MY MICRO-APARTMENT WAS just next to Boulevard de Sébastopol, so I had box seats for the protests that rolled past week after week. Notwithstanding the ever-changing roll call of participants – youth for climate, hospital staff, teachers, retirees, undocumented immigrants, students – all I saw was the same feeling of distress at being faced with the approaching end of the world. It won’t happen like it does in Hollywood, you know, with Noah’s Ark and a sea that’ll swallow everything up one Monday morning. No. We were already there and this was how it was going to play out . . . with a gradual collapse of society’s basic needs: housing, food, movement, heating, education, health, all of which were increasingly difficult to access for ever-larger numbers of people. It would start with social chaos, then an authoritarian regime voted in by the people to maintain law and order.

You need only have read Balzac, Zola or Maupassant to feel in your bones that the way the twenty-first century was starting out was very similar to the nineteenth. Of course, there was the progressive disappearance of public services, but not just that. After a twentieth century that had seen two wars and had glorified both qualifications and the entrepreneurial spirit, the share of a person’s available means that was attributable to work-related income had gradually shrunk to exactly the same levels as those seen at the time of my forebear, Auguste. People were once again finding themselves waiting for Mummy and Daddy’s money so they could afford to buy themselves a place to live or pay for their children’s studies and support them moving out. And this trend would only increase with the end of growth – unavoidable in this depleted world – as we’ve known it since the Industrial Revolution. In other words: anybody with only their work to rely on, and no hope of inheritance, was asking themselves how the hell they could strike it rich when each year a more significant share of what they were earning was being swallowed up by everyday expenses and the little they managed to set aside was barely enough to cover inflation. It was becoming super-trendy to read Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, with its priceless advice offered by Vautrin to Rastignac about climbing the social ladder, while the notion of the world as meritocracy was looking utterly uncool.