‘I’d like to thank the academy’ – Social mobility,education and literary form

Abstract

This article analyses the entanglements of sociological research on social mobility and autosociobiographies (class-transition narratives) in France. This emerging and very successful genre has, since Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims, established itself as a literary form. Drawing on recent autosociobiographies from sociologists, I discuss the critical contribution made by those that came in the wake of Eribon to the ongoing debate on upward mobility via education and ‘widening participation’ campaigns within elite French universities. The article demonstrates that central elements of the debate, such as the figure of the ‘scholarship boy/girl’ and the costs of such efforts – most notably, psychosocial uprooting – are shaped both by sociology and literature. While literature’s renewed interest in class and social inequality demonstrates the critical potential and impact of the genre, my study also interrogates the consequences and risks of the boom in autosociobiography: namely the showcasing of individual success-through-education and the danger of the genre being perceived as an academic one, since it is mainly academics (sociologists inclusive) who feel such a narrative ‘transclass’ desire.

Introduction

In 2021, the French left-wing online magazine with the telling title Frustration published a long review on the genre of ‘class defector stories’ (‘récits de transfuges de classe’), written by a class defector himself. It reads as follows:

The story of a class defector always begins with an origin story [. . .]. Behind a veil of discretion quickly drawn by the author, we discover the modesty of a milieu, the paucity of everyday life, the difficulty of growing up [. . .]. Note that in this first part, the shame is not yet there [. . .] The shame only appears as a by-product of the discrepancy addressed in the second part. The one about the individual dispositions towards school. Unbeknownst to the class defectors, the gap between them and their classmates is widened by the value of their work and the excellence of their grades. They begin to dream of somewhere else; the others don’t. Year after year, it becomes more difficult for them to talk to their childhood friends, who – spoiler alert – will remain in the neighbourhood after they leave. Then a decisive encounter ends the old life. The outstretched hand of a benevolent adult changes their destiny forever. Almost always a man from the teaching profession [. . .]. With the wave of a magic wand, the good fairy propels the defector to their true place: Paris. The ascent [. . ..] to Paris [. . .] crowns their efforts. They enter a Grande École after passing a competitive entrance exam or thanks to a special parallel access procedure [. . .]. But at what price? In this part of the story, the discrepancy and shame reach stratospheric levels [. . .] (Boulet, 2021). ¹

‘Class defector’ or transclass ² narratives have experienced an expansion in terms of both numbers and subject matter and are discussed more broadly today under the term autosociobiography (Blome et al., 2022; Spoerhase, 2017). Whereas this genre is generally considered to trigger a strong desire for imitation, its effect on the ‘class defector’ journalist cited above is a different one. After initial identification, he quite obviously rejects the literary phenomenon. For all its polemics, his article does more than to discredit; what can be ridiculed has reached a certain stability. The form’s core elements appear to be first of all the so-called cleft habitus (‘habitus clivé’) of the autobiographical I, resulting from the painful ‘mismatch’ (Friedman, 2016: 131) of a primary, stable set of dispositions and newly obtained dispositions during one’s own upward trajectory. This element structures the plot and narrative perspective, and it determines the affective economy of the text and draws a line between the worlds that only the class defector is able to traverse. Another defining element of the form is the institutional trajectory of its protagonist: their itinerary is rhythmized by educational institutions, mainly from provincial schools to elite universities (mostly concentrated in Paris in the French case). The happy ending often coincides with the protagonist having reached a certain level within academia. The respective endings of Édouard Louis’s The End of Eddy and Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims, bestselling autosociobiographies, prove to be, despite all critical reflection, apotheoses of academic and educational success. ³

However, journalists are not the only ones asking critical questions about this successful new genre. Recently, researchers have taken a more differentiated view of the genre acclaimed by critics, pointing out, for example, that the literary portrayal of an individual life cannot be fitted into the categories and politics of social class without contradiction (Lammers and Twellmann, 2023; Spoerhase, 2017), and that the aim of many authors to ‘avenge [their own] class’ (Ernaux, 2011: 550) seems to run counter to the literary portrayal of an upward social mobility (Véron and Abiven, 2024). The fact that a genre has now developed a ‘canvas’ (Véron and Abiven, 2024: 197) that can be recognised, criticised and parodied also means that authors are able to work with that canvas, adapt and change it. The present article will analyse the ongoing evolution of the genre, taking as an example the case of France, where the autosociobiography is extremely successful and centred on the narrative of a socially mobile individual. The contemporary French literary field is characterised, on the one hand, by a close association between literature and the social sciences. On the other hand, the recent boom in class-transition narratives has its origins in France. This makes France a particularly interesting case for the study of autosociobiography; the French literary market is at the same time representative with regard to its influence on other European countries and a special case because of the importance of its intellectual and academic agents.

