Returning to Reims

by Didier Eribon

  I always held it against my father that he was the man he was, the incarnation of a certain kind of working class world that, unless you had belonged to it and lived in it at some point, you could only ever encounter in books or at the movies: “It was like something straight out of a Zola novel,” my mother once said to me, without ever having read a page of Zola. Even if you have belonged to that world or known that past, it can be difficult to accept them and take them on as your own. I’m painfully aware that the way I have arranged the writing of this book assumes—both about me and about my readers—that we are socially distant from the circumstances and from the people who still live the kinds of lives I am attempting to describe and to reconstruct. I am equally aware how improbable it is that any of those people could end up reading these pages. When people write about the working class world, which they rarely do, it is most often because they have left it behind. They thereby contribute to perpetuating the social illegitimacy of the people they are speaking of in the very moment of speaking about them. This happens even if they write with the goal of exposing and critiquing the very status of social illegitimacy to which these people are relegated over and over again, because in writing they take a necessary critical distance, and with it comes the position of a judge or an evaluator.

  When you get right down to it, it wasn’t so much the person who had committed these acts who horrified me, it was more the social scene in which such acts were possible. The breaking of the bottles couldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes, and yet I believe that it established in me a disgust at this impoverishment, a refusal to accept the fate that had been meted out to me, and a secret feeling of woundedness, a wound that is still painful, related to having always to bear the burden of this memory. And in fact, such episodes were hardly rare. I must have been 4 or 5, and my father 27 or 28. He was having difficulty giving up a certain kind of (mostly male) working class sociability, one he had only discovered upon becoming an adult: nights spent drinking with your buddies, time spent in bars after work. And since it sometimes happened that he wouldn’t come home for several days, it seems likely he must have spent some of these nights with other women. He had married at the age of 21, and three years later he already had two children. He must have been eager for an occasional break from the obligations of married life and of parenthood, for a chance to experience the distractions of youthful freedom. I imagine he must have wanted to enjoy all those things that had been denied him by his family situation and by all the responsibilities associated with it that were weighing him down. He had moved directly from being an oldest son with serious family obligations to being a husband and father with serious family obligations. It must have been hard to bear, just as it must have been difficult to face up to the fact that all the rest of his life was going to be similarly constrained by familial duties. His disorderly conduct (a phrase whose negative connotations hardly do justice to the complexity of the whole situation it designates) also needs to be understood as a way of giving himself a little breathing space—and a little pleasure. Obviously, no similar behavior was possible—it would have been unthinkable—for my mother, who was obliged to take care of the children on her own. And in any case, my father would never have permitted her to spend her time in cafés, not to mention not coming home at night. (For that he would have killed her, after having broken everything in the house!)

  So as the child of a worker you experience in your very flesh the sense of belonging to the working class. When I was writing my book about the conservative revolution in France, I checked several books by Raymond Aron out of the library. The ideologues who, during the 1980s and 1990s, had it in mind to impose the hegemony of right wing forms of thought on French intellectual life at that time quite reasonably claimed to be his followers. As I skimmed over a few samples of the shallow, lifeless prose of this pompous and tedious professor, I came across the following sentence: “If I make an effort to remember my ‘class consciousness’ from before I began studying sociology, it is barely possible for me to do so without the gap of the intervening years seeming to me to render the object indistinct; to put this another way, it does not seem to me to have been established that every member of a modern society has the sense of belonging to a clearly defined group, one called a class, that exists within the larger social whole. The objective reality of society’s stratification into groups is undeniable, but that of classes conscious of themselves is not.”9

  What strikes me as particularly undeniable is that the absence of the feeling of belonging to a class is characteristic of children of the bourgeoisie. People in a dominant class position do not notice that they are positioned, situated, within a specific world (just as someone who is white isn’t necessarily aware of being so, or someone heterosexual). Read in this light, Aron’s remark can be seen for what it is, the naive confession offered by a person of privilege who imagines he is writing sociology when all he is doing is describing his own social status. I only met him once in my life, and immediately felt a strong aversion towards him. The very moment I set eyes on him, I loathed his ingratiating smile, his soothing voice, his way of demonstrating how reasonable and rational he was, everything about him that displayed his bourgeois ethos of decorum and propriety, of ideological moderation. (In reality, his writings are filled with a violence that those at whom it is directed would not be able to avoid feeling were they ever to come across it. It suffices to read—but there are other choices too—the pages he wrote about the working-class strikes in the 1950s. People have praised his lucidity because he was anticommunist while others still blindly supported the Soviet Union. But this is wrong! He was anticommunist because of his hatred of the working class, and he set himself up as the political and ideological defender of the bourgeois establishment, defending against anything having to do with the aspirations or the political activities of the working class. Basically, his pen was for hire: he was a soldier in the service of those in power helping them to maintain their power. Sartre was right a thousand times over to insult him in May 1968. Aron had more than earned it. Let us salute the greatness of Sartre for daring to break with the conventions of polite academic “discussion”—which always works in favor of “orthodoxy,” and its reliance on “common sense” and what seems “self-evident” in its opposition to heterodoxy and to critical thought. Sartre did this at a moment when it had become important to “insult those who are the real insulters,” to recall a helpful reminder Genet offers us, a happy turn of phrase we should always be ready to take up as our motto.)

