![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
This article is an interdisciplinary study of Gérard Delteil’s Les Écœurés, a 2019 novel that was marketed as a “le premier polar en Gilet Jaune.” In this essay, we explore the generic tensions that arise when murder mystery intersects with socioeconomic criticism in our age of advanced capitalism. We argue that Les Écœurés functions differently when read through a sociological prism than it does as a noir or polar. We demonstrate that analysis of social media data shows that Delteil captures quite well and to a large extent reproduces the concerns of the Gilets Jaunes movement, while at the same time showcasing the dispiriting durability of a corrupt establishment. Second, on the level of character, we maintain that in presenting a drably failed bildungsroman, the novel undercuts the importance of any individual agency or élan. And third, we argue that on the level of genre, the text—by sidelining its own murder mystery—raises questions about the force and relevance of crime fiction as a potential agent of social change. Ultimately, we maintain that the very failures in and of Les Écœurés point metatextually to the novel’s position as an artifact of the period and as embodiment of the Gilets Jaunes movement’s likely fate.
Notes
1 Author names are in alphabetical order. We would like to thank the Massive Data Institute Tech Team for helping maintain the database and determine topic frequencies.
2 See Bepolar. Gérard Delteil (pseudonym for Gérard Folio) was a journalist specializing in underworld exposés before turning to fiction; his books have won awards such as le prix polar de la ville de Reims (for Votre argent m’intéresse, 1986) and le grand prix de littérature policière (for N’oubliez pas l’artiste, 1986). Because of his leftist politics (and although he has publically sparred with Didier Daeninckx), Delteil would generally fit into the category of socially engaged noir writers like Daeninckx, Jonquet, Fajardie, and Manchette that Annie Collovald and Éric Neveu describe in their 2001 essay “Le Néo-polar: Du gauchisme politique au gauchisme littéraire” (Société et Représentations, 2001/1, No. 11, pp. 77–93).
3 On the symbolism and politics of the yellow vest, see Maxime Boidy, “Textures vestimentaires et politiques du gilet jaune,” Parlement(s): Revue d’histoire politique, 2021/3, No. 34, pp. 166–173.
4 See Claire Gorrara (“French Crime Fiction: From Genre Mineur to Patrimoine Culturel,” French Studies, Vol. 61, Issue 2, April 2007, pp. 209–214) on the subversive potential of post-seventies crime fiction. See also Andrew Pepper (Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State, Oxford UP, 2019) on crime fiction as organized by a fundamental tension between an acknowledgment of the state as necessary for the maintenance of society and a critique of the state’s reinforcement of socio-economic inequalities.
5 In the introduction to her recent book (2021), Anne Grydehøj situates the politics of French crime fiction (including the novels of Manchette) within contemporary social and political crises: “[T]he state with which the French polar engages is one that is decidedly in crisis” (2).
6 On the spectrum of possibilities for individual morality in the hard-boiled genre, see Susanna Lee (Detectives in the Shadows, Johns Hopkins UP, 2020); and Sean McCann (Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism, Duke UP, 2000).
7 The novel certainly includes numerous elements of real-life crises. According to Le Monde, an ex-gendarme was sentenced to four months in prison on January 4, 2021, for hitting three Gilets Jaunes with his car in February 2019 (“Prison avec sursis pour un ex-gendarme qui avait renversé trois ‘gilets jaunes,’” Le Monde, January 4, 2021, https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2021/01/04/j-etais-dans-un-etat-de-panique-prison-avec-sursis-pour-un-ex-gendarme-qui-avait-renverse-trois-gilets-jaunes_6065186_3224.html. Accessed 13 Mar. 2022). In November 2020, the state was ordered to pay damages to the victim of a “tir de lanceur de balles de défense” also from February 2019 (Le Monde).
8 See Andrew Sobanet and Lisa Singh, “A Big-Data Approach to Contemporary French Politics,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Sites, Vol. 24, No. 5, December 2020, [pp. 625–634] p. 626.
9 See Sobanet and Singh, p. 626; p. 633.
10 We use the term “tweets” to represent tweets, retweets, and quoted tweets.
11 We use the Twitter Streaming Application Program Interface (API) to collect data. The list of hashtags used include #giletjaunes (its variants) and hashtags associated with the different Actes. A complete list is available at https://frenchpolitics.mdi.georgetown.edu.
