Oedipus in Évreux: A German-French post-war tragedy by Denis Dercourt

Between collaboration and return

The debut novel Evreux (Éditions Denoël, 2023) by filmmaker Denis Dercourt lays the foundation for his central theme in the opening chapter: guilt exists prior to any action and unfolds as fate, forcing the characters into a moral spiral. Léon is born in 1944, a child born amidst and from the ruins of his life. The violence later inflicted upon Irène was not simply "inherited"; it structures Léon's life as a predestined judgment. 

The family saga originates in the bombings of World War II and the German occupation of Normandy. At its heart is Léon, the illegitimate son of florist Irène and a collaborator, who grows up in an environment of betrayal, emotional coldness, and criminal activity. The narrative follows his rise to become a ruthless businessman who gains control of his hometown through blackmail and violence. Interwoven with this are the fates of his scattered, unacknowledged children and that of a vengeful historian, all of whom grapple with the moral wreckage of their origins.

Denis Dercourt develops his narrative over more than seven decades, employing a temporal structure less beholden to actual historical chronology than to a moral logic of recurrence. The setting—the city of Évreux—is portrayed from the very first chapter as a repository of past guilt, its history inextricably interwoven with the characters' biographies. The narrator does not follow a single protagonist, but rather introduces an entire ensemble: Irène, Léon, David and Charles Benjamin, Pablo, Igor, Rose, Antoine, and many others. The perspectives, however, are not subjective, but rather relational: they reveal how each character is defined by the history of the others. The narrative structure is therefore horizontal—broadly dispersed across numerous biographies—but not vertical—never delving into the depths of a single soul.

Denis Dercourt's paratactic style almost entirely avoids emotional adjectives or complex sentence structures. This creates an atmosphere of inevitability and emotional numbness, which underscores the deterministic nature of the narrative.

The language here is as functional as Irène's worldview. The dialogue consists of short, concise demands and affirmations. The parataxis reflects the reduction of interpersonal relationships to purely transactional matters. For the book as a whole, this is the psychological "deformation": Léon learns that survival is only possible through the radical prioritization of the self.

Irène transforms from a victim into a perpetrator by instilling a system of radical self-assertion in her son. Maternal care becomes a pedagogy of coldness. This exemplifies how victim roles can themselves corrupt: Irène's trauma becomes the seed of Léon's later brutality. Guilt is relational. It arises where people depend on one another—for better or for worse. In the chapter about Gremoin, Léon's transformation into a moral usurper is revealed. He uses the guilt of others as a weapon and builds his own empire from it. Crucially, the novel does not present a revenge narrative—Léon does not avenge, he "exploits." The guilt of his fellow citizens is commodified: it becomes the currency of power. This suggests that in the novel's universe, every sin has a twofold effect: it damages the victim—and strengthens the next perpetrator.

Léon grows up without a father, yet Mertens' legacy is ever-present within him. Although Mertens is described as a "Salaud" who organized the Germans' "parties fines," he also possessed taste and an understanding of music. This duality—aesthetic sensitivity coupled with moral depravity—is inherited by Léon. He becomes a man who, on the one hand, appreciates the beauty of a Scarlatti concerto or a precious bow, but on the other hand, uses people like chess pieces in his criminal and business calculations.

Henri Benjamin's suicide is depicted here without empathy. The sentences follow the rhythm of Léon's actions: observing, shooting, approaching, stealing. The detached narrative style makes the theft from a dead man a purely logical consequence. Here, the boundaries between chance and deed blur; Léon becomes a parasite on someone else's misfortune, foreshadowing his entire later behavior as a blackmailer.

Léon's path to wealth leads through blackmail. A key moment is his relationship with Gremoin, a gardener who profited from the black market during the war and betrayed his own sister to the Germans. Gremoin is a perpetrator of the past, but Léon uses this knowledge to make him a victim in the present. He forces Gremoin to sign over his business to him and reduces the old man to a tenant in his own house. Léon justifies his actions with his lineage: "I am the son of Mertens, and not without reason. I am like my father." Here we see atonement as a perversion: Gremoin atones for his betrayal of his sister, but the punishment is carried out not by law, but by a new crime. The blackmailer Léon is no less cruel than the sinner Gremoin.

