Edouard Louis in 2017. Image: Wikimedia
By Stefan Szczelkun
In Edouard Louis’ account, oppression leaves ‘wounds’. It’s a visceral word. A bloody word, suggesting broken skin and serious damage. But the wounds left by oppression are not like physical wounds that can be bandaged, heal and leave a scar. If only! Oppression wounds fester on the surface of our lives, or get buried in our psyche, disabling our aspirations; foreshortening our power to act in our own interest; thwarting our empathy; and undermining social justice and restitution. Attempts at healing can make them rear up like monsters from the deep, scaring us into retreat.
I came across his name around 2018 when I was ‘web surfing’ to find out more about the Gilets Jaunes uprising in France. His name came up as the only young working-class writer that was mentioned. The quote I noted in my blog account was: “Anyone who insults the Gilets Jaunes insults my father!” This seemed to have a working-class sense of humour under the seeming ‘threat’, that tickled me. Anyway, then I got on with my life, and it was only recently that I became aware that he was now a global literary sensation with numerous books translated into 20 or so languages. And he was at the forefront of a revival of radical French literature.
His first book The End of Eddy had been a sensation. I got a copy and it was hard-hitting in a way that reminded me of punk broadsides. A series of raw memories based on his life as a young gay child, growing up in a bleak village in northern France dependent on a single factory. The caustic memories are 90 percent negative experiences.
The elusive search for solidarity
Some commentators on the French Left saw it as doing a disservice to socialism, as a literary form of ‘poverty porn’, representing working-class people in a bad light. But the truth does hurt, and if we persist with his writing we perceive a deep love of his class in spite of the widespread ‘wounds’ that he describes. He wants to get to the bottom of why this oppressed majority will so easily turn on each other with blatant racist, sexist and homophobic attacks, and why achieving solidarity can be elusive. For him his own persistent wound was being derided as ‘a faggot’ by his neighbours in his village and in school. The name-calling was followed up with appalling physical abuses.
His books are what has come to be called ‘auto-fiction’. They are based on his own life, or that of his family members. He describes the quotidian suffering and entrapment in simple but vivid language, based on an unfiltered, forensic reconstruction of his experience. This is framed by a sophisticated sociological perspective that is kept out of view. The language style is plain and everyday, reminding me of my relief on coming across the stories of Raymond Chandler as a teenager.
His oeuvre might at first glance look like an extreme case of self-indulgence but from the acerbic pen of Louis it is more like a boxing match against French belles-lettres. Here comes a new working-class author that delivers stinging blows to the hauteur of the literary establishment. Get in there!
He treats upward mobility as a necessity, motivated not by aspiration or class shame but by survival, the need for self-preservation. This is something that wasn’t a choice for him – it was get out or die, there were no other options. Social mobility is often glowingly described as self-improvement, the usual path being through education for those who show intellectual or artistic promise. But even that path is fraught with dead ends, unemployment, loss of family and temping jobs to get by. There are long odds against making it through the filters that form a maze around making a living in creative professions, fraught with rejections and isolation.
Louis was a youth of unusually single-minded focus and ambition. Amidst the chaos he did at least know his parents loved him, and his father did a least not beat his mother when he got drunk, as many around them did. He was relatively ‘lucky’ in that way. And then a narrow escape route opened up when his school started a theatre option. He embraced the opportunity and excelled. For the majority of people without such lucky breaks the prospect is either to give up on dreams and embrace mundane poverty, or enter a path of self-loathing and destruction through drink, drugs or violence. The account he gives us is bristling with intimate detail of the violence of class oppression – well all oppression, actually! Intersectionality is another academic word that can all too easily rip the soul out of human empathy and solidarity.
We might expect the result of his escape, his upward mobility and success, would have been to bury the past and enjoy the view from the penthouses of Paris. But no! Revenge is higher on his agenda than masking class shame under an adopted bourgeois mask. He is intent on smashing through glass ceilings, grabbing shards of glass to tear conventional literary conventions to shreds: “My privilege was to have known life without privilege.” – Change (2024).
His most recent book L’Effrondrement, (expected in English as Collapse in June, 2026 ) is for me the key book in his panoramic assault on class oppression. It focuses on his brother, who is so violent and generally unpleasant that when he died recently at age 38, Louis says he did not cry. In fact he repeats in interviews: “I Hated my brother! I hated him.” But then he determines to use his craft, his gift for uncompromising and forensic storytelling, to understand his brother.
