I have the feeling that the books I am writing are a party for the people I
used to live with, but that they cannot attend,’’ Louis said.
It’s a complication of the genre that cropped up again with Louis’s sec-
ond novel, ‘‘History of Violence,’’ published in 2016. Also autobiographical,
‘‘History of Violence’’ is a subtle account of the interplay of race, class
and the social systems that determine them. It recounts a harrowing
incident that took place in 2012, in Paris in the early morning hours of
Christmas. Louis was coming home from celebrating with Eribon when
he was approached by a man in the street near his apartment. After some
persistence, the man, who has Algerian roots and is named Reda, per-
suades Édouard (as the book calls Louis) to take him home. They make
love, several times, and afterward, Édouard gets up to take a shower.
When he returns, his phone and iPad are missing. Édouard tries to be
gracious, asking Reda simply to return everything and they can pretend
nothing ever happened. But Reda becomes defensive, his fury escalating
into a brutal assault. He repeatedly rapes Édouard, at one point attempting
to strangle him with a scarf and pulling a gun.
I spoke to Louis for the fi rst time by phone, a few weeks before we met in
Amiens, and he told me that he would not answer questions about the real-
life Reda B., who was arrested and placed in custody in 2016, just as the book
came out. Louis must have been in a cafe as we spoke; I heard him order an
apricot juice. He told me that he had been unable to sleep or work for three
weeks after being questioned about the rape. ‘‘He’s some guy who destroyed
something inside me,’’ Louis said over the phone. ‘‘It’s a sad story for everyone,
and that’s all.’’ Louis does not believe in incarceration or in any kind of repres-
sive function of the state, having seen, by way of his own family members,
how the French penal system compounds the cruelty of already-cruel lives. In
‘‘History of Violence,’’ he expresses a profound discomfort with the decision
he ultimately makes to fi le a criminal complaint (which happened in 2012,
before Édouard Louis was Édouard Louis). In the real case, Reda B. sued Louis,
unsuccessfully, for ‘‘infringement on the right to presumption of innocence.’’
In 2016, he also requested a face-to-face meeting with Louis, which is often
done in the French judicial system. Louis, having already gone through the
details four times, declined. The somewhat spiteful reaction of the French
press was to wonder why he would refuse to confront his aggressor. When
a judge announced last year that the case would be heard by three judges
instead of a jury, the newspaper Libération ran a long article pondering the
eff ects that the already-published literary version of events might have on the
judiciary fact-fi nding process, while also questioning the novel’s veracity. Louis
denounced the paper for perpetuating a culture of disbelieving rape victims.
Reda B.’s trial was supposed to begin this March. In the months immedi-
ately preceding it, a stage adaptation of Louis’s novel played at a theater in
central Paris. Reda B.’s lawyer went on a popular radio program to rebuke
the spectacle as ‘‘indecent’’ and question Louis’s literary motives; Louis’s
circle was aghast at this public degradation of someone who had been the
victim of a crime.
‘‘History of Violence’’ is perhaps Louis’s most searching work, precisely
because the reader can see him struggling with such dissonances. In the
novel, Édouard seeks respite after the assault and goes to visit his sister Clara,
who still lives in northern France, thinking a few days in the countryside will
revive him. He immediately regrets the decision: ‘‘I don’t know what I’m doing
here,’’ Louis writes. ‘‘The last time, I got into the same car,... this depressing
landscape made me nauseated.’’ But he is also there to settle accounts with
his sister. And she plans to do the same with him. He is made to feel that
he has abandoned his family; his sister even accuses him of secretly hoping
as a child that his family would not accept him: ‘‘If we said that, it would
distance him from us, because we would hold his secret against him, and
then he could tell other people, in his arrogant way: You see, it’s their fault if
I distance myself from them.’’ Then Louis does something rather ingenious.
He allows Clara to tell the story of the rape, recounting it to her husband,
while Édouard listens from the next room. In asides to the reader, he notes
whenever she says something he thinks is wrong. Louis the writer seems
to be trying to correct for the way in which he has been able to tell others’
stories while they remain silent, unable to off er their own version. Louis told
me that with ‘‘History of Violence,’’ he wanted to write an autobiography in
which someone else tells his story. ‘‘It puts me at the level of a character, like
all the other characters in the story,’’ he said. ‘‘I’m not the subjective voice,
above all the others, but rather part of the story like everyone else.’’Louis’s third novel, ‘‘Who Killed My Father,’’ was published in France in- In it, Louis took aim at the last three French administrations, singling
out specifi c policies and their eff ects on the life of his father. ‘‘Politics,’’
Louis says, ‘‘is controlled by those who are least aff ected by politics.’’ To be
bourgeois ‘‘is to learn to ignore others and to be OK with that.’’
As it happened, a few months after the publication of ‘‘Who Killed My
Father,’’ French citizens who live in parts of the country that resemble Hal-
lencourt began to don the traffi c vests they are required to keep in their cars
when commuting to the jobs that have moved out of their small communi-
ties. People gathered at roundabouts in Paris to hurl epithets at President
Emmanuel Macron that, at times, eerily echoed Louis’s own. Louis was in
New York at the time, but when he saw images of the protests, he fl ew back
immediately and joined them, denouncing their depiction in the press.
The street movements, wide-ranging and deeply contentious, arguably
amounted to the most serious setback for Macron’s administration up to
that point. Nearly a year later, in an incident that stunned the nation, a
university student in Lyon set himself on fi re to protest the precarity of his
present and future. He had posted a note on social media that read, in part,
‘‘I accuse Macron, Hollande, Sarkozy and the European Union.’’
Much of Louis’s political activity is undertaken as part of a trio, with Didier
Eribon and his partner, the political philosopher Geoff roy de Lagasnerie.
The three form a kind of intellectual triumvirate, critiquing one anoth-
er’s work and sometimes co-signing articles, but also taking vacations
together, posting photos of their travels and streetThe New York Times Magazine 53‘WHY IS IT
THAT THE LOSERS
OF THE STORY
ALWAYS HAVE TO CARRY
THEIR LOSS
ON THEIR BACKS?’
(Continued on Page 66)