Being a man

One is not born a man, one becomes one through heroic tales and taboos, role models and actions, glances and desires. In contemporary French literature, manhood is being challenged: images of masculinity are observed, deconstructed, or transgressed; homosexuality and heterosexuality are questioned; and what was once considered self-evident manhood becomes a field of literary exploration.

Max Jacob von Modigliani, circa 1916–1917.

Max Jacob between transfiguration and documentary evidence: Philippe Douroux and Olivier Rasimi

Max Jacob (1876–1944) was a poet, painter and one of the central figures of the Parisian bohemia in Montmartre, where, in existential poverty and intellectual proximity to Picasso, he revolutionized the prose poem and, with works such as Le Cornet à dés, developed a poetics of dreams, chance and mystical vision between Judaism and Catholic conversion. The review compares two books from the year 2026 that start from the same historical point of departure – the arrest and death of Max Jacob in the Drancy internment camp – but develop radically divergent modes of representation: Olivier Rasimi's "Saint Max" presents a hagiographically grounded internal perspective in an achronologically structured, consciousness-oriented narrative, interpreting Jacob's life and death as a mystically charged Stations of the Cross, while Philippe Douroux's "Max Jacob et le jeune SS" as a documentary double biography intertwines the biography of the poet with that of a later SS volunteer and formulates a historical-political indictment by means of archival research, discovered letters and administrative traces; The review systematically elaborates on this opposition and argues that both texts answer the same fundamental question – how a death can be narrated between religious meaning-making and industrial mass murder – using opposing means. Rasimi's aesthetic transfiguration tends to spiritualize violence, while Douroux's document-based reconstruction transforms experience into evidence, so that only in the contrasting juxtaposition do their respective blind spots become visible: here the danger of theologizing historical violence, there the reduction of existential dimensions to documentary factuality. The strength of the review therefore lies in the precise narratological and epistemological mediation of this difference, through which literary form itself becomes comprehensible as an epistemic instrument.

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Cosmogony and the summer solstice in the supermarket car park: Célestin de Meeûs

In Célestin de Meeûs's "Mythologie du .12" (2024), two worlds collide on a single summer solstice evening in the Belgian countryside, worlds that otherwise never meet: Théo, just turned 18 and finished with his final exams, whiles away the time with his friend Max in a shopping center parking lot, amidst beer, joints, and memories of a failed relationship, while the chief physician Rombouts returns to his villa on the edge of the forest after a long day's work, where his marriage and his role as a father have already crumbled. That evening, when Théo and Max walk into the very same recently acquired patch of woods bordering Rombouts's property, he hears voices and a glow from his terrace, mistakes them for burglars, and shoots Théo with his .12 caliber shotgun—an act of fear that the novel portrays not as a sudden outburst, but as the culmination of a long-standing imbalance of possessiveness, wounded masculinity, and the familial transmission of violence. The essay reads this narrative as an engagement with the myth announced in the title: Shortly before the shot is fired, Théo recalls the ancient succession myth of Uranus and his son Cronus, in which the son emasculates the all-powerful father to unleash a new order—but the novel reverses this pattern, for here a father figure kills a stranger, a young man, to defend his own status, so that liberating detachment becomes sterile repetition. Property, the ideal of masculinity, and the colonial legacy, as the text shows, coalesce into a self-made mythology in the sense of Roland Barthes, which makes a killing appear as self-defense, while the novel's form and syntax—the endless sentences barely interrupted by periods, the parallel presentation of the scenes, the recurring image of "nowhere"—enact this refusal of meaning on the level of language itself.

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The farmer as a seismograph of catastrophe: France profonde by Serge Joncour

"Human Nature" (2020) and "Human Hale" (2023) form a cohesive novelistic diptych, centered on farmer Alexandre Fabrier and the "Les Bertranges" farm in the Lot department. "Human Nature" unfolds in a sweeping flashback, spanning the period from the drought of summer 1976 to the hurricanes of 1999. It traces Alexandre's development from inheriting a family farm to his politicization within the anti-nuclear movement and his sabotage of a motorway project, while simultaneously exploring the decline of traditional agriculture, the dissolution of family ties, and his relationship with the German conservationist Constanze. "Human Hale" picks up twenty years later, just before the first COVID-19 lockdown, and depicts the same farm under the conditions of climate change, species extinction, and pandemic. As the family reunites, Alexandre searches for ways to reconcile agriculture, nature conservation, and family reconciliation. The interpretation argues that Serge Joncour does not conceive of either novel as an ecological thesis novel, but rather as a literary "poetics of delay and reverberation": Major historical events such as Chernobyl, globalization, storms, or pandemics are consistently interwoven with the inconspicuous changes in the landscape, wildlife, and everyday rural life, so that the global climate crisis can only be recognized in local, physically tangible signs. From this combination of family saga, historical novel, and "roman du terroir," Joncour develops a narrative style that reveals the rural landscape of "France profonde" as a sensitive seismograph of social and ecological upheavals and elevates the long, often barely perceptible transformation of nature to the actual subject of the narrative.

