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Journalist and feminist, Élise Thiébaut offers with my ancestors the Gauloises, An autobiography of France, a deeply vital and impertinent book, dizzying erudition and narrative virtuosity.

" I am French. These are the first words of this unclassifiable work which immediately undertakes not to deconstruct, but to dissect the fiction that is expressed in this simple formula. Thus the " I " disappears very quickly to give way to a family autobiography and the elusive essence of the metaphysical " being " appears therein in all that the hazards of a birth, a genealogy and a childhood did it. As for " Frenchness ", the author reminds us that she agrees with the feminine in her case and that this double belonging tells another story, made of conquered rights and inequalities always present.

When our DNA tells the world

These supposedly " Gaulish " roots, it also questions them by the yardstick of one of those DNA tests banned in France, but easily accessible online via American sites, to which she chose to entrust a little saliva for him In return, it offers a great breeding ground for the imagination. The one that specifies from the outset probably belong to these French and French considered of origin, there is discovered as each one of the nomadic ancestries of which it makes as many invitations to the voyage. It does not take much more for his family romance and national circumnavigate the world.

To tell the story of France, but also the " genre ", the " race ", the Amazons, the skin color, whose history, she reminds us, dates back only a few thousand years, Élise Thiébaut arises less as a historian than opening up potential narratives, able to connect the recent news and its Neanderthal ancestors. If she likes the digression, it is however never gratuitous and one can not blame him if the puzzle that is emerging goes far beyond the narrow limits of the hexagon. And when it comes to archives, it is with the rigor of a documentary filmmaker that it exploits its subject.

It must be said that, like so many others, his family closets are full of funny stories or painful, shameful or secretly heroic. To tell us about the war in Algeria, she searched the correspondence of a father who had preceded the call to be sure not to finish at the front - his brother already there - with a friend of his age, we Guessed brave and tolerant, but did not have the chance to escape this tragedy. In a few letters, the trajectory of 20 years old in the Aurès , when a young cultivated man, lulled to universalist ideals, turns into a fatalist and disempowered executioner.

Any story is a fiction

Going further in her family tree, the author takes us to the side of the " cocottes " of Belle-Époque - a social phenomenon that connects to the myth of " seduction in the French ", which she shows in passing any the hypocrisy - of a great-uncle, collaborator and Catholic fundamentalist, of a great-hearted grandfather who saved a little girl from drowning at the risk of her life. So many drawn threads that take us from Lorraine to Marseille, from Brittany to Paris, but also beyond the seas, to the slave trade and the colonial past in Africa and Asia.

If his book does not claim to provide an objective summary of the history of France, it shows us on the other hand how much this story is first of all a construction, and therefore a fiction. On the way, she nonetheless provides a perfect snapshot of the debates that cross the French intellectual world today, attacking with unusual verve the supporters of "national identity", from Eric Zemmour to Renaud Camus . By pushing the paradox, one can always greet a pure manifestation of the French "spirit", a biting irony that would be basically the verbal transposition of the quarrelsome fever of the duellists of the seventeenth century.

It would be however without counting without the tenderness and the deep humanism that live in her family portraits, that the author took care to gather in a photographic patchwork on the cover of her book. If we feel a visceral intolerance for stupidity and exclusion, we feel it inhabited by an acute sense of justice and contagious empathy, though devoid of the slightest naivety. Contempters of "good-thinking" will always be able to return.

Élise Thiébaut, My ancestors the Gauls, An autobiography of France , The Discovery, collection "Cahiers libres", September 2019. 18 €