From Eddy to Édouard – Who is Édouard Louis? – Intellectuals and the Media in France

Many of us have dreamt of reinventing ourselves, but for Édouard Louis, it was imperative. He describes his process of his transformation from Eddy Belleguele to Édouard Louis in an interview in the Baffler as:

“More than just a conscious effort, it became a permanent obsession.”¹

As a self-proclaimed ‘transfuge de classe’², he has been open about how he has systematically rid himself of the markers of his working-class upbringing: his clipped, Picardy accent, his sense of dress, the masculinity he’d tried to emulate for so long, and even his own name.

Poised as a literary intellectual, Louis’ life is now very different. In 2011, he was accepted into the École Normale Supérieure and just 2 years later, he prestigiously helped edit the collective work, Pierre Bourdieu: l’insoumission en heritage. He also maintains close-knit intellectual friendships, notably with his mentor Didier Eribon, and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Annie Ernaux. Together, their work forms part of a broader movement that integrates sociological ideas into literary creation and critique.

And yet, this isn’t a typical rags to riches story. In an interview for The Guardian, Louis discusses the impossible dichotomy of being a class defector as a ‘sense of double exile’ – that you can never properly belong to your new class, and yet never go back to the life you have left behind, even if you wanted to³.

On the 23rd of January 2019, Louis shared a post on Instagram, featuring a half-obscured photograph of his carte d’identité and a caption detailing his experience in changing his name. This artefact permits valuable insight into both the personal and symbolic dimensions of his identity transformation, and by interrogating it we can understand how, for Louis, the act of changing his name was not simply an administrative procedure, but part of an intimate process of becoming someone new.

Regarding the medium, Instagram today is one of the top three social media platforms worldwide, with billions of users. It is complex and multimodal, integrating image, text, sound and motion. It can also be algorithmic and interface-driven, shaping how the users experience the media. (Leaver, Highfield and Abidin, 2020)

Leaver challenges the assumption that Instagram is primarily visual:

“The app is not just a space for photography. […] what is posted to Instagram form both the visual culture of the platform, and are part of the broader visual cultures in which users are situated.”⁴

These visual cultures allow us to understand the relationship between how users construct their self-presentation, and how this is interpreted and responded to by other users. In Louis’s post, every detail matters: the image used, the caption (with its limit of 2,200 characters), as well as the accompanying comments and likes. Each part tells a story about how his identity is portrayed and received in this digital space.

Fig. 1: Louis’ Instagram Post

One of the most striking aspects is his unusually long caption. Given Instagram’s structural constraints, it is uncommon to see a more extended piece of writing, and even rarer for it to be divided into paragraphs. Thus, Louis subtly subverts expectations, asserting his persona as a writer, even within the confines of the platform. His caption is full of rhetorical devices guiding readers to understand the depth and significance of his decision to change his name. He tells us:

‘Un nom ce n’est pas seulement un nom, ce n’est pas qu’une succession de lettres et de syllabes mais une histoire’.

He uses antithesis, contrasting the superficiality of letters and syllables with the profound nature of a story. Further, describing a name as story is metaphorical, and attributes it a narrative depth. In an interview for Literary Hub, writer Monika Zaleska brings up how Louis’ official name change occurred just before he published his debut novel, ‘En finir avec Eddy Belleguele’. He describes how his father called him Eddy, because in the working-class milieu of his childhood, an American name reinforced masculine values. For Louis’ father, America meant strength and domination; it was ‘the country of power’. Ironically, his surname, Belleguele, means ‘pretty face’, although in very strong French slang. This juxtaposition between his hyper-masculine first name and a more softened, effeminate surname, therefore, captures the tension between Louis’s aspiration to strength and masculinity as a child, and the vulnerability of his identity.

It was only when he left his village to attend a theatre programme in Amiens, that he began to understand the deep connection between his name and his history. When he heard Belleguele, he heard ‘poor’: he was hearing a past that he didn’t choose, where his father went to prison and left school at 14, as did his father before him. Where he knew the feeling of being hungry before he knew how to read. (Louis, 2017)

Fig. 2: Louis as a young boy

Louis describes this first escape from his working-class background as leaving him ‘drunk on metamorphosis’; he describes spending hours practising his laugh in front of the mirror, trying to emulate a bourgeois tinkle. He was taught table manners by a close friend, the proper way to hold a knife and fork, and bought himself a new wardrobe of silk ties and button-down shirts. Louis was an actor, at school and at home; he played the role until it became him.

