Generation Y in other words generation Y since Y is said to be Y in English, the generation of 18-30

year olds. And to talk about it, I receive MyriamLevain, hello. Myriam, you are a journalist ... and you

publish with Julia Tissier Generation Y by itself, next to you is Monique Dagnaud, hello. You are

Director of Research at the CNRS and a teacher at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

and you have published a book Generations Y: Young people and social networks from derision to

subversion published by Sciences Po and right by your side, Ludivine Bantigny, hello Ludivine, you

are a Lecturer in Contemporary History at the University of Rouen, author of Jeunesse oblige, histoire

des jeunes en France, and in this book, Ludivine, we find this saying by Pierre Bourdieu "young

people, he writes, it's only a word, and youth, a fortiori, is a concept that catches everything, that is to

say nothing.” What did Pierre Bourdieu, Ludivine mean?

Well, he meant that when we take youth as a criterion we necessarily proceed to a certain division of

the social. We proceed to a factory, we proceed to an identity construction, so we are in the

construction of a category which tends precisely to forget the generational plural on which we will

probably have the opportunity to return. So between valorization or disqualification but it is a

question of building the social, of therefore proceeding to the elaboration of a section. It is a real

media chestnut that the youth. We recently saw another example of this in Le Monde, which

headlined November 24: “And if France no longer loved its young people?” So there is this idea of an

identity construction that also assigns functions to youth. So, as one listener writes to me on Twitter,

since Public Service is now on Twitter, should we speak of youth in the plural? - Most likely and what

is interesting precisely is that those who hold a somewhat generalizing discourse on the young people

arise a little not necessarily as lesson givers but as tone givers, it gives a tone and expectations that are

created through this speech.

Monique Dagnaud, then, how can we speak of generation Y, youth is plural despite everything, a

generation is a notion that exists in history and sociology.

14-Absolutely. Generation Y in fact, this denomination is a convention. American sociologists have

tried to classify the history of the generations and they classify them between that of the baby

boomers, a generation after which would be generation X to refer to a famous book which appeared in

the early 90s by Douglas Copland and then, today Today, therefore, suddenly, as there was generation

X, we are talking about generation Y. What characterizes generation Y, uh obviously, I'm going to go

completely in the direction of the fact that young people it is an extremely heterogeneous whole and

should never be lost sight of, socially heterogeneous. But let's say, there are several dimensions. First,

then, it would come after a generation of baby boomers who would have fought the battle, who would

have fought the cultural battle, who would have fought the political battle, and then there would be

this generation X who would be a bit extinct compared to their brilliant parents, and then then there

will be millennials, so in fact there's often direct contact between baby boomers and people today in

their 20s and 30s to the extent that baby boomers, you have to remember, they made children very

late. The second aspect of Generation Y is that they lived, they grew up in an educational system that

I could qualify as Dolto-Bourdieu, precisely to make Bourdieu speak again.

Dolto-Bourdieu?-Dolto-Bourdieu. On the one hand, she lived this rather permissive type of education

where the parents listen to the children, where we must take into account the personality of the

children, so it is the Dolto side. On the other hand, in France, in particular, school competition is

extremely strong so anyway, even we have to pay a lot of attention to your personality, your talents...

at the same time, there is a very standardized school competition, so she lived through this somewhat

contradictory system. Then she lived through this period. For years we have been talking about the

crisis. So she lived in a world of sobering up in relation to ideologies, in relation to the utopias that

were precisely launched by the 68 generation and especially after the 70s which were emancipatory

movements, and finally she has this other dimension that I have explored the most, that is to say that

she learned about knowledge and information with digital tools, first the Internet and today through
socia networks, which are a revolution in the revolution, in relation to the Internet.- So obviously,

we will talk about the Internet later. Myriam Levain, you signed La Génération Y by itself, along with

Julia Tissier. And you are part of this generation Y. What does that mean today when you belong to

these 18-30 years. You are a journalist, you have accumulated a large number of fixed-term contracts

before finding a stable position. It is first of all a complicated relationship with work, employment,

the economy.

Yes, of course, despite all the young people, I agree with the idea that there are several young people

in France and elsewhere, but there are still major characteristics that we have all known and

precariousness is one of the characteristics of our generation. Moreover, we have even renamed

ourselves the precarious generation and obviously, whether we like it or not, this creates a relationship

to the vision of life and to the world of work in general which is quite specific to our generation and

which we are blame a lot. This is also how the concept of Generation Y was born, within the human

resources department since in companies, we began to take an interest in these

Ludivine Bantigny, in the book that you co-edited, Jeunesse oblige, you talk about working-class

youth. Is precarious youth, the term precarious youth today is, we will say, an extension of the

working condition to all youth. Can we say that? - So it is certain, indeed, as you have just recalled,

precariousness is the characteristic, one of the major characteristics of the conditions for entry into

professional life today For the young. The question is: does precariousness only concern young

people? To what extent is it a question of relativizing it, without in any way denying it, relativizing its

sociological significance insofar as the baby boomers who are, who often appear precisely as Kronos

devouring their children, a little as if they had justly burned all the cartridges for the future of the

generations that succeeded them. These baby boomers are themselves confronted with difficulties and

that this generation itself is extremely heterogeneous, diversified, experiences particularly difficult
situations at the end of their careers and within the young generation, in fact, there too draw

distinctions. Uh, it's difficult to bring together a 28-year-old polytechnician and a young operator, as

they are called today, in factories who are hired at 18.

So young people are not all equal in the face of precariousness. Monique Dagnaud?-Listen, the

numbers speak for themselves. It is true that in an age group today, you have 42% who obtain a higher

education diploma. That means 58% who only have the Bac or below the Bac and obviously the

condition is completely different. If you take people who have a higher diploma and I'm not just

talking about polytechnicians, it's true that they have more difficulty finding a job quickly, that they

go through the internship box, CDI, CDD rather and that this was not the case 30 years ago. But at the

same time, the real precarious are by far the young people who have uh, no diploma or even at the

limit only the Bac for whom the unemployment rate, say three years after the end of their studies, is l

order between 40 and 50%. It is enormous. It's not at all the same situation as when you leave

Sciences Po, you really have to insist on that.

...therefore social class.-on the differences, of course social class and not just age class because we

talk a lot about age wars and a little less today about class wars, but there must reintroduce today this

criterion of social class because the differences are mostly, moreover, intragenerational, within

generations, even if of course today 80% of hirings are on fixed-term contracts, it is that is to say on

precarious contracts. - Myriam, they are also reinventing politics, the 18-30 year olds, because they

are said to be depoliticized. - So this is one of the major misconceptions against our generation.

Against which we rebel a little. Because young people want politics, young people do not necessarily

vote, they use the ballot box to demonstrate a protest, they abstain a lot. But they want politics, and

it's not us who say it, it's Anne Muxel, a political scientist who has been working on young people for

25 years and who does not observe any major depoliticization of young people. On the other hand,
what is happening and which is very clear is that young people no longer recognize themselves in

their policies and this is a real problem and I find that we are already seeing it in this campaign. We

have no mirror, our politicians are much older than us, the average age in the National Assembly is

still 59 years old. When you think that in the 1980s, during the Mitterand era, there was one MP under

40 for every MP over 60, we are no longer at all in that, young people are no longer represented at all

in politics.