A prisoner of politics

Édouard Louis grew up in a house where politics mattered; not because his parents were MPS or the like, or debated current affairs over dinner, but because politics had the power to make or break them. Today, Louis is a bestselling writer and member of the Paris beau monde, says Kim Willsher in The Observer, but he was born into the underclass, in France’s gritty post-industrial north.

His father was out of work and often drunk, and with five children to feed, his mother would lament the days of better governments. “When the Left was in power, we had steak on our plates,” she would tell her son. For the poor, he says, politics is “a matter of life and death”, and it hung over his parents’ lives like a storm. “They were desperate at the thought of losing some badly needed benefit.” Conversely, a tiny increase could make life seem possible. He recalls a day when they heard an allowance was going up. “My father, with a joy we rarely saw, shouted: ‘Sunday, we’re going to the seaside.’ And indeed we went… Politics could change anything. Our lives beat to its rhythm.”

It was a “shock” to escape his background and discover that for the bourgeoisie, politics “is absolutely not about life or death”. They, as the dominant class, make politics, yet their lives are only lightly touched by its effects, and they have little idea what it means for other people. Even the Left, he says, has lost touch with the poor. “These people feel forgotten, so they turn to someone. In France’s case, Marine Le Pen, who they think is listening and who they believe will make life better for them.”