The red and the black: Marie-Noëlle Thibault and the novels of Dominique Manotti

Dominique Manotti is a leading practitioner of the roman noir in France today (Desnain, 2009). Readers know that the key to understanding the detectives in her novels and how they do their work is to examine their earlier experiences. Théo Daquin’s rape as a child allows him to connect with the rape victim Agathe in À nos chevaux! Noria Ghozali, who ran away from home to escape her father’s violent attempts to control her, uses this experience to get a witness to open up to her in Nos fantastiques années de fric: ‘Madame, la liberté pour les femmes, ça commence souvent par une trahison. Croyez-moi, je sais de quoi je parle’ (Manotti, 2001a: 181). With this in mind, let us look at Manotti’s life before she began publishing novels in 1995 to understand what drives Manotti the writer.

Dominique Manotti is the pen name of Marie-Noëlle Thibault, born in 1942 to a bourgeois family, ‘gentiment’ collaborator during the war (Desnain, 2009: 167–8; Manotti, 2011a) Her father was a factory manager and she grew up in a conservative family. Sent to a Catholic school until lycée, she gave the money she had saved to buy a horse to the insurgents against Communist rule in Budapest in 1956 (Hamon and Rotman, 1987: 114). Thibault is an emblematic figure of the cohort of political militants who came of age in the decade before May 1968. ‘The Algerian War opened the eyes of this whole generation’, she wrote, ‘and was largely responsible for moulding it.’ The most important characteristic of her generation, she contends, was its embrace of political action in the form of a mass movement, evident in their actions in support of national liberation movements. She draws examples from the final years of the Algerian War: ‘The [antiwar] demonstration organised by the UNEF [Union Nationale des Étudiants de France] in [October] 1960 attracted more than ten thousand people. Organised in this same way later on, was the fight against the OAS [Organisation Armée Secrète].’ When Thibault went to university at the dawn of the Fifth Republic, she joined the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) and threw herself into the ‘unique experience’ of the Union des Étudiants Communistes (UEC). She was elected secrétaire of the Lettres section of the UEC, which gave her a seat on the Bureau national of the organisation. The UEC was home to dissident currents which challenged the party orthodoxy. Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman identify Thibault as the representative of a ‘vague de militants qui rejoignent l’UEC avec la claire conscience d’adhérer à un mouvement distinct du PCF’. Called ‘la Pasionaria de l’UEC’ by admirers, she presents the left of the UEC to which she belonged as a site of opposition to PCF leadership that dared speak its name outside party confines. It was in the UEC, not in classes, that she trained herself in history in order to contest party dictums. She saw in the Communist philosopher Louis Althusser a man for whom the PCF was ‘the university hierarchy’s last line of defence’; his own theoretical work ‘functioned as a justification for professorial power’, even as it inspired some of his students to turn to Mao. In 1965, she departed from the UEC and the PCF when confronted with party decisions such as support for the Socialist François Mitterrand for president (Thibault, 1989: 192–4; Hamon and Rotman, 1987: 113–14, 212).

For a long time Manotti found it hard to address the PCF in her work beyond mention of it in terms of a policeman’s drinking preferences or reference to Sartre’s warning about the danger of critiquing the party – ’faut pas désésperer Billancourt’ – in discussing the wariness of the police to examine the football club which has replaced the party in making banlieusards dream (Manotti, 2010a: 45; Manotti, 1998: 81). It was not until 2011 that Manotti devoted a work to the party. In Carnet rose, she tells the story of an Italian Communist journalist who agrees to learn a Soviet technique for painless birth and to give birth before an audience to prove Soviet superiority. However, the audience is made up of male Italian party leaders, colleagues of her husband. As she delivers her child on the day that Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Congress is published in the West, they drift off before she gives birth, ignoring her performance (Manotti, 2011b). We, however, witness the birth of Thibault’s generation of militants, who knew that Soviet doctors had nothing to teach labourers in France and Italy.