The work addresses the inevitability of inheritance and shows how trauma poisons the lives of subsequent generations over decades. Significantly, the novel begins with a quote from Sophocles. Oedipus Rex, which defines the city of Évreux as a space that does not belong to an individual, but is the stage for a collective destiny. This reference sets the framework for a narrative in which geography – the bombed-out city, the cathedral, the boarding school "La Providence" – is inextricably linked to the moral constitution of its inhabitants.

Léon's search for Mertens is a modern version of the Oedipus myth, but inverted: Léon is not searching unknowingly, he is searching knowingly. Not for knowledge, but for destruction. The encounter in Ghent reveals a perpetrator who believes he can erase his own guilt by killing his source. But the destruction of his father does not lead to purification—it opens the way to the next catastrophe.

The novel is narrated by an omniscient narrator who adopts a detached perspective. He moves confidently through the decades – from 1944 to 2020 – and gains insight into the innermost thoughts and motives of numerous characters. He shifts his focus between the various protagonists, initially closely following Irène and her son Léon, but then broadening his perspective to include the victims and antagonists such as the Benjamin family, the historian Antoine, the priest Pablo, and the artist Rose. These shifting perspectives are crucial for depicting the novel's central theme of the blurring lines between perpetrators and victims.

The narrator not only describes Frédéric's external isolation at the boarding school, but also knows his inner desire: "In Évreux, Frédéric began to bore himself. [...] Yet, he wanted to make friends." He has insight into the unconscious feelings of secondary characters toward the protagonist: "Instinctively, the two friends sensed that Léon was more cruel than they were." He knows which scenarios Léon imagines in his mind even before he acts: "Léon gazed longingly at the young man's face. He imagined their encounter." After the traumatic accidental death of Antoine's family, the narrator describes his inner perception of his changed personality: "He realized it, but it didn't bother him." The narrator also knows the hidden motives behind Léon's actions and his deep determination: "Léon ne voulait rien laisser au hasard. Il a d'abord fait un repérage." These examples illustrate that the narrator goes beyond the mere observation of actions and can precisely capture the emotional states, desires, and psychological motivations of the characters over a period of many decades.

The narrator is not only aware of the present, but also sees the far-reaching consequences of the actions. He directly links the "original sin" of 1944 with the moral decay of later generations. He knows about the characters' repressed fears, such as Léon's constant fear of being discovered after murdering his father, or Antoine's tormenting dreams after his act of revenge. The narrator thus acts as an invisible but omnipotent observer, tracing the threads of guilt across generations. He does not offer overt moral judgments, but allows the consequences of the actions to speak for themselves, enabling the reader to directly witness the moral decay of the characters.

Over several decades, Dercourt paints a harrowing panorama of human depravity, in which the concepts of guilt and atonement lose their moral clarity. He creates a complex picture where the traditional boundaries between victims and perpetrators become inextricably blurred through traumatic repetition and moral corrosion. This ambiguity is at the heart of a tragic worldview that portrays humanity as a prisoner of its origins, its traumas, and the harsh social realities from the post-war period to the present day. From the very first scene—the birth of a child in a 1944 air raid—the novel establishes an atmosphere in which history is not closed, but rather palpably present. The city of Évreux appears as a social organism whose spaces, families, and institutions are permeated by the shadows of collaboration, silence, and trauma. Violence does not end; it transforms: into mistrust, the lust for power, exploitation—and into a cataclysm that changes its form across generations.

At the heart of the story is Léon, a man who is both a child of war and the executor of his own destiny. His biography reveals how closely intertwined the roles of perpetrator and victim remain in the novel: the abuse his mother suffered recurs in Léon's life as a pattern of behavior that he now inflicts on others. Dercourt narrates this with an almost documentary clarity that doesn't resolve the moral ambiguity of his characters, but rather lays it bare. Léon is not portrayed as a monster; he becomes the tragic product of a world in which guilt does not fade. Guilt is passed on like a silent command.

The result is a novel that is both painfully concrete and highly literarily reflective: a modern tragedy that manages without gods, yet precisely traces their mechanisms – fate, entanglement, and recurrence. The book shows how historical crimes resonate in the present and how attempts at atonement often breed new evil. Dercourt has created a work about the enduring legacy of the past that grips and disturbs, while remaining analytically sharp.