It is therefore interesting to see autosociobiographers themselves commenting on the genre more recently. Annie Ernaux, a French Nobel Prize winner and author of a dozen autosociobiographical accounts, and Rose-Marie Lagrave, a former sociologist at the EHESS Paris and autosociobiographer, ask themselves whether the genre is really that new, apart from the thickness and vividness of lived experience itself. Lagrave states that her own account has only validated what ‘historians and sociologists have established ever since, namely that merit or meritocracy is a myth’ and that this myth ‘served to highlight the figure of the scholarship boy’ (Ernaux and Lagrave, 2023: 78). In the often-enthusiastic reception and the political relevance attributed to the genre because of its depiction of social mobility and its promotion of awareness of class issues, some authors feel the need to remind us of the non-identity of (sociological) research and autosociobiography. Thus, a sociologist much attached to the genre warns that ‘retrospective accounts by elder people are no substitute for ethnographic observation of social mobility in the making’ (Pasquali, 2021 [2014]: 13).

My aim in the following will be, first, to shed light on the connection between sociological research on social mobility and the literary genre of autosociobiography. How does the genre depict social mobility, and does it translate sociological insights into life stories and literature? I assume that autosociobiographies, especially in France, are closely linked to academia, but cannot be equated with ethnographic and sociological research on class. The genre has its roots in literature. It emerged at a time when the lived experience of class transitions was not a focus of sociological research (Pasquali, 2021 [2014]). This contribution therefore aims, second, to examine the genre’s popularity, which cannot be reduced to its sociological insights but seems to stem from its literary form, the most important elements of which are the firsthand account of an ‘I’ as well as the retrospective temporality of the narrative. Unlike observations of ‘social mobility in the making’, autosociobiographies offer a different perspective; they tell the story of social mobility as a personal and educational experience. The autobiographical form assumes an identity between the author, the narrator and the self. However, it simultaneously posits that after their ‘ascension’, the ‘I’ is a converted, different self than before. While the core form of autosociobiographies has been established, one can see their ongoing development in recent works. First, the affect economy of the socially mobile protagonist and the scholarship boy/girl figure seem to change and develop. The figure – and the process of figuration – are formal devices that help organise the narrative, its tonality and its time structure. The scholarship boy figure serves to construct and mediate between polarised worlds – ‘bottom’ and ‘top’ – and a dual, ambivalent tonality of heroic emancipation and shameful uprooting. However, as form theory posits, the figure is not static but processual, capable of change and of absorbing new social material (Auerbach, 2016: 126). Second, one can observe a growing academisation of the form in France. Since the shape of the very form also depends on the findings of critical sociological and historical research, academics are susceptible to being particularly interested in forming the form. In the past years, it was mainly French sociologists with a working-class background who felt a narrative desire to tell their story of social mobility. In the second part of this article, I will thus focus on three recent examples from within a wider range of publications: Gilles Moreau’s (2022) S’asseoir et se regarder passer, Rose-Marie Lagrave’s (2021) Se ressaisir and Norbert Alter’s (2022) Sans classe ni place. All are autosociobiographies written by sociologists in the realm of Eribon. The first part of the article is dedicated to the recent historical conjunctures of the literary genre and research conducted on the experience of social mobility. How does the boom of autosociobiography fit in with an ongoing debate on social mobility, and what roles can be attributed to the genre against the backdrop of these debates? My article thus also aims to explore the social relevance and impact of autosociobiography, a key question for academia, as class memoirs are part of a larger success of autotheoretical and autofictional literature informed and influenced by academia. This article aims to analyse if and how contemporary French autosociobiography translates and transforms sociological knowledge about social mobility into literary form, and how the genre evolves between social critique and academic self-reflection.