However, when Louis moved to Paris to study philosophy at one of France’s elite Grandes Écoles, he suddenly found himself surrounded by the children of the bourgeoisie. To them, his name was funny, peculiar; to Louis, they were reinforcing the class hierarchy, and their social distance from him. In this world, politics was given little more than passing interest, a sharp contrast to his working-class upbringing, where a new law could mean going to the dentist for the first time. Louis felt shame for his teenage self – the boy who would go back to Hallencourt flaunting his expensive clothes, and ostentatiously opening a book in front of his parents as if to display his new class. He describes how to his mother, his very image had become aggressive, reflecting the bourgeoisie, the dominant class. (FANTASTIC MAN, 2017)

In the last line of the caption, Louis reflects on this central theme:

“N’écoutez jamais les rappels à l’ordre des autres quand vous voulez changer, ne les écoutez pas quand ils vous diront tu trahis, tu renies, pour qui tu te prends, dites vous que les rappels à l’ordre social ne sont rien face au bonheur de la métamorphose et de l’invention de soi”

The tone in Louis’ caption is imperative and exhortative, rich in anaphora, enumeration and rhythmic crescendo. He places in opposition “les rappels à l’ordre social” and “le bonheur de la métamorphose et de l’invention de soi”, setting a moral contrast. The social order is at odds with his self-reinvention, the use of metaphor here symbolising this inner transformation. It represents his past as defined by violence, from homophobia, poverty, to the masculine ideal that he could never reach. Pierre Bourdieu, of whom Louis is a scholar, describes his conception of the Law of Conservation of Violence⁵ – the idea that violence doesn’t disappear but instead changes form, moving through society. The State’s structural violence, exerted through economic systems and by financial markets, later reappears as crime, alcoholism or despair. For Louis, this resonates deeply. Even the shame he felt for his social mobility, he argues, is a shame he hasn’t chosen, based in a ‘social construction’ that is the ‘invisible foundation’ of our lives⁶.

In comparison, Louis’ self-reinvention is an experience of bonheur; by changing his name, and using the metonymy of using his carte d’identité as the image, he shows that he has liberated himself from his past. A key principle of existentialist philosophy developed by Sartre is the concept that l’existence précède l’essence, that links consciousness with freedom, and therefore, that humans have the inalienable freedom to choose what it means to exist. In France, changing names and specifically the nom de famille, is a difficult procedure and in principle, considered immutable. In the caption, Louis’ use of hyperbole and metaphor of possession, ‘Ce juge possédait mon identité’, reflects this feeling of domination and control. However, the law can also be a legitimising tool. By getting his name and control back, in a sense, Louis achieves his freedom.

Finally, from photos at protests, interview clips or pictures with other left-wing intellectuals, Louis has always been creative in how he uses social media to promote his ideas. Johansen (2020) highlights the increased interactivity of social media; historically, intellectuals were seen as more authoritative, with a ‘top-down’ relationship with the public. The advent of social media, however, has created a horizontal dynamic between contemporary intellectuals and the public. This might be slightly overstated, after all Sartre and de Beauvoir’s La Tribune des Temps Modernes included an episode responding directly to audience’s letters. However, the speed, and extent of this interactivity, exemplified by Louis replying to comments on his post, shows how social media contributes to direct engagement between intellectuals and their audience.

In his literary work, Louis frequently exploits the theme of the boundaries of the self. His debut novel, En finir avec Eddy Belleguele, describes Louis’ experience of growing up in both cultural and financial poverty. The genre is an interesting and deliberate choice – described as an autobiographical novel, an autofiction, or a nonfiction novel, Louis blends truth and fiction in his writing, much like his friend and fellow intellectual Annie Ernaux. Louis describes this approach as a ‘literary construction’⁷, borrowing ‘construction’ from Bourdieu to imply a graphic illustration of the truth. To him, the factual details matter less than expressing the emotional truth, which the genre provides ample room to explore. For Louis, this is inevitably political; in ‘En finir avec Eddy Belleguele’, he leverages his personal history to reveal a political reality. He wants to confront readers with ‘what they don’t want to see’⁸.

Fig. 3: Louis’ childhood home, Hallencourt, Northern France

It is therefore clear that Louis draws deeply from his personal life in his work; in an interview for the Guardian, he describes how ‘all my writing is political […] and all my life too.’ However, what is interesting to interrogate is where the boundaries between Louis’ literary character, and the real-life intellectual, lie.

In Le Site D’Auteur (2016), Hoffman uses Genette’s theory of paratext, as material that precedes or accompanies an author’s main text, to discuss different intellectual’s personal websites. For Louis, it’s an ‘espace de médiation afin de compléter son œuvre’. However, it is also a space of creative liberty, where he can ‘passer les censures propres au champ de l’édition’, for example, by posting the photographs that he originally wanted to include in En finir avec Eddy Belleguele.

Therefore, unlike the existentialists before him that used the mass media only as a way of maximising their readership, holding their written work above all else⁹, it seems that Louis places the highest importance on his ability to exercise his literary freedom – disrupting the concept of paratext. This is seen in his novels, where because he values emotional truth over factual accuracy, he uses his literary voice to create a new recounting of his past. Therefore, his identity is regularly being rewritten and reimagined and cannot be considered fixed or defined by the state. However, this is also seen symbolically in his real-life Instagram post, whereby changing his name, he commits the ultimate act of authorship: a new definition of Édouard Louis.

Appendix

Fig. 1 : https://www.instagram.com/p/Bs-svx8htdC/

Fig. 2 and 3 : https://edouardlouis.wordpress.com/2015/08/07/la-verite-en-litterature/

Intellectuals and the Media in France

An online exhibition from the University of Bristol

From Eddy to Édouard – Who is Édouard Louis?

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