On a bone-chilling evening in early January, the bestselling writer Édouard Louis is nursing a rum hot toddy and sitting exactly where he has wanted to be for most of his life – at a discreet table at Le Select, one of the most famous literary cafes on the Left Bank in Paris. “I feel at home here,” says Louis, as I express mild surprise at his choice of venue, having expected the young iconoclast (he is 32) to favour the more fashionable drinking dens of the Bastille or Marais districts. “I know it is old-fashioned,” he continues, “but that is why I like this cafe. It is like a monument to French literature. Everybody has been here, and writers, publishers and politicians still come so it is also part of the present. It is a place where I can meet friends easily and connect with the world.” I tell him that I once saw Patti Smith at a nearby table, wolfing down Le Select’s famous (and highly alcoholic) baba au rhum all on her own and he laughs. “You wouldn’t see that in many other places,” he says. Another reason he likes it is that he lives nearby, plus there are so many famous customers that he is unlikely to be noticed or bothered by fans.
For these days Louis is a public figure in France, easily recognisable from his frequent appearances in the French media, in publications such as Les Inrockuptibles, the bible of French hipsters. He guest-edited the magazine and appeared on the cover not long ago, confirming his status as a cultural avatar moving in the coolest of Parisian circles. This was yet another moment of triumph for a young writer who exploded on to the literary scene 10 years ago with The End of Eddy, a novel based on his working-class origins in northern France – searing, sometimes brutal autofiction in the vein of Annie Ernaux or Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Louis talks, too, a lot about politics and gives a voice to a younger generation in France who feel disconnected from the traditional polarities of right and left. In the past he has voiced support for the far-left politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon, though he says he is a poster boy for no one and often changes his mind. As I wait for Louis to arrive, my neighbour at the next table, spotting my copy of Louis’s novel Change,, snatches it up with enthusiasm. “This is an excellent book!” He, it turns out, is Sébastien-Yves Laurent, a history professor from Bordeaux University. Édouard Louis is the best thing that has happened in French literary and political life for decades, says Laurent. “He reminds us of the falseness of our French lives, and why France is in trouble.”
My meeting with Louis comes at a fragile moment for the French political mainstream. France will host the Olympic Games this year, showcasing itself to the world despite being a bitterly divided society. More ominously, there are the European elections in June, with Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National far ahead in the polls, giving Emmanuel Macron’s newly appointed prime minister, 34-year-old Gabriel Attal, less than five months to catch up. Louis is appropriately downbeat about the immediate future. “I do not expect miracles,” he says, “but I do believe that we still have a duty to challenge society with our thinking.”
The rarefied and bohemian air of Le Select, one of the intellectual centres of France where such “thinking” takes place, is of course a long way from Louis’s early life, so vividly described in The End of Eddy. An instant bestseller in France and then the rest of the world, it recounts the adolescence of Eddy Bellegueule (Louis’s real name) in an unnamed hamlet in the northern region of the Somme. Eddy is gay, no good at football and bullied at school. He is brought up in a severely dysfunctional family and community, where nearly everybody is racist, homophobic, alcoholic or obese, or all of these at once. Though the book was highly acclaimed in the metropolitan literary press there were some dissenting voices, especially from those who knew the area, who claimed that he was laying it on a bit thick; that the book conformed to every middle-class leftwing prejudice about the northern working classes. Louis’s angriest critics came from his home village of Hallencourt near Abbeville. In 2022, after France 3 broadcast a film about Louis’s youth, a reporter from the local newspaper, Le Journal d’Abbeville, went back to Hallencourt to speak to those who had known him growing up. They all – including his godmother – fiercely denounced his work as lies and a filthy slur on their poor but hardworking community.
Louis wrote two further books about his family. The first, Who Killed My Father, was an account of his father’s decline after an industrial accident left him unemployed and the government cut his benefits. It was the state, says Louis, that destroyed his father. Next came A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, about the difficult life of his mother, Monique, whose “battles” included early pregnancy, a failed first marriage, and the long calvary of marriage to Louis’s father, the angry and disturbed Jacky, before her eventual departure for Paris. “The lives of my parents were full of silences and misunderstandings,” Louis tells me, “and now the distance of social class separates us, too. I needed to speak to them, and do it in my writing. Now that I have studied and live in Paris, I have become their class enemy. As a child I humiliated them because I was gay. I want to reduce all this violence, but you can’t do it by sheer force of will.”
His latest book, L’Effondrement (The Collapse), is about his brother’s death at 38, a life cut short by unemployment and alcohol. It was due out this month in France but, despite pressure from his publisher, Louis has decided to hold it back until April. He says he has taken more time over it than originally planned because he wanted the book to be more “radical than anything I had done before”. His brother was an aggressive and violent drunk who enjoyed beating up gay people, hitting women and even tried to kill Louis. “How can I understand the indefensible?” Louis wrote to me in an email. “But I need to understand how he crossed these limits.”
