‘Act of family vengeance’: French defamation case highlights perils of writing autofiction | France

TPolish poet Czesław Miłosz famously said: “When a writer is born into a family, the family ends.” In contemporary European literature these days a book is often the beginning of a family quarrel. Subtly disguised autobiographical accounts of domestic strife, which are constantly booming across the continent, may increasingly lead to family reunions in courtrooms.

Such was the case with the French historian Cécile Desprairies; On Wednesday, she was sued for defamation by her brother and cousin over the depiction of her late mother and great-uncle in her 2024 novel La Propagandiste.

“The author’s resentment towards the targeted individuals permeates the entire work, and it is perceived as a literal act of family revenge,” the plaintiffs said in their legal complaint. They claimed there was a “lack of evidence” that the novel’s main subject, a woman, collaborated with the Nazis, and they wanted the book to be withdrawn from the market and sold cheaply.

In the novel, which was longlisted for the Prix Goncourt in 2023 and praised in the Guardian as “an intelligent and lively book” according to Natasha Lehrer’s English translation, narrator Coline tells the story of her morphine-addict mother Lucie, who was engaged in her first marriage to a designer of propaganda posters and “a committed Nazi” during the Vichy occupation.

Although the author rejected the book’s classification as a “roman à clef” (a novel in which real people can masquerade as fiction), he did not hide that it was inspired by his own childhood. “Most of the heroes I could draw inspiration from were dead, so there is freedom of expression,” he told French television in 2023.

Desprairies’s book can be grouped within the genre of life literature that French writer and literary critic Serge Doubrovsky called autofiction, a hybrid that he coined in 1977 as a hybrid of autobiography and experimental fiction, and which has appeared on bestseller lists in the last decade through Italian writer Elena Ferrante’s My Beautiful Friend and Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle.

Autofiction often focuses on painful or traumatic childhood experiences. From a legal perspective, “the problem is that it is very difficult to write about your own experience without touching the experiences of others,” said Larissa Muraveva, a researcher at the University of Grenoble Alpes.

Knausgård, whose six-volume series My Struggle often deals with his difficult relationship with his alcoholic father, was threatened with a libel lawsuit by his uncle before the publication of the first volume. In 2018, Bergen National Theater faced libel threats over its stage adaptation of an autofiction novel written by Vigdis Hjorth’s own mother.

These threats never materialized in court, and families depicted in Norwegian autofiction tended to find satisfactory punishment through creative means rather than through legal channels. Knausgård’s ex-wife, Linda Boström Knausgård, published a novel that countered her ex-lover’s fictional account of their separation, while Hjorth’s sister Helga and her ex-lover Arild Linneberg, who is said to be a literary critic, wrote their own “counter novels”.

Melissa Schuh, a lecturer in English literature at the University of Kiel in Germany, said: “The suspicion that some critics have towards writers of autofiction is that it allows you to have it both ways. In the context of fiction writing, it frees you from the constraints of established genre conventions and gives your writing an air of possible originality. From a nonfiction writing perspective, autofiction allows you to use the tools of literary fiction creatively, but it also inoculates you to some extent against potential legal action.”

In France, however, novelization was less successful in protecting seemingly autobiographical accounts from court proceedings, and this may have encouraged Desprairies’s relatives.

In 2013, leading autofiction author Christine Angot and her publisher Flammarion were ordered to jointly pay €40,000 in damages for the invasion of privacy of her lover’s ex-partner in her novel Les Petits. Another writer, Camille Laurens, was sued by her husband for using her daughter’s name in the novel L’Amour Roman in 2003, but she won the case.

Natalie Edwards, professor of French and head of the department of modern languages ​​at the University of Bristol, said: “It’s remarkable that there’s a huge memoir boom in the US, faced with a very combative culture, but we haven’t seen as many legal disputes as in France. In France, a very vague law on privacy faced a very vague writing style.”

In Desprairies’ case, the situation is different; his relatives are suing him not for invasion of privacy, but for “public insult to the memory of the dead.” British lawyer Mark Stephens, who specializes in media law, intellectual property and freedom of expression, believes that they should not get their hopes up on this issue.

“The law on freedom of the press dated July 29, 1881, which defines insult in France, only protects the privacy rights of living people,” he said. “Descendants cannot sue to dishonor a family unless they can convince the court that their reputation has been damaged.”

In his defense, Desprairies’ lawyer argued that connecting the book’s story to the author’s living relatives would require “excessive knowledge of genealogy or a power of prophecy not possessed by readers.”

Stephens said: “On the face of it, his arguments seem quite weak, if not impossible. French courts will be slow to silence a novelist who reveals disturbing truths. Family pride worsens the law, and even worse literature.”

The decision in the case is expected to be given on March 17.