Doomed Youth

The chapter opens by noting the recurrence of depictions of disillusioned young executives, products of France’s elite business schools, in films by Cantet, Moutout, Corneau and Kim Chapiron and in testimonial literature by Sophie Talneau, Jonathan Curiel, Alexandre des Isnards and Thomas Zuber. In their different ways, all of these texts depict France’s young academic elite as being doomed to disillusionment by the nature of the education they receive and the realities of the contemporary labour market. In this, these privileged individuals betray an unexpected similarity with what might seem more obvious candidates for the moniker ‘doomed youth’, namely France’s ethnic minority banlieue inhabitants, whose fate is also understood to reflect problems in the interrelationships between education and employment. This chapter will therefore examine films and novels that seek to represent the ways in which shifts in the labour market have been mirrored in the adoption of post-disciplinary pedagogies and business-oriented curricula that challenge fundamental republican notions of meritocracy and social integration through education and employment.