Neoliberalism–in its most basic terms, the resurgence with a vengeance in the West of laissez-faire economics after nearly fifty years of Keynesian regulation–took hold in France somewhat later than in the US and the UK. Nevertheless, by 1998 French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was denouncing in “L’Esprit du néoliberalisme” the ideology’s inexorable but nearly imperceptible creep into contemporary society, with its will to suppress all attempts at collective resistance. In 1999 French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello exposed the psychological toll the new management techniques of “cool” capitalism were exacting on workers, who were now called upon to internalize the neoliberal values of individualism, competition, and profit at the expense of previously held beliefs in the benefits of solidarity, cooperation, and service. More recently, in Suicide Voices: Labour Trauma in France (2020), Sarah Waters takes a more textual approach to the question of neoliberalism’s reach by examining testimonies surrounding the unprecedented spate of workplace suicides in France between 2005 and 2015. In the book she exposes the deadly price paid by some employees for the assault on their values, identities, and sense of worth that the privatization and neoliberal restructuring of their companies waged. Sharing an approach closer to that of this panel, Sonya Florey’s and Jérôme Meizoz’s L’Engagement littéraire à l’ère néolibérale (2017) assembles essays on French novels over the last forty years that chronicle the neoliberal transformation of both blue- and white-collar workplaces and that critique its deleterious effects on individual psyches and social cohesion. Papers in this session, however, will explore novels that treat neoliberalism’s effects beyond the workplace per se and that therefore reveal the tolls neoliberalism exacts in other areas of everyday life, such as the home, the family, romantic love and sex, and leisure. The session aims to introduce participants to a number of contemporary French novelists who portray everyday life in France as increasingly infiltrated by the inexorable logic of the market, which leaves no stone unturned in its quest to instrumentalize and rationalize all human interaction. Each panelist will present a “rapid-fire” (8-minute) overview of their paper (which will be made available in advance of the convention) in order to elicit a robust discussion of the particularities of neoliberalism in the French context and of contemporary French writers’ reactions to it.

In his paper, Grant argues that François Maspero and Anaïk Frantz’s representation in Les Passagers du Roissy-Express (1990) of the infrastructural and architectural geography of the peripheral banlieues exposes how the state prioritizes the flow of capital over the flow of individuals and how this neoliberalization of the urban space renders chance encounters nearly impossible. Williams, while acknowledging that celebrity novelist Michel Houellebecq and his work are emphatically products of capital, argues that his fiction concurrently belies a latent “strangeness,” which challenges the flatness of postmodernity and suggests that the contemporary novel can be a site of resistance to the ever-tightening grip of homogenizing capitalistic thinking. On the other hand, Sweeney examines how the satirical objectives of Houellebecq’s writing–the critique of late neoliberal capitalism insofar as it affects intimacy and affect–continues to function as a tolerable alibi for the anti-feminism and, increasingly, misogyny in his novels. Also focusing on representations of women, Murray argues that Leila Slimani’s 2016 novel Chanson Douce, a thriller about a Parisian family and their unsettlingly “perfect” nanny, maps gendered and uneven patterns of care (from pressures for economically privileged woman to conform to the “neoliberal maternal,” to the often poorly remunerated and precarious conditions of working class and racialized women) in order to critique the effects of neoliberal policies on care work. In his presentation, Armstrong maintains that both Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex trilogy (2015-2017) and Philippe Vasset’s La conjuration (2013) explicitly reject the neoliberal status quo by proposing alternative lifestyles that allow characters to escape from competition and hyper-individualism. He cautions, however, that each expresses that lifestyle with tropes of abstraction, mobility, weightlessness, and connection–precisely those that neoliberalism deploys in its cult to free-market capital. Finally, Willging analyses Antoine Bello’s Roman américain (2014), a meticulous exploration of the relatively new “life settlement” industry, in which anonymous stakeholders purchase life-insurance policies from aging or ill holders and then eagerly await their death to collect the payout. The novel reveals the corrupting influence of such a blatant financialization of human life on the countless number of individuals who benefit monetarily but suffer morally from their participation in it.