Growing up in gritty, post-industrial northern France, Édouard Louis learned as a boy that politics was about more than putting a cross in a box. As his mother struggled to deal with his unemployed and frequently drunk father and feed the family of five on little money, she would lament the days of better leaders. “When the left was in power, we had steak on our plates,” she would tell her son.
Today, Louis, whose account of his escape from a violent, joyless childhood has made him a bestselling author, can have steak any day he chooses. Back in his home town, meanwhile, just six weeks from a presidential election, his parents, like much of France’s underclass, are heeding the siren call of the poor’s new perceived champion, Marine Le Pen, and her promises of plenty in a France for the French.
Far from making him turn away from his background, Louis’s access to the literary beau monde of Paris has heightened his belief that politics remains a curse for what his mother would call the “poor, small folk”.
“The word politics means different things to different social classes. How can politics create a better life if the individuals who create those politics are so lightly touched by its effects, if politics doesn’t strike them in the way that it would strike the people of my childhood?” he asks.
“In the lower classes, politics has always been a matter of life and death. My parents were desperate at the idea of losing some badly needed social benefit, which might make the difference between whether we could go to the dentist. I was 15 when my father went to the dentist for the first time because the government created a new health benefit.
“On the day when the amount of the allowance at the start of the school year was raised, my father, with a joy we rarely saw because he usually played at being the man of the house who could not show his feelings, shouted: ‘Sunday, we’re going to the seaside.’ And indeed we went, six of us in a car big enough for five. I rode in the boot.
“All during my childhood, politics could change anything. Our lives beat to the rhythm of politics. It was like a storm that hung over those lives. an adult, I found the same storm was not present for those in the better-off classes.”
That is a powerful theme of his first book, The End of Eddy, published last month in the UK, in which Louis describes his childhood among a “dominated” social class overlooked by the cultural and political elite, a disregard, he says, that has led directly to the rise of the far right.
This autobiographical novel came out in France in 2014 when Louis was 21, and was an instant hit, selling more than 300,000 copies. and sparking an anxious debate in France around class, poverty, social and sexual inequality and racism. It has been translated into several languages and was shortlisted for the prestigious Goncourt literary prize. He wrote it, he says, to give a voice to the working class and to “fight for them and with them because they seem to have disappeared from the public eye.”
Set in Hallencourt in the Somme, a small and isolated factory town of 1,300 people where Louis grew up, the book is a stark tale of his life below the poverty line, punctuated by his father’s drunken violence – the rage of the humiliated working-class male: racism, homophobia and casual daily brutality.
Eddy Bellegueule (Louis’s real name, which means “beautiful face” in French) is an effeminate child; as a “faggot”, “queer”, “poof”, as he is regularly reminded, he is even worse than an “Arab”, “Jew” or “black”.
Another oft-repeated phrase – “just who do you think you are?” – serves to remind him who he is, where he comes from and where everyone assumes he is going. Instead, Bellegueule forges a new path, via a scholarship and one of France’s elite university schools, writes everything down and changes his name.
“Each time I heard ‘Eddy’, I heard ‘poverty’, ‘homo’. That’s how it started. With my first name. He was poor and he was a poof,” Louis says.
It was a “huge shock” to come to Paris and discover the curse of politics did not afflict those who were better off, he says: “Among the Parisian bourgeois, I realised that politics is absolutely not about life or death, about being able to eat and afford medical care or not; that whatever the government right or left does will not stop them living, eating. And because the bourgeoisie is the dominant class everywhere in the world, there is a kind of amnesia about what politics means to other people. Whatever happens, no government is going to radically change their lives as it does for the poor and dominated.”
Sitting in a cafe near the Left Bank of the Seine, Louis speaks with controlled fury. Under the table, his leg is twitching, like a physical manifestation of an internal struggle between the desire to conform and the urge to leap up and rail at the world.
“In the village I grew up in, 50-55% of people vote FN [Front National]. Thank goodness for abstention, because otherwise the figure would be 70-75%. These people support the FN because they’re excluded, dominated, poor and abandoned. My mother used to say she voted FN and for Marine Le Pen because “she is the only one who speaks to us”.
“Today I don’t want to insult Marine Le Pen, I want to attack Manuel Valls [former prime minister] and François Hollande for putting my father in this situation. I accuse them directly. When I see my father voting for Le Pen, I am revolted by the current government and its failings. Of course, I’m revolted by the right, but I never expected the right to do anything for the lower classes, but the left… the left has stopped speaking about poverty, misery and exclusion. People talk about Le Pen winning the presidential [race], but the FN has been winning for the last 20 years because the left that should be representing people like my mother has abandoned them.
