At the time, my father had already been working—at the lowest rung on the ladder—for quite a while. He hadn’t even reached the age of fourteen (school ended in June, and he began working right away, and only turned fourteen three months later) when he found himself in the surroundings that would be his for the rest of his life, chasing the only horizon that was open to him: the factory. It was waiting for him; he was waiting for it. It was also waiting for his brothers and sisters, who would all follow in his footsteps. And it waited, and still waits, for those who were born and are born into families with the same social identity as his. Social determinism had a grip on him from the day he was born. There was no escape for him from that to which he had been promised by all the laws, all the mechanisms, of what there is no other word for than “reproduction.”
My father’s education thus went no further than middle school. No one would have imagined it could have been otherwise, neither his parents nor himself. In his world, you went to school until the age of fourteen, because that was required, and you left school at age 14, because it was no longer required. That’s the way things were. To drop out of school was certainly no scandal. Quite the contrary. I remember how indignant everyone in my family was when school was made mandatory until age 16. “What’s the point in making kids stay in school if they don’t want to, if they’d rather be working?” was what people repeated, never stopping to wonder about how a like or a dislike for school might be distributed differentially across society. Selection within the educational system often happens by a process of self-elimination, and that self-elimination is treated as if it were freely chosen: extended studies are for other kinds of people, for “people of means,” and it just happens that those people turn out to be the ones who like going to school. The field of possibilities—and even the field of possibilities that it is possible to imagine, to say nothing of the field of possibilities that can actually be realized—is tightly circumscribed by one’s class position. It was as if the barrier between social worlds was utterly impermeable. The boundaries that divide these worlds help define within each of them radically different ways of perceiving what it is possible to be or to become, of perceiving what it is possible to aspire to or not. People know that things are different elsewhere, but that elsewhere seems part of a far off and inaccessible universe. So much so that people feel neither excluded from nor deprived of all sorts of things because they have no access to what, in those far off social realms, constitutes a self-evident norm. It’s in the order of things, and there’s nothing more to be said about it. No one thinks about how the order of things actually works, because to do so would require being able to see oneself from a different point of view, have a bird’s eye view on one’s own life and the lives of other people. Only if you actually manage to move from one side of the border to the other, as happened in my case, can you get out from under the implacable logic of all those things that go without saying in order to perceive the terrible injustice of this unequal distribution of prospects and possibilities. And things haven’t changed all that much: the age for leaving school has shifted, but the social barrier between classes remains the same. That is why any sociology or any philosophy that begins by placing at the center of its project the “point of view of the actors” and the “meaning they give to their actions” runs the risk of simply reproducing a shorthand version of the mystified relation that social agents maintain with their own practices and desires, and consequently does nothing more than serve to perpetuate the world as it currently stands—an ideology of justification (for the established order). Only an epistemological break with the way in which individuals spontaneously think about themselves renders possible the description of the mechanisms by which the social order reproduces itself. The entire system needs to be apprehended, including the manner in which dominated people ratify their domination through the choice they make to drop out of school, thereby making the choice they had been intended to make. A theory’s power and interest lie precisely in the fact that it doesn’t consider it as sufficient simply to record the words that “actors” say about their “actions,” but that rather, it sets as a goal to allow both individuals and groups to see and to think differently about what they are and what they do, and then, perhaps, to change what they do and what they are. It is a matter of breaking with incorporated categories of perception and established frameworks of meaning, and thereby with the social inertia of which these categories and frameworks are the vectors; after such a break, the goal is to produce a new way of looking at the world and thereby to open up new political perspectives.