Debris, scars, desecrated graves

Denis Dercourt employs a striking narrative technique that oscillates between documentary-like objectivity and literary concision. Paratactic, with mostly just one sentence per paragraph, elliptical. The chapters are composed like case files: fragmentary, clearly segmented in time, often foregoing psychological introspection. This approach creates a matter-of-fact, almost forensic stance that allows the characters' moral decisions to speak for themselves in all their brutality, rather than commenting on them. At the same time, the novel uses a cinematic, rapid montage that skips decades to reveal structures rather than episodes—a style that reinforces the feeling of witnessing a far-reaching, historical mechanism at work.

The metaphor of destruction and deformation permeates the novel as a central stylistic element, with the city itself becoming the embodiment of France's damaged history. The physical ruin of 1944, in which Léon is born amidst a hail of bombs and German soldiers, marks the beginning of a process of deformation that continues for decades. Although the city is rebuilt on its rubble after the war, this process remains purely superficial; the new facades, such as the concrete reconstructions of the La Providence boarding school, cannot heal the underlying cracks of a fundamentally corrupt society. Évreux thus becomes a space where the historical guilt of collaboration, though architecturally concealed, remains a festering wound in the "zones of shadow" of its inhabitants.

This atmosphere of damage manifests itself in recurring symbols such as the graves desecrated by Léon and the ruined family biographies, supporting the thesis that violence cannot be eradicated, but only displaced. When Léon uses a crowbar to pry open graves, instrumentalizing mummified corpses as leverage for his blackmail, the grave becomes a symbol of a past that cannot rest. The destruction of the Gremoin family through suicide or the systematic degradation of Nathalie, whom Léon forces into prostitution, demonstrate how the original violence of war transforms into private, criminal power relations. The metaphor of the deformed underscores that the moral integrity of the characters has been irreparably damaged by the constant pressure of unpunished deeds.

Ultimately, these landscapes of devastation are reflected in Léon's own body and his interpersonal relationships, which are marked as the result of a collective process of deformation. Raised by his mother Irène from childhood onward to radical harshness and emotional coldness, Léon develops a personality that replaces any form of empathy with economic or sexual calculation. His relationships, whether with Nathalie or with his disowned children, are not spaces of encounter. They are sites of perversion and demonstrations of power. This inner distortion finds its final expression in Léon's violent death: the stab in his eye and the subsequent "Rictus smile" on his face seal the aesthetic representation of a life that began and ends as a deformed product of a destructive era.

German-French episodes

EvreuxRead politically, it is not a text about European unification or reconciliation of the “arch-enemies”, but it is very clearly a novel about the convoluted, often repressed connections between France and Germany, as they have been inscribed in bodies, families and cities in the decades after 1945.

The novel portrays the relationship between France and Germany not in an abstract, political way, but rather intimately and destructively: in the abusive relationship between Mertens, a German collaborator and representative of German power, and Irène; in Léon's birth as a child of this violence; in the continuing presence of German traces in the city of Évreux. Germany is here the origin of a trauma that internally divides France's postwar generation. The relationship becomes a cipher for power, shame, and unaddressed history.

Dercourt's interpretation of the Franco-German past is not one of harmony; rather, he sees it as a history of mutually repressed guilt. France appears as a country that integrated perpetrators into its social normality, while Germany, in Mertens, produces a figure who disappears after the war—a symbol for the many unatoned stories. The connection between the two countries becomes, in the novel, a kind of inherited silence that generates new forms of violence across generations. Political relations may be officially relaxed, but moral and personal relationships remain fractured.

Thus, instead of presenting an official framing of reconciliation, the novel tells the unofficial story of the aftershocks. Franco-German relations are revealed as a web of collaboration, resentment, identity fractures, and family catastrophes. The plot connects to a Europe that, while politically unified, still bears the scars of occupation in its people's lives. In this sense, the novel explores Franco-German relations on the lowest level of the European house: where historical shadows extend further than diplomatic gestures.

Counter-reading to the national master narrative

The author does not, however, present a historical chronicle, but rather a psychologically nuanced interpretation of postwar France that extends far into the present. The history of France after 1945 does not appear as a success story of liberation, reconstruction, and republican renewal; instead, it vividly portrays a complex web of repression, the transfer of guilt, and moral erosion. The city of Évreux becomes the embodiment of this collective experience: a place where the past is not overcome. Rather, the past is sedimented in bodies, families, and social relationships.