  In my case, I can say that I have always deeply had the feeling of belonging to a class, which does not mean that the class I belonged to was conscious of itself as such. One can have the sense of belonging to a class without that class being aware of itself as such or being “a clearly defined group.” It can still be a group whose reality, whatever else may be the case, is experienced in concrete situations of daily life. An example would be when my mother would take us, my brother and myself, with her to the houses she was cleaning on the days we didn’t have school. While she worked, we would stay in the kitchen and would hear the woman employing her ask her to do this or that, or offer compliments or reproaches. (There was one day on which we heard her reproached: “I’m very disappointed; you just can’t be trusted to do it right,” and then saw her come back to the kitchen in tears. We were terrified to see her in such a state. Even today remembering that scene —and that horrible tone of voice!—what disgust I feel for a world in which insulting people comes as easily as breathing, what hatred has remained with me over the years for those kinds of power relations, those hierarchical structures!) I can’t help imagining that there was a cleaning lady in the home Raymond Aron grew up in, and that when he saw her it never occurred to him that she was “conscious of belonging to a social group” that wasn’t the one he belonged to; that he was taking tennis lessons while she ironed his shirts, washed the floor, and cleaned the bathrooms, following his mother’s orders; that as he wa
s following an educational trajectory leading to further study in prestigious places, her children, the same age as him, would soon be starting work at a factory, or had already done so. When I see photos from his childhood, with his family, what I see is the bourgeois world on display in all its self-satisfaction (a self-satisfaction of which it is surely fully conscious). And yet he is unaware of this? Even retrospectively? And can still call himself a sociologist?

  When I was a child, my parents knew a couple in which the man was a worker in the wine cellars and the woman was a caretaker at a mansion in a rich part of town, lived in by one of the big families of the Champagne industry of the region. This couple lived in a lodge near the entrance gate to the mansion. Sometimes we would go visit them for Sunday lunch and I would play with their daughter in the yard in front of the impressive building. We knew that there was another world nearby, up the set of steps that led to the terrace before the front door, one that had an elaborate window above it. Of that other world we had only rare and fleeting glimpses: a fancy car pulling up, someone dressed in a way we had never seen before … Yet we knew without even having to think about it—it was immediately apparent to us—that there was a difference between “us” and “them,” between, on the one hand, the occupants of this mansion and the friends who visited them, and, on the other, those who lived in the two or three rooms of the caretaker’s lodge and the friends they would invite over on their days off, which is to say my parents, my brother, and me. How would it have been possible for us not to be aware of the fact that social classes existed, given how great the distance was between these two universes, separated by only a few dozen yards? Aware that classes existed, and that we belonged to one of them? Richard Hoggart is right to insist on the obviousness of the circumstances in which you live for anyone who belongs to the working class.10 The difficulties of daily life recall them to you at every turn, as does the evident contrast with the living conditions of other people. How would it be possible not to know what you are, when you see how other people live and how different they are from you?

  At the beginning of the 1960s, we went to live in a newly constructed low-income housing complex, where, thanks to endless efforts on my mother’s part, we had obtained an apartment. It was, I believe, a good example of public housing that has been integrated into the surrounding urban environment, and that is located in a central part of town: three different apartment “blocks,” as they were called at the time, four stories high, and built in the middle of a neighborhood made up of individual houses. The neighborhood was located between an industrial area and the cellars of a number of the big Champagne houses (Taittinger, Mumm, Louis Roederer). The apartment had a dining room, a kitchen, and—at last!—two bedrooms, one for the parents and one for the children. Another novelty: we had a bathroom. I attended elementary school not far from there, and also went to a catechism class each Thursday at the Church of Saint Joan of Arc. Was that evidence of some strange paradoxical working class observance of religious tradition or simply a way of keeping children busy, and a form of child care, on the days when school wasn’t in session? Probably both at the same time. My parents were not religious, and were even anticlerical. My father never set foot in a church; during familial ceremonies (baptisms, weddings, funerals, and so on) he remained outdoors with the other men while the women went inside. Still, they had made a point of having us baptized, and then of enrolling us in catechism classes—during which the priest, as one would expect, sat the boys on his lap and caressed their legs. (That was his reputation in the neighborhood, and I once heard my father proclaim his disgust for priests and their habits in this way: “If I find out that he’s touched one of my kids, he won’t know what hit him.”) We continued with this religious education up until our first communion, dressed in a white alb, with an enormous wooden crucifix hanging on our chests.

