BOOKS & THE ARTS
widespread, and a ferocious, rigidly enforced cult of masculinity
The Dispossessed
Édouard Louis confronts the French
elite’s contempt for the poor.
BY BRIAN GOLDSTONE
SHAME PERVADES THE work of the French writer Édouard
Louis. The scenes of aggression in his first two novels, The
End of Eddy and History of Violence, are invariably fueled by
shame’s corrosive spread. Standing in a crowded middle school
hallway, a bullied gay student yells “Shut the fuck up faggot”
at another boy; amid the ensuing laughter, he realizes that he
has managed, momentarily, to “transfer” his shame to him.
Elsewhere, the son of a Kabyle immigrant, mortified by his
own desires, perpetrates an act of astounding cruelty. In these
books, shame is never communicated but inflicted, imbibed,
submerged, and then revealed, often in the most visceral and
excruciating ways, despite itself. Even when escape into an-
other life, another self, at last seems possible, there is a sense
that this escape, too, will be contaminated—less a break with
the past than a variation on it.
When Louis remarked, in a recent conversation with the
novelist Abdellah Taïa, “Shame is the feeling that forges my
life as a writer,” he could have meant this literally. Like him,
the young narrator of his intensely auto-
biographical debut, The End of Eddy, is
born Eddy Bellegueule. His father gave
him that first name because it sounded
tough, like a character from an American
TV show. But the name soon becomes a
burden, an unattainable aspiration. In
Hallencourt, the poverty-stricken village
in northern France where the novel is
set, a father “reinforced his masculine
identity through his sons, to whom he
WHO KILLED MY was duty-bound to transmit his own viril-
FATHER ity.” For generations, a local brass works
BY ÉDOUARD LOUIS
factory had provided Hallencourt with
New Directions,
128 pp., $18.95 jobs and a modicum of stability; by the
time the book begins, in the early 2000s,
many of the jobs are gone, destitution is
48 | THE NEW REPUBLIC
governs social and domestic life. As a child with effeminate
mannerisms and an attraction to other boys, Eddy is doomed
to suffer in such a world. He experiences, with his siblings,
not only the myriad indignities of being poor—the rotted
teeth, the clandestine visits to a local food bank—but he also
bears the stigma of being a “fairy,” a “cocksucker,” and (the
epithet that his parents preferred, because it was “the one best
for conveying disgust”) a “pussy.” Eventually, after strenuous
efforts to conform, he flees the village for high school in a
nearby city. His departure is portrayed not as a triumph—the
precocious kid finally freed from his stifling upbringing—but
as a failure to become the person he so desperately tried to
be. Just before the book’s publication in 2014, Louis legally
took his new name.
In a book crowded with tormentors, it’s the casual brutality
of Jacky, the boy’s father, that leaves the strongest impression.
Eddy describes his father’s words, his relentless bullying and
public ridicule, as “razor blades that would cut me for hours,
for days, when I heard them, words I picked up and repeated
to myself.” Jacky mostly resists the urge, during his drunken
rages, to subject his son to physical abuse (“I won’t ever punch
my wife or my kids,” he says. “I might fuck up all the walls of
the house, but I won’t do what my dickhead of a father did and
mess with the faces of my family”). But there are exceptions.
One pummeling occurs after he learns, from Eddy’s mother,
that his ten-year-old son has been drawn into sexual relations
with a group of neighborhood boys, including a male cousin.
“He walked up to me slowly,” Louis writes, “then came the
blow, a powerful slap across my face, with his other hand
gripping my T-shirt so hard that it ripped, another slap, a
third, and then another and another.” So oppressive is his
father’s presence that when other characters explode in fury,
or indulge their racism or homophobia, they read as proxies
for the elder Bellegueule.
Louis completed The End of Eddy at 20, while a student
at the École Normale Supérieure, by which point the book’s
objective had expanded beyond that of the typical bildungs-
roman. It was something else: an attempt to lay bare the pat-
terns of exclusion and dispossession in French society that
had deformed, degraded, and imprisoned his family and their
milieu. What might, in other hands, have been presented as a
merely personal or familial story thus became an inescapably
political one—about how violence from above gets internalized
and rerouted, usually in the direction of those with even less
power. This attempt to confront France’s ruling class with the
consequences of its neglect made the novel, soon translated
into over 20 languages, an unlikely sensation; when it appeared
in English in 2017, it attracted comparisons to Hillbilly Elegy,
J.D. Vance’s memoir of growing up poor in Appalachia. Yet
where Vance’s book espouses a self-congratulatory bootstraps
ideology, Louis offers damning realism in the service of struc-
tural critique. He sees his community’s despair rooted not in
ILLUSTRATION BY GÉRARD DUBOIS
BOOKS & THE ARTS

MARCH 2019 | 49
BOOKS & THE ARTS
a lack of pluck or individual responsibility but in “a whole
set of logical mechanisms that were practically laid down in
advance and nonnegotiable.”