For social destinies are sketched out incredibly early! Things have been arranged ahead of time. Verdicts have been handed down before it’s even possible to be aware of it. Our sentences are burned into the skin of our shoulder with a red hot iron at the moment of our birth, and the places allocated to us have been defined and delimited by what has come before us: the past of the family and the surroundings into which we are born. My father wasn’t even given the chance to earn a general education certificate, the one that represented, for working-class children, the crowning achievement of their education. Children of the bourgeoisie were on a different track. At the age of eleven, they started high school, whereas working class children and children from farming families were restricted to elementary and middle schools until age fourteen, when their education ended. There was to be no confusion between those to whom one was to mete out the rudiments of the practical education (reading, writing, and arithmetic) that was needed to cope with daily life and sufficient for carrying out manual labor, and those, coming from more privileged classes, who had a right to become “cultured,” to be given access to a culture that was “disinterested,” access to “culture” pure and simple. And of course it was feared that such culture could only exercise a corrupting influence on workers were they to be exposed to it.19 The certificate in question involved the acquisition of basic functional forms of knowledge (with a few other elements thrown in from the “history of France”—a few dates of the main events in the national mythology, and from “Geography”—a list of the different administrative divisions of France and their capital cities). It was an important credential for those for whom it was intended, and in those circles it was a point of pride to have obtained it. Only half of those who took the required exam actually passed it. And there were many people, such as my father, who, having more or less abandoned school even before the legal age for doing so, didn’t make it that far. Most of what my father learned, he learned on his own, later, by taking night classes after finishing work for the day. His hope was to be able to climb up several rungs on the social ladder. For a while he dreamed of becoming an industrial draftsman. He soon woke up to a cold reality. Perhaps he didn’t have the necessary educational background. Above all, it must have been difficult to concentrate after working a full day at the factory. He was forced to abandon his studies along with his illusions. For a long time he saved a few large sheets of squared paper, covered in charts and sketches—course assignments?—that he would sometimes take out of their folder and look over, or show to us, before returning them to the bottom of the drawer where he kept his broken dreams. Not only did he remain a worker, but he had to be one twice over: when I was very young he began his day very early in the morning and worked in a factory until the early afternoon. Then at the end of the afternoon he went to a different factory to work a few more hours to add to his salary. My mother helped as much as she could, wearing herself out cleaning houses and doing laundry. (Washing machines didn’t yet exist, or were extremely rare, and doing other people’s laundry was a way of earning a bit of money to add to the household income.) It was only when my father was caught in a long period of unemployment in 1970 that my mother herself would go to work in a factory, but she kept on working there even after my father found work again. (I now understand that she took on factory work so that I could finish high school—take the baccalaureate exam—and go to college. It was
something I never thought of at the time, or else I repressed it as deeply as I could, even in the face of my mother bringing up the possibility that I might do the responsible thing and start earning my keep and helping the family—a possibility, if truth be told, that she mentioned quite frequently.) My father kept trotting out the notion that “a factory is no place for a woman,” but to no avail. Whatever the damage done to his masculine sense of honor by not being able to provide for his household on his own, he had no choice but to resign himself to the fact that my mother became a “worker,” taking on all the pejorative connotations that attached to the idea of a woman who worked in a factory: loose women whose speech was crude, who maybe slept around—in short, tarts. This bourgeois image of the working class woman who worked outside the home and alongside men was also widely shared by working class men who didn’t like to give up control over their spouses or partners for several hours each day, and who were terrified by the abhorrent image of the liberated woman. Annie Ernaux writes of her mother, who took up employment in a factory when she was quite young, that she insisted on being considered one of the “factory girls, but nonetheless respectable.” Yet the simple fact that she worked alongside men “meant that she would never be seen as a ‘decent young girl,’ which was what she had always longed to be.”20 The situation was the same for older women: the kind of work they did sufficed to give them all a bad reputation, whether or not they took advantage of the sexual freedom imputed to them. The result was that my father would frequently go sit in a café near the factory at the time my mother got off work so that he would know if my mother secretly stopped in upon leaving work, and be able to catch her by surprise if she did. But she didn’t—neither that café nor any other. She headed home to make dinner after having done the shopping. Like all working women, she had a second job waiting for her at home.
It would only be much later that my father would manage to rise up a few rungs in the social hierarchy, at least in the hierarchy at the factory, moving up from the category of an unskilled worker to that of a skilled worker, and finally to that of supervisor. He was no longer a worker, but rather supervised them. Or, more precisely, he was the head of a team. He took a very simple kind of pride in this new status, which provided him with an improved sense of self-worth. Of course, I found all of this laughable at the time, but then I was the person who, many years later, would still blush with shame when, applying for this or that official document, I would be obliged to provide a copy of my birth certificate listing the first professions of my father (unskilled worker) and my mother (cleaning lady)—the same person who hadn’t been able to understand why my parents had been so eager to improve their situation, even in a way that while miniscule to my eyes, was obviously extremely significant to theirs.
As I was saying, my father worked in a factory from the age of 14 to that of 56, when he was given “early retirement,” whether he wanted it or not, and in the same year as my mother (at age 55), both of them spit out by the system that had exploited them so shamelessly. He found himself at loose ends with too much time on his hands, whereas she was happy to leave a workplace where the work was so exhausting—to a degree unimaginable to anyone who hasn’t experienced it—and where the noise, the heat, and the daily repetition of the same mechanical movements slowly wore away at the health of even the most resilient organisms. They were tired, worn out. My mother hadn’t contributed to social security for long enough (her work cleaning houses had always been off the books), which meant that her retirement payments were correspondingly lower, and so their income dropped notably when they retired. They rearranged their life as best they could. For example, they traveled more often—a weekend in London, a week in Spain or Turkey—thanks to the workers’ organization of the factory where my father had worked. It’s not that they loved each other any more than they had in the past. They had simply found a modus vivendi; they were used to each other; and they both knew that only the death of one or the other of them would separate them.
