Edouard Louis interview: ‘Harry Potter saved my life. I think it’s better than a lot of serious literature’

France’s leftist literary sensation condemns political leaders for failing the poorest in society, and tells Arjun Neil Alim how he wants to smash the wall between politics and literature

Édouard Louis describes his new novel 'Who Killed My Father' as “an odyssey back to my childhood” (Arnaud Delrue)

The polemical French writer Edouard Louis is drinking coffee with his agent, laughing and smiling as he waits for me in an office in London’s leafy Bloomsbury. For the author of a furious manifesto condemning the political classes for what he calls ‘social violence’, Louis is surprisingly charming.

His new book, Who Killed My Father, is the third in a series of political novels that charts France’s poor and victimised. What distinguishes this work is how the 26-year-old draws a direct link between government policy and the poverty and backwardness of his family.

“There is a kind of paradox in my book,” he says. “On one hand it is a very political book, like Emile Zola’s J’Accuse, because I talk about French politics and French history. But on the other hand it is a very intimate book, because I am trying to show that decisions made by governments affect my father’s body. A decision from Jacques Chirac or Emmanuel Macron to stop reimbursing my father’s medicine was as intimate for him as his first kiss.”

Louis’s writing has Anglo-Saxon origins; the first books he read were the Harry Potter series from JK Rowling. “Like Harry Potter, I felt disconnected from the world I was living in. At the beginning, Harry is living with this family, he doesn’t connect with them, he doesn’t have the same dreams, the same language, and when he goes to this school he realises that his whole history had been hidden from him. It was one of the books that saved my life, and I think that it’s a lot better than a lot of what we call ‘serious literature’.”

His first book, The End of Eddy, is an autobiographical novel that narrates his brutal childhood in the gritty post-industrial town of Hallencourt, where he grew up homosexual in a poor family with an ignorant mother and a racist, homophobic father. It was a literary sensation that shocked the French chattering classes, selling 300,000 copies in its first year. His second book, History of Violence, explores themes of racism and prejudice following a real episode in which Louis was sexually assaulted in Paris.

Louis describes Who Killed My Father as “an odyssey back to my childhood”. Having escaped to Paris, he is able to return to understand the conditions – what he calls “structures of oppression” – that made his childhood so miserable.

I wonder out loud why his French accent gives no hint of his northern origins. Louis explains that in Paris he reinvented everything about himself, from his laugh to his body language, in an attempt to erase his childhood from his identity and to try to fit in with the Parisian bourgeoisie. But he is glad that he never became a part of them. “My good luck is that the French bourgeoisie is not very welcoming,” he says. He felt alienated by his fellow students, at the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, who had read Gustave Flaubert at the age of 12 and went to the opera with their parents. “Now when I see the bourgeois, I’m horrified and I don’t want to be like them. In me they’ve built a weapon against them.”

The cruelty of political decisions is hidden by technocratic language, Louis explains. “Meaningless concepts like responsibility, management, the common good” serve to mask violent decisions made by governments. He is no fan of France’s liberal president, Emmanuel Macron, either, and has hailed the domestic backlash against recent reforms, epitomised by the gilets jaunes. “My theory is that the big difference between [Donald] Trump and Macron is that Macron speaks with the language of the bourgeoisie – a subtle, nuanced language – whereas Trump speaks like a deep American, a cultureless billionaire.”

Louis’s master concept is that the essence of politics is the exposure of one set of individuals to violence, and the protection of another. “If you are a factory worker in France, and I guess it’s probably worse in the UK, you are 50 per cent more likely to die before 65,” he says. ”Women die from male violence. If you are a person of colour you can be killed by the police. An LGBT person is four times more likely to commit suicide.”

I probe into this comparison with the UK. Louis says that he observes the same patterns of exclusion in Britain as in France. He describes how Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake served as an inspiration for Who Killed My Father. For him they are one and the same: “If you are a poor person in Europe you have two options: either you go back to work and you die, or they take your welfare away from you and you die.”

This scholar of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu scolds my use of the word “system”, which subconsciously removes responsibility from political leaders for their actions. “The more you have knowledge, power, culture you are responsible for what you do. People give sociological excuses for the dominant and not for the dominated.”

Yet, if politicians can take away with one hand, with the other they can give. Louis draws hope from Angela Merkel’s snap decision in 2015 to allow refugees to enter Germany: “Merkel changed the lives of almost one million people. Can you imagine?”

He sees his book as a political tool to allow people to change themselves and fight injustice. He decries the recent depoliticisation of culture, what he calls “the ideology of literature” that encourages artists and writers to stay out of politics. “It was a reaction against Jean-Paul Sartre, against Simone de Beauvoir, against Marguerite Duras. Even people who liked me warned me to stay away from politics for my career.”

Despite his grim diagnosis of western society, Louis remains upbeat and hopeful. “After Who Killed My Father, I received thousands of letters from people telling me about their lives.” He smiles. “This is what I wanted, people to talk.”

Who Killed My Father by Edouard Louis, translated by Lorin Stein, is published by Harvill Secker, £10.99