serving the wealthy

Alizée Delpierre

(La Découverte, 228 pages, 2022)

Behind the facades of luxurious Parisian buildings, immense castle gates, bay windows of vast villas on the Côte d’Azur, hides an invisible staff in the daily service of great fortunes. Governesses, butlers, chambermaids and housecleaners, nannies, cooks, and drivers work from morning to dusk, and often into the night, to satisfy the needs and desires of the uber-rich who employ them in their homes.

Drawing on an immersive investigation spanning several years, this book lifts the veil on the daily relationships between those who serve and those who are served. In doing so, it sheds light on the mechanisms of a socially improbable cohabitation made up of domination and resistance. Sociologist Alizée Delpierre, having herself worked for a time as a domestic, shows how a certain “golden exploitation” can inspire women and men who see it as an opportunity for social advancement. As for the wealthy, delegating the myriad thankless tasks remains essential to consolidating their power and reveling in their capital. In order to retain the loyalty of their servants and maintain their class privilege, they reinforce the idea that domestic staff members are part of the family, saved from what could have been a more miserable fate.

Delpierre’s study, enlivened by the voices of live-in staff and their employers, exposes how sexism and racism remain at the heart of the hidden real-life mechanisms of exploitation at play in modern master–servant relationships. Serving the Wealthy is a vital text for those interested in domestic labor, as well as the issues of gender, class, and race in modern-day France.

Alizée Delpierre is a sociologist at Sciences PO in Paris. She studies paid domestic work, relationships of domination and exploitation, the wealthy upper classes, and immigrant workers.