Historical conjunctures: educational campaigns, sociological research and literary tradition

The Parisian elite school ‘Sciences Po’ was the first university to start a widening participation (‘ouverture sociale’) campaign in 2001. After the riots that hit France in 2005, political debate within the elites took off, and more elite institutions implemented measures to allow broader and more diverse parts of the population to gain access. The French sociologist Pasquali stated in 2014: ‘for a decade now, one and the same keyword: ouverture sociale’ (Pasquali, 2021 [2014]: 8). However, political debates focused and often still focus significantly on sole access to the most prestigious institutions, which are all located in Paris and thus reinforce the novelistic myth of Paris as the unique destination for the young and ambitious trying their luck. And indeed, elite education in France is highly centralised both geographically, in Paris, and institutionally, in the elite schools ENS, INSP (formerly ENA) or IEP/Sciences Po. Yet, the real effects of the measures introduced are controversial. Beaud and Convert (2010: 5) criticise that the widening participation campaign of the French government was above all a strategy to exploit the ‘media value of the question’, thus masking what is really at stake in the democratisation of elite schools.

The fact that it was primarily communication strategies and not social classes that were mobilised by these campaigns bears consequences for the relationship that I want to highlight in the following between education, politics and literature. Where communicative strategies come to the fore, individual stories of upward mobility through education gain significance and attention. Elite universities themselves are interested in being seen as ‘factories’ of ‘transclasses’ (Bras and Jaquet, 2018). When working-class graduates of elite universities publish literary testimonies about their trajectory, they may unintentionally fit into public communication strategies, depending on how critically they reflect on their own careers at educational institutions. The case of the French journalist and autosociobiographer Nesrine Slaoui is compelling in this respect. Her video-interview in the online magazine Brut on her own trajectory that led her to ‘Sciences Po’ Paris was viewed 16 million times in one year. ⁴ Subsequently, Slaoui (2021) published her autosociobiography Illégitimes. In the videoclip, she is filmed in the very rooms of the elite university. At the end, she calls on ‘her’ people not to remain in their milieu but to move up (Brut, 2019: min 3:40). Her video thus ends on a relatively confident note, despite its title subject: only 4 percent of the graduates of the ‘grandes écoles’ are the children of unskilled workers. The message of the video is not a comprehensive criticism of the system but a call to ‘climb the stairs’ if the ‘social elevator is broken’ (Brut, 2019: min 3:58). Behind the figure of the child from popular origins, another social figure appears here: the ‘boursier’ or scholarship girl. Slaoui’s case shows that the public debate on social mobility in relation to educational institutions brings together two dimensions: quantitative data on access to or acquisition of diplomas at elite universities, with the ‘boursier’ as a political aim and an administrative category, ⁵ and the literary and media figure of the scholarship boy. By shifting the focus away from the numbers and towards her personal experience of her educational journey from the ‘quartiers populaires’ to the elite institution, Slaoui exemplifies a renewed interest in France and elsewhere in the cultural and personal dimensions of social mobility, as seen in autosociobiography in general. Contemporary sociology, while underscoring the distinctions between the respective fields, is progressively acknowledging the significance of autosociobiographical literature for its own academic domain (Hugrée, 2025; Truong, 2025). French sociologists, including Paul Pasquali, have assumed an editorial role or have contributed prefaces to the publication of such autosociobiographical texts. Facing the relative scarcity of actual social mobility within academia, Pasquali (2018: 93) emphasises that one needs to focus less on the perspective ‘from above’ (a statistical analysis of a potential ‘renewal of the French elite’) than on the perspective ‘from below’, the individual ‘crossing of social frontiers experienced by a minority of children’ from the working classes. ⁶