Though Thibault’s generation was active in the events of 1968 and succeeding years, she differentiates it from a later gauchiste generation which took shape in the wake of 1968. In 1969, while working on her doctoral thesis in economic history, Thibault began to teach at the new university created at Vincennes after May 1968 (Dijan, 2009). There she committed herself to a pedagogy of the empowerment of students, particularly adults returning to school, by making them actively engaged in the production of knowledge, not its passive recipients. Thibault taught at Vincennes until the university was moved to Saint-Denis and the Vincennes campus torn down near the end of the presidency of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. At Vincennes, she escaped the mandarin orthodoxy of Althusser at the École Normale Supérieur, but for precisely that reason she resented Maoist students who devoted themselves to disrupting classes: ‘Non, vous n’êtes pas comme le poisson dans l’eau’, she told them. At Vincennes, ‘Vous êtes comme le poisson rouge dans le bocal’ (Thibault, 2008:14). Vanguard parties which claimed to know workers’ interests better than the workers themselves shared the illiberal elitism they ostensibly opposed in Althusser and in the PCF. Referring to her experience teaching at Vincennes, she reflected, ‘ Il ne peut pas y avoir d’apport de savoir de l’extérieur ou, alors, il est intransmissible.’ If these radicals were making a new world, it looked remarkably like the old one: ‘Ils se préparaient à retrouver les couloirs ministériels et présidentiels sous une forme ou sous une autre’ (Thibault, 2008: 26, 16–17). We never meet an admirable gauchiste of 1968 vintage in Manotti’s novels. The detective in her first three novels, Daquin, is of the right age, a student in the police école des commissaires in 1971, but he was out of the country in 1968. Told that he was absent from the making of ‘une génération un peu félée’, Daquin responds, ‘je m’en fous’ (Manotti, 1999: 92–3; Manotti, 1995: 80).

Teaching at Vincennes was only one of several experiences in the 1970s that made Manotti the writer we read today. Equally important was her work on Les Cahiers de mai which she joined in September 1968. Today Manotti refers to this as her ‘deuxième experience extraordinaire’, along with the struggles in the UEC (Manotti, 2011a; Thibault, 2008: 20–1). The writer Daniel Anselme, a resister during World War II, a Communist who had left the party, and a successful novelist, launched the Les Cahiers de mai because he felt accounts of May 1968 were factually inaccurate and failed to present workers’ thoughts and experiences (Reid, 2015). The enquête was a central militant practice of the period. Mao, after all, had said, ‘Celui qui n’a pas enquêté n’a pas droit à la parole.’ But Les Cahiers de mai did not pursue enquêtes in order to take the floor; it did so with the aim of keeping the right to speak in workers’ hands. Les Cahiers de mai worked under the direction or control of workers engaged in social movements (unlike the many contemporary studies of the workplace by industrial sociologists). It took a particular interest in the struggles of unskilled, immigrant workers because they were largely ignored by the PCF and the dominant Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT). Workers engaged in a conflict in their factory would contact or be contacted by Les Cahiers de mai. Militants would meet with workers and discuss their situation and their demands. Les Cahiers de mai would then prepare a text which the workers would circulate in the factory and solicit comments and critiques. Using these, workers, in conjunction with Les Cahiers de mai, would prepare a new version which the workers would present for discussion at a meeting of the workers. The amended, revised version of the situation in the factory and changes the workers sought would then be circulated in the factory and published in Les Cahiers de mai so that workers elsewhere in France could learn from and debate these particular experiences. Each issue of the review had a run of 17,000–20,000 copies (Les Cahiers de mai, 1970; Jarrige and Wajnsztejn, 2011).

The method of Les Cahiers de mai was premised on the idea that the demands initially posed by striking workers often did not address the fundamental issues at play, but that these would be revealed in the preparation, discussion and rewriting of texts. Workers would better understand the conflict and formulate more radical, in the sense of more fundamental, demands through this analysis. The Cahiers de mai militants, working as écrivains publics, offered technical assistance, but not answers, which they believed could come only from the workers themselves. Workers acting as collective critics of their own texts can discover what no vanguard party can tell them (Les Cahiers de mai, 1970; Firmin, 1998).

However, Thibault parted ways with Les Cahiers de mai before it dissolved in 1974 because she believed that it was not taking the necessary next step of bringing together the diverse movements and activists with which it worked. The Socialist Party bureaucrats or the putative vanguard of the Communist Party could not bring about fundamental change. This could come only from a political movement that drew on the imagination and creativity of workers themselves. Within Les Cahiers, Thibault sought unsuccessfully to foster an internal organisation by locality rather than industry, in order to allow workers to analyse their situation in all of its dimensions in the workplace and the quartier (Freyssinet, 1998: 108). This desire to pursue change in a broader context led Thibault to the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT), the union more open than the CGT in the early to mid 1970s to new actors in the workplace, new struggles and new ideologies like autogestion (self-management). She launched and edited La Gazette ouvrière (1975–6) with the goal of developing a new politics to replace dependence on working through the PCF or in the National Assembly:

Comment dans ces conditions définir une stratégie de lutte efficace? Un certain nombre de luttes en France, ces dernières années, ont déjà indiqué le chemin … montrent qu’il est possible de construire, atelier par atelier, usine par usine, une combativité et un rapport de force durables appuyés sur l’autonomie et la créativité ouvrière … Toutefois ces luttes sont restées disperses, non articulées entre elles et n’ont pu construire la perspective stratégique qui leur corresponde. ([Thibault], 1975: 4)

Thibault began serving as general secretary of the Paris departmental office of the CFDT in 1972, while continuing to teach at Vincennes and agreeing to serve as one of the translators of the legendary study of working-class self-creation: E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1988). She framed her decade in the CFDT in terms of her experience with Les Cahiers de mai:

Les Cahiers m’ont vraiment appris. Quand j’ai fait du syndicalisme ensuite, j’ai toujours fonctionné sur le mode de Cahiers … les lieux CFDT que j’ai connu étaient stupéfiants d’ouverture, de possibilité de poursuivre un type de connaissance qui était celui des Cahiers. (Thibault, 2008: 24)

The late 1970s witnessed a debate within the CFDT. On the one side were those who saw themselves responding to the economic crisis that followed the end of the trentes glorieuses by putting aside an earlier radical openness to new initiatives in favour of concentration on the union’s role as the workers’ representative on the diversity of institutions governing labour relations and in negotiations with employers. The other element of the CFDT, with which Thibault aligned herself, supported the diversity of workers’ struggles, without making them either the avatars of revolution or subsidiary to the institutions in which the union participated. For Thibault, this meant ‘repartir de l’action d’une manière proche de ce que j’avais cherché dans Les Cahiers de mai’ (Thibault, 1996: 219).

Under Thibault’s leadership the departmental office of the CFDT played an important role in two emblematic conflicts in 1979–80. Eleven thousand foreign workers without papers, many of them from Turkey, worked in garment production in the greater Paris area. Employers used these workers to avoid having to apply French labour law in determining pay and working conditions. The national CFDT federation of textile workers did not favour taking up the illegal workers’ cause, but Thibault’s departmental office ignored this advice and embraced the movement of undocumented workers – individuals on the margin like those Les Cahiers de mai and the CFDT had worked with in the early 1970s. ‘Nous ignorions alors tout de ces travailleurs, de leur culture, de leur langue, de ce métier. Ce fut une aventure extraordinaire’ (Manotti, 2001b: 43). The workers’ struggle lasted six months and ended in victory with the regularisation of the vast majority of workers. Yet neither Mitterrand nor any other Socialist leader expressed interest in this exceptional victory, ‘la dernière grande lutte sociale à la veille du mitterrandisme’ (Manotti, 2001b: 45; Manotti, 2011a). And that marked an end: ‘La grève n’a pas eu de répercussions parce que Mitterrand est arrivé au pouvoir tout de suite après et que les grandes luttes ouvrières n’étaient plus dans l’air du temps’ (Desnain, 2009: 162; Manotti, 2011c).

The other contemporaneous strike in which Thibault and her union office played an important role was the 40-day strike in 1980 of the 1800 immigrant workers who cleaned the Paris metro. Along with the strike of garment workers, Thibault sees it as marking the end of an era:

Cette grève des nettoyeurs de la RATP est très caractéristique des très nombreux conflits sociaux des années 1970 … Ce qui les a tenus debout, c’est le sentiment que l’organisation du travail et les formes de l’exploitation des travailleurs étaient en train de changer, sous leurs yeux, sous leurs pas, et qu’à force de travail, d’imagination et de réflexion collective, les travailleurs allaient avoir leur mot à dire dans ces changements. Toutes ces luttes étaient porteuses d’avenir. Un avenir qui n’est pas advenu. (Gravier and Thibault, 2012: 36–40)

These two strikes, victories for immigrant unskilled workers, are what militants like Thibault had long sought. They marked the fruition of aspirations born before 1968 and nurtured in the 1970s. Then it was all over. The election of Mitterrand in 1981 ‘a représenté la “fin de haricots”’ (Manotti, 2001b: 42). Thibault was not alone among those in the political generation that was born in opposition to the Algerian War to have doubts about him. He was not yet widely portrayed in terms of his compromises during the Occupation, but he was for Thibault and others the Justice Minister during the Algerian War who had authorised martial law, the use of torture and dozens of executions of Algerian independence fighters.

