This is the controversy of the literary rentrée. In The Last Days of the Socialist Party (Seuil), Aurélien Bellanger wants to be the chronicler of the ideological defeat of the left. With this novel with (big) keys, the author stages easily recognizable intellectual and media figures, from Laurent Bouvet (“Grémond”) to Philippe Val (“Revêche”) via Rokhaya Diallo (“Lassana Diop”), Rachel Khan (“Lili Caen”) or Caroline Fourest (“Véronique Bourny”), up to himself (“Sauveterre”). At the heart of the plot, we find two philosophers, one worldly (“Taillevent”), the other rural (“Frayère”), obvious doubles of Raphaël Enthoven and Michel Onfray.
If Aurélien Bellanger, a philosopher by training and a left-wing Houellebecquian, has long specialized in novels of ideas inspired by real characters (Xavier Niel in Information TheoryBernard-Henri Lévy in The Continent of Sweetness…), The Last Days of the Socialist Party is by far the most disturbing. In substance, the writer does not hide the highly questionable thesis of his fiction: gravedigger of the left, the Republican Spring (here called the “December 9 Movement”) would have contributed to the rise of the extreme right. But the most disturbing thing is undoubtedly the form, with characters who have the novelistic thickness of Wikipedia files, but are often attributed behaviors and thoughts very far removed from reality. Aurélien Bellanger is particularly cruel with the romantic double of Laurent Bouvet, co-founder of the Republican Spring who died far too soon from Charcot’s disease in 2021.
For L’Express, the philosopher Raphaël Enthoven reacts to the publication of what he describes as a “perverse enterprise”, highlighting the novel’s numerous inconsistencies (“Bellanger dates my meeting with Michel Onfray to the year in which we stopped talking to each other”), while protesting against the treatment reserved for Laurent Bouvet, who is no longer there to defend himself.
L’Express: In his new novel, Aurélien Bellanger portrays you as Taillevent, a worldly philosopher and seducer who battles on Twitter, defends secularism but castigates wokeism, launches a newspaper called The Circle of Reason and retakes his philosophy baccalaureate every year… Did you recognize yourself in this character?
Raphael Enthoven: Not at all. And for good reason. Aurélien Bellanger doesn’t know me. We’ve never spoken together, I’ve never answered a single question from him. He’s clearly never read a single one of my books. And with one (surprising) exception, everything he says is pure fantasy.
What an exception ?
The escalation. At one point in the book, he recounts a discussion (which did indeed take place) at Fontainebleau, with the Bogdanov brothers. The substance of our exchanges has nothing to do, obviously, with what Bellanger invents. But the circumstance exists. The rest, on the other hand… Bellanger imagines everything, and makes me play a prominent role in a story that is not mine. Without concern for coherence, he lends me both a superficial and ideological temperament. Sometimes I am Don Juan, sometimes Savonarola tinged with Machiavelli. He recounts the obscure dinners where, as a Masonic conspirator, I would have met people… whom in reality, I met on Twitter! He dreams my sexuality, he hallucinates my encounters. In the better world of Aurélien Bellanger, I failed the entrance exam to the ENS, I schemed to get into France Culture, I am a vile “misosophic” social climber (hating wisdom), a thought killer, a danger, the Trojan horse of the extreme right, a defender of Polanski, a socialite who reads Baltasar Gracian to prepare for a dinner, and who tries in vain to join the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo. That is to say, exactly anything. Which, in itself, is not a problem, but becomes more embarrassing when one claims to tell what really happened.
The central figure of the book is a certain Grémond, a political scientist frustrated in his academic life, a PS apparatchik, a promoter of the concept of “cultural insecurity” and a linchpin of the “Movement of December 9”, suffering from a degenerative disease. It is impossible not to recognize Laurent Bouvet, who died of Charcot’s disease. What did you think of this particularly cruel portrait, the author going so far as to present him as a conspirator and admirer of Charles Maurras?
Bellanger accuses Bouvet of being the gravedigger of the left. We can discuss this. As far as I am concerned, I rather feel that Bouvet embodies the lost honor of a truly republican, social and secular left. But this can be the subject of a fair debate. On the other hand, we cannot respond (other than with a middle finger) to the falsifier who invents the thoughts of his (dead) adversary, attributes to him affinities that were not his own and intentions that he never had. We enter a dead person as we enter a mill, said Sartre. By treating Bouvet, who can no longer defend himself, as the “gravedigger” of a left that he has always defended, Bellanger is not behaving like a novelist, but like a necrophage. If Bellanger’s conspiratorial, apparatchik, plotting, Maurrassian “Bouvet” occupies most of the book, it is because Bouvet himself cannot answer him. What courage.