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The delayed crossing: Olivier Bley's

Olivier Bleys' novel "Nous, les vivants" (Albin Michel, 2018) tells the story of helicopter pilot Jonas Muñoz, who, after a blizzard, is trapped in a mountain hut in the Andes and embarks on a seemingly real journey along the Argentinian-Chilean border with the mysterious border guard Jésus. Only at the end does it become clear that Jonas died in the helicopter crash and that the entire narrative depicts his delayed transition from life to death. The interpretation argues that Bleys prepares for this transition not through a surprising ending, but through numerous subtle clues: From then on, reality slips away in inconspicuous signs: The clock runs wrong, hours pass between sentences, the alcohol in the bottle doesn't diminish, and Jésus, whose footprints in the snow are impossibly light, speaks of Jonas's whereabouts in the future tense. Time and space lose their order, the boundary becomes a metaphor for the separation of life and death, and the fading of memories and photographs symbolizes letting go of one's own existence. The interpretation cites motifs, narrative technique, character constellation, and linguistic style to support this view. It thus focuses on the allegorical interpretation of the novel. With his novel, Bleys portrays less death itself than the difficult process of saying goodbye and surrendering to oneself.

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Férocité, class, body: Female Gaze with Caroline Laurent, Benoîte Groult, Éric Holder and DH Lawrence

This article examines four love stories in which women desire men from significantly lower social classes or backgrounds, revealing a precise shift: women are looking at men. The focus is on the novels of Caroline Laurent (2026), Benoîte Groult, DH Lawrence, and Éric Holder, with a brief look at Annie Ernaux. Their desire, however, is never abstract, but always bound to the body: to arms, hands, back, to skin, work, movement. While Lawrence stylizes the gamekeeper's body as an almost mythical source of vitality and salvation, and Groult embeds it in a long, ultimately insurmountable class divide, Holder shows it in its silent materiality—as a marked, working body that has hardly any words for itself. Laurent's novel goes further: here, the male body is examined with a precision that neither glorifies nor excuses, but simultaneously desires and analyzes. This is precisely the article's argumentative point: the "female gaze" is not a simple reversal of the traditional gaze regime, but a contradictory practice in which desire, social conditioning, and self-reflection overlap. Love may cross the class boundary, but it does not abolish it; rather, it makes it visible on the body itself. Ultimately, the focus shifts once more: what matters is not the fulfillment of the relationship, but the writing about it—as an act that captures and intensifies the experience, giving the female gaze its own sovereign form.

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Where the boys go: Alix Boirot

The study by anthropologist Alix Boirot shows that summer party tourism functions as a condensed social laboratory in which masculinity is not simply lived out, but rather produced under high performance pressure: Starting from a media-influenced “tourist imaginary” that stages women as available objects of a male gaze, the young men arrive with a pre-internalized script – visible, for example, in the early evenings on the street, when they almost reflexively react to the description of a club with the question of whether “there are girls there”, or in the dormitories, where, even before the first night, it is negotiated, half in jest, half in earnest, who will vacate the room in the event of a “conquest”. In practice, however, this script proves to be contradictory: The seemingly boundless hedonism is strictly regulated ("controlled loss of control"), and the nights follow ritualized routines – from the collective pre-drinking with cheap alcohol to the dense crowds outside the clubs, culminating in the excessively choreographed ecstasy on the dance floor, the traces of which materialize in the morning in sticky floors, empty bottles, and proudly displayed gaps in memory. The actual stage is organized less heterosexually than homosocially: If a young man demonstratively exceeds his drinking limit or exaggerates a fleeting encounter, the crucial recognition is directed not at the women present, but at the glances and comments of his friends. Following concepts such as "doing gender" and "hegemonic masculinity," it becomes clear that masculinity here appears as a precarious, constantly renewed achievement, the failure of which—for example, when the expected sexual encounters fail to materialize and instead only a distanced coexistence on the dance floor ensues—can lead to self-doubt, but also to a reversal of blame, such as when a rejected conversation outside the club devolves into mocking or aggressive comments. At the same time, the study exposes the structural embedding of these performances—in economically driven experience industries where pimps artificially promise abundance and bouncers select through prices—so that the summery "lightness" reveals itself as a ritualized practice of social differentiation and power reproduction, which unfolds its true social density precisely in its seemingly casual scenes—reaching for the condom packet in a suitcase, clinking glasses with friends, the brief, inconsequential flirtation in the strobe light.