In this respect, literature can offer a valuable perspective to sociologists interested in the perspective ‘from below’. The social mobility of individuals and their journey through institutions have been a core theme of autosociobiographical literature since the 1980s, when Annie Ernaux published La Place. This novel genre of autobiographical literature in France has, in turn, drawn inspiration from seminal works such as Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (Ducornau, 2017; Pasquali and Schwartz, 2016; Passeron, 2007) and the sociology of Bourdieu, Passeron and Grignon. However, the density of lived experience, of popular culture and a personal style of writing draw on a rich literary tradition dating back to the 19th century. With regard to scholarship boys, Spoerhase (2022) has shown that their lived experience is mediated and nourished by literary works. This is also true of France and the corresponding tradition of distinguishing between ‘héritiers’ (‘heirs’) and ‘boursiers’ (‘scholarship boys’), stemming from the literary critic Albert Thibaudet, that was only subsequently taken over by Bourdieu. Thibaudet drew his distinction from the great realist novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries, those of Stendhal, Paul Nizan, André Gide, Maurice Barrès or Charles Maurras, all of which anchored both figures of ‘class defectors’ (‘transfuges de classe’) and figures of the uprooted (‘déracinés’) deeply in the collective cultural memory in France. It is therefore highly significant that more than one hundred years after Thibaudet, today’s social theory relies once again on examples from literature and on literary figures. Thus, Jaquet (2014: 14), reflecting on the ‘transclass’ as an exception to the rule of social reproduction, cites first and foremost, ‘Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir’ and ‘Black Boy by Richard Wright’, before emphasising the importance of ‘auto-sociobiographical accounts’: Ernaux, Eribon, Hoggart. Forging the innovative concept of the ‘transclass’, Jaquet avoids the negative connotations of the traitor and deserter attached to the notion of ‘defector’ or ‘transfuge’. Nevertheless, her influential analysis remains predominantly in the realm of literature and privileges negative affects as the ‘motor’ of any transclass trajectory, a perspective strongly influenced by the novelistic tradition cited above. ⁷ The transclass, be it Richard Wright, Eribon or Ernaux, incarnates uprooting, humiliation and shame. This kind of ‘writing’, according to Jaquet (2023: 55), ‘is born out of [. . .] pain’.

An interim conclusion can be drawn: autosociobiography appears to gain new functions due to the French debate on ‘widening participation’ and on social mobility in general. A literary form that most of the time represents the upward trajectory of an individual, coming from a provincial area and ending in Paris, coming from a working-class milieu and ending at an (elite) university, quite fits into a broader debate about the accessibility of the most prestigious institutions in the country, a debate marked by the efforts of public relations strategies, that is, narrative and medial measures, and less so by statistically verifiable successes of social permeability in the institutions. It itself becomes the subject of political questions. ⁸ The rapidly growing number of literary accounts on class change ⁹ occurs at a time when collective upward mobility is no longer a given and is becoming a contested issue. The precise correlation between stories of social upward mobility and an era of widespread lack of social mobility is too complex to address here. However, it is evident that autosociobiography as a popular genre, and with it certain core elements of autobiography and the novel, contributes to shape public debate and ideas on social mobility. If the genre is receiving significant attention in the present day as part of a broader discussion on class, populism and minorities, it should be noted that its function is not limited to the political or sociological. Literary genres have inherent logics that extend beyond the representation of social reality. The way we tell stories about social class is decisively shaped by what Caroline Levine (2015: 6) has termed the ‘affordance of form’: the potential actions, possibilities and constraints relating to a specific literary or social form that can be realised in different contexts. With its still central figures, the scholarship boy/girl and the transclass, ¹⁰ certain narrative structures migrate into the texts and thus – potentially – in our public debates, namely a rigid class boundary (in the continuity of Hoggart’s dichotomy between ‘us’ and ‘them’), as well as the risks of ‘dolorism’, as Bronner (2023) polemically puts it, that is, the equating of upward social mobility with psychosocial uprooting as it is depicted in Nizan, Stendhal or Wright.

A distinctive feature of recent autosociobiography is its close association with academia, particularly in France. Anyone looking at the list of new publications in the field of autosociobiography will notice that sociologists themselves are increasingly and productively shaping the genre. What happens to the ‘generic code’ of autosociobiography when sociologists take up the pen and subtly incorporate their own research into literature? This raises complex questions about the relationship between literature and sociology, as well as the relevance of literary artefacts beyond those identified by Levine. One such question concerns the demarcation of distinct and autonomous fields of writing in general. To address these questions, I will analyse three recent autosociobiographies by sociologists. I will focus particularly on possible changes in the representation of the ‘scholarship boy/girl’ figure and its affective economy as well as on the implications of the representation of social mobility as a mobility within and driven by academic institutions.