The novel reveals the vast gap between official memory politics and the lived experience of the postwar era. While France liked to portray itself as a land of resistance after 1945, the novel exposes a more subtle reality: collaborators disappeared into the social gray area, were not consistently held accountable, or—like Mertens—continued to live under the protection of silence and oblivion. The moral ambivalence of the village community reflects a national problem: the willingness to look away in order not to jeopardize the fragile social normality. The mythical image of a France of resistance shatters against the novel's figurations, which depict collaboration as a retrospective phantasm that persists because it was never named.

Dercourt interprets the postwar period as an era in which silence became a central social practice. Silence protects some, but destroys others. It prevents Irène's suffering from being acknowledged and creates the conditions for Léon to grow up in a culture of moral ambiguity. On a collective level, this silence points to a nation that, while outwardly rebuilt, inwardly retained a kind of moral wasteland. The inability to openly confront the occupation leads to a state of tension that becomes visible across generations in the novel.

EvreuxDercourt's work, conceived as a project of unresolved guilt, uses Léon's example to illustrate how the ruptures of the war persist in personal attitudes, family structures, and societal power relations. The next generation inherits the psychological and moral consequences: harshness, mistrust, and a distorted relationship with authority and intimacy. In this way, Dercourt describes postwar society as one that never truly became "postwar," but rather perpetuated traumatic patterns from the occupation in altered forms.

In the novel, France appears neither as a victim nor as a clearly defined perpetrator state. France occupies a moral gray area: Dercourt portrays a society that is simultaneously complicit and a victim. This ambivalence is central to French memory culture after 1945, in which heroic myths and repressed guilt coexisted. The novel's characters—Gremoin, Irène, the citizens of Évreux—embody this contradiction: they are part of a nation that, on the one hand, is renewing itself, and on the other, remains trapped in the structures and logics of the past.

Ultimately, the novel suggests that the war continued to linger in private life in France after 1945. Violence took on new forms: sexual exploitation, psychological manipulation, social humiliation. These forms were not isolated incidents; they were echoes of the occupation. Thus, a picture of a "second war" emerges—a silent, internal societal conflict waged between memory and repression.

Dercourt offers a radically different interpretation of French postwar history than the official republican narrative. His novel depicts a country that outwardly appears pacified, yet is inwardly dominated by a past that has never been fully acknowledged. It is a novel about the power of the unspoken, about how history continues to exert its influence in secret, and about how profoundly the present is shaped by it. In this way, the book becomes an important literary commentary on post-1945 France—a commentary that speaks less of heroism than of the complicated truth of a nation grappling with its own shadows.

Tragic entanglement of historians

In Denis Dercourt's text, history is portrayed as an existential form of investigative work that can serve both justice and destruction. The historian's craft is linked to the uncovering of crimes and moral "shadow zones," blurring the line between objective research and obsessive investigation.

The theoretical foundation of this narrative is provided by a professor at the University of Nanterre, who teaches his students—including the protagonist Antoine—that the profession of historian is directly comparable to that of a detective. Both use the same investigative tools to reconstruct a coherent truth from fragmentary sources. This methodological affinity is vividly illustrated by the fact that Antoine logically completes his historical internship at a private detective agency. Here he learns that the analysis of documents such as his identity card or old court records is the key to a person's identity and guilt.

The book also reveals a dark side of historical work: the instrumentalization of facts as a weapon. While Antoine seeks the truth, the antagonist Léon uses research in archives and land registers as a tool for blackmail. He doesn't "study" the history of collaboration in Évreux out of scholarly interest, but rather to exploit the guilt of his fellow citizens as a means of power. Here, historical work is portrayed as a dangerous excavation of trauma that can shatter the social order of a city.

In the novel, two worlds collide in the evaluation of historical work. On the one hand, there is social success: Antoine rises to become editor-in-chief of a history journal, which underscores the seriousness and importance of professional historical research. On the other hand, there is the criticism from state authorities. When Antoine tries to solve the accidental death of his family using his investigative methods, the gendarmerie accuses him of "professional deformation." His urge to connect every detail historically and logically is dismissed by the police as an obsession that transcends legal reality.

