Eric Vuillard, the roots of Trumpism, and versions of Billy the Kid

A handful of sand in the eyes

The motto by Saint-John Perse that precedes the text – “Sinon l'enfance, qu'y avait-il alors qu'il n'y a plus?” – establishes the central frame of reference for the novel. Vuillard announces that Billy the Kid is not to be read as a historical figure, but as a figure of loss: as someone whose life is already damaged before his actual biography even begins. The question of childhood is simultaneously a question of history itself: What is lost when history begins?

The narrative opens with the famous event: seventeen-year-old Billy kills Frank Cahill. Vuillard begins seemingly conventionally, with the reproduction of a court transcript. But this document is immediately problematized. The narrator makes it clear that it is not a neutral source; it is an instrument of power, written by a judge who is himself part of a brothel and violent milieu. Step by step, Vuillard dismantles the official version: Cahill was not a harmless craftsman, but rather a former soldier involved in a massacre of Indigenous people; the judge owns a brothel; the entire social environment is characterized by violence, alcohol, prostitution, and corruption. The "respectable citizens" turn out to be an economically organized group of perpetrators.

The famous phrase "La scène doit donc être réécrite" thus marks a poetic core of the novel. Vuillard rewrites the scene—not in the sense of an alternative truth, but rather as an ethical correction: Billy appears as a physically weaker youth who is abused, panics, and shoots. The murder is an act of naked self-preservation and has nothing heroic about it. History is always already distorted by narrative; literature can make this distortion visible, but not undo it.

Éric Vuillard's text Les orphelins: a history of Billy the Kid. Recit (Actes Sud, 2026) is not a historical narrative in the classical sense, but rather a literary intervention against the narratability of history itself. It takes on one of the most mythologized figures of the American imagination—Billy the Kid—and systematically dismantles what literature, film, and popular culture have made of him: the romantic outlaw, the tragic gunslinger, the idol of freedom. What remains is not a “hero,” but rather a child, an orphan, a body without genealogical, legal, or symbolic protection. Vuillard does not write over Billy the Kid, he writes against the discursive machines that produced it. The Lincoln County War, for example, is deliberately condensed. Vuillard rejects epic storytelling. Deaths, battles, and acts of revenge are dealt with summarily. The focus is not on heroism, but rather on meaninglessness. The only exception is the Battle of Blazer's Mill, which exemplifies how individual bravery disappears in the historical noise.

The text is grounded in autopoetic principles from the very beginning. The narrator repeatedly insists that Billy cannot be narrated, that any attempt to define him biographically is necessarily futile. "You cannot study Billy," he states programmatically; he is "a sand handle in the eyes." These metaphors mark the novel's poetic approach: history is not a coherent narrative, but a dusty field of documents, gaps, acts of violence, and linguistic impositions. Vuillard does not write history; he demonstrates its impossibility—and therein lies its political truth.

Scenic reconstruction as moral correction

The central narrative movement of the novel is the rereading and rewriting of historical scenes. A prime example of this is the detailed reconstruction of the first murder Billy commits at the age of seventeen. The starting point is a single document: the death certificate of Frank Cahill, recorded by a judge who is himself a brothel owner. Vuillard subjects this document to a radical contextualization. He exposes the seemingly neutral language of the certificate as part of a local power structure comprised of the military, prostitution, the judiciary, and economic interests.

For Vuillard, writing means shifting perspectives, making power relations visible, and wresting the bias from supposedly objective archives. The "voye" who kills an "honnête artisan" becomes a terrified youth being abused by an older, armed man with a military background. Vuillard replaces the legal perspective with a bodily one: he forces the reader to empathize with Billy's fear, his physical vulnerability, his panic. Not to excuse, but to understand.

This sequence of scenes is paradigmatic for the entire novel. Vuillard works with a succession of snapshots—fights, thefts, nighttime rides, drinking bouts, impromptu parties—that never coalesce into a linear development. The narrative moves forward by repeatedly pausing, jumping back, and starting anew. Time here is not progress; it is a circling around a center of loss.

Shortly before Billy's death, which marks the beginning of the legend, we read:

Protocol, sermon, incantation

Vuillard meticulously lists the uncertainties: place of birth, date of birth, name, parents. Every fact about Billy the Kid is subject to reservation. The archives are both overflowing and empty. This ambiguity is not lamented as a deficiency, but rather read as the central truth of Billy's existence. Vuillard insists: the closer one looks, the more Billy disappears. His life is entirely conditional. The narrator develops a radical thesis here: the problem is not the uncertainty, but rather the illusion of precision. Billy is an orphan, socially and historiographically. History has no place for him.

