On January 11, French deputy Adrien Quatennens resumed service through the back door of the National Assembly after four months of exclusion from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party, La France insoumise, due to a conviction for domestic violence. The politician, who admitted to having slapped his wife during an argument in connection with their divorce proceedings, was sentenced to four months in prison suspended, a sentence that his party seems to consider amply sufficient.
The affair, which rightly causes an outcry in France, says a lot about the machismo and systemic sexism in force in France, according to the writer Philippe Besson, who became aware of the extent of collective denial during writing his latest novel, This is not a news itemwhich has a feminicide as its backstory.
“I researched a lot before starting to write, and I especially remember this sentence, which came up often during my readings: “all feminicides begin with a slap”, says the author, met during a stay in Montreal. It is not insignificant that domestic violence often passes under the radar. We tend to ignore or ignore weak signals, we stay away from a conflict that we judge to be intimate. We have also long operated according to the logic of the crime of passion, this unsustainable idea according to which a man could kill a woman for love, and which corresponds to a form of construction that we have integrated. A feminicide is not a news item, it is a fact of society. »
The story of This is not a news item was born from an encounter between Philippe Besson and a young man whose mother was the victim of a feminicide. “We had already known each other for a while when he told me that his father had killed his mother. When I asked him why he had taken so long to tell me about his past, he told me that it was impossible for him to speak, that he didn’t have the words and that he didn’t dare. His mother’s death had swept away everything in his path, and he was condemned to remain an invisible and silent victim. »
Some time later, on the television news, the writer comes across a report that gives voice to orphans of feminicide. “A woman said that she had been evicted from her house, which was now considered a crime scene. When she returned a few months later, said scene was intact, and she had to clean everything up herself. I was flabbergasted. I understood that I had to tell the story of these children. »
Philippe Besson therefore slips into the skin of a young man who learns from the mouth of his little sister the murder of his mother by his father, which she attended, powerless. With him, the reader goes through shock, grief, anger, despair, guilt, then the tortuous path of resilience and survival.
Overwhelmed by the burden that weighs on the absent, the narrator dissects his memories and his obliterations, his denials and his buried fears in an attempt to understand the origin of the horror and what led him to blindness. He remembers his father, jealous and possessive, trapped in a narrow vision of masculinity. He remembers his mother, erased, transforming terror into laughter, past master in the art of keeping silent. Step by step, he will learn to live with a multiple and heartbreaking mourning, which will forever redirect a life full of promise.
ferryman of inhumanity
The novelist sticks to a sober, almost analytical language, to tell the horror and the unspeakable, avoiding the traps of pathos and excess; a modesty justified by the choice of the narrator, the son, who realistically has no choice but to soften the contours and detach himself from what he is telling to be able to state it. From these appearances of control emerges a duplicated emotional charge, carrying a misunderstanding and anger that will leave no one indifferent.
“We have a great literature on feminicides, but we always seem to stay away from it. A woman dies every three days under the blows of her spouse, and we say to ourselves that we understand because we have read it. I think you have to get out of sociology to get into the humanity — or the inhumanity — of this phenomenon. It is perhaps the job of the novelist, who passes through the register of empathy, to awaken consciences, to concretize the crime and its consequences. »
This is not a news item adds to a long line of reflections on death, mourning and guilt that make up the work of Philippe Besson, since His brother (Julliard, 2001) up to Paris-Briancon (2022), via stop with your lies (2017). “I lived my youth in the 1980s. I have many friends who were 20 years old and who never turned 25. I write books to give a presence to the absent, to avenge an injustice that is that of absence, to dissect the great violence and the great concrete powers of mourning, which binds us to existence. To understand the price of life, one must have seen death. »