Ultimately, the novel portrays the historian's work as a necessary but tragic imperative. In Dercourt's narrative, Évreux's history is deeply steeped in guilt, so that only an investigative gaze can illuminate the "zones of shadow." But this work is not without consequences: the uncovering of the past leads to a bloody act of retribution in the Évreux cinema parking lot. Here, the historian Antoine himself becomes the perpetrator, employing his investigative skills—from meticulously documenting the murder weapon (Léon's Porsche) with photographs to researching the archives of the Alésia detective agency—to identify the person responsible for the accidental deaths of his wife and daughter. Antoine abandons the passive distance of historical scholarship and stabs Léon with a folding knife, first driving the blade into his abdomen and then, following a dark prophecy, directly into his right eye.

The novel's finale stylistically mirrors both the beginning and Léon's own actions. In concise, paratactic sentences, Antoine's act of revenge is recorded with the same clinical precision that previously defined Léon's crime. The violence appears as a mere physical fact—dispassionately registered, without psychological commentary—and precisely through this, acquires the character of an inescapable, almost ritualistic act. With the murder, Antoine definitively crosses the line between observation and participation: the "innocent" historian ends up as a brutal perpetrator, thus completing the circle of guilt and atonement.

Antoine's vigilante justice is a vindication he believes he has derived from his sources and archival materials. But by translating his researched knowledge into action, he himself becomes part of the very spiral of violence he originally intended only to document. Historical scholarship thus appears ambivalent: as an instrument of truth-finding, bringing hidden crimes to light, yet simultaneously inextricably entangling the researcher with the murderous fate of his subjects. Knowledge is not without consequence; it transforms into action—and corrupts the one who produces it.

Oedipus

With Nathalie, the novel reaches its tragic center. Léon precisely repeats his father's crime against Irène. Here, the tragic moment becomes fully apparent: Léon becomes his father's double. The biographical spiral closes—not coincidentally in the constellation of abuse, pregnancy, and humiliation. Dercourt shows that traumatic patterns are not only passed on but also reenacted, as if seeking repetition.

Intertextually, the novel clearly alludes to Oedipus Rex, transforming its tragic structure into a modern interpretation of French and German history. Collaboration, occupation, shame, and the subsequent silence constitute the city's "repressed fate"—a counterpart to Oedipus's repression of origin and guilt. In the ancient tragedy, Thebes is a cursed place. In Dercourt's novel, the city of Évreux itself is a repository of trauma, a kind of modern-day Thebes after collaboration. Dercourt interprets the postwar history of both countries as an intertwined zone of trauma: France as a society that often integrated its perpetrators and collaborators into bourgeois normality, Germany as the birthplace of a father whose violence casts a shadow across generations. Thus, Dercourt's book becomes a literary investigation into how Europe narrates its postwar history—and how this narration reveals that the past does not disappear until it is named and understood.

The comparison between the ancient Oedipus tragedy and the novel reveals profound parallels in the structure of guilt, fate, and intergenerational damnation: The “root of guilt” (the Davor) manifests itself in both works as an inescapable fall from grace of the fathers, which constitutes a religious or moral defilement (Miasma) entails. In Greek mythology, the curse begins with Lajos's breach of the sacred right of hospitality, while the novel Evreux His tragedy is rooted in the real historical collaborationist crimes committed by Mertens in 1944. In both cases, the view of history is profoundly deterministic: guilt is passed vertically from father to son, meaning that Léon Mertens—like Oedipus—is marked from birth amidst ruins and violence. This "original sin" functions as an archaic moral understanding, in which the individual act of one person stains the entire "blood" of his descendants and predestines Léon to later cruelly reproduce his father's patterns of violence (such as the instrumentalization of women).

The execution of the crime is dissected into agonizingly precise, short sentences. Each sentence is a technical step ("He folded it […] and he tightened it"). The narrative style avoids expressing any moral judgment or emotional turmoil on the part of the perpetrator. This underscores the thesis that Léon sees himself merely as a tool in a long-overdue atonement. The parataxis creates a coldness that makes the reader a detached witness to a patricide that seems almost like a gardening task (with a vine).