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Putin's Russia, homophobia and paper Frenchmen by Sergueï Shikalov

This essay reads Sergueï Shikalov's "Espèces dangereuses" (Seuil, 2024) as a poetologically highly reflective text about homophobia in post-Soviet Russia, in which an entire generation of gay men becomes visible between a brief historical "springtime" and a renewed authoritarian ice age. At its core is less a linear narrative than a collective form of experience articulated in the indeterminate "on": a litany-like, fragmented discourse that suspends individual biography in favor of a shared existence marked by violence, shame, and precarious desire. This very refusal of the self becomes an aesthetic strategy that both documents and counteracts disappearance by transforming anonymity into a process of witnessing. The novel addresses homophobia not only as a social reality—in the form of attacks, institutional indifference, and political repression—but also as a discursive order that classifies, devalues, and excludes bodies from the realm of expression. Crucially, the novel articulates this experience in the learned French language, which, as a medium of exile, opens up a paradoxical space: distance and the possibility of articulation coincide, making the unspeakable speakable in the first place. Against this backdrop, the question of French citizenship also takes shape: while it marks a legal and existential break, it remains—as Shikalov's essay "Français de papier" (2025) demonstrates—ambivalent, insofar as belonging remains conditional and the logics of exclusion continue to perpetuate themselves in new forms.

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Two perspectives on David Hockney: Catherine Cusset and Fabrice Gaignault

Both books revolve around David Hockney, yet approach him from opposite angles: Catherine Cusset's "Vie de David Hockney" (Gallimard, 2018), a biographical novel, tells the painter's life from within—from his Bradford childhood, where rusty metal turns a brilliant red under his father's brush and "the world changes color," to his late mastery—carried by free indirect discourse that allows the narrator to disappear behind the character and makes Hockney's desires, defiance, and joie de vivre the true substance; Fabrice Gaignault's "Patrick Procktor, le secret de David Hockney" (Séguier, 2022), on the other hand, approaches him from the periphery, as an essayistic investigation into the forgotten friend, rival, and "twin" Patrick Procktor, who was once ahead and ultimately died penniless and forgotten, while Hockney rose to become the world's most expensive living painter. This interpretation contrasts the two books – through narrative perspective, character construction, the relationship between success and failure, the portrayal of creation and homosexuality, ekphrasis, and ultimately the fact that both discuss the same key works, "A Bigger Splash" and "Portrait of an Artist." These identical images reveal how two irreconcilable truths emerge: that of life, experienced from within, and that of posthumous fame, measured from without. The scope of this comparison is outlined by the question of why, of two closely related talents, one ascends to the heights of auction success while the other sinks into anonymity – and what it reveals about writing itself when an apology for joy and an elegy for forgetting both contemplate the same painter.

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The intimate as a political technique: Theses on Édouard Louis

This article reads Édouard Louis's work as a self-contained poetics project and explores how his texts transcend the boundaries between autobiographical narrative, sociological analysis, and political intervention. Starting with the concepts of "confrontational literature" and "intimism," which Louis develops in his recent collection of conversations, "Que faire de la littérature?" (2025), ten interpretive approaches are presented that illuminate the formal procedures, thematic constants, and strategic shifts in his writing. At its core is the question of whether, over the course of his work, one can observe a maturation of the author or rather a refinement of his literary means—and how Louis, through his texts, aims not only to narrate but also to compel his readers to see what they all too easily repress.