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I confess I have a particular interest in Louis. I am writing a book, France in Fragments, that looks at the country’s fractured society, and have spent a lot of time in the north of France studying the kind of poverty and social shifts that he describes. As a product of the northern English working class myself (with some family origins in northern France), I am curious about Louis as an eyewitness to the slow death of the northern French working class. And I am especially interested in him as a self-described “class defector” or, even more poignantly, as the tortured and self-hating “class enemy” of his parents.
We are meeting in Le Select, however, to talk about Change, his 2021 work of autofiction, out in the UK in February . Picking up from the The End of Eddy, it follows Louis’s journey deeper into the French class system. His success at school takes him from his home village to a lycée in Amiens, where he works in a theatre and makes a new friend, Elena, who introduces him to art and literature and middle-class manners, while heworks hard to shed any traces of his working-class background. He changes his accent, his clothes, his name and even his physical gestures.
He leaves Amiens for university in Paris, abandoning Elena, who loves him and dreams of a future together. He takes up with a new best friend, the real-life philosopher and university professor Didier Eribon (an actual close friend of Louis’s), who is a former associate of Michel Foucault and a prominent figure on the Left Bank. Eribon, like Louis, grew up alienated and gay in the provincial working class (he wrote about this in his memoir, Returning to Reims). After hearing Eribon give a lecture on his early life, Louis begs him to help him change his life. Eribon becomes a mentor and introduces Louis to the glamorous artistic milieu of Paris and the radical left intelligentsia, who furnish Louis with new political opinions. While he is building this new life, Louis supports himself financially by selling his body to older men, which he finds depressing and degrading.
Change was not quite as well received in France as The End of Eddy. For my money, however, Change is a far better book. Ten years on from The End of Eddy, Louis no longer plays the victim and is unafraid to reveal his own casual nastiness towards his parents and his friends. That is what makes the new novel so compelling – it is less a misery memoir and more The Talented Mr Ripley as told by Ripley himself, who, slim, blond and slightly awkward, is now sitting opposite me in Le Select, waiting to be asked some questions.
I begin with a simple accusation: how we can know what is true when we read him and why should we trust him? “I don’t think it really matters,” he replies. “The truth of a text lies in its creation. It doesn’t matter how that truth finally appears. We have now in French this genre called autofiction, which some use to describe Annie Ernaux’s work. Annie is a friend of mine and we have discussed this. The emotional truth is more important than names or facts. That is what you set out to find as a writer, and that is where the risk lies because it’s frightening what you find out about yourself. But that is what you have to do. There is no choice.”
This is a sophisticated but slippery answer, clearly well-rehearsed and probably delivered many times before, but also accurate. Truth and fiction are inevitably always blurred in Louis’s writing. Most crucially, it is the narrator, “Édouard Louis”, who is the invented fictional element in Change, which is why it is labelled “a novel” and not an autobiography. One of Louis’s models for this sort of narrative trickery is Jean Genet, and in particular Genet’s supposed “autobiography” of 1949, The Thief’s Journal, which is an account of his vagrancy and wanderings across Europe in the 1930s, with detours into theft and male prostitution. Change opens with a clue – a quote from The Thief’s Journal (“I am no longer anything, only a pretext”) – and the novel is peppered with other references. One early scene is a Genetesque memory of a humiliating sexual encounter with an older, richer man, who pays for sex with Louis but then halves his fee when Louis is unable to properly perform.
We discuss the idea of humiliation, a recurring theme for Genet. “It is very important for me too,” says Louis. “I have always loved The Thief’s Journal because Genet is not afraid to show the humiliation of being discovered as a homosexual. There is a beautiful scene where he is arrested and the police find out that he has a tube of Vaseline in his pocket, obviously a sexual object, and that he is therefore a homosexual. But Genet turns it around. The object which is the source of his shame becomes the source of his defiance. It is a totem of love, of his love for men, and by turning it around he gets his revenge on society. I cried when I read that scene. It was something I understood straight away. That is what I have always wanted to do in my writing and in my life. I’ve said this many times in public, that we have to take arms against society and steal back what has been taken from us as gays, women, all marginalised groups.”
Despite his occasional protestations to the contrary, politics is clearly as essential to Louis as literature. Throughout his career he has given as much energy to publishing manifestos and going to demonstrations as he has to his literary writing. He says that the two activities are inseparable (“All of my writing is political,” he says, “and all of my life is too”). But although his political views are modern – he subscribes to the theory of intersectionality – his influences come from an earlier generation. One of these is Pierre Bourdieu, the French social theorist known for his idea that social capital is as much based on cultural background and parental contacts as what is in your bank account. Louis, who edited and published a book of essays on Bourdieu in 2013, has clearly imbibed this lesson. If nothing else, Change is a manual for the would-be social climber following the Bourdieu model – that changing how you appear to the world can actually change your world.
