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Writer Pierre Guyotat, laureate of the Prix Médicis 2018 for "Idiotie", published by Grasset. Philippe Lopez / AFP

On Tuesday, November 6th, the Prix Médicis jury members awarded Pierre Guyotat the Prix Médicis for his novel "Idiotie". In this autobiographical account of an author accustomed to controversy around his books, Guyotat plunges us into Paris in the 1950s and in the Algerian war.

He devoted his life to writing and marked French literature. The award-winning text paints the genesis of the youth and poetry of this author, born in 1940, in Bourg-Argental, in a family very committed to the Resistance and in free France.

The story of Idiotie takes place between 1958 and 1962. Pierre Guyotat describes his entry into adulthood, after his years of youth told in Formation and Background . We witness his arrival in the capital, still minor, after running away from Lyon, one year after the death of his mother. He sleeps under the Alma bridge. In long passages, it resuscitates in a dazzling way the Paris of yesteryear today: the streets, neighborhoods, banks of the Seine and women's bodies ...

" Eat on the sly, change neighborhoods ; return to Les Halles ; waste, vegetables, meat, everywhere, on the stalls, the healthiest on, the least safe underneath ; around the kiosks, traveling glaciers, open cornets - we pick them up, in croquons ; the hunger of one or two days reinforces the senses, the will ... "

Idiocy or the questioning of reality

For Pierre Guyotat, idiocy is not a question of intelligence, but the questioning of the real to enter into rebellion through the arts and words: " My rebellions then and their consequences : fugue hunger, theft, remorse, wanderings, military coups and prisons, bodily manifestations of this kind of refusal of the imposed reality : we will find here some remarkable scenes. "

We plunge with him in his revolt against the war of Algeria, the rapes, the tortures, the massacres, to share at the same time the fate of the Algerians and the soldiers sent by France before living the tragic return of the French of Algeria in the hexagon. He himself had been in Algeria since 1961. In March 1962, he was sentenced to three months' imprisonment because of the morale of the army.

Author of fiction, he has built his worlds with words and constructions of phrases of his own. His ultimate goal: to think the world and in particular the human being without limits. Hence also his support for committees of soldiers, immigrants or prostitutes ... His experiences of several nervous breakdowns and coma - transformed into literature with his book Coma , published in 2006 and crowned by the December award - allowed him to to transform his tongue from within, beyond the perceptible.

Writing and forbidden

His career as a writer was always punctuated by scandals and taboos. It begins with Tombeau for five hundred thousand soldiers where he mixes scenes of war and sex between men, work rejected at the time by the editions of Seuil, before being published by the Gallimard editions in 1967. Three years later, Eden, Eden, Eden misses a price close to the price Medici and will be further prohibited (until 1981) by the Ministry of the Interior to display, advertising and sale to minors. This, despite the support of personalities like Pasolini, Sartre, Boulez or Beys or Simone de Beauvoir ...

After receiving the 2010 National Library of France Award for all of his work, the Prix Médicis today pays tribute to one of the most illustrious writers of French literature.

► Read also: The Femina Prize awarded to a survivor, Philippe Lançon, for "Le Lambeau" , rfi, 5/11/2018