Within a few years of becoming president, Mitterrand had launched France on the path of market globalisation with no place for the hopes and aspirations of the workers to whom Thibault had devoted her life for more than a decade. As she explained in an afterword to Affairs of State, the translation of Nos fantastiques années de fric:

In France, the 1980s were commonly referred to as the ‘years of easy money’, because during this decade money came to represent, for an entire political class and regardless of whether they were in power or in opposition, an end and a value in itself, at a time when entrepreneurs and financiers became the new heroes of modern times. The Socialists, who came to power with Mitterrand when he became president of the Republic in 1981 – having been sidelined over a period of decades – assumed and practiced their new religion with the zeal of neophytes. (Manotti, 2009a: 202)

The CFDT aligned itself with Mitterrand and chose the institutional approach to industrial relations. Feeling that her experience was written out of the union, Thibault left in 1983. ‘Tous les gens qui, à la CFDT, avaient mené une série de luttes sociales qui n’étaient plus directement en phase avec la perspective socialiste [of Mitterrand], ont alors totalement disparu de la mémoire collective’ (Manotti, 2001b: 43). She could have written their history, but it was precisely the sense that such movements were history that she resented. The end of the long 1968 which had begun with opposition to the Algerian War was a trauma for her. ‘À partir de 81, je me suis barrée.’ There was, Thibault felt, no longer any place for someone like her who valued the project of Les Cahiers de mai. ‘Les Cahiers ont dû changer profondément notre façon de faire. Tellement profondément que quand j’ai arrêté de militer, vers 81–83, je ne suis plus parvenue à faire de la recherche historique’ (Thibault, 2008: 23–5). She had begun historical research engaged in combat with the Communist leadership in the UEC. She recognised that her passion for history drew on her political militancy. Without a place in the France of François Mitterrand to engage politically, history lost its appeal: ‘La recherche historique est passionnante si on a quelque chose à en faire’, but she no longer did (Manotti, 2001b: 42).

Union work, teaching and historical research had defined Thibault’s identity as a committed woman of the left. But now the world in which she had done these things was gone. Emblematic for her was the fact that when the translation of Thompson’s canonical text was finally published in 1988, it sold only 600 copies (Manotti, 2011a). There was no place for the E. P. Thompson she translated in the France in which it appeared. ¹ Lost, Thibault turned to literature and discovered the roman noir, a genre with its origins in the land where capitalism has never been threatened, the United States. As Manotti recognised, in the roman policier order is restored when the criminal is captured. This is not the case with the roman noir:

Le roman ‘noir’ lui, enracine les crimes dans les circonstances sociales dans lesquelles ils sont commis. Ce n’est plus l’individu seul qui est criminel, c’est le monde de souffrance, de misère, de violence et de corruption dans lequel nous vivons qui produit les individus criminels, ce monde que la loi et la justice recouvrent sans l’organiser. Le rétablissement de l’ordre, s’il a lieu, n’est jamais que le rétablissement précaire, identifié comme tel, d’une apparence d’ordre et de paix… le désordre est installé, au cœur même de l’organisation sociale, il en est l’irrémédiable vérité. (Manotti, 2009b)

It is significant that in À nos chevaux! Daquin has on his table a novel by the Albanian Communist dissident Ismail Kadare in October 1989, but a month later, the day after the Berlin Wall falls, he stays up all night reading James Ellroy’s roman noir, Black Dahlia. Manotti found no better entrée to the new world without alternatives to the années fric. ²

In Manotti’s work, crime is a social phenomenon, produced at the core of society, even if publicly enacted at its margins. This is why, Manotti explains, that in her characters, ‘la part de psychologie est mince mais la part de relations sociales est grande’ (Desnain, 2009: 164). The roman noir fits well with Manotti’s depressing Marxist-informed vision of the world in which Bernard Madoff appears dreaming that Barack Obama will recognise his expertise in the evil arts and take him from jail to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission (Manotti, 2013a). In the absence of a conscious, militant class of producers who are nothing but could be all, capitalist hegemony and the moneyed elite’s reproduction of itself are little affected by the capture of wrongdoers.

Manotti’s contemporary, Didier Daeninckx, writes in order to show that the collective memory upon which the current social order depends for its legitimacy is false. Showing this will undercut that order (Reid, 2010). Manotti’s view of the world is darker. ³ She certainly sees a past history at work in the present. Of her novel about the French Gestapo in Occupied France, Le Corps noir, Manotti said:

Je reviens à cette période parce que, selon moi, le mitterrandisme est né en 1943–44, c’est-à-dire au moment où une certaine droite prend la virage – rien de gauche là-dedans –avec comme ciment l’antigaullisme et l’atlantisme. Ils ont été réintégrés dans la communauté nationale par les Américains contre les communistes, et en parité contre de Gaulle. (Manotti, 2001b: 46)

However, Manotti rarely makes the plot turn around this revelation of a dark historical past as Daeninckx does. In Lorraine connection, she sets a scene in the Hôtel Lutétia in Paris: ‘Le Comité du 50e anniversaire du débarquement dans ces locaux, après les services secrets de l’armée allemande pendant l’Occupation, puis l’accueil des déportés à leur retour, c’est symbolique, sûrement, mais de quoi?’ (Manotti, 2006: 86). Daeninckx would never feel the need to ask.

