Pierre Lemaitre

The four-volume saga "Les Années glorieuses" (The Glorious Years) traces France's post-war rise from 1948 to the cusp of 1968 through the lens of the Pelletier family. Beginning in colonial Saigon ("Le Grand Monde"), where the Piaster scandal exposes the moral bankruptcy of the empire, the narrative shifts through the reconstruction and technocratic modernity of the early 1950s ("Le Silence et la Colère") to the atomic age and the Cold War ("Un avenir radieux"). Infrastructure projects, consumer society, media spectacle, and political myths are consistently presented in two dimensions: as promises of progress and as mechanisms for suppressing social violence. The concluding volume ("Les belles promesses") brings these threads together in early 1960s Paris, where the construction of the Boulevard Périphérique becomes a stark symbol of a modernity built on dispossession, corruption, and silence. With the deaths of key characters and the dissolution of familial power structures, the prosperity of the "glorious years" is revealed as a product of accumulated guilt. – This essay consistently reads this tetralogy as a retrospective autopsy of an era. The central argument is that the Années glorieuses do not mark the beginning of modernity, but rather its belated echo – the "last page of the 19th century." Crucially, the ending date is decisive: the novel concludes on March 21, 1968, one day before the outbreak of the unrest, in a moment of not-yet. Lemaitre does not explain the upheaval of 1968, but rather its necessity. Simultaneously, a poetics shift occurs: with the revelation of François Pelletier as the fictional author of the saga, the work abandons its journalistic claim to truth and asserts the novel as the only appropriate form for understanding this era. Narration becomes analysis, fiction becomes historical insight. The tetralogy therefore does not end with hope, but with clarity: it shows why the old was exhausted – and why the new had to come.