12 The list is available at https://frenchpolitics.mdi.georgetown.edu/.
13 For a sentiment analysis of tweets collected from this period, see Sobanet and Singh, p. 632.
14 See Sobanet and Singh, p. 632.
15 See Sobanet and Singh, p. 629.
16 T.4 “L’Idylle rue Plumet et l’épopée rue Saint-Denis.” Pépin and Morey were the real-life republican co-conspirators in Fieschi’s infamous attack on Louis Philippe during the king’s public parade on the Boulevard du Temple in 1835—so here they represent political violence as opposed to the private crimes of Jean Valjean. It is during the novel’s climactic scenes of collective revolt that Javert’s and Valjean’s individual fates intersect, thus fusing private crime and political revolt in a way that troubles the police inspector’s sense of his moral mission.
17 There’s a moment when Devers notices that one of the Gilet Jaune leaders looks like Lee Marwin, an actor from 1960s American crime shows (Delteil 27). The intent seems to be to connect the character to the 1968 era that founded the polar, and to the golden age of crime television that nourished it. But the detail is so unrealistic, given that the character is around twenty-five years old, that it stops the reader. Stendhal famously wrote that politics in a novel is like a pistol shot in a concert. But when an entire novel is political, when one’s entire daily experience is political, it is culture that sounds like the pistol shot. The characters in this novel share a political experience but seem devoid of a shared culture. The repeated references to polars recall a time when a shared political experience meant a shared culture, but that equivalency seems to have dried up.
18 Manchette, Romans noirs, p. 494; p. 491; p. 492; p. 512.
19 At times, Devers departs from his usual passivity, but this does not mean that he becomes “active” in the usual sense of the word. When he hears that the murdered woman had worked for Super Price and had been fired for noticing corruption, “Le rythme cardiaque de Devers s’accéléra, comme si on lui avait fait une piqûre de digoxine” (39); and when he learns that the victim had just begun dating someone, “Un signal se déclencha dans le cerveau du lieutenant” (142). These illuminations, which move the plot forward, are presented more as neurological abnormalities than as moments of reason. This is the closest that the narrative comes to giving Devers a body: the moments when he thinks as a detective are those when he is taken over, and character is principally a conduit for impulses and jolts of understanding.
20 See Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit à la ville, Paris, Economica, 2009.
21 See Purcell: “The right to the city stresses the need to restructure the power relations that underlie the production of urban space, fundamentally shifting control away from capital and the state and toward urban inhabitants” (101).
22 The color red also recalls the red flag of the Revolution-era Jacobins and the 1870s Communards. More broadly, it is a symbol of blood and violence as well as of communism, socialism and anarchism.
23 The jurisdictional confusion between local and national law enforcement agencies in Delteil’s novel might remind one of an even more recent event: the January 6, 2021, storming of the United States Capitol and of the crowds in the D.C. streets who were met by Capitol guards, city police and then, after more confusion, by the National Guard. It is also tempting to extend Lefebvre’s analysis to other moments of street occupation, such as the BLM painting on 16th street in Washington, D.C. in summer 2020. Lefebvre writes: “Revolutionary events generally take place in the street. […] The urban space of the street is a place for talk, given over as much to the exchange of words and signs as it is to the exchange of things. A place where speech becomes writing. A place where speech can become ‘savage’ and, by escaping rules and institutions, inscribe itself on walls” (19). Lefebvre is writing here about protest slogans, like the ones in Delteil’s novel (“Macron, t’es foutu!”).
24 See Andrea Goulet (Legacies of the rue Morgue, U of Pennsylvania P, 2016), which traces a sub-genre of popular “street-name mysteries” of the Second Empire and fin-de-siècle that identify their titular crime by the address where it was committed; the street toponymics of those novels register a tension between political insurrection and domestic drama that maps on to France’s particular revolutionary history.
25 See Andrea Goulet (“Burma's Bagnoles: The Mobile City of Malet's Nouveaux mystères de Paris,” Criminal Moves: Modes of Mobility in Crime Fiction, edited by Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, and Alistair Rolls, Liverpool UP, 2019, pp. 129–145), which argues that Malet uses the street as a crash site (or “clash site”) of French identity with foreign elements, from the Nazi occupation of World War II to the 1950s importation of American cars, cinema, and the noir genre itself. In Malet’s stories, gypsies, lefty anarchists, and immigrant workers at the Citroën factory are left in the dust of flashy Cadillacs carrying American-style starlets and high-flying government thugs. Though the crime networks gesture toward a boundary-less world of capitalist flow, Malet’s arrondissement-by-arrondissement urban mysteries take us back to the bounded quartiers where cars and guns jerk between the poles of explosive entropy and spatial stasis and where streets offer no way out.
26 For Ross, the Gilets Jaunes movement re-introduced unpredictability into the form of demonstrations; their resistance of officially preordained routes and their transgressive occupation of urban sites prevented those territories from becoming “a mere node in a global capitalist system” (“Polar Chaos” 224).
