Globalizing forms of elite sociability: varieties of cosmopolitanism in Paris social clubs

Abstract

This article examines the cultivation of transnational connections, cosmopolitanism and global class consciousness among members of elite social clubs in Paris. Drawing from interviews with members, it compares how – according to their respective characteristics – various social clubs promote different kinds of bourgeois cosmopolitanism, while rejecting the more recent internationalism of upper-middle-class service clubs such as the Rotary. Each club's peculiar ethos, practice and representations of social capital are related to the features of competing clubs through relations of mutual symbolic distinction; for example, some clubs emphasize the ‘genuineness’ of links while stigmatizing others for the accent they put on utility. The varied forms of cosmopolitanism that they promote partly replicate these logics of distinction, eliciting struggles over the authenticity or inauthenticity of transnational connections. Yet, clubs also oppose each other according to the unequal emphasis that they place on international ties per se, which creates a competing axiology within the symbolic economy of social capital accumulation.

Keywords:

• upper class
• cosmopolitanism
• sociability
• social capital
• symbolic relations
• Paris

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Apostolos Andrikopoulos, Mabel Berezin, Rogers Brubaker, Jan Willem Duyvendak, Shamus Khan, Michèle Lamont, Peggy Levitt, Ashley Mears, Ann Morning, Jules Naudet, Pál Nyíri, Susan Ossman, Rachel Sherman, Tommaso Vitale, Roger Waldinger and anonymous reviewers of Ethnic and Racial Studies for their comments on the previous versions of this article.

Notes

1. In this article, when no further specification is given, we use the terms ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ in a limited and non-moral acceptation. They refer to travelling abroad, being part of and cherishing a network of international contacts, displaying intercultural ease, and feeling at home in different countries. It is therefore a quality and world view that does not necessarily have to do with the sharing of universalistic or egalitarian values. This restricted sense, which is already documented in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie and texts by many English-speaking figures of the Enlightenment, is also – nowadays – the usual meaning of the French word ‘cosmopolite’.

2. Other monographs focus on the cosmopolitanism fostered by the activity and the professional sociability of specific cultural producers or mediators: artists, writers, academics, foreign correspondents, diplomats, United Nations personnel, and so on.

3. All interviews (except one with an American interviewee) were conducted in French, at one of the clubs (ten interviews out of twenty-one), at the apartment of the interviewee (two), at his office (three), at our faculty office in Paris (five), or by phone (one). Except for this latter, which lasted only twenty minutes, the duration of each interview ranged between one hour and three hours twenty-five minutes. Interviewees were recruited through chain referral. All the quotes in the article were translated by us.

4. Although this article focuses on the French case, the theory of elite social capital that we deploy and some of the findings we present here were first outlined in a previous study conducted in Italy, on Milan's social clubs and most prestigious Rotary clubs (Cousin and Chauvin 2010).

5. Today, 97% of the 1,100 Jockey members come from aristocratic families, with the consequence (related to the distinct professional traditions between the French upper classes) that many of them work in the financial services, in real estate, or as top civil servants, diplomats and sometimes as entrepreneurs. On the other hand, the great families of the industrial bourgeoisie are almost not represented in the club, whose aristocratic component has progressively expanded since its creation in 1834 (Mension-Rigau 2003).

6. In addition to the presence of many French diplomats among the regular members, the (male) ambassadors of several countries are honorary members of the NCU for the duration of their appointment in Paris.

7. In comparison, the members of the Travellers – whose families generally entered the elite later but often studied in the USA – tend to be more involved in alumni associations (those of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia and Stanford are particularly active in Paris).

8. The Jockey Club also has less than twenty reciprocal agreements, all of them with clubs located outside France that it considers its foreign counterparts. This special attention to international social equivalence was particularly patent when, after 150 years of partnership with London's Turf Club, the members of the Jockey recently considered that Turf's social selectivity had declined (among other reasons, because it was keeping with the tradition of facilitating the admission of racehorse owners). They therefore decided to find an additional – more appropriate – British partner, and made an agreement with Boodle's.

9. ‘We are open to the world, but it does not mean we are open to all cultures,’ a thirty-three-year-old investment banking manager told us, also evoking the fact that, in all Paris social clubs (although a little less at the Travellers and at the ACF), not being of Catholic origin – and, more broadly, not being Christian – can be an obstacle to admission. For instance, only 2% of ACF members have African or Asian surnames: mainly Sephardic, but also often Lebanese (or Persian). They generally come from other national bourgeoisies that moved to Paris after major geopolitical events – either the end of the French colonial empire, the Lebanese civil war or the Islamic revolution – and almost never from upwardly mobile labour migration.

10. It is interesting to note that A. Frère's candidacy to the Jockey Club had been sponsored by French American David René de Rothschild, current head of the tricentennial international banking empire known today as the Rothschild Group and of one of the world's most prominent cosmopolitan families (which is also among the few belonging traditionally to the Jockey despite not being Catholic).

11. In a similar way, interviewees from the ACF stressed the fact that the swimming pool of the club and the metal structure that tops it were designed by Gustave Eiffel.

12. Rotary International has a very meticulously planned ‘Friendship Exchange Program’ (based on a Rotary Friendship Exchange Handbook) designed to create new international connections between its members, and whose goals include ‘learn[ing] how [Rotarians'] vocations are practiced in other parts of the world’, ‘observ[ing] new customs and cultures’ and ‘promot[ing] an appreciation of cultural diversity worldwide’ (2009 edition, 1).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bruno Cousin

BRUNO COUSIN is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Lille 1.

Sébastien Chauvin

SÉBASTIEN CHAUVIN is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam.