FRANCE: A group of French intellectuals, including Nobel laureate in literature Annie Ernaux, urged people to participate in protests scheduled by the left for the following week, accusing President Emmanuel Macron of not doing enough to assist the poor in coping with high prices while some businesses reap windfall profits.
In a letter that was published in the Journal Du Dimanche, a group of 69 signatories, including authors, film directors, and university professors, said that “Emmanuel Macron is exploiting inflation to expand the wealth divide, to raise capital income at the expense of the rest.”
The letter, which was co-signed by Annie Ernaux, the first Frenchwoman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday, stated that “it is all a matter of political will.”
According to the text, the government has not done enough to combat rising energy costs and has refrained from raising taxes on businesses that generate windfall gains due to excessive inflation.
Despite the fact that French inflation has increased significantly this year, primarily as a result of the conflict in Ukraine, it has decreased significantly in recent months as a result of the government’s implementation of policies like a gas price freeze, food checks, and special pump price subsidies.
The hard-left France Unbowed party, which this year joined forces with more moderate left-wing parties to form an alliance to become France’s largest opposition group, organised a protest march, and the signatories issued a call to action encouraging people to take part in it. On October 16, a protest march is expected.
The protest, which France Unbowed is promoting as being “against the high cost of living and climate inaction,” comes as Macron is encountering fierce opposition from unions over a proposed pension reform and as strikes by workers calling for a pay increase have disrupted the economy in a number of sectors, including retail and refineries.
About Annie Ernaux:
The French author Annie Ernaux has been meticulously analysing the most embarrassing, private, and scandalous parts of her life for decades. In her 1997 autobiography, “Shame,” Annie Ernaux declared, “I shall carry out an ethnological study of myself.”
She received the Nobel Prize on Thursday for her body of work, one of literature’s highest awards. She has discussed her upbringing in a small Normandy town, an illegal abortion she had in the 1960s, her dissatisfaction with domestic life, and a passionate extramarital affair.
The Swedish Academy cited Ernaux, 82, as having “consistently and from different aspects explored a life characterised by substantial differences regarding gender, language, and class” in giving her the Nobel prize.
Her writing has particularly spoken to women and to others who, like her, come from a working class rarely depicted with such clarity in literature.
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