His new book, Who Killed My Father, makes the case more
explicitly: France’s class system has long served to separate
some groups, “whose lives are supported, nurtured, protected,”
from others, who are at once discarded and humiliated. It’s
a sentiment widely shared in France today, as a growing
segment of the country refuses the abject status accorded
them by a Paris-centric political and economic establishment.
“We are an entire population, we are an entire people full of
South Huntington Apartments
BY KATHLEEN WINTER
And you were breathless in the laundry room.
Hiding behind a closet door, ajar. Listening
for him to take the cellar stairs. Is it possible he was frightened
he might kill you? You could see his shoes through the strip
between hinges, high tops that looked innocent even
when he kicked you. Rounded rubber
at the toes is stiff, can bruise a shin, thigh
—hell, what’s not soft enough to blacken
when you’re twenty-four. Your ears, eyes
are accurate, are keen and clear. You stare
at green laces wrapped over his ankles.
Horses drown in the molasses time
that floods a shadow-tinted room.
Until his fear spins him around
and up the cement stairs, a chemical wind
rising to find some spark to fire it. Three flights up
he sprints but you just need to gain one floor
to leave. You just need one story
and it isn’t his.
Kathleen Winter is the author of two poetry collections, I WILL NOT KICK
MY FRIENDS and NOSTALGIA FOR THE CRIMINAL PAST.
50 | THE NEW REPUBLIC
shame,” Louis has said. “We are a movement.” Now he wants
to collect this shame and direct it at its proper targets: those
responsible for decades of callous and crushing policy. Noth-
ing will really change, his work insists, until we manage to
shame the shameless.
AFTER PUBLISHING TWO novels heavily based on his own
life, it’s significant that Louis’s latest book appears under the
banner of nonfiction. At first glance, coming in at just over a
hundred pages, Who Killed My Father seems slighter, less mo-
mentous than his previous work—clearly a companion of sorts
to The End of Eddy and History of Violence, but without
the first novel’s wealth of ethnographic minutiae (Louis
has spoken of his debt to the sociologist Pierre Bour-
dieu) or the latter’s formal inventiveness (whereby, for
example, an account of Louis’s rape and near murder
at the hands of a stranger is mostly narrated by his
sister, whom Louis overhears talking to her husband
in the next room).
It quickly becomes clear, however, that the new
book has a force and immediacy all its own. Who Killed
My Father tells the story—part lament, part searing
polemic—of a tough guy reduced to something like a
state of living death. “Last month I came to see you in
the small northern town where you’ve been living,”
Louis writes in the book’s opening pages, addressing
his father directly. “At first when you opened the door,
I didn’t recognize you.” Nor do we. Several years
have passed since Eddy left home. His father’s body
has been ravaged in the interim. When he was 35, a
storage container fell on him in the factory, crushing
his back and leaving him bedridden and jobless. Now,
barely 50, he has trouble walking. He can no longer
drive or drink or take a shower without help. He sleeps
with a breathing machine to prevent his heart from
stopping. His wife, Louis’s mother, has finally left him,
ending their 25-year relationship. He has severe dia-
betes, cardiovascular disease, and a ventral hernia; his
belly is distended to the point that his abdominal lining
has ruptured. He has difficulty speaking. “You had
to sit and catch your breath,” Louis writes. “You apol-
ogized. These apologies are a new thing with you.”
Given how forbiddingly large this man loomed
over his childhood and adolescence, Louis knows
little about him. As a young boy, Louis’s father and
his siblings looked on, powerless to intervene, as their
alcoholic father beat their mother; when he was five
years old, the man left for work at the factory and
never returned, leaving his family destitute, hungry—
this is all we’re told of his earliest years. The book is
composed of fragments, wandering snippets from
memory, small details gleaned from Louis’s mother
and grandmother; Louis lacks a fuller picture of his
father’s life and doesn’t try to construct one. “I’ve
only come to know you accidentally,” he writes. “Or

through other people.” He gleans almost nothing from his
father himself, and while Louis adopts an intimate tone with
him, it’s more in the manner of a diary or monologue, not an
actual conversation.
