May 2022. A few months before receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Annie Ernaux comes out The Young Mana booklet of around forty pages where she tells with great condescension a story lived with a boy of around twenty when she herself was in her fifties. In Saint-Germain-des-Prés, everyone knows who it is: Philippe Vilain. But his name does not appear anywhere in the press, Ernaux having forbidden journalists to “track” him, as she then declared to Read Magazine. Three years later, Philippe Vilain signs today Bad studenta story of psychological finesse worthy of Benjamin Constant, which is in a sense his response to Young manbut also to The Occupation (2002) where Ernaux already anonymized and belittled him with disconcerting class contempt on the part of a Pythia of the intellectual left. First of all, let us clarify that Bad student is in no way a book settling scores: Vilain often expresses his admiration for Ernaux’s literary work. The portrait he paints of the Annie he knew, painted as a bourgeois woman cut off from the people whose spokesperson she claims to be, should on the other hand dissipate his most idolatrous readers.
At the bar of the Aubusson hotel where he arranged to meet us to answer our questions, Vilain speaks as in his book: with sincerity and precision, without the slightest bitterness. How did he take the publication of Young manfrom Naples where he had just settled and still lives? “At first, I didn’t think for a single moment that it was about me. I saw the cover on Instagram, I didn’t dwell on it. It was one of my aunts who m ‘sent a text after seeing Annie Ernaux at François Busnel’s [NDLR : à La Grande Librairie sur France 5]. Wasn’t it about me? I waited a month and a half before buying the book. It destabilized me. I found it very good literaryly: it’s not so easy to be synthetic, concise, to move towards a form of accuracy. But I also read this text like the young man I was, and there I did not understand Annie Ernaux’s approach: why, after so many years, still describe myself in such a depreciating way? An academic said that I seem like the young man without qualities, and that is very true. If you make two columns of adjectives, the negatives and the positives, you will see that the negative column fills up much faster… Annie Ernaux presents me as a redneck – she uses the word, and that’s not nothing. How can she be so lacking in kindness towards me? We spent over five years together, traveling all over the world, sharing many things. His story factually transcribes the truth of the situations, but everything is so decontextualized that it results in a text woven with lies by omission…”
Among ten examples, Philippe Vilain chooses one that is particularly significant: “In the book, the young man is characterized by his popular tastes, for example his passion for football. And it’s true: I am a big football fan. At the time, I watched Téléfoot on Sunday morning. But isn’t it unfair to reduce myself to fifty minutes of TV a week when I was a master of modern literature, crazy about the work of Marguerite Duras, and I was already writing? In addition to the violence of her judgment on someone of more modest origins than herself, Annie Ernaux is not intellectually honest, even though she claims to write a literature of truth – it’s a little embarrassing…”
Fascinated by “La Place”
Let’s rewind the facts. Born in 1969 in a cosmopolitan working-class town in Normandy, Philippe Vilain lives next to the Sonacotra dormitories. Son of an alcoholic, enrolled in BEP, he is destined to fail at school. His discovery of literature saved him, allowing him to “thwart determinisms and social destiny, to escape fate” – he finished his Doctor of Letters course. At the Faculty of Letters in Rouen, he was fascinated by The Squarewhich he studies. He writes to Annie Ernaux. A correspondence begins between them. One Saturday evening in October 1993, they met in Paris, on the first floor of the Café de Flore. A second meeting took place in January 1994 at the Café de Cluny. The famous 53-year-old writer offers the 24-year-old stranger to accompany her to her home in Cergy, where she makes him her lover. He accepts “without pleasure” and feeling “trapped”. The next day, upon waking up, the young man was struck by the beauty of the place, “the grounds of his important bourgeois house”: “The house was called La Fabula – the story. I was surprised that we could name a house , personalize it thus, suspecting snobbery in this Italian designation, affected pride in property and family territory, conservative pride in heritage, and I wondered what name I would have given to my pavilion in the city where I lived in: La Zona?” Vilain understands that he was deluded while reading The Square : “I thought that Annie Ernaux came from the same background as me, which was not the case. She came from white provincial France. Her parents were small wealthy people, owners of a café-grocery store in Yvetot. She grew up behind the counter, going to private school If we had been the same age and had known each other as teenagers, I would have considered her a bourgeois.
Gratitude Pages
Already notable at Gallimard (she was the winner of the Renaudot prize ten years before their adventure), Ernaux became for the student a “social fairy”, an “eighteenth century tutor”: “In The Young Manshe says that she is pleased to have been my initiator, and she was in a certain way. I was in my master’s degree, on the path to academic healing; she perfected my culture and re-educated me. She put me through the school of literary rigor, rigor, and method. She restructured my thinking. And then she made me travel and discover worlds. This is why there are so many pages of gratitude in Bad student.” The honeymoon only lasts a while. In 1996, Annie Ernaux published in the magazine The Infinite a very crude text, “Fragments around Philippe V.”, where his lover is reduced to the rank of “sexual potiche” – which will come up again in The Occupation and in The Young Man.
