A commitment that ruffles feathers: the attacks against Annie Ernaux's political stances

Preamble

Originally written in French, this article appeared in En attendant Nadeau on 30 November 2022. ¹ It constitutes an intervention in the public debate, written in response to the attacks on the Nobel laureate, and based on my previous analyses of the work and political engagement of Annie Ernaux (Sapiro, 2018a, 2018b: 381; 2022a, 2022b). These attacks had reverberated over to India where, on the occasion of a lecture that I was giving on her work at Jawaharlal Nehru University soon after the prize was announced, and whilst readers were unsuccessfully requesting Ernaux's books in bookshops where for several months they could not be found, a professor of French literature who was very familiar with her work asked me with great astonishment why Ernaux was being accused of antisemitism… It must be said that the attacks against Ernaux's engagements, which came from the political right and from Zionist activist spaces, followed a questioning of Ernaux's legitimacy in receiving the prize on a strictly literary basis; these two kinds of contestation only partly overlap. What they have in common, however, is the rejection of Ernaux's radical critique of symbolic domination, conveyed both by her texts and her political commitment. These highly localised, albeit violent and numerous, attacks do not reflect the overall very positive reaction to this prize in France, where Annie Ernaux is considered to be a great writer, a singular and authentic voice. It remains the case that, as some have astutely pointed out (Salmon, 2022; Samoyault, 2022), the violence of these attacks – attacks which were not directed at her French male predecessors – can be ascribed to her social characteristics: a woman, born working class, who lays bare the mechanisms of symbolic violence.

In the French tradition, politically-committed intellectuals have used their symbolic capital in the service of a cause, just like Émile Zola in the Dreyfus affair. François Mauriac, the Nobel Prize in Literature laureate of 1952, was engaged in the anticolonial fight, which brought insults and threats upon him. A member of the French Academy, Mauriac had already taken a stance against Francoism, and then against the Vichy regime's policy of collaboration with the Nazi occupier. Jean-Paul Sartre, who refused the honour of the Swedish Academy in 1964, had long used his international renown to defend the oppressed throughout the world, for which the dominant class never forgave him.

Annie Ernaux did not break with this tradition when, on the day that the venerable Academy announced that it had chosen to honour her, she called for protests against the cost of living and climate inaction, in keeping with her fight against social injustice. Ernaux's work lays bare the symbolic violence which is inherent in class relations. She manages to overcome this violence with her writing, which reinfuses the world from which she originates, the world of the little people, the dispossessed, the voiceless, with all of its dignity. The poignant description of a clandestine abortion with which she opened her first novel, Les Armoires vides (published in 1974 as the French National Assembly debated the draft bill authorising the voluntary termination of pregnancy), based on an experience to which Ernaux returned in L’Événement (2000), along with her discerning analysis of the symbolic violence present in gender relations, but also the affirmation of female desire and even the reversal of the relationship of domination in the adventure narrated by Le Jeune Homme (2022): all of these elements make Ernaux a key figure for feminists.

Far from being didactic literature, her chiselled writing, crafted in its form and musicality to achieve an almost Beckettian austerity, nonetheless breaks with the abstraction of writers such as Beckett in order to reintroduce the social dimension, which had been banished from literature since the Nouveau Roman. Ernaux's is a social dimension which is embodied in lived experience, bodies, feelings and words she has heard, thanks to the acuity of an objectifying ethnographic gaze, which recreates the violence of social relations at the same time as it problematises them. For example, when she returns to her first sexual experience, an experience which was desired but violent, and yet which she cannot describe as rape – unlike Simone de Beauvoir, who considered any first penetration to be rape – Ernaux also sets aside notions of consent or submission, in favour of

the stupefaction of the real. All one can do is repeat ‘this can't be happening to me’ or ‘it is me this is happening to’, but in the event, ‘me’ is no longer, has already changed. All that remains is the Other, master of the situation, of every gesture and the moment to follow, which only he foresees. (Ernaux, 2022a: 11)