Three transclass sociologists take up the pen: Lagrave, Moreau and Alter

In 2021, Rose-Marie Lagrave presented Se ressaisir: Enquête autobiographique d’une transfuge de classe féministe (‘Piecing yourself together: An autobiographical investigation of a feminist class defector’), a meticulous examination of her own trajectory. As a Catholic working-class girl from the countryside, she grew up with 13 siblings who all managed to ‘move up’. She eventually became a sociology professor at the prestigious EHESS in Paris. Her account differs radically from those that preceded it: namely, that of Bourdieu, her own teacher, with Sketch for a Self-Analysis, as well as the already mentioned autosociobiographies by Eribon and Louis. First, Lagrave accuses her male predecessors of ‘analytical blindness to the effects of [their] gendered habitus’ (Lagrave, 2021: 17). Second, the real topic of Se ressaisir is not her own life but the institutions (family, school, church, university) that shaped her. Starting with the family, Lagrave describes these institutions in historical depth. Writing against a heroic scheme of emancipation, the gaze of the sociological observer is constantly diverted away from the self and towards the various actors in the school system, such as the elementary school teachers and the village school and boarding school staff. Lagrave wants to disenchant her readers: she openly admits her status as a scholarship girl but opposes both the clichés of the figure and the process of figuration itself: ‘Against the figure of the meritorious scholarship girl, I would like to examine the way in which the school works with these students’ (Lagrave, 2021: 174). There is one exception to the prohibition of figuration, however. Rejecting Bourdieu’s term of the ‘miraculé’ (‘miracle case’), which also characterises Eribon’s and Louis’ accounts, she adopts the term ‘oblate’. ¹¹ The oblate designates a person who owes everything to the institution they work for and grew in so that the institution can in turn give them credit for their faithful service. Acknowledging her own dominated role within the EHESS and subverting as well as appropriating the pejorative term ‘oblate’, Lagrave breaks with what one might call the ‘male imaginary of upward social mobility’: the unexplained yet painful miracle of success, the break with one’s family, the world as resistance. Most importantly, however, Lagrave does not reclaim a cleft habitus, unlike Annie Ernaux or Pierre Bourdieu. This may be due not only to personal dispositions that differ from her peers but to the long work and research she has conducted on her own biography. By reporting on the mechanisms of her trajectory in far more detail than her peers and critically scrutinising each stage of her career and life, Lagrave reduces her emotional identification as a writer with painful episodes (such as her difficult start at the EHESS) and negative feelings during her past trajectory. She insists on the possible adjustments of the ‘lasting effects of a very large gap between high academic achievement and low social extraction’ (Lagrave, 2021: 385). Not only has Lagrave never broken with her milieu and her family, but her brother’s disability and her father’s illness prevented her from developing distance and shame (Lagrave, 2021: 386). She also sees and presents herself as a good student of sociology and feminism: ‘The more I mastered sociological thought and incorporated a political and feminist understanding of the world, the more I understood, without justifying them, the material conditions and effects that had shaped my parents into coercive ascendants’ (Lagrave, 2021: 387). Lagrave’s meticulous account seeks to reject figurations and narrative templates in favour of a differentiation of affects and the role of institutions for her own trajectory. Nevertheless, the figure of the scholarship boy with its affective economy and the template of an upward trajectory remain ex negativo the productive foundations of this project. Her autobiographical account also illustrates the constraints and potential of form. Lagrave’s narrative self-reflectively addresses the pitfalls of a first-person perspective and of narratives in general. For the author, ‘agreeing to say “I” is a sign of a re-evaluating the practices of the sociologist’s profession [. . .] and more importantly, a rebellion against the paternal precept prohibiting any inclination towards singularisation [. . .] a pronominal rebellion’ (Lagrave, 2021: 20). Multiple references to scientific prose try to shift the focus from the self to the institutions (Lagrave, 2021: 170). However, the ‘I’ does not escape figuration. Se ressaisir transcends the heroic emancipation narrative of the proletarian male to create yet another figure through which the social material finds a form: the caring woman from the provinces. In the chapter ‘Frère Saint-Claude’, which presents her disabled brother as a modern, provincial saint, Lagrave reveals her awareness of the tradition she is continuing and rewriting. She reactivates and subverts a kind of Flaubertian moral typology, prominent in his Un cœur simple and Saint Julien l’Hospitalier. Rather than rendering submission as holiness, Lagrave transforms submission and simplicity into consciousness, while also aestheticising them. In this way, Lagrave’s efforts to complicate her trajectory establish a connection between a sociological perspective and a broader audience that appreciates both the figuration of the scholarship boy (albeit crossed out) and the provincial novel that subsequently becomes a novel of the (academic) institution. ¹²

