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For five years you tried to be young. When you left high school - just a few days after you started - you were hired at the village factory, but you didn't stay there long, either, barely a couple of weeks. You didn't want to repeat the life of your father and his father before him. They'd gone straight to work the moment childhood was over, at fourteen or fifteen. They had gone, without any transition, from childhood to exhaustion and getting ready to die, without ever having been granted those few years of oblivion toward the world and reality that others call youth [...]
[...] You lived as intensely and aggressively as possible, because you felt that these experiences were stolen - and this, this is my point: there are those to whom youth is given and those who can only try desperately to steal it. [...]
When you'd had too much to drink, you'd lower your eyes and say that no matter what you loved me, that you didn't know why you were so violent the rest of the time. You would cry, admitting that you couldn't make sense of the forces that came over you, that made you say things you'd instantly regret. You were as much a victim of the violence you inflicted as of the violence you endured.
The problems had started in the factory where you worked [...] one afternoon we got a call from the factory informing us that something heavy had fallen on you. Your back was mangled, crushed. They told us it would be several years before you could walk again, before you could even walk.
The first weeks you stayed completely in bed, without moving. You’d lost the ability to speak. All you could do was scream. It was the pain. It woke you and made you scream in the night. Your body could no longer bear its own existence. Every movement, even the tiniest shift, woke up the ravaged muscles. You were aware of your body only in pain, through pain.
Then your speech returned. At first you could only ask for food or drink, then over time you began to use longer sentences, to express your desires, your cravings, your fits of anger. Your speech didn’t replace your pain. Let’s be clear. The pain never went away.
In March 2006, the government of Jacques Chirac, then eleven years in office as president of France, and his health minister Xavier Bertrand, announced that dozens of medications would no longer be covered by the state, including many medications for digestive problems. Because you’d had to spend your days lying flat since your accident, and because you had bad nutrition, digestive problems were a constant for you. Buying medicine to relieve them became more and more difficult. Jacques Chirac and Xavier Bertrand destroyed your intestines.
Why do we never name these names in a biography?
In 2007, presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy leads a campaign against what he calls les assistés, those who, according to him, are stealing money from French society because they don’t work. He declares: The worker… sees the assisté doing better than he is, making ends meet by doing nothing. What he was telling you was that if you didn’t work you didn’t belong, you were a thief, you were a deadbeat, you were what Simone de Beauvoir would have called a useless mouth. He didn’t know you. He had no right to think that: he didn’t know you. This kind of humiliation by the ruling class broke your back all over again.
In 2009, the government of Nicolas Sarkozy and his accomplice Martin Hirsch replace the RMI—a basic unemployment benefit provided by the French state—with the RSA. You qualified for the RMI because you could no longer work. The shift from the RMI to the RSA was supposed to incentivize a return to employment, as the government put it. In truth, from that moment on, the state harassed you to go back to work, despite your disastrous unfitness, despite what the factory had done to you. If you didn’t take the jobs they offered—or rather, forced on you—you would lose your right to welfare. The only jobs they offered you were part-time, exhausting, manual labor in the large town twenty-five miles from where we lived. Just getting there and back cost you three hundred euros a month in gas. Then, after a certain period, you were forced to take a job as a street sweeper in another town, making seven hundred euros a month, spending all day bent over gathering up other people’s trash—bent over, even though your back was destroyed. Nicolas Sarkozy and Martin Hirsch were breaking your back.
You understood that, for you, politics was a question of life or death.
One day, in the fall, the back-to-school subsidy granted each year to the poorest families—for school supplies, notebooks, backpacks—was increased by nearly one hundred euros. You were overjoyed, you called out in the living room: “We’re going to the beach!” and the six of us piled into our little car. (I was put into the trunk, like a hostage in a spy film, which was how I liked it.)
The whole day was a celebration.
Among those who have everything, I have never seen a family go to the seashore just to celebrate a political decision, because for them politics changes almost nothing. This is something I realized when I went to live in Paris, far away from you: the ruling class may complain about a left-wing government, they may complain about a right-wing government, but no government ever ruins their digestion, no government ever breaks their backs, no government ever inspires a trip to the beach. Politics never changes their lives, at least not much. What’s strange, too, is that they’re the ones who engage in politics, though it has almost no effect on their lives. For the ruling class, in general, politics is a question of aesthetics: a way of seeing themselves, of seeing the world, of constructing a personality. For us it was life or death.
September 2017. Emmanuel Macron condemns the “laziness” of those in France who, according to him, are blocking his reforms. You’ve always known that this word is reserved for people like you, people who can’t work because they live too far from large towns, who can’t find work because they were driven out of the educational system too soon, without a diploma, who can’t work anymore because life in the factory has mangled their back. We don’t use the word lazy to describe a boss who sits in an office all day ordering other people around. We’d never say that. When I was little, you were always saying, obsessively, I’m not lazy, because you knew this insult hung over you, like a specter you wished to exorcize.
There is no pride without shame: you were proud of not being lazy because you were ashamed to be one of those to whom that word could be applied. For you the word lazy is a threat, a humiliation. This kind of humiliation by the ruling class breaks your back again.
August 2017. The government of Emmanuel Macron withdraws five euros per month from the most vulnerable people in France: it reduces—by five euros—the housing subsidies that allow France’s poorest people to pay their monthly rent. The same day, or a day or two later, the government announces a tax cut for the wealthiest in France. It thinks the poor are too rich, and that the rich aren’t rich enough. Macron’s government explains that five euros per month is nothing. They have no idea. They pronounce these criminal sentences because they have no idea. Emmanuel Macron is taking the bread out of your mouth.
You’ve changed these past few years. You’ve become a different person. We’ve talked, a lot. We’ve explained ourselves. I’ve told you how I resented the person you were when I was a child—how I resented your hardness, your silence, the scenes that I’ve just described—and you’ve listened. And I have listened to you. You used to say the problem with France was the foreigners and the homosexuals, and now you criticize French racism. You ask me to tell you about the man I love. You buy the books I publish. You give them to people you know. You changed from one day to the next. A friend of mine says it’s the children who mold their parents and not the other way around.
But because of what they’ve done to your body, you will never have a chance to uncover the person you’ve become.
Last month, when I came to see you, you asked me just before I left, Are you still involved in politics? The word still was a reference to my first year in high school, when I belonged to a radical leftist party and we argued because you thought I’d get myself into trouble if I took part in illegal demonstrations. Yes, I told you, more and more involved. You let three or four seconds go by. Then you said, You’re right. You’re right—what we need is a revolution.