The Sitcom Dictatorship: Political Thought, Literary Form, Machiavelli and Giorgia Meloni in Hélène Frappat

Decree and spectacle

Nero (Actes Sud, 2025, cited as NER) by Hélène Frappat tells the story of an unnamed European nation ruled by a right-wing populist dictator who calls herself "le Prince" by decree. Nerona—daughter of a single mother from the urban underclass and founder of the FEU (Force, Énergie, Union) movement—rule by means of a ceaseless barrage of decrees that encompass all aspects of life: migration policy, media control, family values, economic development, and ultimately, an attempt to outlaw natural disasters. Her political rise is portrayed as a series of self-dramatizations: she uses the story of her impoverished childhood, the traumatic apartment fire, and her mother's deliberately thwarted abortion as a quasi-mythological founding narrative.

The narrative unfolds in fragmented scenes—speeches, interviews, conversations with advisors, the prophetic chants of Sister Sibylle—that paint a panorama of populist rule from various perspectives. The multi-perspective structure of NER is itself a political statement: by never depicting populist rule from a single, privileged observer's position, but rather fragmenting it into a simultaneous panorama—the ruler's self-presentation, the weary cynicism of her advisors, the prophetic lament of the sister, the matter-of-fact tone of the film set, the small, fearful conversations of museum visitors—Frappat makes visible what populism structurally obscures: that it does not describe one reality, but rather overlays and represses many. Nerona can talk endlessly because her speeches are never confronted with what is happening simultaneously; but the novel forces precisely this confrontation. While she speaks of soldierly love in the detention center, the survivors of the bridge collapse are rehearsing the Pietà scene; While the gladiatorial games are underway, Sibylle sings about the nameless on the island without graves. The novel's form deprives populism of its most important privilege: the monopoly on perspective.

At the same time, the polyphony reveals an asymmetry that is central to populist rule. Nerona always speaks to an audience, always aware of being heard and seen; her language is thoroughly performative, constructed for effect. The other voices in the novel—Sibylle, the survivors, the advisors among themselves, the museum visitors who whisper because they fear the microphones—speak in moments of relative unobservance, and precisely for that reason, they tell the truth. Frappat juxtaposes these voices without a mediating narrative instance, forcing the reader to judge for themselves, to endure the simultaneity that populist discourse constantly suppresses through its spectacle. The fragmented narrative is thus not merely an aesthetic choice, but a democratic gesture: no voice carries more weight than another—except that of the novel as a whole, through its architecture.

At the heart of the narrative tension lie the relationships within the family: Nerona and her sister Sibylle, who possesses prophetic gifts and warns of impending doom, and their mother, who gave Nerona both life and an explosive political mythology. In parallel, Frappat develops a second narrative layer—the film "Le Pont de la Vérité" (The Bridge of Truth) by director India Shiva, starring Julia Roberts—composed of genuine testimonies from surviving residents of a collapsed bridge district, giving a voice to the victims of state infrastructure corruption. These film images constantly contrast with Nerona's pompous self-aggrandizement, as she simultaneously commissions the construction of a gigantic new bridge, banishes migrants to an island within the Protocol camp—the "Confin Protocol"—and invented the television spectacle "Jeux Princiers" (Princes' Games), in which migrants fight each other as gladiators.

The final third of the novel builds to an apocalyptic climax. Nerona has her mother and sister drowned in a staged boating accident—a matricidium directly alluding to the historical Nero—before inaugurating the new bridge. As the surrounding forests burn, the nation is in turmoil, and the voice of the dead Sibyl screams ever louder in the protagonist's mind, Nerona crosses the bridge, suspended over the chasm of two seas. The bridge begins to tremble; Nerona's eyes literally pop out of their sockets. In a surreal, montage-like final chapter, the dictator sinks blindly and alone, calling for her mother, sister, and people—while the song her grandmother always sang, "Si tout finit dans le feu, brûlons ensemble!" (If everything ends in the fire, let's burn together!), returns as the novel's final line.

The work concludes with an appendix: a quote from the writer Anne Carson – “Parfois je pense que le langage devrait se couvrir les yeux quand il parle” – which, in retrospect, can be read as a poetics manifesto for the entire novel. Language that should be aware of its own blindness: this is the fundamental linguistic critique that Frappat conceals behind the superficial grotesqueness.