As Tiphaine Samoyault (2022) has rightly pointed out, this writing ruffles the feathers of ‘male dandies who see in literature only excess and spectacular manipulation of the French language, and who, in any case, prefer right-wing writers, who are braver and more free than the so-called “self-righteous”, in their opinion’. The attacks, insults and scornful remarks which, alongside the chorus of commendations, were unleashed across the Internet following the announcement of the prize revealed the social conditions which underpin symbolic recognition and cultural legitimacy. As a woman of modest origins owing her upward social trajectory to school (or rather, to her own investment in her schooling as well as that of her parents), Annie Ernaux refuses the role of the oblate forced into allegiance to the institution to which they owe everything. She gives herself permission to subvert the symbolic power that she has acquired, and the arms of legitimate culture of which she is now the keeper as a professor of French and a renowned writer, in order to understand and undo the symbolic violence of class, which requires the abandonment of what Bourdieu (1984) called the ‘racism of intelligence’. She has achieved this better than anyone. That is what cannot be forgiven.

These attacks would not merit our attention were it not for the fact that they were even proclaimed in what was once, in times past, one of the high places of cultural legitimacy, France Culture, during a programme with significant listening figures. It was on the programme ‘Répliques’ of 26 November 2022 that Alain Finkielkraut expressly rebuked Annie Ernaux for her lack of gratitude – a supreme form of symbolic violence which signals the submission and allegiance required of the dominated (in this case, a woman who is also a class migrant, or ‘transfuge’) in exchange for their admission to the literary coteries of the highest status. These cliques must have felt their symbolic power to have been deeply threatened in order to have reached the level of hostility which was freely deployed during this programme against the first French female writer to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Admittedly, the first part of the programme, devoted to Ernaux's work, recognised – not without condescension – the literary value of some of her books, whilst reproaching her for having shown ‘resentment’ in them, based on a misunderstanding of the sentence ‘j’écris pour venger ma race’ (‘I write to avenge my kind’), which actually underlies the project of undoing symbolic violence, by giving readers a handle on its mechanisms and by offering a different perspective on the life of the working classes (and on the interior life of women). Ernaux was also accused by Pierre Assouline, a guest on the programme, and who has been known for more discerning analysis, of reducing social relations to the conflict between the dominant and dominated. According to him, this ‘binary’ vision of the world characterises not only Ernaux's work but also her reading, in particular her reading of Proust, because she dared – what sacrilege! – to point out the upper-middle-class gaze through which the narrator of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu perceives the servants, detectable in a lightly contemptuous irony. Ernaux's reductionism can be explained, as Assouline would have it, and as we might have guessed, by the influence of Pierre Bourdieu. Assouline cites, as readings which influenced Ernaux, Les Héritiers (1964), La Reproduction (1970), and La Misère du monde (1993), which he highlights in particular. He was, however, no doubt thinking of La Distinction. For if Ernaux, who studied literature and sociology, did indeed read the two first books when she was young, shortly after they were published in 1964 and 1970 respectively, and if those readings were indeed decisive, to the extent that she spoke of an ‘ontological shock’ (Ernaux, 2002), she could not have been aware of La Misère du monde before it came out in 1993 – that is, well after the publication of La Place (1983) and Une femme (1988). It would have been interesting to examine the difference in method between this book of sociological interviews (a method which inspired Daewoo by François Bon) and the quasi-ethnographic observation that Annie Ernaux favours in Journal du dehors (1993) or La Vie extérieure (2000) (the two methods are combined in Ceux qui trop supportent by Arno Bertina). But the objective of the programme was not to probe the relationship between literature and the social sciences. ²

It was in the second part of the programme, devoted to the political engagements of the female writer, that the hostility reached its highest point. It comes as no surprise that Alain Finkielkraut should disagree politically with a woman who has never hidden her attachment to left-wing values. But for him to carry out, with Pierre Assouline, a public denunciation by twisting the meaning of her words and her engagements indicates that the rules of intellectual debate were broken in this case. These rules call for accurate accounts, the examination of arguments, the contextualisation of a statement, and the analysis of its social and political meaning. All of these principles were flouted (and the attempts at correction by the second guest, Le Monde des livres journalist Raphaëlle Leyris, struggled to counterbalance this flouting). For, in order to discredit the female writer, nothing was off-limits.

