If Robert Louis Stevenson looked at the strange case of François Bégaudeau, he would distinguish two people: the one who speaks and the one who writes. On YouTube, there are plenty of long interviews with the author ofBetween the walls. One of the latest, a debate opposing him to Geoffroy Lejeune (the editorial director of JDD), has already been viewed more than 150,000 times. When he takes on the role of the left-wing “joking gladiator”, his rhetorical ease earns Bégaudeau smug admirers (who find him brilliant) and fierce enemies (who judge him to be a slap in the face). In writing, it’s something else. Alternating novels and essays, big hits and more confidential releases, Bégaudeau tends to disconcert even his fans. With his new book, Like a mulehe blurs the lines even further by mocking a certain militant feminism.
The starting point was an upset that took him to court. In 2020, responding to a question on the forum of his website, Bégaudeau wrote this about the historian Ludivine Bantigny: “In the Parisian radical milieu, Ludivine is known to never be the last. All the authors of La Fabrique tell him passed over it, even Lagasnerie.” Geoffroy de Lagasnerie being homosexual (and not even published by La Fabrique), it’s a joke. Not very fine, certainly, but paltry. These two sentences caused an outcry on Twitter and Bantigny attacked Bégaudeau for defamation, demanding more than 8,000 euros in damages. In 2024, the accused is acquitted. Several malicious (and lazy) articles published on Like a mule only spoke about this controversy. However, it only occupies the introduction and conclusion of this rich and lively book which questions humor, the link between art and morality, art and politics. We think of A new theologian, Mr. Fernand Laudet by Charles Péguy. In 1911, offended by a little scathing paper published against The Mystery of Joan of Arc’s Charity in a review edited by Fernand Laudet, Péguy decides to respond line by line. One thing led to another, carried by his crazy inspiration, he produced more than 200 pages which went well beyond the initial subject. Ludivine Bantigny is to Bégaudeau what Fernand Laudet was to Péguy: a trigger.
One might wonder what fly bit Bégaudeau. Last year, he pleased everyone with his beautiful novel Love. What need did he have to rush into the stretchers with such an azimuth attempt as Like a mule ? This hotheaded side combined with digressions which sometimes flirt with graphomania can remind us of Yann Moix. In a café in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, near his home, Bégaudeau laughs at this unexpected parallel: “It must be an old anarchist reflex: I’m not crazy about unanimity. Here, I’m putting my foot in politics, reactions are necessarily more lively However, I cannot see myself as a provocateur As for Moix, and this is neither to my credit nor to my discredit, but he is still more incontinent than. me… My prose is drier, more methodical. Clarity is not Moix’s main concern, which also makes him very interesting. loses in himself He’s a true literary man, a Célinian – regardless of any anti-Semitic liabilities, I’m talking about style.”
“If I’m a dandy, I’m a third world dandy”
The style, precisely, no one cares about it anymore among our colleagues. When does he think this lack of interest dates back? “There is still one constant. In the 19th century, Baudelaire and others deplored the fact that we never talk about form. It’s as old as the world… When society takes over a work, it brings back everything to her: we will look for the subject, and preferably the social subject. In the 1950s and 1970s, there was more room for criticism and analysis of the workmanship. shape looks out of date, out of date, out of date – it’s art for art’s sake, etc. We look like a socialite in a butt clip with a flute of champagne. All the great leaders of the radical left. yesteryear (Deleuze, Foucault, Bourdieu, Badiou) had a strong connection to art, which we do not find in those of today We read useful, essays, we need ideas. novels, it’s for those who only have that to do In my political sphere, I’m called a dandy I have sneakers, I listen to punk rock, I get my hands dirty. politics. If I’m a dandy, it’s a third world dandy, a slum dandy!
Like a mule would have enchanted one of Bégaudeau’s masters: Witold Gombrowicz. Very dandy indeed in his detachment and his lofty view, the Polish aristocrat exiled in Argentina liked to throw some hair into his writings: “He seeks accuracy at all costs, he thwarts falsifications, he removes layers. His equivalent in philosophy would be Nietzsche or Kafka doing the same thing differently… They are great hunters of falsity, who want to expose the truth. excellently well in its Newspaper : he spends everything in vitriol, with a grating humor and a brilliant joy, a joyful and frolicking style, never pontificating. I also admire the construction of his novels, especially the last three, Transatlantic, Pornography And Cosmos. Gombrowicz is not just a thinker, he is a great novelist. When you are a reader, there are contingent memberships and lasting friends, around ten authors to whom you return all the time. Gombrowicz is one of them.”
The Watchdogs, on the other hand, will not be counted among his friends. They were there in court. Bégaudeau’s comment: “At my trial, the bench of women supporting Ludivine Bantigny was the most ridiculous news.” If he denounces “the moral feminists who hold the spittoon”, he defends less media-oriented essayists like Morgane Merteuil and praises the comic Blanche Gardin, “who is located in the right diagonals, beyond good and evil, neither of left nor right. Contrary to the right-thinking clergy, Bégaudeau cites Diary of a country priest by Bernanos in his favorite novels. His religious questioning has made him unclassifiable in recent years. A subject about which he speaks with sincerity: “I am more of a Marxist, certainly heterodox. And at the same time, I have always had a very strong relationship with Christianity, despite priest-eating parents. My mother thinks I am lost, whereas there are plenty of Christian Marxists, like Pasolini… Pascal screwed me up when I was 15. Christ touched a sensitive spot in me. There is something in the good news. radical. Believers are intense, it’s courageous to be so these days…”
Does this authentic free spirit see reasons for hope here and there when his favorite comic (Aymeric Lompret) admits to self-censorship so as not to shock and his willingly joking book has unfairly earned him more criticism than praise? “At the moment, I come across as a cad, I’m a bit in the sauce, but I receive expressions of sympathy. You have to understand that, on the left too, people are fed up with all this. There are many more people exasperated by this moral screed than those who compose it The ayatollahs who poison the associative circles will not have my joy, in any way. This will be my last word – very Bernanosian!
Like a muleby François Bégaudeau. Stock, 443 p., €22.90.
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