Basically, Aurélien Bellanger’s thesis is assumed: “heresy of the Socialist Party”, the Republican Spring ideologically liquidated this old left-wing party and worked towards the rise of the extreme right in France. What do you say to him?
Aurélien Bellanger talks about the Republican Spring like Jean-Marie Le Pen talked about B’nai B’rith. By hallucinating its tentacles and its power. While it is simply an association of proudly republican citizens, at war on three fronts: against the extreme right, against Islamism and against a resigned fraction of the left whose methods consist solely of smearing the adversary. To present the Republican Spring (of which I have never been a part or even signed the charter) as a sneaky office is abject. To make it the Trojan horse of the extreme right shows an absolute ignorance of the most elementary realities of the French political landscape. The reason for being of the Republican Spring since its creation is to fight against the extreme right not with hatred but with combat. Laurent Bouvet’s diagnosis is that the left is wasting away from leaving the themes of insecurity or immigration, for example, to the right. His ambition was to take these universal concerns back from the far right to prevent the latter from thriving on their denial.
I am paid to know that the Republican Spring is phobic of the extreme right: the day when, unfortunately for me, I declared (which I do not think) that between Mélenchon and Le Pen, I would vote for Le Pen, the most virulent towards me came precisely from the Republican Spring. But strangely, Bellanger does not tell this. It does not fit into the pattern that his false mind preconceived before weaving his web of bile.
“It’s been more than twenty years since I had any contact with Michel Onfray.”
Oddly enough, the novel presents a rivalry, but also a complicity between your character, Taillevent, and another media-friendly but provincial philosopher, Frayère, an obvious double of Michel Onfray. Is this really credible?
Yes, it’s great, the author presents us as the obverse and reverse of the same coin. However, Aurélien Bellanger dates my meeting with Michel Onfray to the year when we stopped talking to each other. It’s been over twenty years since I had any contact with Michel Onfray, and our only relations are limited to a few skirmishes (notably in L’Express). Before that, at the beginning of the century, we were very close, I was the first fan of his solar hedonism and we had set up together (him first) the Université populaire de Caen.
In truth, I have known Onfray since I was 15 (and he was 27) and he signed in the Rules of the Game a remarkable “critique of ecological reason” for which he was invited (first TV) to My goodness, my Tuesday!. These are the (true) circumstances of a meeting followed by a sincere friendship, which was succeeded by a long cold war, sometimes broken by a mortar fire without conviction, which covers a frontal ideological opposition. When we were friends, we were, apart from hedonism, in disagreement on everything, from the left to Israel (which he abhorred); when we became enemies, we were no less in disagreement on everything (from sovereignty to Freud, including his defense of a “Nietzschean Manichaeism”). Whether Onfray was left or right, whether we were friends or enemies, whether he fought against liberalism or against abortion, we never agreed. And, even more so, with the exception of the first two years of the People’s University, we never imagined making common cause.
Beyond us, our quarrel testifies to a deeper opposition than that of two characters, the disagreement that animates us testifies, in my opinion, to the face-off of the future between liberalism and sovereignism. However, Bellanger’s thesis rests entirely on the alliance of the two “philosophers” who, like the city mouse and the country mouse, founded together a review that slays the left. The reality is simpler: Michel Onfray founded Popular frontI co-founded Free-Shooter. The two magazines are ideologically at opposite ends of the spectrum. We haven’t spoken to each other for decades, we’ve never had any joint projects or done any joint shows. The book describes a parallel world where we met in 2004 (I think) and where we then forged ever closer ties. It’s fascinatingly false. But falsehood is nothing. What’s really fascinating is the taste for inventing scenes that suit Bellanger’s idea of the thing. Since nothing exists that corroborates what he believes, he forges it and then presents it to the public as an inside view.
Yourself had caused controversy with your autobiographical novel Time savedwhich did not spare the fictionalized doubles of Bernard-Henri Lévy or Michel Onfray. What distinguishes your approach from that of Aurélien Bellanger?
It’s very simple: in Time savedI tell the truth. I return to facts that, from my childhood until the year 2000, did indeed take place. If my book is indeed a “novel” (because it is the way of writing, in my opinion, that determines the romantic), it is not a fiction. And those I target in the novel, or on whom I take revenge, know perfectly well that I have not invented anything. No need. Aurélien Bellanger’s process (writing a pure fiction that is nevertheless sold as a copy of reality) is more like the method of Justine Lévy who, in her own “novel”, Nothing seriousattributes to me behaviors that I never had and sentences that I never said. The approach which consists of telling nonsense and attributing the worst to innocent people while making it seem like the other side of the story, is Justine Lévy in the text. In fact, since Nothing seriousI had never been the subject of such a perverse enterprise.