In the roman noir, the past appears because it lives on in the present, not because revelation of this past will destabilise present society. In Lorraine connection, Maurice Quignard had been in the terrorist OAS, but its only impact on his world is that it facilitates work with the president of the regional council whom he had known in the OAS. Just as radical leftists are no longer leftists in the Mitterrand era, a one-time radical nationalist like Quignard now gets subsidies for his Korean client from the European Union. Quignard, previously a manager in the now-vanished steelworks, lives in the mansion of the former owner of the factory. In the world since 1981, there are new ways to work the system where, having made losing choices in the past, whether as Justice Minister or terrorist, does not exclude actors from present success.

Nowhere is this past which informs a character without informing those who depend on him in the current world clearer than with François Bornand, an advisor to President François Mitterrand in Nos fantastiques années de fric. During the war Bornand was a milicien who murdered a resister. His mistress, decades later, is his own daughter, the grandchild of the leader of the Milice in Lyon. Bornand was in the OAS and maintains ties with members. Yet he also funded the UNEF demonstration against the war in 1960 that Thibault considered emblematic in the history of the political militancy of her generation. Bornand even brought Mitterrand to this protest, where the future president had ‘le bon goût de prendre un ou deux coups de matraques, sous le regard de journalistes’ (Manotti, 2001a: 35). Manotti has Bornand think the way she thinks Mitterrand acted: ‘la politique est un réseau d’amitiés personnelles; le politiquement correct: la gauche est à gauche, la droite est à droite, un pur enfantillage, et, avec l’âge, il a de plus en plus de mal à faire mine d’y adhérer’ (Manotti, 2001a: 77).

Thibault situates the coming of age of her political generation in the final years of the Algerian War and the beginnings of its end in May 1968, when a new world for which her generation was not fully prepared began to emerge and reached fruition in the election of Mitterrand in May 1981. In À nos chevaux! Manotti takes aim at the extreme left born of 1968 which she finds antithetical to her engagement at Vincennes, Les Cahiers de mai and the CFDT. In the novel, Christian Deluc, Agathe Renouard, Nicolas Berger and Amélie were members of a far-left group in Rennes of 1968 vintage. Amélie characterises it in terms of ‘les lendemains qui chantent, et le reste’ (Manotti, 1999: 80). Since we never learn any more in Manotti’s novels about the politics of this or any other group born of the radical impulse which derived from May 1968, this is Manotti’s way of dismissing their seriousness. Agathe recalls when she and Deluc attacked ‘à la barre de fer des petits chefs à la sortie d’une usine’. The police came, Agathe fell, but Deluc, who ‘jouait au leader charismatique’, ran away without looking back. ‘Il fallait sauver le noyau dur de la révolution’, he would later say. The police caught Agathe and a policeman raped her (Manotti, 1999: 249–50). In their groupuscule, Amélie reported that ‘il fallait se conformer à des règles de vie collective strictes, avec une forme d’inquisition quasi permanente’; this drove Nicolas to cocaine addiction. Amélie herself fell apart after the group collapsed, living several years as a ‘semi-clocharde’ (Manotti, 1999: 80, 82). Agathe and Nicolas went on to handle image making – the emblematic soixante-huitard profession – for a big conglomerate run by a right-winger who takes the firm from industrial to financial capitalism, bringing ‘son concours à des opérations télécommandées par le pouvoir socialiste’, and at one point arranges a financial scam with an East German Stasi spy who is working undercover as director of a West German insurance company (Manotti, 1999: 111).