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Reactionary masculinity as empty provocation: Côme Martin-Karl

Côme Martin-Karl's novel "La réaction" (2019) leads its readers into the bizarre world of French reactionaries, online trolls, Catholic integralists, and monarchist splinter groups, whose political radicalism increasingly veers into the comical. At its center is Matthieu Richard, a young man adrift, who is drawn into this milieu less out of conviction than out of a lust for provocation and being an outsider. This essay demonstrates how the novel, with satirical sharpness, exposes the rituals, linguistic forms, and self-images of a scene that constantly speaks of greatness, tradition, and decline, yet is characterized by internal contradictions and political emptiness. The central argument is that Martin-Karl is not primarily caricaturing right-wing ideologies, but rather a form of male self-presentation in which political positions become mere props for a pose. Based on the narrative style, the relationships between the characters, and the tense interplay between political radicalism and homosexual desire, the interpretation reveals how the novel exposes the supposed harshness of its protagonists as an expression of a deep need for recognition and distinctiveness. Thus, "La réaction" ultimately appears less as a political novel than as a brilliant satire on masculinity, the lust for distinction, and the transformation of politics into a game of self-presentation.

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Trilogy of Masculinity: Franck Mignot

This essay reads Franck Mignot's three novels, "Mollesse" (2023), "Les Viandards" (2025), and "Faire avec" (2026), as a cohesive narrative project that traces a genealogy of exhausted masculinity. Starting with the programmatic titles, which signify lethargy, predatory behavior, and resigned accommodation, the analysis reveals how Mignot portrays the crisis of male role models not as a spectacular collapse, but as a slow process of enervation. The central thesis is that the three novels trace a movement from an eruptive act of violence to an exhausted, sustained existence: from the murderous Samuel in "Mollesse" to the childlike observer in "Les Viandards" to the weary, lingering Bertrand in "Faire avec." This essay does not trace this development chronologically, but rather along recurring structural themes—speechlessness, desire, fatherhood, gender asymmetry, spatial poetics, and writing practice—and demonstrates how the books mutually comment on and illuminate one another, ultimately leading to a narrative study of manhood. Particular emphasis is placed on the analysis of Mignot's laconic style: the sober, paratactic prose appears not merely as a stylistic device, but as the ethical stance of a world in which the characters have lost any stable value system. The essay argues that Mignot's novels systematically reject the classical Bildungsroman and instead create a "chronicle of the unchanging," in which development is replaced by repetition. This is precisely where the trilogy's radicalism lies: not catharsis or healing, but the exhausted "continuation of life with what remains" forms the horizon of these texts. By reading Mignot's work simultaneously as a chronicle of milieu, a poetics of silence, and a reflection on modern masculinity, the study reveals how closely form, language, and theme are intertwined in this trilogy.

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The defeat of the winners: Laurent Gaudé

Laurent Gaudé's hitherto untranslated novel "Écoutez nos défaites" (2016) is a polyphonically composed text that weaves five narrative threads—from the contemporary world of intelligence services to historical battlefields (including Hannibal, Grant, and Hailé Sélassié)—into a dense tapestry of existential experiences. At its core lies not victory, but defeat as a universal category: military, moral, and psychological. Vivid, powerful scenes—such as Grant's calculating coldness after the massacre, Hannibal's confrontation with his brother's death, or the traumatic perceptions of the soldier Sicoh—illustrate a poetics of silence at the heart of violence, in which characters do not act to overcome, but are besieged by their experiences. This review reads the novel as a radical rejection of the idea of ​​a "clean victory" and as a critique of contemporary remilitarization, systematically intertwining historical and contemporary levels. Methodologically, she works with paradigmatic scenes that exemplify an ethics of defeat, elevating this to a normative thesis: dignity arises not from triumph, but from dealing with loss. The montage of times and perspectives does not create a linear development, but rather a movement of continuous transition, in which inner and outer worlds are inextricably intertwined. The modern characters function as existential sounding boards for the historical warrior figures: Assem and Sullivan embody the "wavering" of modern agents of violence, whose actions, in retrospect, prove meaningless and who are shattered by the question of the purpose of their missions. Mariam, on the other hand, forms the crucial counterweight, embodying, as an archaeologist and guardian of cultural memory, a practice of preservation and transmission that defies the logic of destruction and defeat. While the agents are in the process of disappearing, Mariam insists on the possibility of continuity—not through victory, but through remembrance. The novel refuses a definitive meaning – there is neither cathartic resolution nor heroic exaggeration – and achieves a rare combination of narrative intensity and ethical-political reflection.

