Who Killed My Father. The title of Edouard Louis’ latest book does not end on a question mark, because it isn’t a question. Throughout the short work which is part memoir part polemical screed against the violence of modernity, the names of the people to blame are revealed and repeated. These people, Macron, Hollande, Valls, El Khomri, Hirsch, Sarkozy, Bertrand, Chirac, didn’t literally murder Louis’ father who is still alive, but they broke him and prevented him from living a dignified life of his own choosing. Louis’ concern is with the biopower exercised by politicians in the ruling class against the working class. He condemns the elite for whom “politics is a question of aesthetics” with an intensely visceral language of power; “Jacques Chirac and Xavier Bertrand destroyed your intestines”, “Nicolas Sarkozy and Martin Hirsch were breaking your back”, “Emmanuel Macron is taking the bread out of your mouth”. The work applies equally to the UK. One is minded of the thousands of ill and disabled people who have died after fitness for work assessments, people like James Harrison who had a hernia and severe lung condition and died after the DWP told his doctor that they shouldn’t give him any more sick-notes. Ian Duncan Smith filled his lungs with fluid.

The book originally came out in French in May 2018, 6 months prior to the start of the Gilets Jaunes movement, but Louis’ anger at the decisions of the Macron government prefigures it perfectly. He writes “[the Macron government] thinks the poor are too rich and that the rich aren’t rich enough. Macron’s government explains that five euros a month is nothing. They have no idea”. This was one of the refrains chanted angrily across the country at blockades and demonstrations — that Macron had cut taxes on the wealthy but was raising taxes on them, the ordinary people in the small, isolated, rural towns and villages like Louis’ place of birth. Louis has been a vocal supporter of the Gilets Jaunes citing the fact that it is a revolt by people like his parents as his justification. Indeed, the movement is a near perfect reflection of the France described across all three of his books, The End of Eddy, History of Violence and Who Killed My Father. The mixture of anger, desperation at the ruling class, racism, homophobia, violence and deadly decisions by politicians aiming to cultivate an aesthetic have all been at one point or another prominent or at least present features of the movement and the backlash to it. Even aggressive displays of masculinity can regularly be found on their pages as people mock Emmanuel Macron for the age of his wife and his “feminine” behaviour.

The Gilets Jaunes movement at first, and for a long time was the previously unheard or un-listened to people from rural and small-town France making their anger felt. It often feels like Louis is writing about the past. In part this is because he delves into the lives and backstories of people older than himself, but even when he writes about his own childhood, it is only the references to a playstation game or him pretending to be the lead singer in the pop-group Aqua that give a clear indication of the era. This is because people like his father, the people in the yellow jackets had been left out of the country’s narrative for so long. There is a hauntedness to many of the towns and villages like the ones Louis’ describes. The bottles of pastis from the village shop that Louis’ father favours seem quaint and antiquated even if it always results in emotional abuse when the bottle is finished. These towns and villages feel trapped in the seventies or eighties, in much the same way as many of the UK’s former mining towns have never recovered from their destruction by Thatcher and remain frozen that way.

The way Louis talks about the biopower of politicians and how their decisions can have devasting consequences on not just the lives but on the bodies of vulnerable people, reminds me of the many Gilets Jaunes I have interviewed. Louis has done a lot of work with the Comité Adama — the group established after the death of Adama traoré by asphyxiation in police custody. Police violence is an issue against which Louis is vocal and active. Once again his work is extremely prescient of the violent repression hundreds in the Gilets Jaunes movement would go on to face. He could just as easily have written Emmanuel Macron and Christopher Castaner shot out the eye of Fiorina Lignier, burnt the neck of Alain Hoffman and caused his PTSD, broke the metatarsal of Manon Méa and ripped the flesh out of Floriane Chabot’s calves. Louis’ empathetic and sociologically meticulous detailing of forgotten aspects of the French citizenry makes him one of the most vital authors for understanding the current moment. In his viral essay Why My Father Votes Le Pen which appeared on the front page of the New York Times, he explains why his father, a former factory worker, the natural voter of the left has drifted towards the far-right. In the piece he explains how, when the traditional social democratic parties of Europe began to adopt the language and policies of neoliberalism, they abandoned the working class. Louis is not soft on racism in the way people in the Blue Labour/ Red UKIP left traditions tend to be. In the essay he writes “A vote for the national front was of course a vote tinged with racism and homophobia”, but he understands the conditions in which this hatred flourishes and is empathetic to the plight that the people espousing those views are themselves suffering through.

One of the themes of Who Killed My Father is the construction of masculinity. Louis thinks about it in much the same was as Simone De Beauvoir did womanhood. He heart-wrenchingly describes how a society that demands the performance of masculinity condemns working class men to an early death:

“Masculinity — don’t act like a girl, don’t be a faggot — meant you dropped out as fast as you could to show everyone you were strong, as soon as you could to show you were rebellious, and so, as far as I could tell, constructing your masculinity meant depriving yourself of any other future, any other prospect that school might have opened up.”

This idea, that abusers are turned into victims by what is denied about them in the process recurs throughout the short book. Louis’ father has to get drunk to say that he loves his son, and watches opened mouthed at the opera, though could not admit it. He sums this up neatly through a phrase addressing a time his father started crying over the lack of control he felt; “you were as much a victim of the violence you inflicted as the violence you endured”. The book is comprised of many such memories, short scenes that get expanded into much larger ideas. We receive a rounded portrait of Louis’ father, a deeply flawed man, but someone that could have turned out differently if life were not so cruel. He hated that his son wanted a Titanic VHS for his birthday but spent more than he could afford not just on the video, but a coffee table book and a model ship. He was cold, emotionally violent and often insensitive, repeating homophobic slurs around his closeted son who knew even at a young age that he was gay. But, he drew the line at hitting his children, still shaken by the physical violence that occurred against him in childhood.

Who Killed My Father is a slim book at just 81 pages, but the short memories and ideas within it create a constant barrage of thought bombs dragging you through sadness and anger to philosophy and back again. It is clear that Louis intends his father to act as a synecdoche for the wider population of the forgotten in France and in such a spirit, he ends the book on a note of redemption. He proudly looks at the way his father has changed and invokes the need for a revolution. This short, evocative often beautiful work is crucial if you want to understand the pain felt by much of the French republic.