My father was handy at many things, and proud to be so, just as he was proud of manual labor in general. It was in these kinds of activities that he flourished, and he spent all his free time on them. He knew what fine work was, and he appreciated it. When I was in one of the last two years of high school, he turned an old table into a desk for me. He installed cabinets, and fixed whatever needed fixing in the apartment. I, on the other hand, was all thumbs. Perhaps willfully so (for after all couldn’t I have chosen to learn something from him?) given how invested I was in not resembling him, in becoming something socially different from what he was. Later I would discover that certain intellectual types could also be quite handy, and that it was in fact possible to be bookish—to read books and to write them—while still enjoying practical tasks and manual kinds of work. Discovering this would leave me utterly perplexed. It was as if my whole personality was called into question by the destabilization of what I had perceived and experienced as a fundamental, a defining opposition (but obviously only defining in my particular case). With sports it was the same thing. Learning that many of my friends watched sports on television was deeply disturbing to me, causing a principle whose solidity had imposed itself powerfully upon me to dissolve before my eyes. For me, in order to define myself as an intellectual, as part of my very desire to be an intellectual, I had felt required to experience as intolerable nights spent watching soccer matches on television. The culture of sports, sports as one’s only interest (for men, since for women it was mostly popular news items), these were aspects of reality that I had been intent on deprecating, on disdaining out of a sense of superiority. It took me quite a while to break down all these dividing walls that had been necessary for me to become who I had become, to reintegrate into my mental and existential universe all these dimensions that I had shut out.
When I was a child, my parents got around on a moped. They carried us, my brother and I, on kids’ seats attached behind them. That arrangement could prove to be dangerous. One day, while my father was negotiating a curve, the bike slipped on some gravel and my brother’s leg was broken. In 1963, they got their driver’s licenses and bought a used car. (I can be seen at the age of 12 or 13 leaning against the hood of that black Simca Aronde in a number of photographs my mother gave me.) My mother passed the driver’s exam before my father. For my father, the idea of sitting in the passenger seat and being driven around by his wife was so degrading that he preferred driving without a license for a while in order to avoid any such ignominious situation. He would literally go crazy, and turn quite nasty, when my mother would voice her concern and express her intention to take what he considered to be his place. Then, after a while, things sorted themselves out: it would always be he who drove. (Even when he had had too much to drink he wouldn’t let her drive.) On Sundays, once we had a car, we would go on picnics to forests or fields outside the town. It was never a question of taking a summer vacation. We didn’t have the money. Our trips only extended as far as a day’s visit to a nearby town: Nancy, Laon, or Charleville, for example. We even crossed the border into Belgium to visit a town called Bouillon. (We learned to associate this name with Godefroy de Bouillon and his adventures in the Crusades; but since then I have come more willingly to associate it with Cilea’s opera, Adriana Lecouvreur, and with the terrible and imposing character from that opera, the Princess de Bouillon.) We toured the chateau and bought chocolate and souvenirs, but went no farther. It wasn’t until much later that I would get to know Brussels. Once we even went to Verdun, and I remember a gloomy and frightening visit to the Douaumont Ossuary, where the remains of the soldiers who died in battle there during the first World War are gathered. That visit gave me nightmares for a long time. We also sometimes went to Paris to visit my maternal grandmother. Parisian traffic jams would send my father into astounding fits of rage. He would stamp his feet, utter streams of obscenities and cries of anger, without anyone really understanding why he was working himself up into such a state. The result of th
is would be endless arguments with my mother, who had little patience for what she referred to as his “cinéma,” his crazy song and dance. The same things happened every time he drove. If he took the wrong road, or missed a turn, he would start screaming as if the world were about to end. But most frequently of all, when the weather was good, we would drive along the banks of the Marne, in champagne country, and spend hours engaged in my father’s favorite relaxing pastime: fishing. At these moments it was as if he became a different man, and there was a bond that passed between him and his children: he taught us all the gestures and techniques we needed, he gave us advice, and we would spend the day commenting on what happened or what didn’t. “They’re really biting today,” or “Not even a nibble.” And we would speculate as to why, blaming the heat or the rain, the earliness or lateness of the season, and so on. Sometimes we would meet up with my aunts and uncles and their children. In the evening we’d eat the fish we had caught. My mother would clean them, dip them in flour, and fry them up. It was a royal feast for us. But with the passage of time, I came to find all this pointless and silly. I wanted to spend my time reading, not to waste it with a fishing rod in hand watching a piece of cork bob up and down on the surface of the water. Soon I hated all the cultural aspects of this activity, all the forms of sociability associated with it: the music playing from the transistor radios, the meaningless chit chat with the people you’d meet, the strict division of labor between men (who fished) and the women (who knitted and read photo romances, or took care of the kids and the cooking). I stopped going with my parents on these outings. To invent myself, I had first of all to disassociate myself from all of that.
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