In his brief, elliptical preface to the book, Louis suggests
that if he had written this story as a play, it would begin with
a father and son standing a few feet apart in “a vast empty
space”—an open field, say, or an abandoned factory. “The son
is the only one to speak,” he writes.
He addresses his father, but his father doesn’t seem to hear,
we don’t know why not. Although they stand close together,
neither can reach the other. Sometimes they touch, they come
into physical contact, but even in these moments they are apart.
Their estrangement has a salutary effect, creating the distance
from which to reconsider the past. A kind of righteous anger
A group of Yellow Vest protesters at Le Havre in Normandy in late December 2018
gradually replaces judgment. Nowhere is this truer than in
Louis’s discussion of his father’s choice to leave school at the age
of 14. Initially, Louis explains that fateful decision as a result of
“masculine pride”; there’s frustration that his father wanted to
prove, above all other considerations, that he didn’t give a shit.
“Constructing your masculinity meant depriving yourself of any
J E A N G AU M Y/M AG N U M P H OTO S
other life, any other future, any other prospect that school might
have opened up. Your manhood condemned you to poverty.”
And yet, only a couple of pages later, he relates an episode
that subtly reverses this formulation. Louis is twelve, in grade
school, and he has just learned for the first time about the
Berlin Wall. He’s fascinated and disturbed. (“The fact that a
major city, not so far away from us, could be divided in two,
BOOKS & THE ARTS
practically overnight, by a wall, came over me like a storm.”)
Later, at home, he begs his father to tell him more: What was
it like? Why exactly was it built? Could you ever see your loved
ones if they lived on the other side? His father says nothing.
“I started to see that my nagging was causing you pain,” Louis
writes. “I used words you didn’t understand.” Still, he keeps
pushing, and his father erupts.
But it wasn’t the way you usually lost your temper. It wasn’t
normal, the way you snapped. You were ashamed because I
was confronting you with a school culture that had excluded
you, that had wanted you out. Where is history? The history
they taught us at school was not your own. World history was
what they taught us, and you were left out of the world.
Louis’s father, like his grandfather and great-grandfather, had
been expelled from the realm of culture and education long
before he chose to leave it behind. His masculine
pride was not the cause but a by-product of this
exclusion. It was poverty that condemned him
to manhood.
As Louis revisits the story he’s been telling
himself about his father, he starts to discover
a new perspective on their relationship. “From
my childhood I have no happy memories,” reads
the first line of The End of Eddy. “Suffering is
all-consuming: it somehow gets rid of any-
thing that doesn’t fit into its system.” Now, with
the benefit of time and space, and a different
name, these memories seep back in; what Eddy
couldn’t or wouldn’t see, Édouard finally can.
Some are minor, nearly imperceptible: a quick
smile in the rearview mirror, his father’s moist
eyes while watching an opera telecast. A goofy
face—“Look Papa, I’m an alien!”—that elicits
laughter. Waking up, on his eighth birthday, to
discover the Titanic video box set at the foot of
his bed; his father had said no, that’s for girls,
but surprised him at the last minute. And then,
at ten years old, pictures in an old mildewed
photo album of his father, from about a decade
earlier, dressed as a woman, a cheerleader.
All my life I’d seen you sneer at any sign of femininity in a
man.... I pored over those images all night long—your body,
your body in a skirt, the wig on your head, the lipstick on your
mouth, the fake breasts under your tee shirt. You must have
stuffed cotton wadding in a bra. The most surprising thing to
me was that you looked happy. You were smiling. I stole one
of the photos and several times a week I would take it out of
the drawer where I’d hidden it and try to decipher it. I never
mentioned it to you.
ANGUISHED AT THE sight of that body now wrecked and ruined,
Louis identifies, in the book’s final section, the people and
MARCH 2019 | 51
BOOKS & THE ARTS
forces he believes precipitated this condition. There’s nothing
natural, he contends, about a 50-year-old man unable to breathe
or walk on his own. Abandoned by the state and useless to
the market, his father belongs to a category of people whose
suffering confirms, as the cultural historian Michael Denning
has put it, that under contemporary capitalism “the only thing
worse than being exploited is not being exploited.” They can be
exposed to illness and premature death at no real cost to the
prevailing order. “There are murderers,” Louis writes, “who
are never named for their murders.” If the book’s title ever
contained a question mark, it’s been removed. What remains
is a statement, an accusation: They did this to him.