The “sitcom fascist”: Genre reflection as political critique

The blurb for Actes Sud promotes NER with the term "sitcom fascist"—a phrase that initially seems like a marketing provocation, but on closer inspection describes a precise genre poetics. The sitcom—that television form based on comic misunderstandings and character consistency—provides Frappat with a structural model that is ideal for depicting populist rule for two reasons: First, it simulates an intimacy that prevents reflection from a distance; second, it is based on the premise that the characters never learn from their mistakes, that the world returns to equilibrium after each episode, and that the comedy continues endlessly.

Frappat uses this principle as a structural analogy to populist politics: it, too, feeds on the eternal recurrence of the same rhetorical gestures, the same spectacle, the same performance that never escalates—until it suddenly does. The satire arises not from exaggeration, but from precision. Perhaps the crucial dramaturgical decision is the construction of Nerona's voice: she speaks in an idiom that surprises no one. We've heard these lines before. The infamous passage in which Nerona addresses the staff at the migrant detention center as "soldiers" at Christmas sounds like this:

On ne choisit pas d'être un soldier par haine. On choosing a soldier for love. On ne choisit pas d'être un soldier parce qu'on aime la war. On the choice of a soldier parce qu'on aime sa patrie.

The chiasmatic structure – hate/love, war/fatherland – is characteristic of a rhetorical style that simulates depth through symmetry. Frappat isn't quoting any specific politician here; she's distilling a pattern. The sentence sounds like Giorgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen, or Viktor Orbán – precisely because it doesn't originate from any of them, yet could have come from any of their mouths.

The sitcom—a serial television format based on stable characters and the structural impossibility of genuine change—provides the formal model for a political diagnosis: populism functions like a sitcom because it repeats the same spectacle, because its characters never learn from their mistakes, and because the world seemingly returns to equilibrium after each episode. Frappat uses this parallel to expose the production conditions of populist rule—the advisors who craft discourses and are horrified when the ruler takes them literally; the decrees that take on a life of their own; the audience that applauds because it doesn't know what else to do. A peculiar literary tension arises: the reader laughs because the scenes are comical and is simultaneously horrified because they recognize the laughter—it is the same laughter with which one observes real politicians before the laughter stops. The “fascist” in the genre term is not an exaggeration, but an extension: The sitcom never ends on its own, it has to be cancelled – and who cancels it remains an open question.

The choice of the genre "sitcom" corresponds to a reflection on form: NER is not a realistic novel. There is no narrative voice, no psychological introspection, no unified perspective. Instead, there is a polyphony: the protagonist's monologues, fragments of dialogue with advisors, press conferences, excerpts from speeches, television commentaries, prophetic chants, film directors' instructions, advertising brochures, and bulletin sheets containing decrees. The form is the message: populism appears as media noise in which coherent critique finds no place.

The Prince as Princess: The Prince as pretext

The Machiavellian dimension of the novel is explicit. The title itself is a deliberate feminist reappropriation: Nerona's insistence on being called "le Prince" (with the masculine article) is a direct allusion to Machiavelli. The Prince (1532). Nerona explains this in an interview:

After my election, I am named Prince by decree. Monsieur le Prince. This is my title. This is the title that the people want to choose.

Machiavelli's treatise was, as is well known, a handbook of political reality—a work that separated the ethics of rulership from the morality of private life and defined the prince's ability to maintain power as the central political good. In NER, this separation is parodically taken to its extreme. Nerona understands Machiavelli not as a philosophical legacy, but as a management doctrine. Her understanding of "virtù"—for Machiavelli, the skill in dealing with "fortuna," or chance, fate—is reduced to a kind of populist energetics: whoever shouts the loudest, decrees the fastest, and stages the most effective events is right.

Particularly revealing is the dialogue in which a journalist confronts Nerona with the term "dictator":

Eh bien, sous the République Romaine qui a inventé ce title, the dictateur is a magistrat unique et sovereign, nommé extraordinairement, en certaines circonstances critiques, pour une durée qui ne peut pas céder six mois.

This archaeological strategy—interpreting the word from its historical “purity” in order to neutralize its modern connotations—is one of the main techniques of populist language politics and, at the same time, a distorted application of Machiavelli’s own philological method. Machiavelli was a humanist; he worked with Latin sources to distill principles from history. Nerona caricatures this method: she uses historical philology not for knowledge, but for immunization against criticism.

The Machiavellian trinity of Church – People – Prince finds its contemporary equivalent in NER in the constellation of FEU party – media system – population. Machiavelli taught that a wise prince should instrumentalize the Church but not become dependent on it. Nerona treats the Pope in exactly the same way: she cites him as a witness for her ban on surrogacy, but as soon as a journalist points out the religious connotation – “Amen” – she is offended. The alliance between right-wing populist politics and church conservatism is strategic, not substantive.