Formally lives Les orphelins of the friction between different forms of communication. First, there is the language of the archives: court records, registers, photographs, newspaper reports. As demonstrated, Vuillard does not quote them neutrally; he exposes their rhetorical strategies—their smoothing over, omissions, and moral pronouncements. Alongside this is an emphatic, often apostrophic, narrative voice that addresses the reader directly, poses questions, and formulates imperatives ("il faut imaginer," "il faut sentir"). This voice shifts between historical analysis, moral indictment, and poetic evocation.

A third form emerges: quasi-lyrical condensation. The text repeatedly shifts into rhythmic, almost hymnal passages dominated by chains of metaphors, anaphora, and repetition. The novel thinks in images: dust, sun, dirt, blood, linen, horses, weapons. These images are not merely decorative; they are in fact epistemic, replacing missing facts with sensory evidence. Vuillard places more trust in intensity than in information.

Figures as necessary tools

Billy's early delinquency is presented by Vuillard: the theft of butter, of laundry, his imprisonment, his escape through the chimney. Vuillard interprets these actions not morally, but existentially. Theft appears as the first language of a child without possessions, without recognition. Particularly central is Vuillard's reflection on ownership: things belong to whoever desires them; possession is only experienced through violence. The act of stealing is an act of self-affirmation—and simultaneously of self-destruction. The narrator identifies in theft a paradoxical form of love: Billy loves the things he destroys. Possession is fleeting, pleasure immediate, the future excluded.

The novel's title is programmatic. "Les orphelins" refers not only to Billy and his companions, but to an entire class of subjects: people without protection, without a voice, without institutional representation. For Vuillard, orphans are not sentimentalized; they are politicized. They are the ones who suffer history without being allowed to write it. At the same time, the title can be read as self-ironic. The narrator, too, is an orphan: he has no reliable source, no complete archive. His writing is writing born of scarcity. Literature appears here as the last, precarious form of justice—knowing that it can never be sufficient.

The characters in the novel are not psychologically developed individuals; they are positions within the social space. Billy himself remains fragmentary, fleeting, constantly in a state of disappearance. His identity is unstable: William, Henry, McCarty, Bonney – names that are merely administrative accidents. This ambiguity makes him a paradigmatic figure of modernity: a subject without origin, without a future, without symbolic capital.

Alongside Billy, characters like Jesse Evans, Dolan, Riley, and the nameless soldiers and prostitutes appear. They are all part of a system that Vuillard describes with biting irony: the outlaws appear as necessary tools of an expansive economy. They are the cheap enforcers of a violence that is later monopolized by the state. The desperado is the failed self-made man, the dark side of the American Dream.

Vuillard's reading of the famous photographs is particularly striking. The images of Jesse Evans and his companion are not read as historical documents, but rather as ideological focal points. In them, Vuillard recognizes "America in reverse": freedom as a pose, violence as a style, lawlessness as a prerequisite for later order. The photography becomes a text, which the novel reads against the grain.

Intertextuality with Shakespeare and Rimbaud

Vuillard invokes Shakespeare as an implicit counter-horizon to fundamentally reject the tragic narratability of violence. Shakespeare's mode of history—power as drama, guilt as consciousness, crime as a rhetorically formulated act—presupposes a subject that acts, reflects, and moves within a symbolic order. Billy the Kid lacks precisely these prerequisites. He possesses no center of power, no inner monologue, no awareness of guilt or mission. His violence is not a choice, it is a reflex. By severing Billy's connection to the tragic figure, Vuillard formulates a philosophical point about history: tragedy is a privilege of the powerful. Only those who possess significance can fail dramatically; the poor do not die tragically, the poor die incidentally, in protocols, bars, marginalia.

The Rimbaud reference points to another, equally seductive myth: that of the prematurely extinguished, rebellious genius. The parallels—youth, excess, marginality, later iconization—are obvious, and Vuillard explicitly names this temptation in order to immediately dismantle it. The crucial difference lies not in talent, but rather in the historical infrastructure. Rimbaud leaves behind texts, which are edited, commented on, and canonized; his silence becomes aesthetically productive. Billy leaves behind nothing but files, wanted posters, and rumors. Vuillard here formulates a bitter critique of class: genius is also a form of survival. Those who write continue to exist; those who do not write are written about—by the police, the justice system, and the press.

In their shared function, the references to Shakespeare and Rimbaud are directed against the grand narratives of meaning in history: against the tragic form and against the aestheticized myth of youth. For Vuillard, both forms are not universal; they are exclusive, belonging to those who possess power, language, or a legacy. Billy the Kid is their product of exclusion. Vuillard's negative poetics denies him the stage and transfiguration, so as not to make the violence bearable through grand forms. Billy is neither a Shakespearean hero nor a Rimbaud of the prairie; he is what remains when history offers no dramatic structure and literature no saving memory.