And, above all, the accusation of anti-Zionism, which fed into the trial by social media for antisemitism that followed articles in the German magazines Bild and Der Spiegel (bearing in mind that, in Germany, BDS has been classed as antisemitic and declared illegal), ³ and the French revue Tribune juive. ⁴ On what is it based? On the fact that Annie Ernaux signed letters calling for the boycott of the France-Israel cultural season in 2018 and the Eurovision Song Contest in Tel-Aviv in 2019. ⁵ This frequent amalgamation of antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israeli governmental policy in the occupied territories, an amalgamation that was at the heart of Benjamin Netanyahu's propaganda to counter this criticism throughout the world, has been denounced by the ‘Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism’, written and signed by specialists on antisemitism and the history of the Jewish people. ⁶

Let us read closely the letters signed by Annie Ernaux: whether or not one agrees with the content or, indeed, the call to boycott as a mode of political action, we can find no trace of antisemitism, but rather a denunciation of the discrimination and violence of which Palestinians are the victims, and a refusal to endorse the cultural foreign policy of this government which uses culture as a ‘showcase’ to improve its international image (an argument which was supported by citations from accredited voices in both cases). Besides, the second letter mentions that progressive Israeli organisations are also ‘hampered by the authorities’. ⁷ On the basis of these petitions, Alain Finkielkraut and Pierre Assouline conclude that Ernaux's engagement is focused on ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’, which they take as proof of ‘obsessive’ anti-Zionism, with an undertone of antisemitism. Detecting a ‘racist basis to all this’, Assouline hypothesises that Ernaux acquired these views from conversations in her parents’ Yvetot café; this hypothesis begs the question of what exactly it relies upon – there are no traces in Ernaux's work – unless we are to assume that the working classes are racist and antisemitic by nature… ⁸

In order to further beef up this ill-founded insinuation of antisemitism, there was mention of a petition signed by Annie Ernaux in 2017 in favour of the socialist Gérard Filoche, who had retweeted an antisemitic caricature featuring Emmanuel Macron. However, the petition explained that the tweet had been deleted as soon as Filoche had realised its antisemitic nature, and had publicly apologised; the text also recalled that he was one of the founders of SOS Racisme and deplored his expulsion from the Parti Socialiste. ⁹ Once again, whether or not one agrees with its content, nothing in this petition can be qualified as antisemitic. And Annie Ernaux is reproached for having cosigned a text against the attacks on the founder of the Indigènes de la République party, Houria Bouteldja. A text which, without subscribing to all of her ideas, intervenes in the debate concerning ‘the activist use of notions such as “race” or “islamophobia”’ (a debate which is still current in the social sciences, independently of the questionable stances taken by Bouteldja). ¹⁰

Annie Ernaux's opposition to the law prohibiting the hijab in schools, despite being part of a complex debate on freedom of belief and religion, over which the French left is divided, is interpreted by Finkielkraut and his guest as unconditional support of Islam, and even radical Islamism (yet another common amalgamation). In their view, this interpretation is confirmed by the fact that the writer would not have supported Iranian women, which is inaccurate, given that, on the very same day that the prize was announced, she clearly declared herself to be ‘totally in favour of women rising up against the absolute constraint’ which is the obligation to wear the hijab, whilst specifying that she ‘advocates the liberty to wear hijabs in France’, where the ‘context’ is different. In France, ‘the context is not the same; nobody is forcing them (women who wear the hijab), it is a choice. The unwillingness to recognise this choice is an error in France’ (Ernaux, 2022b). The fact that she expressed her support for Jean-Luc Mélenchon's candidacy in the 2022 French presidential election was all that her two judges needed to condemn her fully, not to mention her solidarity with the demands of the Gilets jaunes during their protests.