27 “One of the most crucial differentiating factors that, for Manchette, made the noir politically superior to other forms of crime fiction was that it did not view the reified form of the ‘labor of the negative’—crime—as a disruption of peace or of an essentially good ordering of the world, but rather recognized in it the broader sickness of the political-social order” (Hollister 85). Hollister sees Manchette’s later work as potentially entering the realm of meaningful escape from such circularity through its “ever-renewed confrontation with alterity that constitutes the promise of the political” (99).
28 See King (“[T]his article argues for the denationalization of crime-fiction studies” (10)); Nilsson, et al. (“[C]rime fiction is a pre-eminently ‘glocal’ mode of literary creation and circulation” (4)); Franco Moretti (“Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review, Vol. 1, Jan.–Feb. 2000, pp. 54–68); and Wai Chee Dimock (“Genre as world system: epic and novel on four continents,” Narrative, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Jan . 2006), pp. 85–101).
29 In addition to gesturing outward spatially as an international harbor, the port setting echoes generic tropes: “Ce paysage ne manquait pas d’une certaine beauté angoissante. Il évoquait des décors de polar. On imaginait assez bien des traffics mystérieux et des règlements de comptes. Cette atmosphère ne déplaisait pas à Devers” (161). The scene, with its cargo containers and mechanical cranes, combines the industrial aesthetic of the néo-polar and the maritime mist of a Simenon novel. Jacques Audiberti had described the movie adaptation of Simenon’s Le Voyageur de la Toussaint as a “fulgineux décor où se dilue, dans un océan de brouillard, aux lisières de l'océan proprement dit, la silhouette des mâts et des grues d' un port breton” (201). One also thinks of Le Port des brumes, which takes place in Ouistreham, or Les Vacances de Maigret, set in Sables d’Olonne. Rooted in atmosphere and solitude, the “polar” evoked in the port scene of Delteil’s novel means a particular distance from the “traffics mystérieux”—a relationship of remove and observation. For Devers, being in a polar means being the policeman, the watcher, the reader. His cover story, that of a recent graduate student in history (a fiction chosen because the commissioner found him to have a “tête d’écolo”) is part of this sense of watching without being himself watched; he is the main character and the observer in his own narrative, but the broader narrative envelops him and stops him from being a character or having a meaningful story.
30 In the same volume, Susanna Lee notes the “national morality crises” (286) of the Vietnam War for America and right-wing Le Pen-ism for France as contexts that paved the way for crime novels featuring the possibility of restorative justice (“Crime Fiction and Theories of Justice,” The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction, Oxfordshire, Routledge Publishing, 2020, pp. 282–290). Delteil’s novel fails in that promise.
31 Andrew Pepper and David Schmid, Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction: A World of Crime, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
32 Every time a character articulates the title emotion, it is because of the injustices of capitalism. Devers’ yellow-vest girlfriend Claire, for example, describes being fired for asking that her full-time status be acknowledged: “Puis faut raquer pour un avocat qui cherche qu’à se faire du blé sur not’ pomme. Je suis écœurée” (16). As her former coworker laments the delays in her husband’s disability payments: “‘Quand je vois le pognon qu’ils se mettent dans la poche, ceux d’en haut, je suis écœurée’” (79).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Andrea Goulet
Andrea Goulet is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Co-Chair of the Nineteenth-Century French Studies (NCFS) Association. She is the author of Optiques: the Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction (2006) and Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Space and Science in French Crime Fiction (2016) and co-editor of Orphan Black: Performance, Gender, Biopolitics (Intellect Press, 2018). At Penn, she currently co-directs the interdisciplinary Humanities + Urbanism + Design program.
Susanna Lee
Susanna Lee teaches French and Comparative Literature at Georgetown University. She is the author, most recently, of Detectives in the Shadows: A Hard-Boiled History (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020) and Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Decline of Moral Authority (Ohio State UP, 2016).
Lisa Singh
Lisa Singh is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and a Research Professor in the Massive Data Institute (MDI) at Georgetown University. She is also affiliated with the Institute for the Study of International Migration and the Institute for Environment and Sustainability. She has authored/co-authored over eighty peer reviewed publications and book chapters related to data-centric computing, i.e. data mining, data privacy, data visualization, and data science, and is the co-author of Words That Matter: How News and Social Media Shaped the 2016 Presidential Election (Brookings Institution Press, 2020).
Andrew Sobanet
Andrew Sobanet teaches French literature and culture at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality (Indiana UP, 2018).