Vuillard defends the (often inaccurate or exaggerated) accounts of Billy's companions as a form of self-empowerment against the official legal narrative. Vuillard finds truth not in the facts, but in the force of testimony. When these "good-for-nothings" embellish their story, it is not deception, but a rebellion against the "silence of the vacuum" into which history seeks to plunge them. Vuillard's poetics of history is partisan: he pits the "radiant nothingness" of the hunted against the "blanched" (whitewashed) record of the powerful.

The conclusion: Utopia or indictment?

The novel's ending is disturbingly radical. In a visionary, almost delirious passage, Vuillard imagines an uprising of the Orphelins: banks are robbed, presidents are assassinated, systems of order are destroyed. This scene is to be read neither as a realistic scenario nor as a political manifesto. It is a dystopian vision, a cry.

Through its exaggeration, this passage exposes the impotence of literature. The text knows it can change nothing—and yet allows itself this imaginary excess. It is an act of symbolic atonement that simultaneously reflects its own absurdity. In the end, Jesse Evans returns to a bar and pays his bill. Order is restored. History continues. This ending is bitter and consistent. It denies catharsis. The Orphelins remain Orphelins. What remains is the text itself—as a disruption, as a protest, as a reminder that behind every myth lies a fallen body.

Les orphelins It is a fundamentally political novel because it refuses to present politics as plot or message. Vuillard employs a poetics of disillusionment. He dismantles myths, exposes archives, and attacks narrative comfort zones. His Billy the Kid is not a figure of freedom, but rather a symptom of structural violence. The novel reads American history as a history of orphanhood—and compels its readers to engage with this history. Elegiac, polemical, relentless: Vuillard's text is less a novel than a literary assessment of the moral costs of modernity.

Laurent Rigoulet reads in Télérama Vuillard's book as an angry, deliberately subjective continuation of that literary project with which Vuillard has been working since Tristesse de la terre Vuillard systematically demythologizes American history. Despite its elegiac tone, he refuses any conciliatory resignation: his book is simultaneously an indictment, a rebuttal, and a politically charged text that does not supplement official history but attacks it head-on.

In Waiting for Nadeau situated Hugo Pradelle Les orphelins This is also within the framework of a long-term literary project in which Vuillard tells fewer individual stories than he constructs a coherent, serial counter-reading of Western history. The apparent repetition of his methods—the combination of documentary material, commentary, and moral-political perspective—proves not to be a sign of weariness, but rather a deliberate poetics: Each text complements the others like a palimpsest, contributing to a “moral and political fresco” that makes hidden connections of guilt visible. Vuillard’s writing is anachronistic in a productive sense: It reads past events through the lens of the present’s urgency in order to construct a history of violence, colonialism, and capitalist predation that can only be articulated through literary condensation and partisanship. Literature appears here as a privileged space for making the repressed, the missing, and the morally burdened aspects of history narratable in the first place.

Against this backdrop, Pradelle reads Billy the Kid not as a biographical figure, but as a vector of pure fictionality: an unstable, fragmentary figure whose historical elusiveness precisely opens up the space for literary speculation. Vuillard is not concerned with reconstruction, but with an "aesthetics of doubt" that places the possible, the uncertain, and the deliberately inexact at its center. Billy thus becomes a cipher for a national myth in which freedom, violence, and individualism are inextricably intertwined, but at the same time also a representative of the losers, the excluded, the "orphelins" of history. Pradelle emphasizes the ethical and political implications of this approach: by revealing and intensifying the fabulatory foundations of collective memory, Vuillard compels a critical self-examination of contemporary forms of domination and narrative. Les orphelins From this perspective, it appears as a radical literature of resistance that does not escape the false stories but makes them visible in order to oppose them with a fragile but necessary form of resistance.

Les orphelins as a genealogy of Trumpism

Vuillard portrays the America of the Wild West not as a mythical realm of freedom, but as a testing ground for capitalist violence. The apparent lawlessness is functional: it allows for swift expropriation, land theft, and accumulation. The state delegates the dirty work to outlaws, militias, and adventurers—in order to later establish order and reap the rewards.

The author describes the "Golden Age" of bandits like Jesse Evans, who robbed cattle on behalf of businessmen and the army to rapidly build an empire. Here, the sacred calf of the "free market" is slaughtered. Vuillard unmasks capitalism as the bastard child of pimps, murderers, and state interests. The market didn't arise through hard work, but because a "horde of idle crooks" was needed to cheaply liberate the country. Modern economics, therefore, is nothing more than criminal energy that has survived long enough to create its own laws.