He lists a procession of culprits from across the political
spectrum. Jacques Chirac, Xavier Bertrand, Nicolas Sarkozy,
Martin Hirsch, François Hollande, Myriam El Khomri, Manuel
Valls, Emmanuel Macron: Whether adding work requirements
to state benefits—forcing his father, despite his back injury, to
take a job as a street sweeper—or cutting coverage for essen-
tial medications, these are the politicians who destroyed his
If the book’s title ever contained a
question mark, it’s been removed.
What remains is a statement, an
accusation: They did this to him.
father’s intestines, mangled his spine, and asphyxiated him.
Louis cites, as emblematic of these vindictive policies, President
Macron’s decision in 2017 to reduce by five euros per month
the housing subsidies for France’s poorest citizens; that same
month, Macron’s government announced a tax break for the
rich. “The ruling class,” Louis writes, “may complain about a
left-wing government, they may complain about a right-wing
government, but no government ever ruins their digestion,
no government ever breaks their backs.” For his father and
those like him, on the other hand, “politics was a question of
life or death.”
Louis’s indictment echoes what has become a battle cry
among the French precariat. In November of last year, the
gilets jaunes or Yellow Vests movement spontaneously erupted
throughout the country, with hundreds of thousands of men
and women, many of them hailing from the rural provinces,
blocking the roads and roundabouts leading into nearly every
town in France. The diffuse, leaderless uprising began in op-
position to a planned fuel tax but soon turned into a denunci-
ation of economic injustice more broadly. They saw Macron,
who has a habit of speaking derisively of the working class
(and pushing “reforms” that disproportionately hurt them),
as merely the latest face of elite contempt for the poor. Louis,
not surprisingly, has been a vocal supporter of the protests.
If The End of Eddy gave the French literary public a window
52 | THE NEW REPUBLIC
onto the social world of people they didn’t know existed (or
whose existence they had gladly ignored), Who Killed My
Father is a crucial text for a moment when those people are
refusing to die quietly.
In a recent essay, “Can the Yellow Vests Speak?,” Louis de-
scribed his shock at the first published images of the gilets jaunes.
I saw bodies who almost never appear in the public and media
space—suffering bodies ravaged by work, by fatigue, by hunger,
by the permanent humiliation of the dominated by the domi-
nant, by social and geographical exclusion.… The bodies that
I saw in the photos looked like my father’s, my brother’s, my
aunts’. They looked like the bodies of my family, the inhabitants
of the village where I lived as a child, of these people whose
health is devastated by poverty and misery. Of those people
who—rightly—constantly repeated, day after day throughout
my childhood, “We count for nothing, no one talks about us.”
While acknowledging the far right’s presence in the protests
(commentators immediately seized on reports of demonstra-
tors chanting racist and xenophobic slogans), Louis, like many
activists, insisted that the uprising was still taking shape and
its political orientation was “not yet fixed in place.” Any social
movement, he argued, presents an opportunity to subvert and
destabilize language, so that old objects of scorn can be sup-
planted by more appropriate targets, producing unexpected
alliances. Such had already happened with the gilets jaunes,
as France’s white rural poor and largely nonwhite urban poor
united in an attempt to unmask their country’s leaders—or
to enact what Louis, in a 2015 manifesto co-written with
Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, defiantly termed the “principle of the
redistribution of shame.”
On the last page of the book, Louis’s father comes to embody
this possibility. A fervent admirer of Marine Le Pen’s National
Front, his father had long ago latched on to the only party, as he
saw it, willing to diagnose the system under which he suffered.
But his views have undergone a shift: “You used to say the
problem with France was the foreigners and the homosexuals,”
Louis writes, “and now you criticize French racism. You ask me
to tell you about the man I love.... You changed from one day to
the next.” Louis doesn’t really explain the transformation, and,
as presented in the book, with its tone of profound alienation,
this abrupt, somewhat shocking ending has the feeling of a
dream, if not a miracle. But then the emergence of the gilets
jaunes, too, has been called miraculous.
Last month, when I came to see you, you asked me before I
left, Are you still involved in politics? ... Yes, I told you, more and
more involved. You let three or four seconds go by. Then you
said, You’re right. You’re right—what we need is a revolution.
Perhaps the son, improbably, has been able to resuscitate
his father. a
Brian Goldstone is a writer based in Atlanta.