B2 Core Program · Upper-Intermediate French
La fabrique du consommateur
How We Are Made into Consumers
Two centuries ago, most people grew food, baked bread, built homes, and rarely bought goods made far away. Today, everyday life depends on vast and unfamiliar global networks. Drawing on Anthony Galluzzo's La fabrique du consommateur, this course traces how railways compressed distance, commodification separated producers from consumers, and branding filled objects with desire, identity, and symbolic value. It also asks a sharper question: Are we choosing products, or have products already designed our choices?
Who It's For
Who this course is made for
B2 learners who want to improve French through sociology and economic history
Learners interested in consumer culture, branding, advertising, globalization, and sustainability
Anyone who wants to read extended arguments and analyze social change in French
Learners seeking precise language for critique, concession, hypothesis, regret, and solutions
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this course, I can…
From self-sufficient communities, transport revolutions, and commodification to branding, advertising, and symbolic consumption, build the advanced French needed to decode markets, analyze social change, and defend a position.
Understand how self-sufficient communities became market-dependent consumer societies
Analyze how railways, global trade, and supply chains transformed everyday life
Explain commodification, fetishization, and the separation of producers from consumers
Identify how brands create trust and transfer responsibility to buyers
Analyze how advertising links products to identity, gender, and social values
Use complex structures to propose solutions, criticize systems, and debate with nuance
Course Content
Four themes, from brand influence to consumer choice
Four units follow the historical making of the modern consumer: from rural self-sufficiency and expanding markets to commodification, branding, and symbolic engineering. Historical texts, Taiwan's food self-sufficiency, supply chains, and brand comparisons ground the discussion.
SOMMAIRE · Course OutlineDe l'autosuffisance au marché mondial
From Self-Sufficiency to the Global Market
Compare rural and modern consumer life through food security, transport revolutions, compressed distance, and market integration
La conversion à la marchandise
The Conversion to Commodities
Use the village of Peyrane and the pork supply chain to understand specialization, fetishization, and producer-consumer separation
La naissance des marques
The Birth of Brands
Analyze how early food companies overcame distrust through brands, guarantees, and loyalty strategies
Le pouvoir symbolique du branding
The Symbolic Power of Branding
From Marx and Don Slater to Axe and Dove, explore how products acquire identity, gender, and value through branding
Vocabulary
L'autosuffisance, l'agriculture et la sécurité alimentaire
Self-sufficiency, agriculture, and food security
Le déplacement, le chemin de fer et la mondialisation
Transport, railways, and globalization
La marchandise, la fétichisation et la chaîne de production
Commodities, fetishization, and production chains
La marque, la confiance et la fidélisation
Brands, trust, and loyalty
La publicité, le branding et la valeur-signe
Advertising, branding, and sign-value
La consommation de masse et le pouvoir marchand
Mass consumption and merchant power
Grammar
Proposer des solutions
The subjunctive, conditional, and impersonal structures for proposing solutions
Le conditionnel passé et la rumeur
The past conditional and reporting rumors
La conséquence, le regret et le reproche
Consequence, regret, and reproach
La nominalisation et les tournures passives
Nominalization and passive structures
L'opposition et la concession
Opposition and concession
L'association symbolique et la mise en relief
Symbolic association and emphasis