For Les Inrockuptibles reads Gérard Lefort Vuillards Les orphelins As a determined deconstruction of the American myth: The brief, violent existence of "The Kid" serves as a prismatic window onto a society founded on colonial violence, land theft, the slave trade, and massive profits—a "first democracy" built on terror and systematic exploitation. Lefort emphasizes that the figure of Billy the Kid, as an orphan, is not only a victim but also a mirror reflecting the structural brutality of the early United States; the literary projection transforms the desperado into a witness to societal cynicism and state-sanctioned violence. At the same time, Lefort argues, Vuillard stages the literary proximity to Billy the Kid as a risk and an experiment: Writing "inside Billy," immersing himself in his perspective, allows for a reflection on the political and moral dimension of the myth. Beneath the surface of the legend lie the far greater crimes of colonial construction, which are systematically concealed or downplayed. In this light, the Orphelins become symbols of the marginalized, whose resistance and destruction are inextricably linked to the emergence of American society – a literarily condensed panorama of violence, profit and historical abysses that simultaneously questions the myth and radically contextualizes it ethically.

From this perspective, the West becomes the primal stage of modern power. The massacres of Indigenous peoples, the economic exploitation of violence, the linguistic neutralization through euphemistic terms ("Native Americans")—Vuillard reads all of this as a blueprint for later imperial practices. The novel is thus explicitly contemporary. When Vuillard speaks of banks, corporations, and presidents, it is not an anachronism, but an update: The logic of exploitation has not changed, only its forms.

Les orphelins It can be read as a historically grounded structural critique of Trump's America. Vuillard doesn't write about Donald Trump, but he writes about the conditions that made his rise possible. The America of the Wild West appears as the primal scene of a political style that merely finds its grotesque late form in Trumpism: contempt for institutions, a conflation of power and masculinity, violence as a form of communication, and wealth as moral legitimation. Billy the Kid is not a precursor to Trump; rather, he is his antithesis from below: a poor, disposable subject who embodies the same ideology from which others profit. While Trump presents himself as a self-made man, Vuillard shows that the American myth has always been based on Orphelins—on unprotected people who do the dirty work of expansion.

Billy joins a gang led by Jesse Evans. This section of the text examines the social dynamics of the outlaws. Vuillard describes their freedom as precarious, delegated, and functional. Revolvers replace work; violence replaces wages. Vuillard's America is an America of gestures: weapons, poses, photos, slogans. He interprets the famous photographs of the outlaws as early media stagings of political power. Freedom appears as a matter of style—and as a precursor to the later order. The desperado is interpreted as a deformed version of the self-made man: he embodies the ideology of upward mobility without ever being allowed to arrive. Herein lies a connection to President Trump: politics as performance, truth as secondary, provocation as program. Trump appears—implicitly—as the heir to this logic: not as an accident, but rather as the consistent continuation of a culture in which volume triumphs over justice and image over responsibility. Vuillard's polemic is directed less against a person than against an aestheticized brutality disguised as democracy.

Vuillard's shift in perspective is crucial. While Trump portrays himself as an opponent of the elites, Vuillard shows Les orphelinsthat true power is always invisible, legally and economically secured. Lawyers, bankers, landowners, politicians – they outlive every outlaw, every scandal, and every revolt. Here Vuillard speaks as a left-wing intellectual: The author believes neither in rebellious individualism nor in moral purification through chaos. Populism – whether armed or tweeting – is not, for him, the antithesis of power, but rather its useful prelude.

The looting and terrorizing of Mexican villages in Les orphelins It reveals the colonial dimension of the West. The gang's violence is directed against property and against social order, intimacy, and everyday life. Vuillard makes it clear: this violence is not anarchic; it is structurally permitted. The line between private brutality and state expansion is fluid. The outlaws' "festivals" are the ugly precursor to national history.

From a French perspective, Vuillard reads America as a myth-obsessed nation that does not reflect on its violence but rather aestheticizes it. Where France's republican tradition is based, at least theoretically, on universalism and institutions, Vuillard sees in the USA an early alliance of capital, violence, and narrative. Trump embodies this alliance in its purest form: rich, loud, ahistorical, and proud of his ignorance. Les orphelins The book doesn't respond with mockery; rather, it reacts with archaeological detachment: That's how it's always been. That's how it was constructed.

Les orphelins It can be read as a polemic against Trump's America—but not in terms of current politics, rather genealogically. Vuillard doesn't attack Trump; he writes against the America that produced Trump: a country that confuses freedom with violence, romanticizes poverty, and renders power invisible. Thus, from Vuillard's perspective, the book becomes a bitter diagnosis of the present: Trump is not a rupture, he is a symptom.

The eruptive revolutionary fantasy at the end of the book—banks, presidents, systems of order—reads like a deliberate counter-argument to the authoritarian redemption fantasy of Trumpism. But Vuillard immediately sabotages it himself. The revolution remains an imagination; the bill is paid. This is crucial: Vuillard doesn't believe in the strongman, regardless of which side he's on. The final note of Vuillard's text is sobering: Order remains. History goes on.