“You belong to the category of humans whom politics has doomed to an early death.”
Édouard Louis is writing about his father again.
English-language readers were first introduced to the man who raised the author born as Eddy Belleguele in The End of Eddy (FSG, 2016), an autobiographical novel about growing up gay in homophobic, hypermasculine, working-class northern France. In the novel, Louis’ father is portrayed as a product of his environment: obsessed with reinforcing predominant standards of masculinity, derisive of anything effeminate (especially when exhibited by his son), and, above all, proud.
This pride is hurt when Louis’ father suffers a workplace injury at the hometown factory where his father and his father’s father worked before him. At the age of 35, Louis’ father is left unemployed and unsupported by the increasingly neoliberal policies of the French government. He turns to drinking, his health deteriorates, and by the age of 50, he is at risk of dying unless he sleeps with a breathing machine.
In his new nonfiction j’accuse of France’s deeply entrenched class system, Who Killed My Father (New Directions, 2019), Louis revisits the village he and his father grew up in, and reexamines the aftermath of his father’s workplace injury. He is unapologetic about returning to this subject: “I am not afraid of repeating myself because what I am writing, what I am saying, does not answer to the standards of literature, but to those of necessity and desperation, to standards of fire.”
That phrase—standards of fire—as well as Who Killed My Father‘s slim length and letter-like address to Louis’ father as “you,” recalls James Baldwin’s best-selling double essay, The Fire Next Time (Dial Press, 1963), which opens with a letter to Baldwin’s nephew on the hundredth anniversary of emancipation. In the letter, Baldwin describes his father—his nephew’s grandfather—as, “defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.” According to Baldwin, his father was killed off long before his death because he had internalized society’s pervasive racism.
Louis begins his address to his father by paraphrasing Ruth Gilmore’s definition of racism: “the exposure of certain populations to premature death.” According to Louis, “The same definition holds with regard to male privilege, to hatred of homosexuality or trans people, to domination by class—to social and political oppression of all kinds.” And the “you,” his father, “[belongs] to the category of humans whom politics has doomed to an early death.”
Louis defines politics as, “what separates some populations, whose lives are supported, nurtured, protected, from other populations, who are exposed to death, to persecution, to murder.” It is this separation—this segregation—Louis claims, that has led France’s “ruling class,” for whom “politics is a question of aesthetics,” to lose touch with the needs of the working class, for whom it is “life or death.”
Louis condemns the policies of three of France’s last four ruling governments as responsible for his father’s deteriorating health: those of Jacques Chirac (1995-2007), who, in 2006, “announced that dozens of medications would no longer be covered by the state, including many medications for digestive problems;” Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012), who, in 2009, “[replaced] the RMI—a basic unemployment benefit provided by the French state—with the RSA […] to incentivize a return to employment, as the government put it;” and Emmanuel Macron (2017-), who, in his first year of office, “[reduced]—by five euros—the housing subsidies that allow France’s poorest people to pay their monthly rent.”
That sum—five euros—highlights, for Louis, just how out of touch the ruling class has become: “Macron’s government explains that five euros per month is nothing. They have no idea.”
The truth, Louis tells his father, is that these policies, these people—Chirac, Sarkozy, Macron, and their respective governments—have “destroyed your intestines,” “[broken] your back,” and “[taken] the bread out of your mouth;” “Your life story is the history of one person after another beating you down. The history of your body is the history of these names, one after another, destroying you. The history of your body stands as an accusation against political history.”
Louis aims his accusation squarely at France’s ruling class, leaving little doubt as to whom he considers responsible for the charge in the title of his latest volume.
But what distinguishes Who Killed My Father from a political pamphlet—raises it to the standards of literature achieved in Louis’ earlier works of autofiction, despite the insistence on answering only to standards of fire—is the book’s subtext: to what extent Louis’ father, like Baldwin’s father before him, has internalized his “social and political oppression.”
How does this internalization manifest itself? Louis suggests through his father’s obsession with masculinity: “As far as I can tell, constructing your masculinity meant depriving yourself of any other life, any other future, any other prospect.”
Louis’ father—like his father and his father’s father before him—left school as soon as he was legally permitted to, as a “matter of masculine pride;” “Constructing a masculine body meant resisting the school system. It meant not submitting to orders, to Order. It even meant standing up to school and the authority it embodied.”
Dropping out of school, according to Louis, was for his father a form of protest against authority, against domination, against social and political oppression. But it may have been self-defeating, and actually fulfilled what was expected of him: that he, like the generations before him, would at the age of 14 enter the village factory.
Louis’ father would appear to have realized this, and panicked. After only a few weeks at the factory, he left, and went to live in the south of France, “telling [himself] that life would be better there, less oppressive, if only because of all the sunshine.” There, Louis tells him, “You fought for your youth with all your might […] You stole mopeds, you stayed out all night, you drank all you could. You lived as intensely and aggressively as possible, because you felt that these experiences were stolen—and this, this is my point: there are those to whom youth is given and those who can only try desperately to steal it.”
But even in his attempted escape, his desperate reclamation of youth, Louis’ father was doomed. After five years, Louis tells him, “You stopped. It was a question of money, but not only that. You stopped everything you were doing and went back to the village where you were born—or the one right next to it—and you got yourself hired by the factory where your whole family had worked before you.”
If it was not only a question of money, what then? Could it have been the defeat that Baldwin saw in his father? Had Louis’ father been “beaten” into believing, at the age of 19, that his proper place—the working-class man’s proper place—was in the factory?
Is it possible that he had so internalized his systemically segregated milieu’s standards of masculinity that he was killed off long before his workplace injury—long before the piecemeal policies of Chirac, Sarkozy, Macron, and their respective governments?
After all, even in his youthful attempt to buck what was expected of him—to become a “man,” to make a living by the sweat of his brow, to roll up his sleeves—wasn’t Louis’ father behaving in a hypermasculine, cowboy-ish way: stealing mopeds, staying out all night, drinking excessively?
What do the attempts of Louis’ father to “resist the system” say about the pervasive nature of social and political oppression “of all kinds?”
And how are we supposed to take it when—practically on his deathbed—Louis’ father’s sole response to his son’s diagnosis is to half-heartedly beat his chest, say, “You’re right. You’re right—what we need is a revolution“?
These are the questions that bubble underneath the surface of Who Killed My Father, and which Louis addresses more poignantly with a portrait of the man who raised him than a political accusation—manifesto?—against those who beat him down.
- Who Killed My Father by Édouard Louis (translated by Lorin Stein) is available from New Directions.