Yet Deluc is the figure who interests Manotti. He embodies what Manotti hates in gauchiste opportunists. Deluc goes to a PLO training camp in 1972 or 1973, but he is ‘pas le genre sérieux, à l’allemande. Plutôt tourisme politique à la française’ (Manotti, 1999: 35). Only to us is it surprising that Deluc would become a close confidant and adviser to President Mitterrand. Manotti does not criticise Mitterrand directly in her novels beyond a few asides in À nos chevaux! about a planned trip to East Germany on the eve of the regime’s collapse. However, in line with her later development of Bornand, she extends Mitterrand’s loyalty and reliance on individuals compromised during the Occupation to figures from the ‘me generation’ which succeeded her own after 1968. Deluc ‘gagnait correctement sa vie jusqu’en 1981’, the year of Mitterrand’s election, but beginning then his fortune soars as he provides insider information and help to a drug-dealing real-estate mogul he had met in Lebanon (Manotti, 1999: 228). Deluc explains fortuitous stock purchases as ‘un geste politique’: ‘je crois à la réconciliation des socialistes avec l’entreprise privée et l’économie de marché, après des années d’incompréhension réciproque’ (Manotti, 1999: 206). Liberation struggles no longer concern him. At a lavish party on 14 July 1989 – ‘Mitterrand et 1989, ce bicentenaire scandaleux’ (Thibault, 2008: 18) – held at a mansion in the Place d’Étoile in Paris, Deluc spurns Tiananmen Square, the true site of radical politics in 1989.

However, Manotti does not concern herself solely with Mitterrand and recuperated gauchistes. The workers to whom she had devoted herself during the entre-deux-mai are featured in two of her novels, Sombre sentier and Lorraine connection, but in neither work are they quite as she had celebrated them earlier. Sombre sentier is set in the garment district at the time of the workers’ movement to gain residence and work permits. In a nod to her past as a historian, Manotti keeps the chronology of the movement and includes descriptions of the workshops and the workers’ refusal of a government attempt to use concessions to break the movement, but she does not tell the story as she had experienced it 15 years earlier. The workers’ leader she creates, Soleiman, appears to have it all from the perspective of her generation of militants. He is a radical leftist who used violence in his non-Western homeland, Turkey, and escaped to France where he organises immigrant workers. But since 1981 the world operates in new ways. There is political change in Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, but it is not of the sort that might spark political change in the capitalist West, as Thibault’s generation of leftists had hoped the victories of Algerian and Vietnamese liberation fighters would do. All that the non-Western revolutions of 1979–81 did was produce the self-regenerating disorder that took the place of social revolution in Manotti’s France.

In Sombre sentier, Manotti makes Soleiman a police informant and the detective Daquin’s lover; the success of Soleiman’s movement is in part attributable to Daquin’s guidance and assistance. We are far from the world of Les Cahiers de mai or her union work. Equally significant is the place of labour – or lack of place – in the novel. Perhaps 10 per cent of the text is devoted to workers and their movement. The workers’ success is particularly appealing in an account in which drugs and the sex trade demand more attention. While every other event in Sombre sentier is historically situated in the late twentieth century, the Turkish workers’ meeting in the Bourse du travail ‘restituent à la vieille Bourse son soufflé utopique, et son esprit dix-neuvième siècle’ (Manotti, 1995: 209). These workers are the only figures whose actions do not need unpacking. In their beatific innocence, the workers are exploited, but live outside the roman noir world of paedophilia, sex trafficking, arms sales, drug smuggling (and ties between fundamentalist Catholics and fundamentalist Muslims!) that detectives spend 90 per cent of Sombre sentier unravelling. ⁴ The Turkish workers’ practice of solidarity is the one small appearance of purity in a corrupt society.

The purity of the exploited fighting for their rights is what drove Thibault in 1980, but when Manotti returns to this story 15 years later, it exists outside of history without any suggestion that it could affect that history. ⁵ Sombre sentier begins with Soleiman speaking in French to French supporters about the lives of undocumented workers. ‘Un petit air bolchevik d’avant 17 flotte sur la scène’ (Manotti, 1995: 11). However, the militant seeking the revolution that could be is forgotten for several hundred pages. Only at the very end of the novel does a shocked Manotti realises what she has done and turns the last page of the novel over to a first-person reflection on the workers’ victory in Thibault’s voice: ‘Finalement, on n’a pas fait la fête, pour célébrer notre victoire. Et c’est le seul regret que j’ai gardé de ce printemps 1980’ (Manotti, 1995: 315). But Dominique will rarely let Marie-Noëlle near the keyboard in future romans noirs.

Unions play virtually no role in the new world portrayed in her novels. ⁶ Near the end of Sombre sentier, unions send representatives to a press conference and that is it (Manotti, 1995: 308). French supporters of the Turkish workers make several appearances, but they are not identified as union militants, although in the historical movement itself presumably some were from her union office. In any case, Soleiman’s relation with the detective Daquin is more important to the workers’ success. The steelworkers’ union in Lorraine connection is remembered for having dismissed striking women who sought its assistance. Policemen’s unions appear to protect officers in the wrong, like one in Bien connu des services de police whose false testimony sends an Arab to jail (Manotti, 2010a: 155, 179, 192).

