization, the couple is the most essential level of solidarity and the most desirable.
Anthony of Gabrielli
The weakening of couples is not due to the work of mothers, nor even to an individualistic triumph, but rather to the failure to evolve the social and productive system to take into account the new norm of so-called “dual-active” couples. .
Today it is very difficult for spouses to both be strongly committed to their professional lives while each assuming the responsibilities of life as a couple.
Look around you: these couples are very rare.
The vast majority, when a second child arrives, couples make choices.
These can be endured and generate deep frustrations, in particular for mothers, who, statistically, more than fathers, then review their professional ambitions.
This is the source of many couples' conflicts.
On the question of the link between feminism and individualism: all emancipation is individualist, therefore feminism has an individualist dimension, but feminism is part of a movement of individualization which affected the entire society from the end of the 1960s The growth in consumption has been generated by an immense individualization of products and services.
Spouses each watch a different film in bed, each listens to their own music, groceries are delivered to their homes, the family telephone has given way to individual cell phones, joint bank accounts are rarer, etc.
From there, all structures of social solidarity have been affected: the French vote less (30% of voters in municipal elections), no longer unionize much (8% of employees), hardly go to mass or worship ( 2% to 3% of Christians practice regularly), and loyalty to companies is much weaker than before.
My conviction is that in this race for emancipation and individualization, the couple is the most essential level of solidarity and the most desirable.
It is from this that all social solidarity is built in concentric circles.
As such, it seems to me that it is urgent today to get him out of the blind spot in which society and work have kept him until now.
Antoine de Gabrielli,
Emancipation for two.
The couple, work and equality
, Éditions du Rocher, February 2024, 240 pages, €17.90.
Éditions du Rocher