More surprising, perhaps, is Louis’s admiration for Richard Hoggart, the English academic whose classic work The Uses of Literacy, published in 1957, provided a blueprint for how young British intellectuals from working-class backgrounds – the postwar grammar school generation – could attain social mobility while holding on to their roots and background. Hoggart became fashionable in sociological circles in France in the wake of May 68, when The Uses of Literacy was translated into French as La Culture du Pauvre (The Culture of the Poor). Although distinctly out of fashion in Anglo-American sociological circles, Hoggart remains an important figure in France for his idea that the key to not being trapped as you move between classes is “authenticity”; to believe in the value of a local, organic working-class culture that is not prey to manipulation from mass media and, ultimately, capitalism.
That is a notion that Louis’s mentor Didier Eribon has written about at length (Annie Ernaux is also a Hoggart fan), and it is an idea that still fires up Édouard Louis. “I love Hoggart because he does not hide the truth,” says Louis. “Capitalism is the enemy. But it is not easy to confront. Changing class is never easy either, and does not guarantee happiness. It can lead you away from an authentic life. That is what my book says. There are many marginalised groups in society but I think class defectors are a kind of hidden minority. Perhaps that will never change. But there is always the sense of living a double exile. You do not and probably will never properly belong in the class you move to, but at the same time you can never go back to the life that you have left behind, and this can make you melancholy, even if you wanted to leave it all behind.”
The terrible twist in Change is that this is precisely what the narrator feels at the end of the book. He has risen to a better place in society but feels a painful nostalgia for the abandoned world of his childhood. He feels remorse, too, for all those he has betrayed, especially Elena, whose mother accuses him of “stealing” a cultural identity from them. Betrayal is of course, as Louis points out, another theme he “steals” from The Thief’s Journal.
* * *
There are also those on the left who think that Louis, the “class defector”, has betrayed his working-class origins and that his new politics only reflect middle-class realities. One of these is the writer and geographer Christophe Guilluy, who invented the term “peripheral France” to describe the kind of poverty-stricken environment where Louis grew up, and whose books describe the sharp political division between the rich and powerful French cities and the rest of the country. Guilluy grew up in a staunchly working-class household and claims his real education was the French Communist party. When I spoke to him, he criticised the fact that Louis is now the poster boy of the metropolitan left, who for all their liberal credentials still feel free to sneer at the working class. According to Guilluy, the likes of Louis, who show only the supposed barbarity of the working class, deepen the contempt of these leftists for the French white working class. For Guilluy this is not only class prejudice but a form of racism. “It is,” he told me, “the only form of racism that is now acceptable to leftists in France and Édouard Louis plays right into their hands. He is not necessarily a force for good.”
Other critics have accused Louis of narcissism, snobbery, self-satisfaction and even coined a new word, proleophobia, to describe his disdain for the working class. This criticism has been compounded by Louis’s loud advocacy for the need to break up traditional family networks and even gay binary couples. He has made much in print and in conversation of the three-way “friendship” he shares with Didier Eribon and another close friend, the writer Geoffroy de Lagasnerie. Along with other “amis”, they have formed an emotional and intellectual circle that is also a kind of new family (often meeting in Le Select and other Montparnasse cafes).
For all of Louis’s embrace of such radical practices, the question is how politically useful can he be in practical terms in France, where the collapse of the old solid working-class support for the left has created a political vacuum to be filled by Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. Surely even Louis cannot really believe that the disaffected working class of France will be dissuaded from Le Pen by Anglo-American identity politics, which many despise and see as one of the globalised causes of their problems? “Maybe we can’t stop the fascists, not now anyway,” he says. “But the old politics has gone and won’t be back. There are now new ways of thinking. We have to look at the way society pushes people away from the centres of power as individuals, people of colour, different sexualities, and that these are categories of class relations too, not just working class and middle class. All of the disempowered have something in common, which is the beginning of resistance.
“Maybe these ideas aren’t all French but France is part of the world. It is absurd for us to be in isolation, to think that France has some kind of essence and is unique. It’s not. The Olympic Games this year is France showing itself off to the world but this is not a happy country. We can see this with the popularity of the Rassemblement National, which is about anger and hatred. We have to look beyond France perhaps to get away from this. But I am not a spokesperson for anyone. My writing is personal, and that is why it is political.”
Whatever his politics, Louis is a very good writer and, as evidenced in the self-lacerating elegance of his latest book, getting better all the time. (When I say this to him, disarmingly, he blushes.) In some ways he is also very French – a stock figure of 19th-century French literature, such as Balzac’s Rastignac or Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau: smart provincial chancers on the make in the capital.
He is also a man of his era not only in his politics, but with his opportunism and alertness to subtle shifts in political and intellectual fashion. He is a quick learner. For this reason, although Louis would set himself at the opposite end of the spectrum, he also reminds me of Emmanuel Macron, another gifted student from a lycée in Amiens who came to Paris to conquer the world. At the age of 32, Louis has already earned a seat at Le Select and a place at the heart of the French literary establishment. But you do get the feeling that for the prolific, talented and satanically ambitious M Louis, this may just be the beginning.
Change by Édouard Louis is published on 8 February by Harvill Secker (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
