And yet what those elections really meant for my father was a chance to fight his sense of invisibility. My father understood, long before I did, that in the minds of the bourgeoisie — people like the publisher who would turn down my book a few years later — our existence didn’t count and wasn’t real.

My father had felt abandoned by the political left since the 1980s, when it began adopting the language and thinking of the free market. Across Europe, left-wing parties no longer spoke of social class, injustice and poverty, of suffering, pain and exhaustion. They talked about modernization, growth and harmony in diversity, about communication, social dialogue and calming tensions.

My father understood that this technocratic vocabulary was meant to shut up workers and spread neoliberalism. The left wasn’t fighting for the working class, against the laws of the marketplace; it was trying to manage the lives of the working class from within those laws. The unions had undergone the same transformation: My grandfather was a union man. My father was not.

When he was watching TV and a socialist or a union representative appeared on the screen, my father would complain, “Whatever — left, right, now, they’re all the same.” That “whatever” distilled all of his disappointment in those who, in his mind, should have been standing up for him but weren’t.

By contrast, the National Front railed against poor working conditions and unemployment, laying all the blame on immigration or the European Union. In the absence of any attempt by the left to discuss his suffering, my father latched on to the false explanations offered by the far right. Unlike the ruling class, he didn’t have the privilege of voting for a political program. Voting, for him, was a desperate attempt to exist in the eyes of others.

I don’t know for sure how he voted last month, in the first round of the presidential election, and I don’t know for sure how he will vote on Sunday, in the runoff. He and I almost never speak. Our lives have grown too far apart, and whenever we try to talk on the phone, we are reduced to silence by the pain of having become strangers to each other. Usually we hang up after a minute or two, embarrassed that neither of us can think of anything to say.

But even if I can’t ask him directly, I’m confident he is still voting for the National Front. In his village, Marine Le Pen came out way ahead in the first round of the election.

Today, writers, journalists and liberals bear the weight of responsibility for the future. To persuade my family not to vote for Marine Le Pen, it’s not enough to show that she is racist and dangerous: Everyone knows that already. It’s not enough to fight against hate or against her. We have to fight for the powerless, for a language that gives a place to the most invisible people — people like my father.