“I’m astonished at the feeble level of discussion that tries to explain the extreme right vote or the FN. Instead of inventing a new debate, people are falling back on historic explanations and errors, saying, ‘people live in misery, but it’s not just poverty; misery means so much more, it’s anguish about your place in the world. Take the person who plays the triangle in the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra, the lowest of the orchestra hierarchy; it’s no good saying, ‘fter all it is the Berlin Philharmonic, the best in the world, if, within their world, the triangle player feels the lowest of the low.
“My father lives in the village where my grandfather and great-grandfather lived. He worked in the factory where my grandfather and great-grandfather worked. My mother left school at 14, my brothers and sisters also. Nobody is giving people like them a way out of their prison, their misery.
“This social hierarchy, the dominated and the dominant, is in itself a violence. People say to me, ‘Ah, but you managed to escape,’ but to me that doesn’t show it’s possible – quite the opposite. Now I’m out, I can see how difficult it is to escape. I can see the extraordinary violence of it… and who speaks for these people whose lives are shattered, who are humiliated by the system? These people feel forgotten, so they turn to someone. In France’s case, Marine Le Pen, who they think is listening and who they believe will make life better for them.”
Louis is equally angry about what he sees as the “global fascination with the extreme right” that has hijacked the news agenda and made everyone a prisoner of the far-right discourse. “Even the most ridiculous thing said by Marine Le Pen or Nigel Farage makes headlines, while anyone who is young, who is trying to invent a new discourse, is ignored. It’s a shrinking democracy: the right speaks to the right, the left speaks to the right, where is the left’s discourse? What’s even more dramatic is that the whole world is speaking the language of the extreme right; Marine Le Pen is imposing the language, the subjects we talk about.
“My friends go and debate with the FN on television, but I say no. I will not legitimise their issues by responding. Twenty years ago nobody listened to them or their views because they were considered so outdated.”
He adds: “Silence has to be a part of our progress. We have to put silence at the centre of politics today. Stop responding to the questions, stop letting them control the language, the debate, the agenda. I hear some argue it’s better to be open about these things. If you are racist and hide your racism, then you’re a hypocrite. I say no, it’s better you keep quiet.
“To me, democracy is not about saying everything. Some things, like racism, antisemitism, shouldn’t be issues, they shouldn’t be talked about. Some subjects should be considered obsolete, and yes, let’s shut down the debate because they are obsolete. I grew up as a queer child in a small village. Lots of gay children in this situation suffer the same things: being threatened, beaten up. When I published my book in Paris, some said, ‘Well, if you’d grown up in a bourgeois milieu, people would have thought the same thing, they just wouldn’t have hit you.’ Are they joking? I would rather that, than being constantly beaten up for being queer. Of course I’d rather people weren’t racist or homophobic, but if they are they can keep it to themselves. Just shut up.
“And if they don’t and won’t, we need to start redistributing shame, making people feel ashamed, so when they repeat what the FN is saying, we reply, ‘Quelle honte!’ [Shame on you]. That would be progress, that would be democracy, not letting people say what they want, not giving their racist, homophobic views the same value, the same credibility as other propositions. Not giving those stupid, unacceptable propositions weight and currency by responding to them. This has been the great tragedy of recent years in literature, the press, intellectual life, this ideology that in a debate all views have the same weight, that we can debate with the FN, with the extreme right. That’s wrong.
“We should say to the FN and far right: just shut up. Keep your stupid, nasty views to yourselves. This shame business is quite important.
“Today, we see the far right vote and we understand there is racism, of exclusion of poverty of violence around the world, but when we speak of it, we are always accused of exaggerating. Primo Levi spoke of the concentration camps and how the Nazis would tell prisoners that, even if they did escape, nobody would believe them. Nobody would believe what had been done. It is the difficulty in transmitting the truth of violence.”
Last year, Louis, who has been compared to the Norwegian autobiographical novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, published his second book, Histoire de la Violence (story of violence), based on an incident when he was throttled and raped by an Algerian man he picked up in the street on Christmas Eve. Again, he examines questions of class and culture. A few hours after we meet, he is flying to the United States to talk about film projects and visit Dartmouth College, which has made him a fellow. He is working on his third book, which he says will be “a tragedy”.
Relations with his family back in Hallencourt are strained. His mother was furious that he had described them as “poor” in The End of Eddy. Louis says the difficulty is they do not speak the same language, so conversations are like “treading on eggshells, trying not to say something that will hurt”.
The search for a common language is a challenge for his writing too, he says. “I ask myself, how can we write about the dominated without using the language of the bourgeoisie, who have the advantages, or the language of my childhood, the language that called me a poor faggot, the language that was no friend of mine but a language of violence. For me, that is the challenge: how to find a new voice, a new way of speaking.
“As a writer, every single line I write is intended as a reminder to the dominant class, not to forget that for most individuals like my parents, like refugees, politics is still a question of life and death. We must put that idea of life and death back in the centre of politics.”
• Édouard Louis is the author of The End of Eddy, published by Harvill Secker. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
