The red and the black: Marie-Noëlle Thibault and the novels of Dominique Manotti

Abstract

Dominique Manotti’s novels are informed by her experiences before she adopted this pen name and began writing fiction. As an instructor at Vincennes, a union leader and a militant with Les Cahiers de mai, Marie-Noëlle Thibault practised forms of political action aimed at empowering students and workers. She saw the possibilities for social change these promoted lost with the transformation of France during the presidency of François Mitterrand. Though Manotti continues to use methods she learned in Les Cahiers de mai and related projects, she adopted the roman noir to depict the self-reproducing nature of contemporary society which has displaced the world of participatory democracy to which she had devoted herself. Aware of France’s troubled recent past, she is less confident than Didier Daeninckx that revelation of it will weaken the powers that be.