Machiavelli's *The Prince* emerges most clearly as a pretext in the chapter *Matricidium*. Machiavelli recommended—with genuine coldness—that a prince must be prepared to act cruelly, even toward confidants and family members, when the interests of state demand it. Nerona translates this principle literally when she has her mother and sister drowned by a rigged boat—and then immediately returns to routine.

“— Faut que je retourne à ma réunion, le Conseil m'attend.”

This sentence is the most cynical in the novel. It surpasses Machiavelli: Machiavelli had described the emotionlessness of power; Frappat shows that this emotionlessness is no longer even perceived as such. It has become routine—the most banal form of evil.

Populist rhetoric: a discourse analysis

One of the most remarkable features of NER is the linguistic precision with which Frappat reconstructs the idiom of right-wing populism. Nerona's rhetoric follows recognizable patterns that are well described in political science research – and Frappat employs them with almost pedagogical meticulousness.

The folk myth of origin. Nerona begins her self-portrait with her own biography as a child from a lower class who, despite adverse circumstances—an absent father, house fires, poverty-driven migration—rose to prominence. This narrative strategy is fundamental to populist legitimation: the leader doesn't have to speak for the people, he has to come from the people. The grandmother with her pimento-flavored coffee, the mother who refuses an abortion and goes to a café instead of the hospital—these are founding myths that are deliberately autobiographical and unverifiable, yet simultaneously archetypal. Frappat allows the inconsistencies to show through: an advisor remarks that he doesn't understand the connection between the pimento coffee and abortion, which exposes the constructed nature of the narrative.

“Sérieux, c'est quoi le rapport entre les plats de la grand-mère et l'avortement ?”

This meta-level of consultant critique is crucial to the dramaturgy: we not only witness Nerona telling her story, but also the conditions under which that story was produced. NER is also a novel about spin doctors, about the backstage world of populist performance.

The semantics of deviation. Nerona systematizes deviant behavior under the concept of "déviances"—a word that can encompass everything from eating disorders and homosexuality to political opposition. The principle is one of discursive homogenization: all opponents—judges, journalists, NGOs, even one's own mother—are lumped together under the term "ennemis de l'intérieur" (inner enemy). This strategy finds its theoretical basis in Laclau and Mouffe: populism constitutes a people through the construction of an outside, an enemy. Frappat makes this mechanism transparent by taking it to its absurd conclusion: in the end, Nerona issues a decree against volcanic eruptions because they, too, fall under the category of "ennemis de l'intérieur."

Scolie. Dans son program de protection et de modernization du territoire national, le Prince interdit les incendies et les éruptions volcaniques, deux ennemis de l'intérieur, signe d'un archaïsme dépassé.

The joke here is that of a reductio ad absurdum: once populist discourse absolutizes the logic of enmity, it knows no natural limits. Nature, climate, volcanoes – everything can become an internal enemy. This is not merely satire; it is political epistemology.

Affect management. Nerona cries frequently—in speeches, in interviews, in conversations. Frappat demonstrates with great precision how the populist body uses emotions as a political instrument. The tears are never unobserved; they always fall before an audience or a microphone. At the same time, Nerona is unaffected in private—the murder of her mother and sister leaves no emotional trace as long as no one is watching. This duality of public emotion and private cynicism is one of the book's clearest diagnoses: populist affect is a performance, not a condition.

Example: Retention center

The retention center on Confin Island fulfills several overlapping functions in the novel, which together form one of the book's sharpest political diagnoses.

On a narrative level, it is Nerona's central prestige project: the "Protocole du Confin" – Externalisation, Rétention, Sécurisation, Réhabilitation – is the political measure with which she most strongly consolidates her rule and with which she boasts to Europe. The bridge connecting the mainland to the island is simultaneously an infrastructure project, a triumphal arch, and a tomb – literally, since her mother and sister were drowned in the waters below. The center is thus the place where personal guilt, state violence, and national pride converge into a single symbol.

On a discourse-analytical level, Frappat demonstrates how the retention center is constantly redefined linguistically. In Nerona's Christmas speech to the staff, it becomes a humanitarian rescue station—the migrants are "rescued" from exploitation by smugglers, from crime, from themselves. The reversal of perpetrator and victim, violence and care, is complete: the camp is not a camp, but a rehabilitation center; those being guarded are not prisoners, but rescued. Sibylle, however, calls the island by its name: "Sur l'île sans sépultures / Tu marches sur les cadavres"—a place without graves, without names, without memory. The center is thus also a political issue of memory: it produces namelessness as a system.