Another falsehood is the reproach made against her for having published in Le Monde on 10 September 2012 a ‘petition’ against Richard Millet demanding his dismissal from his role as editor at Gallimard, an action described as a ‘lynching’. The article (which was not a ‘petition’) by Annie Ernaux made no such demand. It discussed, in accordance with the rules of intellectual debate, two texts by Richard Millet published in 2012 by Pierre-Guillaume de Roux Editions, Langue fantôme (Ghost Language) followed by an Éloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik (In Literary Praise of Andres Brevik), the murderer of 77 individuals during the summer of 2011 (8 during the bombing of a government building in Oslo and 69 on the Norwegian island of Utøya, the majority of whom were teenagers at a youth Labour Party camp). Moreover, an incendiary article by J.M.G. Le Clézio had been published three days prior to Ernaux's. Like Le Clézio, she shared the disgust that she had felt upon reading Millet's text, dissecting the ‘perverse rhetoric’ of the pamphlet, which becomes clear in the first essay, Langue fantôme, in which the author laments the decline of French literature and the loss of its ‘purity’, under the effect of immigration and multiculturalism. Ernaux firmly rejected this thesis: ‘Never will I accept the linking of my work as a writer to a racial and national identity that defines me in opposition to others, and I will fight against those who would seek to impose this division of humanity.’ Denouncing a ‘political act which aims to destroy the founding values of French democracy’, she concluded that it was no more and no less than a ‘fascist pamphlet which dishonours literature’ (Ernaux, 2012). This article had gained the approval of 118 female writers. In any case, it was not for this reason, but rather because of an abject article against Maylis de Kerangal, that Gallimard decided to part ways with its editor three and a half years later ¹¹ (which Pierre Assouline, an author with the same publishing house, must have known).

Not content with this false allegation, Alain Finkielkraut defended Richard Millet, stating that he had highlighted the ‘formal perfection’ of the killer's actions whilst repeatedly condemning the massacre, which is inaccurate: Millet certainly declared from the outset that he did not approve of it, a necessary clarification in order to avoid the charge of vindicating the crime, but which is not the same as a condemnation. Then, under the guise of the ‘formal perfection’ of the actions, he proceeded to recall ‘what happened’ in a factual and matter-of-fact style before giving way to a defence of the killer whom he described as a ‘victim’ of multiculturalism and the loss of national identity (the essay was published two days before the murderer's trial). ¹²

Additionally, Alain Finkielkraut placed this supposed ‘literary praise’ side by side with a sentence taken from Les Années about September 11: ‘the ingenuity astounded’. He went so far as to compare the number of victims, thus insinuating that this sentence by Annie Ernaux was considerably more serious than Millet's ‘praise’. Let us cite the passage from Les Années here, which was taken out of context:

De prime abord c’était quelque chose qui ne pouvait être cru […]. On ne parvenait pas à sortir de la sidération, on en jouissait via les portables avec le maximum de gens.

Unlike Raphaëlle Leyris, Pierre Assouline refused to separate Ernaux's work from her political interventions, considering that it is possible to be a great writer and to take indefensible stances, in the manner of Céline. He was alluding to the debate engendered by the project to republish Céline's antisemitic pamphlets, which Gallimard had tasked him with introducing, before the project was abandoned in the face of public protests (in particular, see Samoyault, 2018; Sapiro, 2018b, 2020a). If the problem of the relationship between the author and the work can be posed in the case of Céline and others (Sapiro, 2020b), we, just like Raphaëlle Leyris, may be surprised by the parallel with Annie Ernaux on this point. What is the meaning of it, if it is not to associate her with these antisemitic writers? For, what would otherwise be reprehensible about her support for the extreme left in itself in a country which prides itself on defending freedom of expression and which boasts of its tradition of politically-engaged intellectuals? Annie Ernaux has never separated the two, the individual that lies behind the author is of a piece with her remarkable work, thus proving that their indissociable connection can sometimes be good news.

Translated by Helen Burton