Serving the Wealthy

The invisible relationship between the ultra-rich and their domestic workers

Behind the facades of luxurious Parisian buildings, the immense gates of châteaux, and the bay windows of vast villas on the Côte d'Azur, live the invisible workers who serve the ultra-wealthy of France. Housekeepers, butlers, maids and cleaners, laundresses, nannies, cooks, and chauffeurs work from morning to night—and often through the night—to satisfy the needs of the rich families who employ them. In Serving the Wealthy, Alizée Delpierre offers an inside view of this unlikely cohabitation.

Drawing on extensive immersive research, Delpierre calls the relationship between ultra-rich French employers and their domestic help “golden exploitation”: workers see the potential for social advancement, and the wealthy will do anything to preserve their class privilege, enjoying the fruits of their capital while outsourcing daily drudgery to others. The need for round-the-clock serving, however, does not compel the rich to pay their domestic workers a fair wage; some earn less than minimum wage—and off-the-books gifts of designer handbags don’t necessarily fill the gap. Most of these domestic workers are women, many of whom are immigrants, and Delpierre notes that it is considered perfectly normal for a wealthy employer to hire on the basis of ethnicity—to state explicitly a preference for Black and Arab maids, for example, or a distaste for Muslim workers.

The world inhabited by servants and their ultra-rich employers might seem archaic and absurd; but Delpierre’s account sheds light not only on these particular power relations but also on the extreme inequality of our current era.