In The origins, sociologist Gérald Bronner (columnist at L’Express) criticized Edouard Louis for propagating a “doloristic” vision of class defectors. But, surprise, Monique escapes stands out for its optimism. “For a long time, I was ashamed of writing about joy. I always had the feeling that there were serious, ugly things that needed to be talked about as a priority,” confides Edouard Louis, who was meeting at the café of a Parisian hotel.
Short and very moving, the book once again evokes the author’s family, the Picardy Kardashians. And in particular his mother Monique. This mother who, in 2014, protested in the media against the devastating portrait of her family and her village in the North painted in Put an end to Eddy Bellegueule. This same mother who, in 2021, was the subject of Fights and metamorphoses of a woman. The writer then recounted how she had left her father for another man based in Paris. Three years later, Monique escapes relates a new flight and emancipation. “One day, at 55, my mother escaped from this man who drinks every day and calls her a whore, a slut. She calls me to warn me, I tell her on the phone to leave without delay, she takes some things and her dog, and she runs away”, summarizes Edouard Louis.
The young thirty-year-old then helps his mother rebuild her life from Athens, where he is in a writer’s residence. The scene where he remotely follows Monique’s escape via her taxi application is particularly striking. His book reminds us that freedom represents above all a material question. “My mother didn’t know what it meant to live alone and free. She got pregnant at 17, then she had more children with her first husband who was an alcoholic, she divorced, then she met my father who made her suffer by forbidding her from working or getting her license for example, and she had other children with him too.”
“There is a polarity between my father and my mother”
But Monique is also an embodiment of resilience. “My mother has experienced extremely violent situations in her life, but when she manages to escape from them, what is incredible is that the trace of this violence suddenly disappears within her. She does not maintain never the injury.” Always political, this Bourdieusian cannot help but, in front of us, make a class analysis: “I often see in the bourgeoisie individuals who cultivate their wound, who constantly return to it, in particular by doing psychoanalysis, therapies collective. I know that this can help some people, but I also wonder to what extent this culture of one’s own injury prevents one from coming out of it.”
Through the evolutions of his parents, the autofictions of Edouard Louis offer a good image of how the trajectories of men and women can diverge within the working classes. “There is a polarity between my father and my mother. My father can hardly walk anymore, he collapsed, while my mother got through it. More generally, we know that classy women Popular people often have more education than men and live longer. The difference is that my father, like many men from his background, always experienced the violence he received as if it were. It was something he chose. To be a real tough guy, in his eyes, was to drink alcohol, to behave aggressively, to not submit to discipline, to refuse the school system. deeper, the more he thought he was free While my mother, as a woman, never thought she was choosing what she experienced. My father told her ‘you stay at home, you cook’. she never thought that her life was a choice, she was able to escape from it. That’s also what I experienced as a gay person.”
The affair is less publicized than the romance between Vosges transclasser Nicolas Mathieu and Princess Charlotte Casiraghi, but Monique now happens to smoke cigarettes with the most famous French actress in the world. One afternoon, Catherine Deneuve recognized her, then they saw each other again. “My mother says around her that she is the mother of Edouard Louis, even though she was complaining about the books I wrote under that name. A few months ago, Catherine Deneuve told her: ‘ You must be proud of your son.’ And she replied: ‘Ah yes, I encouraged him a lot to write books'”…
Monique escapes, by Edouard Louis. Threshold, 162 p., €18.
.