Edouard Louis, the vanguard of France’s new generation of political writers, poses a question without a question mark. Who Killed My Father takes the form of an intimate letter addressed to his father, who is lying on his deathbed at the age of 50. There is no mystery to his father’s state. Jacques Chirac destroyed his intestines. Nicolas Sarkozy broke his back. François Hollande asphyxiated him. And Emmanuel Macron starved him.
In his autobiographical, bestselling début novel, The End of Eddy, Louis portrayed his relationship with his father — an aggressive alcoholic, with homophobic and often racist views — as strained. Yet here we see a new side to him. Louis, still only 26, reminisces about better times, when he found a photo of his younger father in a dress, or when they inexplicably laughed so hard that their sides ached.
His father came from a broken family, born into a culture of what now might be termed “toxic masculinity”, where the norm was for men to be violent and to suppress their emotions. He dropped out of school, took a manual labour job in the same factory as his own father, and despised authority. “Your manhood condemned you to poverty,” Louis writes.
Right, Left and centre, Louis condemns the political élites who humiliated people such as him. With little idea about the deprivation of communities such as his, they called his father lazy; they took away his medicine and slashed his benefits.
For Louis, influenced by the theories of the philosopher Pierre Bourdieu about how power and culture are harnessed to exert control over the weak, the grotesque fact of politics is that it is a parlour game for people whose lives it barely affects. For his family, however, it was “a question of life or death”.
"This book offers an insight into the present division between those who succeed and those who are forgotten."
This book offers an insight into the present division between France and the West, between those who succeed in a global world and those who are forgotten. Louis believes President Macron is a leader elected by winners and he has criticised Macron’s government for being excessively tough on the “left behind”. He has also defended the Gilets Jaunes movement for standing up for their rights. “Every person who has insulted a gilet jaune has insulted my father,” he declared on social media.
The story has a bittersweet ending. On his deathbed, Louis‘s father is transformed. Freed from the chains of his masculinity, he criticises France’s intolerance and recognises his son’s success. People can change, Louis is telling us. 1789 this is not. But he has given his people a voice.
Who Killed My Father by Édouard Louis, trans Lorin Stein (Harvill Secker, £12.99)