Gilles Moreau also shifts the focus of the genre to the provinces. In S’asseoir et se regarder passer (‘Sitting back and watching yourself go by’), he sketches his life as that of a committed ‘provincial’ sociologist and transclass at the universities of Nantes and Poitiers. His book is a detailed account of school, university and the history of sociology in France itself. Moreau is himself ‘peripheral’ in many senses: as a ‘class defector’ yet ‘far from the typically French ideal of the scholarship boy who finishes his career at the Sorbonne’ (Moreau, 2022: 195) and finally as an activist and militant anti-militarist who was put to jail for his convictions. S’asseoir et se regarder passer thus works against two clichés of the genre: against the attraction of Paris and against the image of the transclass who must necessarily have crossed the threshold of an elite preparatory class or the ENS (Moreau, 2022: 18). Like Lagrave, Moreau traces his career in detail; like Lagrave, he emphasises that his upward trajectory was a collective one: among siblings, but also among a generation that profited from the welfare state expansion in the domain of national education (‘Between 1965 and 1975, 2354 secondary schools were built, that is, one per working day for 10 years’. [Moreau, 2022: 55]). Like Lagrave, Moreau’s work is characterised by his (often implicit) engagement with Eribon’s work within French sociology. While Eribon delivers a political diagnosis of the decline of communism within the French working class, Moreau shifts his diagnosis to the inside of academia: he uses his own career to examine how Marxist sociology in France gave way to other schools of thought, above all that of Bourdieu. This deprives his book of the political pathos that characterised Eribon’s work. Even more important is that Moreau also casts his own uprooting and his relationship to his milieu of origin in an academic-sociological light – something that can also be clearly read against a certain type of autosociobiography. Whereas he experienced political and intellectual uprooting through his own social trajectory, Moreau does not stop at this point. Again, parallel to his colleague Lagrave, the sociologist from Nantes testifies to a deep trust in the tools of sociology ‘“reconciling opposites” through the work of objectification’ and ‘allowing us to make a return, which, unlike that of the prodigal son, is done without emotion, through the distance they force us to build’ (Moreau, 2022: 195–196). Against the ‘miracle’ (Eribon, 2013: 199) of social non-reproduction and a necessarily painful return to the origins, Moreau’s sociology of personal mobility is disenchanting: ‘What have I seen? Disenchantment, as sociologists should: what else would I have been but the child of a minor civil servant who became a slightly more senior civil servant? Certainly nothing’ ¹³ (Moreau, 2022: 198). Like Lagrave, Moreau tries to steer clear of the literary form of Romance, with its ideals of overcoming and heroic emancipation. He does so by introducing what he terms a ‘sociological’ distance into his self-reflection. However, his final sentence, a quote from anti-fascist songs and protests, shows that the authoritative narrative commentary of the ‘sociologist I’ has its limits when it comes to disenchanting the narrative. While the dominant affect of autosociobiography, the uprooting, is kept at a distance by the narrator’s comments, it is precisely these allusions to anti-fascist traditions and their ‘hymns’ that subtly reintroduce notions of overcoming and heroic resistance. Moreau’s declared ‘conversion’ from militancy to sociology (Moreau, 2022: 114) collides with the affordances of the autobiographical transclass form, thus highlighting an area of tension between sociology and literature.