The closest we get to the world from which Manotti came is the relationship of Daquin and his detectives that evolves over the three novels in which they appear, Sombre sentier, À nos chevaux! and Kop. We are familiar with polar authors who come out of experiences on the far left after 1968 (Collovald and Neveu, 2001; Reid, 2010). However, what sets Manotti apart is her rootedness in the enquête developed by Les Cahiers de mai, rather than gauchiste politics. The methods used by Les Cahiers de mai are at the root of the practice of Manotti’s detectives, who in their daily recounting and discussion of their findings with one another, come to recognise and confront fundamental processes not apparent in the cases as they originally understood them. The detectives employ practices like those of Les Cahiers de mai when doing an investigation, both in the relatively non-hierarchical cooperative relationships between the police agents and in their ways of dealing with informants. This in turn underlies the intra-bureaucratic conflicts within the police which mark virtually all of her novels. The agencies and hierarchies with which Manotti’s detectives come into conflict cannot see the pursuit of new goals which emerge from her detectives’ investigations, discussions and critiques as revelatory of fundamental elements of their roman noir world (or they do, and want to stop them for precisely this reason). Manotti’s detectives are not striking workers, but their innovative methods resonate with her work on the Les Cahiers de mai. While Manotti’s novels allow the reader to share in the imagination, creativity and sense of victory felt by the detectives, the reader also leaves each novel fully cognisant that these individual triumphs, unconnected to one another, will in themselves never lead to a change in the system that produced the crimes. This was exactly her critique of the failure of Les Cahiers de mai to seek to develop a politics which could draw insights and activists together to change the system itself. If Thibault maintained this hope for labour throughout the 1970s, she lost it after 1981, and this loss is at the heart of the novels she began publishing in 1995.

Lorraine connection is set in the autumn of 1996, but there are frequent references to the steel factory that workers fought unsuccessfully to save in ‘luttes grisantes’ at the end of the Giscard d’Estaing presidency. These left ‘une classe ouvrière dynamitée, comme les hauts-fourneaux’. The place of the steelworks has been taken by a struggling cathode-ray factory run by Daewoo where two former steelworkers who had lost the ‘fraternité’ of their earlier lives, are left to manage female assembly line workers as a foreman and an ineffective workers’ delegate. Both further their own interests, rather than those of the female workers (Manotti, 2006: 19). These female workers are on their way out as well. Their leader, Rolande Lepetit, is presented as a Stakhonova, not because she is a heroine of labour, but because she retains all that is left of that era of Communist celebrations of production. She is a poster girl whose physique transfixes men rather than a worker who surpasses production quotas. Yet this Stakhonova is ‘le dernier témoin d’un monde englouti. L’atlantide, ou pas loin’ (Manotti, 2006: 107, 142). The novel ends with Rolande sure never to set foot in a factory again.

The masterful presentation of factory life and financial scams in Lorraine connection reveals Thibault the economic historian and the labour activist better than any other of her works. The workplace is not just a setting, as in Sombre sentier; it is the site of actions around which the plot turns. The first part of the novel captures the anxiety and anger created by a workplace accident, the withdrawal of promised bonuses, the firing of a popular employee and company efforts to remove stock from the factory, leading to sequestration of the managerial staff and a chaotic factory occupation. Aïcha, a young female worker, speaks of the liberation Thibault had spent her life trying to achieve for workers:

Les gens qui n’ont pas travaillé à la chaîne … ne peuvent pas comprendre ce qui m’est arrivé. Quand notre équipe a débrayé, on s’est toutes mises à se promener dans l’usine, librement, les chefs avaient disparu. J’ai cru devenir folle de joie. J’avais l’impression d’exister. J’ai crue que c’était facile, et que je changeais de vie. J’avais déjà entendu des gens dire ça, à la radio, à la télé: Rien ne sera jamais plus comme avant. (Manotti, 2006: 114)

Manotti brought her experience in Les Cahiers de mai to research Lorraine connection. She visited the area and learned that the comité d’entreprise at the Daewoo firm had commissioned an examination of the business, but did not know what to make of what had been uncovered, nor did any union official explain it to them, ‘ce qui’, Manotti commented, ‘montrait très concrètement le délabrement des structures syndicales, et la rupture dans la transmission d’une culture et d’un savoir ouvriers’. But Manotti did know what to do with the discovery that the factory did not make money by manufacturing goods, but by ‘le siphonage’ of subsidies from the European Union (Manotti, 2009b). In the opening pages of Lorraine connection, she shows the exploitation of labour even if the source of profit is not this exploitation. Readers are likely to see Lorraine connection as a novel about financial swindles, like other Manotti novels, but with less exploitative sex and drug dealing. However, in Lorraine connection she presents the unmaking of the working class; she writes a novel that fulfils the role of Les Cahiers de mai in the absence of the unions and activists present in France before 1981.

