In Germany he was not a name, in France everyone knew the sociologist Michel Pinçon.

With his wife Monique Pinçon-Charlot, he has published more than twenty books, all on the same subject: the seventh, eighth, sixteenth and seventeenth arrondissement of Paris.

In short: the rich.

Contrary to what is customary among sociologists, after early studies on the industrial workforce and the urban segregation of income groups, the couple did not examine economic and cultural inequality from below, but instead wrote incessantly on an ethnography of the wealthy and owners of large fortunes in France.

Jurgen Kaube

Editor.

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"In the beautiful districts", "The battue hunt, its rites and operations", "Journeys to the big bourgeoisie", "Large fortunes", "Castles and lords of the castle", "The ghettos of Gotha" - the series of variations on the motif "C 'est quoi être riche?' (What it means to be rich) did not break off.

The two sociologists even presented their findings in a comic entitled “Wealth, but why not for you?”

Only Soziologie von Paris, which was published by a small publisher in 2008 and is now out of print, was translated into German.

The authors were also political activists.

They attacked Nicolas Sarkozy as the “president of the rich”, and for a while they sympathized with Jean-Luc Mélenchon before the Pinçons, members of the French Communist Party, thought they realized that this was also just a new Mitterand.

In their field, the two, whose writings convey a downright hatred of the rich, who are blamed for all the misfortunes of society, met with a mixed response.

Michel Pinçon, who was born in the Ardennes municipality of Lonny in 1942 and was research director at the Center national de la recherche scientifique, a kind of French Max Planck Society, until 2007, has now died in Paris at the age of eighty.