On a satirical level, the camp is perverted into a job placement agency: the survivors of the gladiatorial games are marketed to the population as "livrors"—delivery drivers in the gig economy—and in the end, Nerona sends the inmates to the Mégafeux as firefighters because the regular fire chief has failed. The detention center thus perfectly illustrates a political logic that treats people as a commodified resource and simultaneously sells this process as humanity.

The Prince's Gender: Feminism as Subversive Undermining

NER is also a feminist novel—albeit a complex one, since its protagonist is a woman who wields power in a profoundly antifeminist way. Frappat is interested in the paradox of the authoritarian woman at the top of a patriarchal system. Nerona herself articulates this paradox with remarkable candor:

"Je suis convaincue qu'il existe des femmes absolutely adaptées à ce rôle. Simplement il va falloir, disons, briser un tabou."

The “taboo” that Nerona breaks is not the patriarchy – it is women’s reluctance to assume absolute power. The title principle – “le Prince” instead of “la Présidente” – is ambiguous: On the one hand, it is a rejection of the grammatically feminine, a self-masculinization of power; on the other hand, it is a direct appropriation of Machiavelli’s legacy.

Sibyl, the sister with prophetic gifts, functions as the repressed feminine that the protagonist has banished from the political sphere. Sibyl is conscience, the mournful memory, the Cassandra figure. Her name directly references the ancient Sibyls, the oracular voices that should not be ignored and yet were. The prophetic verses that Sibyl speaks take the form of ancient laments.

“Les morts n'ont pas de nom sur leur tombe / Attention! / Sur l'île sans sépultures / Tu marches sur les cadavres / Tu piétines les âmes errantes”

These verses refer directly to migration: to the nameless dead of the migration routes who have no graves on the island of the Confin camp. Sibylle is not only the voice of conscience in relation to Nerona personally—she is the literary embodiment of that ethical memory which populism systematically destroys.

Nero, Neronism and the historical dimension

The proper name "Nerona" is semantically saturated. It refers to the Roman emperor Nero (37–68 AD), known for his matricide, his narcissism, his arson (whether historical or mythical), and his downfall. Frappat thus inscribes an explicit continuity into history: the populism she represents is not new. It has precedents; it has a repeating pattern.

The parallels to the historical Nero are precise: the Matricidium as a political act, the palace of gold (Nero's "Palais Doré" in Neronapolis), the burning of the city (the Mégafeux), the self-deification (the "Train of Remembrance" with its souvenir shops). Frappat takes the allegorical intensification so far that the novel's ending seems like a literal transposition of Nero's ending: the emperor loses power, his sight, his people—and dies alone.

At the same time, Frappat introduces the term "neronisme": in the novel, an official designation for Nerona's political legacy; in the intertextual context, a generic term for a political pathology. In the novel, "neronism" is already institutionalized, museum-worthy, before it ends—which contains a bitter diagnosis: Fascist and populist movements leave their memory as kitsch, as souvenirs, as Taurinus figurines in museum shops.

When everything ends in fire

The novel opens with a gesture of intimacy and self-empowerment: Nerona addresses the reader directly – “My name is Nerona. I am going to tell you my story” – and immediately situates herself within the bosom of her family, at her grandmother’s kitchen table, with a game of tarot. The opening scene is warm, nostalgic, almost fairytale-like: a woman from the common people, who has remained true to her roots, who has internalized her grandmother’s instinctual principle – “Don’t reflect, Nerona, draw a card!” – and draws her political energy from it. The first-person narration suggests familiarity, transparency, and authenticity: here is someone who has nothing to hide, who shares her story because she believes in the power of truth. Rhetorically speaking, the beginning is the consummate populist opening – the people, the family, instinct, the continuity from grandmother to granddaughter to nation.

The end is the complete destruction of precisely this order. Nerona sits alone in her limousine on the bridge she herself built, surrounded by fire, without a chauffeur, without a safety net, without eyes—her eyes literally fall from her head, rolling across the ground. She calls for Sibylle, for her mother, for the people, for the driver—no one answers. The first-person narrative, which at the beginning was sovereign and inviting, collapses into a delirium of soliloquy, hallucinations, and cries for help. What remains is the grandmother's song: "Si tout finit dans le feu, brûlons ensemble!"—the same song that at the beginning stood as a symbol of familial warmth returns at the end as an apocalyptic fulfillment. Frappat thus closes a circle that contains no salvation: The resources from which Nerona drew her power—family, fire, instinct, voice—are the very ones that destroy her. Populism consumes itself with its own founding myth.