In classical tragedy, patricide—as in Oedipus, to which the novel explicitly refers—serves as a painful but necessary moment of realization and ritual purification (catharsis). In Denis Dercourt's novel, however, this act is stripped of its spiritual dimension and portrayed as a mechanical, almost bureaucratic execution of "atonement" that merely breeds the next injustice.

Léon murders his father, Mertens, in 1998 not out of some twist of fate, but as a cold promise to his mother, Irène. He uses a kiwi vine as his weapon—a highly symbolic instrument from his horticultural collection—to strangle his father under a bridge in Ghent. Instead of subsequent introspection or a cleansing of the city, Léon returns to his "Moulin" for a hedonistic celebration, where he immediately plunges into sexual excesses after the act. Thus, the atonement for his mother's suffering does not lead to the resolution of a trauma, but rather to the cementing of his own monstrosity.

The distortion of morality becomes definitively apparent when, decades later, this violently enforced "justice" destroys the most innocent life in the novel: Maya, the nine-year-old daughter of Antoine and Laurence. Léon, who considers himself godlike through the murder of his father and his economic ascent, speeds through the night in his high-powered BMW. In his hubris, he disregards the traffic laws, resulting in a collision with Antoine's small Citroën. Maya dies instantly, Laurence shortly thereafter. Herein lies the moral core of the novel: Léon's attempt to atone for the wrong done to his mother through murder has transformed him into a man who, out of sheer arrogance, produces new, even more senseless injustice (the death of a child).

The novel closes the circle by also forcing the victim, Antoine, into the role of perpetrator. To "atone" for his daughter's death, Antoine resorts to a knife (instead of legal means). He carries out the young Marilyn's prophecy and stabs Léon directly in the eye. This final act of atonement is the ultimate confirmation of the thesis: Antoine believes he is doing justice for Maya by murdering Léon, but in doing so, he himself becomes part of the "spiral of vice" that he, as a historian, had only intended to document objectively. The ending does not depict a cleansed world. Rather, it is a collection of traumatized survivors in which atonement has merely sown the seeds for the next crime.

During the protagonist's own era, the tragic irony of self-reflection becomes apparent: Oedipus attempts to escape his fate through reason, only to discover in the end that he has thereby fulfilled the gods' plan. Leon, on the other hand, initially seems to powerfully instrumentalize his destiny as "Mertens' son" by extorting the guilt of others, but his story also culminates in an inevitable catastrophe. The integration of tragedy reaches a modern climax in the figure of the historian Antoine: Like Oedipus as an "enlightener," Antoine attempts to illuminate the realms of shadow, but this quest irrevocably entangles him with the murderous fate of his subject. In the finale, Antoine carries out a bloody act of atonement that follows a dark prophecy: stabbing Leon directly in the eye physically executes the ancient symbolism of blindness and self-knowledge through violence.

The "aftermath" of the tragedy focuses on the disintegration and instability of the next generation, with the ancient image characterized by the "horizontal self-destruction" of Oedipus' sons. In the novel, this disintegration is reflected in the lives of Frédéric, Sophie, and the Manouche twins, who are portrayed as "heirs" to Léon's ruthless empire and his repressed passions. But while the Theban genealogy ends with Antigone's death and the total destruction of the house, Dercourt's novel offers a fragile glimpse of healing. The disparate siblings meet at the end in a brasserie to exchange their fragments of the past—such as photographs and memories. This act breaks down the purely vertical transfer of guilt and replaces it with a horizontal approach that, while not erasing the traumas of the past, at least halts the "spiral of vice" in the moment of shared grief.

Dercourt's novel depicts a world where the "original sin" of collaboration and violence mutates over the decades. Léon is at the center of a black hole that sucks in every character—priest, artist, or historian. The lines between victims and perpetrators blur because every act of atonement (Léon's murder of his father, Antoine's murder of Léon) breeds new injustice. In the end, instead of a clear moral judgment, what remains is the complex picture of a city whose very soil is saturated with the guilt of its fathers. Each chapter serves as a mosaic tile in this monumental portrait of human fallibility. The children's meeting at the end brings no peace, but the possibility of "another path." The next generation is not redeemed—but it recognizes the legacy, and this recognition is the first step toward liberation.

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.