The Novel of French Deindustrialisation and Decline by Nicolas Mathieu

This paper will focus on describing the sociological aspects of the changes undergone by the world of work and industry in France at the turn of the 21st century, based on a social and labour reading of Nicolas Mathieu’s novels Aux animaux la guerre (2014), now adapted for the cinema, and Leurs Enfants après eux (2018). In the context of contemporary French narrative fiction, Mathieu’s poetics, following in the footsteps of Émile Zola or, closer to home, Annie Ernaux, but also in the wake of the whole tradition of the proletarian novel, are characterised by a concern to revive the characterisation of the world of work in its profound crisis engendered by deindustrialisation, globalisation, relocation and the ideological and programmatic mutations of the French left, and the Western left in general. We will see how this author, who often goes against the grain of the dominant doxa that devalues, marginalizes and even scorns this theme, brings it out into the open, thereby exposing all the socio-political aporias of our time, and of France in particular, by painting a sociological portrait that has been forgotten or ignored.