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Concealing and revealing: the violence of art in the work of Benjamin de Laforcade

Benjamin de Laforcade's novel "Rouge nu" (Gallimard, 2022) centers on a paradoxical premise: a famous painting whose very invisibility lends it power, as it—hidden in an architecturally staged sanctuary—simultaneously enhances myth and market value while concealing a violent history. The novel focuses on the painter Andreas Mauser and the model Izabela, whose body, in the act of artistic production, becomes the scene of violence systematically concealed within the discourse of the cult of genius. This review explores this connection as a dialectical relationship between showing and concealing, interpreting the aesthetic technique of overpainting and uncovering as a metaphor for the cultural logic of the art world: visibility is selectively produced, invisibility not merely absence, but active repression. Nadeije Laneyrie-Dagen's art historical study, "Cacher/montrer: une histoire des œuvres invisibles en Occident" (Gallimard, 2024), traces from prehistory to the present day how artworks in the West were not designed for permanent visibility, but rather derived their impact precisely from ritualized practices of concealment and selective display, thus revealing visibility as a historically regulated form of power, desire, and social control. The essay intertwines the narrative structure of the novel with such considerations, demonstrating that the "invisible" artwork is less an object than a dispositif that stabilizes power relations.

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The Body as a Battlefield: Boris Bergmann

Boris Bergmann's "Les Corps insurgés" (2020), in an intricately interwoven triptych structure, traces the life paths of three figures—the Renaissance artist Lorenzo, the Parisian '68er Baptiste, and the contemporary migrant Tahar—whose experiences are organized along the lines of individual body parts, thus unfolding a poetics of the body as a historical repository and political arena: cheeks, esophagus, liver, or heart function not only as anatomical markers but also as semantic condensations of shame, desire, violence, and resistance, thereby embedding individual biographies within broader contexts of power and discourse. The formal structure clearly draws on the tradition of "blasons," the early modern genre that rhetorically isolates and poetically elevates individual body parts, transforming it into a modern, fractured aesthetic in which fragmentation no longer serves to celebrate but to problematize the body. The novel's argument—and this is also its aesthetic point—unfolds less discursively than structurally, through the parallel editing of the three time periods, which generates analogies and contrasts: While Lorenzo explores the body as a site of artistic transgression against ecclesiastical authority, Baptiste's story reveals the creeping ossification of a once politicized body, and Tahar's story radicalizes this line to an existential climax marked by migration, precarity, and potential self-destruction. The text's argumentative sharpness lies precisely in its consistent connection of social and ideological processes to bodily experience. It does not treat violence abstractly, but rather understands it as inscription on the body, and in the final twist—Tahar's decision for life at the moment of potential detonation—it creates a fragile yet insistent counter-figure to the logic of destruction.

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Song in Chaos: Apocalypse, Nomadism and Resistance in the work of Mathieu Belezi

Mathieu Belezi's "Cantique du chaos" depicts a post-apocalyptic world that has emerged from a biblically exaggerated flood event, and whose political and existential order is characterized by violence, emptiness, and uprooting: At its center is the aging desperado Théo Gracques, who, after a failed attempt to retreat as a hermit, flees with Chloé and her children across devastated Europe and America, while his present is incessantly intertwined with the lyrically condensed memories of his lost love Léonore and the death of their child; after further losses and increasing physical decline, his journey ends in a standstill at the Orinoco, where he dies and leaves his last poem to a young woman who keeps it in remembrance. The essay interprets this narrative arc as a triply structured poetics—between road novel, epic, and lyric cycle—in which being on the move is simultaneously spatial movement, the work of remembering, and the dying process. It precisely elucidates how Belezi, through the interweaving of a mythical opening hymn, prosaic chapters of escape, and poetic diary entries, establishes a "poetics of the end": writing here appears not as a representation of the world, but as the final autonomous act in a world without alternatives. The hybrid form is interpreted as a response to the depicted catastrophe—the baroque abundance of language against the emptiness of the devastated world, the lyrical transcendence of time against the linearity of decay, the female characters as bearers of action and tradition against the exhausted male narrator. By closely linking these formal and thematic lines, the review shows the novel not only as a dystopian narrative, but as a reflection on the conditions of literature itself: The “cantique” becomes the last, precariously continuing form of meaning-making in the face of total disintegration.