  At my mother’s place, I found some ridiculous photos of me and my brother from that day, taken with aunts, uncles, and cousins in front of my paternal grandfather’s house. Everyone had gathered there after the ceremony for a festive lunch for which the religious ceremony doubtless provided an excuse or a pretext. Religious rituals, however absurd they may be, offer the occasion for gatherings that are quite pagan in nature, and that serve the function of keeping the family integrated, maintaining connections between brothers and sisters and establishing connections between their children—my cousins. These gatherings also simultaneously enable the reaffirmation of a certain social cohesion, since the cultural and professional homogeneity they evince is always total: no one has taken themselves out of the group since the previous family reunion. This must be what would later hold me back me from attending further ceremonies of this kind, notably the weddings of my two younger brothers: it was impossible for me to imagine myself once again immersed in these forms of sociability and culture, where I would now be so uncomfortable, taking part in the rituals that happen at the end of meals when everyone at the table calls out: “Simone, sing us a song!,” “René, sing us a song!,” and everyone has a song saved up that they sing on such occasions, maybe a comical one or a sentimental one. The same risqué jokes get told year after year, the same dances are danced, the same stupid comments that never seem to grow old are made, the same arguments break out as the night wears on, sometimes turning into fights as disagreements and points of discord from years gone by, often linked to suspicions of infidelity, rise once again to the surface.

  Little has changed as regards the social homogeneity of my family. When I got to know my parents’ house in Muizon, I examined the photos that were everywhere, on the walls and on top of various pieces of furniture. I would ask my mother who this or that person was. They were all part of the extended family: my brothers’ children, a cousin and her husband, and so on. Each time I would ask, “What do they do?” The answers drew a map of today’s working class: “He works in the X factory or the Y factory.” “He works in the champagne cellars.” “He’s a builder.” “He’s in the National Guard.” “He’s out of work.” The examples of social mobility occurred in the case of a female cousin who worked for the Internal Revenue Service or a sister-in-law who was a secretary somewhere. The intense poverty I knew in my childhood is no longer present: “They’re not bad off,” or “She earns a good salary,” my mother would add after having told me the profession of the man or woman I was asking about. But the position occupied in the social field is still the same: an entire family group whose situation, whose relative position in the class structure, hasn’t budged an inch.

  A chapel in the Roman style designed by Léonard Foujita was being built only a few dozen yards from the building we were living in. He would decorate it with frescos to celebrate his conversion to Catholicism, which had happened in Reims in the Saint Remi Basilica a few years earlier. I would only learn about this much later: there wasn’t much interest in art in our household, and even less for Christian art. I finally visited the chapel while I was writing this book. An interest in art is something that is learned. I learned it. It was part of my project of nearly complete self-reeducation, necessary in order to move into a different world, a different class—and to put some distance between myself and the world and the class from which I came. An interest in artistic and literary objects always ends up contributing, whether or not it happens consciously, to a way of defining yourself as having more self-worth; it helps produce a differentiation from those who lack access to those same objects, or a “distinction,” in the sense of a gap between yourself and the others—those from an “inferior” or “uncultured” class. This distinction is constitutive of your sense of self and of the way you look at yourself. On so many occasions throughout the rest of my life as a “cultured” individual, I’ve had the chance to observe, while visiting an exhibition or attending a concert or an opera performance, to what an extent people who take part in “high” cultural practices seem to gain a sense of self-satisfaction from their participation in these activities, a feeling of superiori
ty that can be read in the discreet smile that never leaves their lips, or in the way they hold themselves, the way they talk knowingly as connoisseurs, the way they display how at ease they are in these circumstances. All of these things are manners of expressing the social joy that results from corresponding to expectations, from belonging to the privileged world of those who can flatter themselves with appreciating “refined” forms of artistic expression. I was always intimidated by all of this, yet I went on trying to resemble these people, to act as if I was born into the same world they were, to appear as relaxed as they were in aesthetic situations.

  It was also necessary to relearn how to talk, to eliminate incorrect pronunciations and turns of phrase along with regional usages (to stop saying that an apple was “sour” [fière] and say instead that it was “tart” [acide]), to correct both my northeastern accent and my working-class accent, to learn a more sophisticated vocabulary, to make use of more suitable grammatical constructions, in short, to keep both my language and my delivery of it under constant surveillance. “You talk like a book,” I would often be told by members of my family as a way of making fun of my new habits while also indicating that they understood what I was up to. As time went by, and this is still the case today, I would in fact learn to be quite careful, when I found myself dealing with people whose language I had unlearned, not to make use of turns of phrase that seemed complicated or little used in popular circles. (For example, I might say “I’m gonna” instead of “I’ll” [j’ai été instead of je suis allé]), and I would make an effort to return to the intonations, vocabulary, and idioms that, even if I’ve locked them away in a far corner of my memory and almost never use them, I’ve never forgotten. This isn’t really a form of bilingualism, but more an interplay between two levels of language, two different social registers, both determined by one’s situation and surroundings.