The Édouard Louis phenomenon in France has been analogized by some
American reviewers to that of J. D. Vance, the Ohioan author of ‘‘Hillbilly
Elegy,’’ in the United States. It’s a comparison that might work better if Vance
were a communist inspired by the poetics of Toni Morrison rather than an
aspirant to political offi ce in the mold of Ronald Reagan. Still, both writers
escaped the static, endemic poverty of forgotten places and climbed, against
fearful odds, to the top of their countries’ elite education systems, writing
damning accounts once they arrived. Both also became important public
fi gureheads in the political movements convulsing their countries: Louis, who
has been an activist since he was a teenager, was a highly visible supporter
of the ‘‘Yellow Vest’’ protest movement that emerged across France in the
fall of 2018, in response to Macron’s proposal to raise taxes on fuel, which
disproportionately aff ected the working and middle class.
As with Vance’s book, ‘‘The End of Eddy’’ was a kind of unbidden oracle,
off ering, without really intending to, the possibility of a timely explanation of
tumultuous events. It coincided in France with the ‘‘Manif pour Tous,’’ move-
ment, or ‘‘Protest for All,’’ a reactionary response to the policy passed by
François Hollande, then France’s president, called ‘‘Marriage for All,’’ which
extended marriage rights to same-sex couples. Tens of thousands of conser-
vatives, many from traditional Catholic backgrounds, marched across the
country against the ‘‘demolition of the family,’’ foreshadowing the elector-
al wave that would propel the candidacies of both Marine Le Pen and the
2017 ultraconservative ‘‘trado’’ (traditional Catholic) François Fillon. This in acountry where the infl uence of Freud, the idea that a properly raised child
must have both a feminine and a masculine role model, remains potent.
‘‘We were in a big debate about gender theory,’’ Marion Dalibert, a pro-
fessor of media studies at the University of Lille, who has written exten-
sively about Louis, told me. The media portrayal of these debates had tied
homophobia in France, perhaps unfairly, to Catholics and Muslims. When
Louis’s novel came out, Dalibert said, ‘‘ the white working classes also came
to be connected to homophobia.’’ Jean Birnbaum, the literary editor of the
newspaper Le Monde, told me that ‘‘up to that point, there was this idea
that sexual politics was a ‘bobo’ question — a bourgeois question, generated
by a certain neighborhood in the center of Paris.’’ Louis’s book insisted that
this was everyone’s debate, Birnbaum said, planting it fi rmly within other
debates ‘‘about immense poverty and social misery.’’
Louis was born Eddy Bellegueule (which in French means ‘‘nice face’’
or, more precise, ‘‘nice mug’’) in Hallencourt in 1991. He was his father’s
fi rst child and son (though not his mother’s, who was married before and
who brought Louis’s half brother and sister into the new hybrid family).
This was signifi cant, because Louis’s father, who left school at 14 to work
for a brass-parts manufacturer, imagined his fi rstborn inhabiting this given
name, which was inspired by American TV and was, Louis writes, that of a
‘‘tough guy.’’ Life in Hallencourt was spare and harsh. There wasn’t enough
hot water for everyone in the household to shower every day, and the most
consistent source of light was the television screen. When food was scarce,
Eddy’s parents would send him to the grocer to buy on credit, thinking the
owners wouldn’t say no to a child. As Louis grew older, his father became
alarmed when he discovered that his son didn’t like soccer, girls or pub
brawls. His parents constantly pleaded with him to ‘‘stop putting on airs,’’
asking themselves why their son had to behave like a ‘‘sissy.’’
In Hallencourt, Louis’s parents were not the only ones reacting to him
in that way. Eddy found himself the target of perpetual harassment at
school, including by two bullies, ‘‘the fi rst tall with red hair, and the second
short with a hunchback,’’ whose reign of terror he describes in painstaking
physical detail in the opening scene of ‘‘The End of Eddy’’: ‘‘The gob of spit
dripped slowly down my cheek, thick and yellow, like the noisy mucus that
obstructs the throats of old people or people who are ill, with a strong,
sickening smell to it.’’ By the time the reader comes to the end of ‘‘The End
of Eddy,’’ there is a kind of Proustian doubling-back, so that the very fi rst
lines (which, like a hit single, have taken on a fame of their own in France)
may now be fully understood: ‘‘From my childhood I have no happy mem-
ories,’’ Louis writes. ‘‘I don’t mean to say that I never, in all those years, felt
any happiness or joy. But suff ering is all-consuming: It somehow gets rid
of anything that doesn’t fi t into its system.’’
To get away from the bullying and the general misery of Hallencourt,
Louis auditioned for, and was accepted by, a residential theater program
at the arts high school in Amiens. There, he encountered the children of
the professional class for the fi rst time. Everything about him changed; or
rather, he changed everything about himself — the way he dressed and
spoke, the music he listened to and, eventually, his name. (‘‘Louis’’ is Eribon’s
middle name and also that of the main character in ‘‘It’s Only the End of the
World,’’ a play by Jean-Luc Lagarce) As we wandered through town with
the camera crew, he remembered a friend who once invited him for lunch.
Having largely subsisted on processed meats and pasta, he was served a
tomato salad for the fi rst time. I asked him what his memory of it was. ‘‘It
was slimy,’’ he said, laughing.
In 2009, Louis entered the university in Amiens, and the following year
attended a talk by Eribon, the sociologist and author of a defi nitive biography
of Foucault. Eribon had recently published ‘‘Return to Reims,’’ a personal
book in which he wove together memoir, sociological analysis and polit-
ical commentary. It recounted an emotional trip home to Reims, a town
on the Champagne route not far from Amiens, where he grew up the gay
Photographs from Édouard Louis child of factory workers. Louis, reading Eribon’s book, had the feeling that
The New York Times Magazine 51Top: Édouard Louis’s childhood home in 2010.
Bottom: Louis, then called Eddy Bellegueule, at 10.