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All the Guilty: The Pelicot Trial as Documentary Theatre by Milo Rau and Servane Dècle

Milo Rau and Servane Dècle have created an oratorio in 40 fragments from the trial material of the Mazan rapes, “Le Procès Pelicot”, which transforms the historical criminal trial against Dominique Pelicot and his 50 co-defendants into a polyphonic theatrical document: indictments, witness statements, street interviews, psychiatric reports, feminist manifestos, perpetrator biographies and SMS dialogues are assembled into a panorama that aims to reveal not the legal truth, but the deep social structure of violence. This interpretation traces how Rau operates on several levels simultaneously: poetically, through the choice of the oratorio as a form of meditative contemplation without scenic action; intertextually, through the framing with Petrarch's "Ascension du Mont Ventoux" as a critique of the male gaze; and dramaturgically, through the arrangement of the 40 fragments, which ranges from the external legal framework through perpetrator biographies and sociological analysis to feminist counter-arguments. The interpretation reveals that Rau's most powerful decisions are often decisions of omission: no pathos, no political class, no synthesis of open questions of justice. At the center is Gisèle Pelicot herself—not as a saint or icon, but as a political actor whose refusal to accept the hus-clos becomes the fundamental gesture of the entire piece and who, in the epilogue, beyond the 40 numbered fragments, has the last word.

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Belonging as exclusion: the foreign language and the father as Yekkes at Dory Manor

The novel reveals how Jewish identity functions simultaneously as a historical protection and as a normative inscription on the body, placing the individual in an irresolvable tension between diaspora and Israeli belonging. A son writes to his dead father in a foreign language, demonstrating how history, origin, and power are indelibly inscribed on bodies, names, and desires—and how one can only escape them by retelling them. Manor Dory's "Le Gorille" (Grasset, 2026) explores how identity is produced through historical, bodily, and linguistic inscriptions—and how these inscriptions cannot be overcome, but only transformed. The starting point is the constellation of an autobiographically grounded epistolary novel in which a son writes to his dead father in order to escape his grasp and simultaneously recreate him in literary form. From this starting point, the essay reconstructs the central lines of movement in the text: the childhood experience of a physically and symbolically different father (non-circumcision, name change from Reinhard to Ezer), the author's own adolescence as a phase of violent approach to this very body and simultaneous resistance (culminating in a psychiatric episode and homoerotic impulses), and adult life, in which genealogical, political, and erotic conflicts converge in a transnational existence between Tel Aviv, Berlin, and Paris. The interpretation reads the novel along the lines of the thesis that different power structures—family, religion, state, masculinity—function homologously insofar as they mark, discipline, and make legible the body; circumcision acts as a paradigmatic figure, but is expanded through names, languages, and institutional practices. Particular attention is paid to the poetics employed: the choice of French as the “private” language of writing, the mosaic structure as a reflection of a non-linear memory, and the figure of deadnaming as an intersection of Zionist naming politics and queer-theoretical thought. At the same time, the review highlights the central paradox of Jewish existence, which the novel encapsulates in a concise image: what ensured survival in Europe (the uncircumcised body) signifies exclusion in Israel—a historical reversal realized in the father's body and made explicit in the son's writing. From this perspective, writing itself appears as an ambivalent practice: not as liberation from violence, but as its displacement into a self-determined form, as a “translation” that makes loyalty possible only through betrayal. The ending—the announcement of an uncircumcised, multilingual child—is interpreted as a deliberate interruption of a context of inscription, the continued influence of which the novel simultaneously reflects upon and does not negate.

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Francia as a new Marianne: Allegory of a kaleidoscopic France in Nancy Huston's work

Nancy Huston's "Francia" (Actes Sud, 2024) is a novel that is both narratively focused and thematically expansive. At its heart is the transgender protagonist Francia, originally from Colombia, whom the novel follows as a sex worker in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris on a May day. This strictly defined timeframe forms the stage for a multifaceted panorama in which seventeen male clients—from diverse social, cultural, and biographical backgrounds—appear one after another, revealing their hidden needs, traumas, and self-deceptions. Through flashbacks, Francia's own story unfolds, from her birth as Rubén, through her transition, to her self-chosen identity, which, in the name "Francia," is programmatically intertwined with the country of France. The novel thus constructs a kaleidoscopic portrait of contemporary French society, in which issues of migration, gender, masculinity, and social inequality intertwine. The interpretation suggests that Francia can be read as a "new Marianne," a modern allegory of the French Republic itself: her body, her hybrid identity, and her social position encapsulate the contradictions of a country marked by postcolonial diversity, social tensions, and collective trauma. Accordingly, the essay argues that Francia is not merely an individual figure, but a symbolic projection screen for national self-understanding. It particularly highlights the dual perspective structure—the expansive inner view of the men versus Francia's sober, professional external perception—from which an implicit critique of male self-interpretation emerges: the men appear less as autonomous subjects than as driven by desire, fear, and societal expectations. Central to the analysis is the thesis of the universalization of "prostitution" as a social principle ("tout le monde est pute"), which negates the moral distinction of sex work and instead interprets exchange, need, and performance as universal human practices. This interpretation reads Huston's methods of multiperspectivism, polyphony, and metafictional self-reflection (the character of "Griffonne") as a poetics program: literature itself appears as an act of empathy and appropriation, ethically risky but epistemologically productive. Overall, it portrays the novel as a text that is both political and profoundly empathetic, one that does not doactically resolve societal conflicts but rather condenses and makes them visible in the figure of Francia—as a "new Marianne."