With Sans classe ni place (No class no place), Norbert Alter, a sociology professor affiliated with Sciences Po Paris, develops the most elaborate narrative arrangement of all autosociobiographers presented here. Instead of seeking to engage with previous examples of the genre and central sociological theorems at the level of discourse, Alter develops a critical dispositive through the narrative form itself. He doubles his own self and calls his alter ego ‘Pierre’. Pierre and the ‘I’, both sociology professors in their sixties, meet to drink Beaujolais wine regularly in an anonymous Parisian café. Pierre tells the ‘I’ his story; the ‘I’ writes it down: ‘It helps me to elucidate and say what the “I” doesn’t allow’ (Alter, 2022: 7). I contend that what is discussed in this doubling of the professorial figure – Pierre without or even below any class, the I with a certain sense of class affiliation and professionalism – is the cleft habitus. Adapting implicitly Bourdieu’s concept of dislocation and internal division of the self due to its dramatic upward social mobility, Alter tests the limits of narrating a social ‘ascent’. Why does the text nevertheless fit into the examples presented here, all of which extend and vary Bourdieu’s concepts and those of the autosociobiographical genre beyond cleft habitus and uprootedness? After all, it is precisely with this adventurous narrative design that Alter insists on the individual’s agency to partly free itself from social determinisms. ¹⁴ One reason for this is Pierre’s social background: he grew up in a ‘lumpenproletariat’ family (that is the I’s comment on Pierre [Alter, 2022: 39]), his father in prison or absent, his mother abusive. The family moves twelve times within a year and is constantly evicted and humiliated due to rent debts (Alter, 2022: 19–20). Unlike the working-class surrounding Pierre, he has no social capital whatsoever. This gives rise to the need to (re)invent his own story and his own place. Thus, ‘Home’ (‘Maison’) is a central category to the book. In keeping with the novelistic account of Pierre’s life, the protagonist appears here as a transcendentally – but also a de facto – homeless person. Pierre – and thus Alter – is much more than a transclass; he is also a transplace, constantly changing places. On the other hand, the somewhat split narrative style serves to balance sociological theory and commentary by the ‘I’ with completely different literary styles and references by Pierre. Pierre’s story is itself characterised by deviance and restlessness, with an entire chapter devoted to his misdemeanours, such as theft. School in particular serves as a substitute for home for Pierre; despite the difficulties he encountered, he is grateful to the institution that repairs the social anomie of his origins. He reports surprisingly positive encounters with institutional actors: ‘Representatives of the institutions thus give him confidence in his destiny, by taking responsibility for telling him, like his teachers, “Go on”’ (Alter, 2022: 198). However, since Alter does not describe the full path of his double ego to a career in sociology, this academic-institutional trajectory does not take on a teleological quality. More than an educational experience, a narrative desire as well as a concrete desire is presented here as the motor of the plot. Somewhat at odds with the staid academic accounts of his colleagues, part of Alter’s exuberantly novelistic account is characterised by roads and motorbikes, love and beatnik literature and a political awakening in the events of May 1968.

Avoiding the threats of populism (a relativist perspective celebrating the merits of an ‘autochthonous’ popular class and culture) and miserabilism (a legitimist perspective conceiving of popular class and culture only in terms of domination and social determinisms) conceptualised by Grignon and Passeron (1989), Alter distinguishes between inventing ‘his’ own history and the impossibility of inventing ‘history’ (both termed ‘histoire’ Alter, 2022: 295–296]), which, as he recognises, is imposed on us all. Alter’s text fully recognises the cleft habitus and uprootedness as parts of an upward mobility but presents a discomfort with the fact that individual lives could not only be narrated but also lived under the mantra of the ‘sole submission to the great social determinisms’ (Alter, 2022: 295).

The three examples presented here all demonstrate that the form of autosociobiography both creates stable structures that are passed on and offers rich opportunities for variation. Of central importance for the genre is undoubtedly the formal core of a first-person narrator telling the story of their former self, as is the associated process of figuration, which can be criticised, but nevertheless remains present: the scholarship boy/girl and their affective economy. Yet, Lagrave and Moreau in particular show that uprooting and internal division of the socially mobile protagonist are not necessarily identical with autosociobiography. However, the corpus I have presented shows an interesting variation. Lagrave and Moreau, who present a less spectacular trajectory than Bourdieu, for example, emphasise the possibility of dealing professionally, as sociologists, with the negative affects and social costs of their upward mobility. Alter, on the other hand, whose spectacular case cannot be that easily inscribed in the broader history of the welfare state, more clearly represents a cleft habitus, even if he has no definable milieu of origin, his desire to move corresponding to a marked ‘anomie’. Common to all accounts, including the extreme case (in terms of misery) of Alter, is, however, that they reject the one-sidedness of negative affects belonging to scholarship boys/girls. All present a wider and more mixed range of affects. The form of the autosociobiography entails two affordances: the focus on (a) a figure in one’s (b) path through (educational) institutions. Rather than rejecting an ultimately attractive narrative figure outright, the more recent autosociobiographies develop a critical stance against specific aspects of the figure that have become particularly prominent in France through Bourdieu and his school. They refuse the status of a ‘miracle case’, which ultimately leaves the mechanisms of social mobility in the dark, and they emphasise, even more than Eribon, Louis and Bourdieu did, the status of allies in their social advancement. Overall, the narratives of sociologist-autobiographers can be seen as driven by two key tensions. On the one hand, they aim to create a recognisable, literary figure capable of crystallising social processes. In writing literature and addressing a broader, general audience, they benefit from Bruno Latour’s insight that literary authors are ‘much freer in their enquiries about figuration than any social scientist’ (Latour, 2005: 54). On the other hand, their work involves complication, which paradoxically is precisely what the first-person narrative allows for. The individually specific trajectories that can only be reconstructed by the ‘I’ are used to create new forms of emplotment of social advancement with the help of sociological insights. However, as the preceding analyses have also shown, sociologists are not entirely free in shaping the form. Rather, the chosen literary form also exerts a formative influence on their narratives.

