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marches on Instagram, their life a kind of glam-
orous 21st-century update of the Paris engagée of
Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert
Camus. (Eribon and de Lagasnerie appear as
characters in ‘‘History of Violence.’’) The three
are frequently portrayed in the French press as
a single unit. (‘‘It’s not true!’’ Eribon insisted to
me, though when I suggested to him that it was
more envy than animus, he laughed. De Lagas-
nerie, who is 38, described the relationship as a
‘‘factory that mutualizes our knowledge.’’) They
often cite Michel Foucault’s dictum that friendship
is a way of life; Louis has said that he would never
have written a word without it.
The German director Thomas Ostermeier
adapted Eribon’s memoirs for the stage in 2017,
and then turned to ‘‘History of Violence.’’ Louis’s
work reads, at times, like a performance of his
emotions, and it’s easy to see how the text might
turn into stage directions. As a child, he found the
theater to be a natural refuge. There, his habit of
role-playing (at being straight and macho) could be
transformed into ‘‘a place in which others would
see me,’’ he said. Like many kids from small towns
with nothing else to do, he joined a drama club in
middle school, partly to avoid being alone during
recess. But enacting possible worlds also brought
its discomforts. During high school, in Amiens,
his class attended a production of Tony Kushner’s
‘‘Angels in America,’’ which showed men having
sex together onstage. Fifteen years old at the
time, Louis got up in the middle of the show, to
announce angrily that he didn’t want to watch this
‘‘fag stuff ,’’ and left the auditorium. ‘‘I’ll never forget
it,’’ Louis says. ‘‘It was a whirlwind of emotion. The
theater really forced me to face the part of myself
that I did not want to acknowledge.’’
‘‘History of Violence,’’ is now part of the regular
repertoire at the Schaubühne on Kurfurstendamm
in Berlin. Ostermeier’s solution to the complicated
narrative devices was to place a microphone at a
front corner of the stage that the characters could
grab in order to speak directly to the audience
when so inclined (a live drum set on one side of
the stage mimics the tensions between the char-
acters). The German actor Laurenz Laufenberg
plays a sweet, 20-year-old Édouard in a trim pink
sweater and clean-fi tting jeans, his beechwood
hair neatly cut; Renato Schuch, in baggy street-
wear, is his lover-turned-aggressor, Reda.
Laufenberg and Schuch told me that they were
unsure how, or even whether, to stage the rape,
wondering whether it might not be better to use
some kind of image or metonymy to suggest what
happens. But Ostermeier’s adaptation establishes
in the opening seconds that some kind of chilling
disaster will occur, and the actors decided that
to not play that out would frustrate the audience.
Then Louis attended their fi rst week of rehears-
als, and they had to perform the story in front of
him. ‘‘I was always not really sure if I should do
it like I was doing it,’’ Schuch told me. ‘‘Because
emotionally, it’s a lot of pain coming up, and I
was always concerned about him.’’
When I attended a performance in Berlin, I
found the rape scene complicated but neces-
sary. The violence is blunt and unforgiving, and
Schuch told me later that he had slapped Laufen-
berg in a way that wasn’t choreographed into the
scene, taking Laufenberg by surprise, which he
later regretted. But he acknowledged that being
forced to improvise made them burnish their per-
formance. Beneath the stage lights the two bodies,
with all their social and racial markings, seemed to
transcend the particulars of their circumstances,
and I had the feeling that I was watching, all at
once, many other acts of violence.