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Genealogy of Hate: Autobiography, Antisemitism and the Poetics of History in Édouard Drumont and Christophe Donner

As this essay demonstrates, Christophe Donner's novel "La France goy" unfolds a genealogical narrative project in which individual family history and collective ideological history intertwine: The starting point is the first-person narrator's archival search for his great-grandfather Henri Gosset, which quickly expands into a far-reaching reconstruction of French antisemitism since the late 19th century. Through Gosset's social mobility and his entanglement in the circles of Léon Daudet and Edgar Bérillon, the family is directly integrated into the ideological network of the time, while in parallel, Édouard Drumont's biography unfolds as an "anatomy of hatred," revealing how personal failure, social humiliation, and media strategies condense into a powerful antisemitic narrative. This network is complemented by counter-figures such as the anarchist Marcelle Bernard, as well as by the genealogical perspective on the grandfather Jean Gosset, whose death in a concentration camp brings the historical threads to a brutal culmination. The interpretation argues that Donner's method is neither purely autobiographical nor classically historical, but rather, as a kind of "genealogical archaeology," develops a reflexive poetics of the archive in which documents, fiction, and self-observation intertwine, systematically subverting the boundaries between self-biography and biography. Central to this is the thesis of a structural continuity of antisemitism, which is not asserted discursively but demonstrated narratively by making visible ideological, linguistic, and affective sediments across generations. Donner's literary achievement is seen in not only morally condemning antisemitism, but also revealing its aesthetic and narrative appeal: Drumont's success is understood as the result of a narrative logic that transforms diffuse resentments into a coherent story. This leads to a sophisticated critical approach that understands writing itself as an ambivalent power—as a medium of both ideological seduction and enlightened counter-work—and reads the novel as a whole as an attempt to gain a form of historical knowledge that transcends mere factuality through the literary exploration of genealogical entanglements.

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The Monster and its Double: Pierre Rivière in Michel Foucault and Ismaël Jude

The review focuses on two radically different but inextricably intertwined books: the documentary volume “Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère”, edited by Michel Foucault, which makes the historical triple murderer Pierre Rivière visible as a focal point of competing discourses, and Ismaël Jude’s “grief” (éditions verticales, 2022), which performatively attacks precisely this discursive containment. While Foucault's book embeds Rivière's prison-written memoir within a polyphonic archive—legal files, medical reports, historical commentaries—thus demonstrating how a life becomes a "case" through institutional language, Jude propels this constellation into the present and dismantles it from within: His narrator reads Foucault, rewrites his terms (parricide becomes matricide, sororicide, fratricide), and transforms herself into the repressed female doppelgänger of the murderer. The review does not merely highlight this contrast as a difference between two methods—here the analytical distance of genealogy, there the furious, corporeal, language-destroying counter-speech—but as a kind of dialectical movement: Foucault shows how discourses appropriate a text; Jude shows that this critique itself remains a form of appropriation. The focus shifts decisively: Where Foucault reads the text as a battleground between justice and psychiatry and emphasizes its “strange beauty,” Jude insists on what disappears in the process—gender-specific violence, the bodies of the victims, the possibility of another, non-male voice. The review's argument derives its strength precisely from the fact that it does not pit these two perspectives against each other, but rather understands them as a necessary tension: It shows how Foucault's project creates the conditions under which Jude can write at all, and simultaneously how Jude shatters these conditions by radicalizing writing itself into an act. This creates a picture of a literary-theoretical constellation in which a central question becomes increasingly acute: If—as with Rivière—text and action merge, who then controls their meaning? And who is heard—or silenced?

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