Last fall, the prodigious French writer Édouard Louis visited The New School as a guest of honour for the Fiction Forum. I wanted to hear his work based upon his international success and two bestselling novels. I had heard his name and decided he was a distinguished older French writer. Then, in walked an unassuming young man close to my own age.
While he read us a brand new essay of his, I pieced together his story: Édouard Louis was born Eddy Bellegueule and raised in a working class village in the north of France. The community was racist, homophobic, poor, and dominated by toxic masculinity. Eddy, more sensitive and feminine with “a high-pitched voice,” was bullied at school and at home for these qualities. Though he desperately wanted to conform, he could not meet his village’s expectations of being a “tough guy.” His two novels En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (The End of Eddy) and Histoire de la violence (History of Violence) both tackle this subject matter. The former, his debut, is based on true events of the author’s childhood and coming of age. It is labeled a novel, but Louis said that for him, “‘novel’ means construction. Construction doesn’t have to mean fiction.”
He stressed that he viewed himself as a “loser”—that his success as a breakout novelist living in Paris is a result of his failure to conform with his hometown kin. In fact, he—like everyone in his family—hated books because of what they represented. He said that literature was the most exclusive thing, that “there are some lives considered more literary than others.” In The End of Eddy—which I started reading after this event—he stresses that this too is violence. The book opens with Eddy being bullied by schoolmates, then being called a “pussy” by his father—but the violences of the book occur in much less overt ways, as well. This exclusion by the upper class—by literature and its governance—is the invisible, but most consequential form of violence. It’s the blindness of bourgeoisie, Louis argued in an interview, “the core of violence.”
Louis never saw poor people accurately represented in literature. He argues that if the poor are included at all, their lives are romanticized; they are portrayed as authentic, salt-of-the-earth people. “We use literature to help people turn their heads,” Louis said that night, “and with my books, I want to do the contrary. I want to say ‘this is an objective truth. This is a reality.’” And that’s exactly what he accomplishes. Louis shows us a class of people who are proud to be overweight because it’s the opposite of going hungry; bigots who hate people of colour and queer people because it gives them a sense of superiority; factory workers like his father, who get ill and injured and suffer at the hands of a government that refuses to help with accessible healthcare, insurance, and fair wages.
Louis has said that conceptions of France do not include the community he depicts in his novel. I was guilty of this prejudgment when I expected that older, upper-class gentleman to walk in to the Fiction Forum—someone of the bourgeoisie. Louis stressed that classes are the same everywhere.
Soon after Trump was elected in the U.S., Marie Le Pen of the far-right party in France was elected president as well. An overwhelming percentage of people from Louis’ village voted for Le Pen despite the danger she could do to the country and to them. However, she acknowledged their existence. Louis’ mother voted for Le Pen because of this reason—“to exist in the discourse,” said Louis. This class of people in both France and the United States who have felt excluded for so long “are having their revenge by voting for these crazy, awful people” he said.
Louis was a bigot and homophobic as a child, because he wanted so desperately to fit in. Only by removing himself from the hate was he able to alter himself. Louis thought it was important to stress this in his book, because “if you say that Eddy was not different, but he became different, then you open a door and you say ‘we can create difference’.”