Amid a turn toward the convergence of leisure and escapism—I’m looking at you, recreational sourdough bakers—a number of French citizens are heading in the opposite direction. Take the success of Kapital!, a board game about class warfare. Kapital! is the creation of Michel Pinçon and Monique Pinçon-Charlot, celebrity sociologists in a country where “celebrity sociologist” is not an oxymoron. At Christmas, the game was a runaway hit. The magazine Les Inrockuptibles recommended it as “a delicious poisoned gift for your right-wing friend,” and ten thousand copies sold out in weeks. Since then, another twenty thousand customers have paid thirty-five euros apiece in order to “understand, apprehend, and even experience the sociological mechanisms of domination,” as the game’s promotional copy promises. “It makes you want to take up a pitchfork!” Maud R. wrote, leaving five stars on a retailer’s Web site.
“Les Pinçon-Charlot,” as the couple is known in the press, met in the library at the University of Lille in 1965 and have been married for fifty-three years. He is the son of laborers from the Ardennes; she was raised in the moyenne bourgeoisie of the Lozère, where her father was a prosecutor. “We both had a kind of rage in our stomachs,” Pinçon-Charlot recalled. “We were convinced that our respective unhappinesses were as natural as the sun or the snow.” In their life’s work of studying class relations, they have met the patrimonial classes where they live: villas, châteaux, vineyards, banks, private clubs, private schools, racecourses, dinner parties. They spent three years biking around France doing research for a book on stag hunting, and have conducted field work in their bathing suits on the beaches of the Riviera. “It helped that we could go out together, as a couple,” Pinçon-Charlot said. “Everything operates through that worldly sociability.”
Pinçon-Charlot is tiny, with heavily lined, no-bullshit eyes peeking out from under dense bangs. (The hair style, an interview subject once gingerly informed her, marked her as an interloper on the society scene.) She was sitting in the dining room of the couple’s row house, in Bourg-la-Reine, a suburb of Paris, offering a visitor hand sanitizer and sparkling water while her husband trimmed hedges in the garden. A red (like Communism) Kapital! box sat on the table. Pinçon-Charlot (“a Communist of the soul,” if not currently a Party member) opened it and took out a game board, a die, and a stack of K, the game’s paper currency.
“Let’s roll the die!” she instructed. The visitor rolled a two. Pinçon-Charlot rolled a six, establishing her as the “dominant” player to the visitor’s “dominated.” “In life, it’s like that,” she said, sighing. “Frankly, it’s all chance.”
Pinçon-Charlot began distributing the cash. She dealt herself 50K in each category: financial capital, cultural capital, social capital, and symbolic capital, according to the groups first established by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Her opponent received a fifth of that.
“In real life, I wouldn’t have five times as much,” Pinçon-Charlot said. “It’d be more.”
Kapital! follows a simple, snakes-and-ladders-style trajectory. You roll and then move your game piece the corresponding number of spaces along a winding road. The path—eighty-two squares, for the average life expectancy in France—begins at birth and ends in a tax haven. If a dominant player lands on “General Strike,” she has to skip a turn and forfeit 30K in financial capital; a “Revolution” means that the wealth in the game gets redistributed. Every round, each player draws a card from a designated pile and reads it aloud.
“You buy a newspaper: who better than oneself to promulgate dominant opinion, n’est-ce pas?” Pinçon-Charlot read. The card instructed her to surrender 10K of her financial capital and to collect 10K each of symbolic and social capital.
Kapital! has been described as the “anti-Monopoly,” which goes to show that Pinçon-Charlot is likely correct when she attributes the game’s success to “being perfectly in tune with the political moment, in France and everywhere else—the whole world is under the same globalized capitalism.” The game that became Monopoly, it turns out, was first conceived, in 1903, as a left-wing protest against the privatization of property, but the allure of racking up hotels and railroads was so strong that the critique was lost on players.
Kapital! risks no such ambiguity. “In France, ten billionaires possess almost all the media,” a pedagogical factoid, printed in red italics at the bottom of the card, warned. “The news that one receives and the manner in which it’s presented reflect their vision of the world and their interests, not ours.”
It was the visitor’s turn. “It’s your birthday: you receive season tickets to your city’s theatre, and that brings you 10K of cultural capital,” the card read.
A butterfly flew in through an open window. Pinçon-Charlot rolled again, profiting socially from a promising encounter at a rallye, a kind of débutante party for pedigreed teens. The visitor, meanwhile, was having car trouble and had to cancel her summer vacation, costing her a cultural arm and a symbolic leg. ♦
