A Tale of Two Frances

This chapter reads Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex trilogy (2015-17), a comédie inhumaine that depicts a deeply divided—increasingly neoliberal and reactionary—France. Despentes, in a rather utopian vein, would heal those divisions, staging a collective social awakening. As such, the trilogy is symptomatic of a trend one encounters in a swath of recent French novels, in which a sudden refusal of the neoliberal socio-political order ignites revolutionary movements. A key element of these novels (including Despentes’s) is the representing of a post-Mitterrand France for whom society is marked by la précarité [precarity]. Vernon Subutex must fall through the cracks of society and become homeless in order to, in a surprising reversal, encounter new, utopian, and borderline-mystical social possibilities. I uncover the internal contradictions of this reversal, however, noting that such contradictions are also symptomatic of that recent utopian novelistic impulse that must imagine another world at all costs. This chapter reads Despentes’s depiction of a divided, pre- and post-‘Charlie Hebdo’ France in the light of Emmanuel Todd’s Qui est Charlie: Sociologie d’une crise religieuse ? [Who Is Charlie?: Xenophobia and the New Middle Class], as well as via a reading of Despentes’s own writings on gender and society.