In his work, Louis always hews to stories that
are strictly personal while also insisting that the
experiences they delineate are collective. ‘‘The
discussion about who can tell a story,’’ Laufenberg
said, ‘‘it’s so interesting because Édouard said to
us, more or less, It doesn’t matter if you’re gay or
you’re older or anything.’’ The actor who plays
Reda is not North African, and Laufenberg isn’t
gay. ‘‘I totally see the point if there’s a minority
that has no voice outside the majority world, then
you need a voice, and it’s so important that they
speak for themselves, that they can speak at all,’’
Laufenberg said. But he didn’t necessarily agree
that others shouldn’t be allowed to tell that story,
too, and Louis almost prefers it otherwise. ‘‘Why
is it that the losers of the story always have to
carry their loss on their backs when they didn’t
choose it?’’ Louis often says. ‘‘Other people are
responsible for the suff ering of others.’’Last fall, Louis, Eribon and de Lagasnerie were in
Berlin for the city’s annual Internationales Liter-
aturfestival. They had been invited to give a talk
entitled ‘‘France Under Macron.’’ The lecture was
in a gallery on Berlin’s Museum Island, a superla-
tive example of the towering neo-Classical style
beloved of the German state. Many of the German
members of the audience seemed unaware that the
three were some of Macron’s most vocal critics.
As Eribon detailed in his memoirs, when he
was growing up, his parents supported the French
Communist Party, not because as factory workers
they yearned for any kind of Soviet-style system but
because the party gave them political weight within
the system. In the late 1980s, when Eribon called
home to speak with his mother, he realized that his
parents were voting for the far-right National Front.
They had not become right-wing ideologues over-
night, but, as the Communist Party disintegrated,
the National Front became the only organization
that put pressure on the political establishment
from the outside. The National Front, Eribon
argued, had staged a kind of transference, replac-
ing the sense of collective belonging provided by
the Communist Party (‘‘we the workers’’) with the
collectivity of the nation (‘‘we the French’’).Louis’s parents, a generation younger than
Eribon’s, had always been National Front voters;
they came of age not in industrial France but in
postindustrial France, no longer workers but out-
of-work workers who had become dependent on
the state. Louis got involved in politics when he
was a teenager, though many of his early convic-
tions were adopted as a way to rebel against his
family. When he arrived in Amiens, he became
a member of the Socialist Party. Soon thereafter,
he joined a movement to protest against a reform
proposed by the French education minister and
was invited on the local news. His father proudly
asked his friends over to watch Louis’s appearance
on TV. But once on camera, Louis announced that
he would not, as the program had invited him to
do, speak about the proposed reforms, but rather
about undocumented students who were being
denied their rights. His mother, he recalled, later
told him that his father exploded, humiliated in
front of his friends, who were hardly keen to sym-
pathize with the plight of immigrants.
Louis is an impassioned public speaker, his gen-
tleness dissolving into an intensity of purpose. In
front of an audience of several hundred packed
into stadium-style seating, the moderator in Berlin
mused that the last German chancellor, Gerhard
Schroeder, was the son of a laborer and had gotten
his education at night school. She wondered wheth-
er such a thing was imaginable in France.
‘‘The question of class seems, to me, a very
important one,’’ Louis said. Macron had taken
an increasingly hard line on asylum, which, in
conjunction with the E.U. policy of giving money
to off shore countries, especially Libya, to block
migration, has led to thousands of deaths, not
to mention the traffi cking, torture and enslave-
ment of would-be migrants. The Mediterranean,
according to the U.N.’s migration agency, is
now the deadliest border on Earth. In another
example, the encounters of French police with
the Yellow Vest protesters in late 2018 — videos
showed riot police dragging protesters through
the street, and 25 people lost an eye — prompt-
ed Amnesty International to call for an end to
excessive use of violence by law enforcement
in France, and in January, the Paris prosecutor
opened an investigation. And yet the coverage of
Macron, particularly internationally, and espe-
cially in Germany and the United States, contin-
ued to be overwhelmingly positive. Certainly,
there was nothing resembling the outcry that
followed the border policies of Donald Trump.
‘‘When Emmanuel Macron speaks, he uses the
language of the bourgeoisie,’’ Louis continued.
‘‘He has the body of the bourgeoisie, the culture
of the bourgeoisie, and so the lesson is that this
violence becomes acceptable when it is delivered
by the bourgeoisie.’’
The coverage of the Yellow Vests in the French
press, on the other hand, had been, with some
clear exceptions, condemnatory and dismissive.
Eribon, at 66, is a more hesitant speaker thanLouis
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