Record of poverty in France: the high cost of living is no individual accident

According to France 24, the poverty rate in France has never been this high in at least thirty years. Per Insee, the national statistics office, 9.8 million people lived below the poverty line in 2024, or roughly 15.5% of the population. Each month they have less than 60% of the median income, meaning less than 1,337 euros for a single person. This figure is one of the issues behind the mobilisations against the cost of living this Thursday, 5 November.

The news report stops there: it does not detail the profiles of those affected, the causes, or the specific demands of the marches. What follows is therefore our reading, not an established finding.

First lead: we are wrong to read this figure as a sum of bad luck. 1,337 euros is the price of a decent rent in many towns, plus a little electricity, and nothing left. When housing is a commodity that yields income for its owner, every rent increase is a silent transfer from tenant to landlord. The poverty line measures not only a wage that is too low, but also what property takes before the month has even begun.

Second lead: the work that appears in no growth statistic. Feeding the children, caring for a parent, keeping the home running: this is what Marxist feminism calls social reproduction, the labour that produces human beings rather than commodities. It is largely unpaid or underpaid, and it falls first on women. When public health, childcare or housing services retreat, this work does not vanish. It is pushed back into households, borne by those who have no margin left. A lone mother juggling a part-time job and a childcare place that cannot be found is not "managing badly": she is, for free, filling a gap left by austerity policies.

Alexandra Kollontai already described, in "Communism and the Family", a woman who became a wage earner without her burdens as housekeeper and mother having been lightened (our translation). A century later, the formula still stings: employment was added to the list, but the chores were never removed.

Third lead: wages themselves. Trade unions fight over the price of labour, and they must, because a poverty rate that climbs also says that the balance of power has shifted. But winning pay rises is not enough if rent, energy and care swallow the increase at once. This is perhaps what the marchers on Thursday are pointing to, though without details we cannot say more.

A country that breaks its poverty record in thirty years does not have a problem of individual foresight. It has a problem of distribution: who pays for the work, who collects the rent, and who makes up the rest at home, in the evening, without a payslip.