"The lifestyle of the ultra-rich is not sustainable without servants"

• In the 21st century, there are still servants in France, in the pay of the ultra-rich who make them work almost continuously.

• The sociologist Alizée Delpierre worked for years on this very atypical profession, and released the book Serving the rich.

• For 20 Minutes, the expert looks back on this professional, intimate and emotional relationship between two worlds that everything is supposed to be opposed, the ultra-rich and the servants.

It's a term that was thought to be relegated to history books and past centuries.

However, France still has servants, in the full-time service of a few ultra-rich.

A cohabitation between diametrically opposed social classes with a very special professional and intimate relationship studied by sociologist Alizée Delpierre.

For years, she rubbed shoulders with this environment and carried out hundreds of interviews with the people concerned.

A work that gave his first book,

(Edition La Decouverte, 2022), published in September.

For

, the sociologist looks back on this profession really like no other.

What would be your definition of a servant?

Maid covers a large number of tasks and professions - cook, butler, maid, driver, nanny, laundry, etc.

If the majority of servants are women from immigrant backgrounds, from the working classes and with few qualifications, this wide range of trades also involves other profiles - men, white people from the middle classes and with more qualifications.

What makes the domestic servants who work for the very wealthy unique is both the great diversity of the tasks they take on, and their place of work: the employers' home, private and intimate which, a priori, is not a workspace like the others.

The servants reside there full time, most sleep and live in or near their employer's house.

This work situation distinguishes them from home helpers, child minders and housekeepers that we see more commonly in our societies.

Your book evokes cases of employees waking up in the night at the request of their employer, working dozens of hours in a row, or seven days a week… Is all this really legal?

It is completely legal and framed to employ someone in its service in France.

It is possible to declare domesticity, to make employment contracts, and there are specific collective agreements.

This does not prevent a large number of overtime hours or tasks being carried out under the table.

This is not only the will of the ultra-rich;

servants also find interest in this undeclared work.

Both parties play with the law.

There are sometimes totally illegal situations, cases of violence, physical, moral or sexual aggression, but this is not representative of the majority of cases.

Nevertheless, these situations are not insignificant: they reveal that the home as a place of work is particularly conducive to slippages, since it is a closed place, very often considered as a place of lawlessness, and in which the inspection of the work does not penetrate.

Additional tasks and undeclared work are not without consequences for the physical and mental health of servants.

What vision do servants have of their profession?

The servants are taken by what Pierre Bourdieu calls

 : they and they believe that the game is worth playing because in the end, there is the possibility of drawing benefits from it.

There is a real fascination for the wealth of their employer, and the servants are well aware of the material and symbolic rewards that their profession confers on them.

Symbolically, they actively participate in the social and economic success of large fortunes, and materially, the salaries of servants can be very advantageous (2,500-3,000 euros), even sometimes considerable (8,000-10,000 euros), not to mention the many gifts, the being fed, bleached, housed in a sumptuous setting.

They reach a standard of living never known before.

Doesn't the quasi-permanent cohabitation between the employer and the employee in the same home disturb the bond at work?

Proximity to the employer creates real bonds of friendship, attachment and even love.

Many servants told me with pride that they were part of the family of their employers and were very attached to them, despite the sometimes difficult working conditions.

It is an improbable cohabitation between social classes that everything opposes.

This working relationship cannot hold without emotion, it is also intimate.

The servants know a lot about their employer, they have for example already seen him naked, sometimes manage their papers, have direct access to their intimacy.

This helps to excuse certain behaviors of their employer: “that day, he was angry”, “He is sensitive”, “I know him well”, etc.

The rich also have an intimate relationship with their servants, they delegate what is most precious to them, in particular the education of their children.

The servant is very often a confidante.

I remember an aristocrat who, when talking to me about her childhood nanny, had tears in her eyes and considered her a real mother.

Isn't all this intimacy within a professional relationship risky?

This relationship can cause forms of disillusionment for servants.

Especially since the ultra-rich often manage to put them in their place and remind them that it is not because they are part of the same family that they belong to the same social class.

There is a fear among the rich to risk a mixture of class, race, gender, the fear of a shift in the balance of power.

This fear pushes them to regularly and abruptly distance themselves from their servants.

I have the example of an employee dismissed overnight after five years of faultless work, for accidentally breaking a crystal glass.

Another had been banned from swimming in the owner's pool after being allowed to for years, without any explanation.

More frequently, there is the unjustified passage from familiarity to familiarity, to restore distance.

We talk a lot about the intimate, but what your work shows is also a depersonalization of the servant...

It is very common to see the employer call the servant by a first name other than her own, in order to reduce her to her function and cancel her identity.

Some ultra-rich even assign a specific first name per position: each person who works on this position receives the first name in question.

How does the servant manage to find her way between her social life and her professional life?

Most of the time, they give up their social life.

The majority of employees are very devoted to the employer, the social life on the side is reduced to a few hours a week, or even the life on the side does not exist.

More often than not, domestic work takes precedence over the rest.

What do servants bring to the ultra-rich?

Servants cover two needs.

The first is a symbolic need, that of showing, by having servants, that one has economic capital and power.

As one would expose his Ferrari, one ostensibly shows his servants.

But the servant has a real utility: that of relieving himself of all the binding tasks.

The servant thus allows the reproduction of the elites.

No ultra-rich could grow their wealth by remaining CEO of their company while raising their children, cleaning their house and cooking.

What the servant offers through her services is time that the rich can devote to what they want, in particular to their work.

The lifestyle of the ultra-rich is not sustainable without servants.

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