How can we explain that all the greatest French women of letters of the last two centuries have had in common this taste for men significantly younger than them? George Sand with Alexandre Manceau, Colette with her minor stepson Bertrand de Jouvenel, Marguerite Yourcenar with Jerry Wilson, Simone de Beauvoir with Claude Lanzmann, Marguerite Duras with Yann Andréa, Annie Ernaux with Philippe Vilain… We rightly speak of predators, but the predators are legion. Vilain sees a clear explanation: “It is not a question of gender, but of power. A man or woman who has notoriety or money allows themselves to seek youth, quite simply. The gesture of emancipation that Annie Ernaux had by imposing her desire on the young man that I was resembles, I imagine, the attitude of all these men of power with much younger girls. Why does she objectify me. by presenting oneself as dominant In the three texts that I inspired and in which I supposedly desire her very much, the young man is not a thinking being, an apprentice writer who has escaped from his social class; ‘a body is violent… Let’s reverse it for a second: if, now aged 55, I wrote The Young Girl using the same terms as Annie Ernaux, would that be appreciated? It’s a safe bet that I would, on the contrary, be blacklisted…” In 1997, Vilain published his first book with Gallimard, The Embracea novel where he imagines his separation from Annie Ernaux. In 1999, she left him. But, in the year 2000, she did everything to get him back, humbling herself at his feet, even suggesting that he move in with her in Cergy, with a space of his own. He refuses. There is something pathetic in remembering Ernaux’s texts after having closed Bad student : the powerful woman was in truth much more submissive than she wanted to admit to her young lover…
Bad student reminds Saint-Lazare stationa little-known gem published in 1976 in which Betty Duhamel reveals the true face of her ex-boyfriend Patrick Modiano, presented as a manipulative, cruel boy interested in money behind his appearance of a false dreamer. With Bad student the mask of the official Ernaux falls when the real Annie appears. In one of the tastiest passages, Vilain demonstrates with her alongside Arlette Laguiller and Alain Krivine, shouting: “We are all children of immigrants, first, second, third generation!” Ernaux is then chosen as a “republican godmother” by an Algerian undocumented migrant who wants to marry a French woman. She is going to have lunch with the boy in Amiens. Alas, he’s a very annoying redneck – the kind to watch Téléfoot. The writer has nothing to say to him, and Vilain closes the scene thus: “In popular circles, she was the intruder.” During our conversation, he drives the point home: “The people are not part of Annie Ernaux’s entourage. To develop sincere class thinking, everyday relationships count, it is not enough to parade from time to time. It’s the frequent presence of the people that determines whether we are there or not. With this undocumented person, I was in my element while it was exotic for her.
Demagogic character
In marvelous pages of poetry and humor, Vilain describes the “luxurious life” of his initiator, his “numerous prospections to buy a second home”, “his Byzantine refinement for the dinner ceremonial”… Let us remember that Ernaux supports La Insubordinate France. In 2022, the committed writer participated with Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Mathilde Panot in a march against the high cost of living – a problem with which she is not directly confronted, with her marvelous prints or the million euros received with her prize. Nobel. Being the icon of class defector literature obliges her to compose a demagogic character: “It was Annie Ernaux who was the first to borrow the term class defector from sociology, and brought it into in the literary field with The Square. Today, I concede to you that there is a form of falsification in this notion: many people want to present themselves as class defectors, undoubtedly to accentuate their merit. It’s fashionable, but the expression is ambiguous and a victim of its success. We are not defectors in the same way whether we come from the middle classes or the lower classes. A writer like Nicolas Mathieu is not a defector in the same way as me: he was like Annie Ernaux in a private school. To define a true defector, one must measure the gap between the point of departure and the point of arrival – even if one has never quite arrived before death…” Such comedies do not fool the lucid and Vilain, magnanimous, refuses to overwhelm Ernaux for his ideological positions: “I look at it from afar now, from the top of Vesuvius, with my binoculars. I don’t want to comment on what she says politically.”
We could have ended on this conciliatory note. However, at the end of Bad studentVilain slips in this naked confession: “Perhaps to move me, I don’t know anymore, she told me this terrible sentence, that, in her, the woman was not always up to the level of the writer. ” If the writer is not a saint, that does not prevent her from being an icon in the most chic circles, the most privileged circles. Questioned by L’Express in 2022, she recognized three “direct heirs”: Didier Eribon, Edouard Louis and Nicolas Mathieu, the current companion of Charlotte Casiraghi. By chance or coincidence, a year before this interview, Annie Ernaux had received the prestigious Prince Pierre-de-Monaco literary prize for all of her work. Eternal dilemma between ghettos and elite. In the land of class defectors (or so-called such), are princes and princesses better than rednecks and undocumented immigrants?
Bad student, by Philippe Vilain. Robert Laffont, 236 p., €20.
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