At one point Quignard reads of a strike and thinks disparagingly, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une grève peut contre les grands manœuvres de la finance international? Rien. À la limite, c’est même risible. Ces gens-là ne comprendront jamais’ (Manotti, 2006: 147). He remembers leftists in his youth speaking of the spark that could set the prairie on fire – a reference to Lenin’s newspaper, Iskra (the spark) – but he does not fear such a conflagration. Without the consciousness that Les Cahiers de mai had brought in the 1970s and that romans noirs bring today, strikes in themselves will achieve too little. Lorraine connection ends with business leaders agreeing not to reveal the corruption they have uncovered in order to protect the system that profits them all. The roman noir explains once again why we do not know the world in which we exist.

In recent novels, Manotti is no longer so fixated on the disappointments of the soixante-huitards and the Mitterrand presidency, and without them the world she paints is blacker. In Bien connu des services de police Noria can cite a phrase from Mao she picked up from a friend, but this reference to the world past of 1968 is now a distant source of humour (Manotti, 2010a: 156). Bien connu des services de police is a book in which the corrupt forces within the police, riven with racism and ties to the far right, triumph and in which Noria, the agent who contests them, comes out empty-handed. Her nemesis Le Muir is connected to the far right and through her father to the OAS. Manotti’s earlier romans noirs had generally featured a particular success within a corrupt self-perpetuating world. But in Bien connu des services de police, we no longer have even this.

L’Honorable Société, co-written with DOA, shows that electoral politics will not offer a way out. The election pits Eugène Schneider, the candidate on the left who seeks to reassure business and has the name of the leading figure in nineteenth-century industry, the founder of the Le Creusot ironworks who was renowned for his anti-labour policies. As for his opponent, the right-wing populist modelled on Sarkozy – he speaks of ‘nettoyage haute pression de la banlieue’ – his name is Guérin, that of a leading twentieth-century French anarchist, Daniel Guérin. His campaign manager is Guesde, a name he shares with the founder of first French Marxist political party, Jules Guesde. It is not a question of connections to the past, but of their complete severance. To add insult to injury the sub-prefect in the novel who works behind the scenes to thwart the possibility of change is Michelet, the name of the great French historian of the French Revolution. In any case, Schneider throws the election and in L’Honorable Société we are left in the same hopeless roman noir world as in Bien connu des services de police.

Manotti’s most recent novel, L’Évasion, returns to themes of her first novels, Sombre sentier and À nos chevaux!, but from a different perspective. The novel is built around the story of Filippi, a petty criminal who writes a first novel in 1987–8 about a well-known radical Italian leftist Carlo, whom he had known in prison and with whom he had escaped. He fabricates much of the account however, but gives readers the impression that he is writing from his experience. This causes problems in the exile community of radical Italians in Paris and ultimately leads to his execution, probably by forces tied to the Italian far right. The extreme left in L’Évasion, a decade after its demise in Italy, is presented in human terms, not the caricature of gauchistes in À nos chevaux! Manotti has not reconciled herself with the paths chosen by errant comrades, but her choice of the exile community in Paris makes for a more sympathetic appreciation of their post-activist years. L’Évasion echoes Sombre sentier in that it is a novel about a novel which retells an event in the radical past transformed by important fictional elements. Manotti’s account of Soleiman in Sombre sentier (like Carlo, a man of the far left in exile in Paris), has dimensions others did not know of the historical leaders of the workers (because they were not true); Filippi’s account of Carlos does not match what others knew of him for the same reason. However, the message of L’Évasion is not that fiction should be abandoned. On the contrary, Lisa, the one-time Italian Communist journalist who broke with the party and is now an exiled radical activist and gifted researcher, says in the final lines of the novel, ‘Si je veux essayer de sauver notre passé, il ne me reste plus qu’une chose à faire. Écrire des romans’ (Manotti, 2013b: 211). But not, one expects, the kind that Mitterrand, described several times in L’Évasion as a lover of literature, would appreciate. No, the thing left to do is to write romans noirs. Black is the new red.