Trapped in a self-destructive whirlpool
In a recent interview he talks about how important it is for the Left not to dismiss the right-wing monsters that seem to be thriving in our communities. Rather than deride them with dehumanising labels, like ‘gammon’. Instead, we should ask: Why? Why are they violent? Why do they have such a need to hate? We can oppose the politics they espouse, but we need to see how such things work on a human level. And this means getting to grips with the unrecognised violence done against many young people who are caught in the vice-like grip of conditions beyond their control, with no possibility of escape:
Their violence is nothing but the continuation of the violence that surrounds them. – Acast podcast, December 2022
His brother is inarticulate about the reason for his self-destruction with drink. Louis can at least reconstruct his brother’s ‘voice’, and show how his brother was performing a self-destructive masculinity that Louis had found impossible to live with.
He realises that the difference between him and his brother is sheer circumstance. His brother had a different father who was very violent. Like Edouard, his brother had dreams of overcoming his situation. His dream was of becoming the best butcher in France, but the people around him ridiculed his dreams! They called them unrealistic, but he wasn’t able to accept a life of quiet invisibility and resignation.
Louis wants a collective effort to help people like his brother who are trapped in the conditions of class oppression that surround them, to help them to escape the death sentence his brother faced, to allow them to have the chance realise their dreams. He sees his brother as an example of the many working-class men who are trapped in a self-destructive whirlpool. In a psychological mind-cage in which romantic love is not enough. His brother’s female partners said that they loved him, in spite of his violence, but personal love alone could not break his addiction to alcohol, which inexorably destroyed him:
I drank to escape and alcohol has become my prison. – L’Effrondrement.
It was not an easy choice to make for Edouard. There was a strong pull to let the hate he felt for his brother win. We can be cynical, as it might seem an obvious choice to write another bestseller, but I believe him when he speaks about how he had found it difficult to write, to follow this against-the-grain thought process. He came up against things like family disapproval, things like actually doing research out of his comfort zone, by making contact with his brother’s ex-partners. This was research he hadn’t done previously, relying only on his own life experience or on friends’ accounts.
I can understand this. Anytime we step out of the usual mental ruts to think anew, things that fundamentally threaten the system of oppression will cause a sort of brain freeze, a crisis of self-confidence and a sense of disapproval in those around you. The oppressive system is like something devilishly organic at such times – it automatically maintains its own survival. Over time this gives rise to the deeply ingrained assumption that we should give up and look away. Or simply condemn, when faced with certain levels of bad behaviour.
I have a strong sense that within working-class oral cultures there are many examples of people stepping up to creatively interrupt self-destructive patterns of behaviour in their mates. There must be a million isolated examples of such brilliant thinking out there. Turning them into collective self-defence and a culture of interpersonal survival techniques will face stiff hegemonic opposition. This is not identity politics, it is developing class consciousness.
My brother was not a good person, and yet I want to understand him. I want to understand why he became that being…..The working class who are unlovable. Do we give up on them?.….The working class vote far-right to get an ugly revenge for what is being done to them.— Acast podcast, December 2022
Previously he had written books about his mother and his father.
I’ve been told that literature should never resemble a political manifesto, but already I’m sharpening each of my sentences the way I’d sharpen the blade of a knife. … Because I know now that what is called literature has been constructed against lives and bodies like my mother’s. Because I know, from here on, that to write about her, and to write about her life, is to write against literature. – p.13, A Woman’s Battles and Transformation, 2022
No one had to spell it out to me. I could see that the world was organised around binary principles: heavy/light, noisy/quiet, thin/fat, visible/suggested, pushy/subtle, uncouth/distinguished, which are also class principles, and that I was always inevitably, on the less legitimate side of this dichotomy. – p.63, Changes, 2024
We thought oppression creates anger and revolt…but what if oppression creates sadness? ….What if the history of the working class is a history not of revolutions but a history of melancholia. How can we theorise class struggle through its history of sadness?
Has he read Cynthia Cruz’s The Melancholia of Class, 2022? His writing is carnal, frank, direct and above all compassionate. He says he wants to make people cry and cries easily himself. He thinks that a class war is happening around our perception of emotions:
I changed my laugh because in high school and during my studies, I was told that I laughed too loudly. But in the working class, you express your emotions, you laugh so hard you might fall on your back; laughter in the working class is very physical. – Dissenz interview, Louisiana Literature Festival, October 2024.