Parallels and differences to Giorgia Meloni

The references to Giorgia Meloni in the novel are so frequent that one must speak of a key figure – although Frappat remains discreet and does not directly mention any country or name. Nerona is not a caricature of Meloni; it is a literary condensation that synthesizes features of European right-wing populism. Nevertheless, the similarities are substantial and the differences revealing.

Both Meloni and Nerona construct their political legitimacy through a biography of origin: daughter of a single mother, growing up in an urban working-class environment (in Meloni's case, the Garbatella in Rome), and early political socialization in their youth. These "woman of the people" narratives are structurally identical. Both pursue a politics of "God, Fatherland, Family" that instrumentalizes religious rhetoric without being theologically grounded. The stance on GPA (Gestation pour autrui, or surrogacy), which is extensively discussed in the novel, directly corresponds to Meloni's real-world policy: the Italian government has declared surrogacy a "universal crime"—a formulation that Frappat adopts verbatim. The novel character's migration protocol—externalization, detention on an island, forced labor—reflects Italy's real-world agreement with Albania, which relocates migrants to Albanian camps.

The media strategy is also parallel: Meloni, like Nerona, uses social media and television appearances for direct communication with the people, bypassing institutional intermediaries and establishing a parasocial relationship in which the leader speaks and the people listen. The sentences that Nerona produces in her speeches in the novel—her style of rhetorically staged emotion, the appeal to national pride and the victim myth—are a precise literary paraphrase of Meloni's speaking style.

The crucial difference between Nerona and Meloni lies in the radical nature of their fictional constructions. Meloni governs within a democratic system that she has deformed through her policies, but not formally destroyed. Nerona rules by decree, has effectively abolished press freedom, controls the judiciary, and even has her own mother murdered—a level of escalation that stems from the historical Nero, not from current Italian politics. Frappat projects a possible future: What would remain if the institutional brakes were removed? The answer is a dystopian extrapolation, not a description of reality.

Another difference lies in the international network. The character of "Egon Must"—a hyper-rich tech magnate who enters into a discreetly amorous business alliance with Nerona in Las Vegas and is appointed head of a "Commission de Contrôle"—points to a type that has no structural equivalent in Meloni's work. The character seems more like a condensation of Elon Musk's recent European political activities (which were already massive in Frappat's publication year of 2025), perhaps combined with the Berlusconi model of media power: the entrepreneur who is not elected but nevertheless governs. In this constellation, NER reveals a political logic that goes beyond Meloni and analyzes the relationship between democratically elected leadership and private super-wealth on a global scale.

Finally: Meloni was married and has a daughter; Nerona is divorced and also has a daughter named Victoire. Little Victoire is one of the most endearing characters in the novel—intelligent, headstrong, and empathetic. She criticizes her mother with childlike directness. Frappat introduces a glimmer of hope here: the child sees what the mother can no longer see. Whether this applies to Meloni, the novel leaves open.

Literary form and political epistemology

Finally, we must ask about the cognitive function of the form. Why is NER a novel – and not a political essay, a satire, or a journalistic report? What does literature achieve here that other forms could not?

The answer lies in Frappat's choice of polyphony and montage. An essay would have provided arguments; a satirical magazine would have constructed individual scenes. Frappat, however, demonstrates simultaneity: while Nerona speaks of soldierly love in the migrant detention center, the director India Shiva rehearses the Pietà scene with the survivors; while Nerona's gladiator games are underway, an advisor silently notes that the joke about the libror was invented by them and is now official decree. The world of populism and the world of victims exist simultaneously, and the book denies us any escape from this simultaneity.

The quote by Anne Carson that concludes the book must be read in this light: “Parfois je pense que le langage devrait se couvrir les yeux quand il parle.” – “Sometimes I think language should close its eyes when it speaks.” Nerona speaks incessantly, with open eyes and full awareness – and yet she is blind. Literature, on the other hand, Frappat’s novel, sees. It sees what populist discourse produces: the bodies on the bridge, the dead without gravestones on the island, the child Victoire, who asks her mother why her dog has to undergo the same tests as migrants.

NER is a book that harbors sadness beneath its laughter. The last line of the blurb reads: “Rions ensemble pendant qu'il est trop tard.” “Let’s laugh together while there’s still time.” – this implies the opposite: there might soon be no time left. The laughter isn’t carefree; it’s the kind of laughter we give when we don’t know how else to react.