Between social critique and academic self-reflection

Certain developments of the autosociobiographical form coincide with findings of recent research on the social mobility of students from working-class origins. Thus, Pasquali’s thick description of students from popular origins preparing for elite universities in special classes in France shows that ‘without neglecting the role played by symbolic violence, class contempt and racism in any class migration’, the ‘scheme of uprooting’ is not a generalizable case (Pasquali, 2018: 114–116). As French sociologists like Schwartz (2011 [1997]) or Siblot et al. (2015) argue, the ‘classes populaires’ (that have in great parts replaced the notion of the working class in French sociology) are no longer a homogeneous, insular world. To a certain extent, class boundaries have become more permeable, even if absolute social reproduction remains strong (Savage, 2021: 207–209). Many of the cited sociologists thus estimate that the affective costs of social advancement depend on its scope and scale, not on the mere fact of having crossed a class boundary. Pasquali has observed within his sociological-ethnographical work that an initial uprooting ¹⁵ of students coming from the ‘classes populaires’ and experiencing an upward social trajectory during their studies may often result in coping practices (‘arrangements’), that is, semi-conscious practices that allow these students to mediate between their space of origin and their new life in the institutions. These practices may include ‘transfers of capital (cultural, social, sometimes economic) from the host universe to the universe of origin’, a ‘measured dosage of one’s own physical presence with relatives to compensate for the distance (returns to the family at weekends, regular telephone calls [. . .])’, or writing practices ‘in the form of disguised self-analyses (e.g. university assignments or dissertations)’ (Pasquali, 2018: 115; 2021: 373–422). ¹⁶

For sociologists of social inequality and mobility between classes in France, this results in a complex overall picture: general social reproduction remains high, but statistics show strong ‘micromobility’ between generations that falls through the cracks of conventional sociological models of social mobility. ¹⁷ As Hugrée (2025) explains, such results have led sociologists to turn away from the figure of the ‘class defector’, in part because it is too strong and spectacular for the observed ‘close’ upward mobility. Conversely, however, this means that if sociologists are interested in the ‘exceptional figure’ of the class transitioner and the scholarship boy, they recognise the literary radiance and its significance for the public debate. Hugrée (2024), Pasquali and Schwartz (2016), and Pasquali (2021 [2014]: 11) all suggest that it is the literary success and public interest in the transclass and scholarship boy that have contributed to their own, critical, revision of these figures. The fact that it is precisely the more ‘literary’ autosociobiographies (Eribon, Louis and Alter) that are attracting more readers – all have been published several times – shows that literature can have a broader and different appeal than traditional research, even though both come to similar conclusions on social mobility and its limits.

This presents both an opportunity and a risk for the social relevance of autosociobiographies – an opportunity because the literary figure of the ‘class defector’ and the literary representation of individual experiences of social mobility can raise awareness of current challenges. For example, accounts of past advancements during a period of welfare state expansion can lead to comparisons with the current situation and a critical examination of current policies. Also, the criticism of Lagrave and Ernaux, which I quoted at the beginning, can be turned in a positive direction: Lagrave’s or Ernaux’s ‘redundant’ accounts compared to decades of sociological research, namely a critique of the still very much alive idea and myth of meritocracy (Littler, 2017), can presumably have a strong effect on the reader in the context of a literarised and personal portrayal; readers may more easily be able to share the affects and experiences made by the autosociobiographers. The figure of the transclass today may thus be ‘one of the more radical forms’ of a general sense of individual displacement.

The strengths of literarised experiences of social mobility certainly also harbour risks. The formal affordances of literary figures such as the scholarship boy/girl and the class defector have a long-lasting effect and favour a dramatisation of the idea of social advancement, which in many cases is more likely to be attractive today as a collective imaginary than as a lived reality. Even the aforementioned presentation of past trajectories may not always lead to a fruitful practice of comparison. Developments and historical differences in the experience of social classes and social mobility can become blurred; even a genre such as autosociobiography, which often commits itself to a (historical) truth, does not have the duty to present social realities in a differentiating way – for example when Ernaux writes of her father, ‘His frame is the Middle Ages’ (Ernaux, 1983: 29).

However, the literary commitment of many sociologists in France can enrich the autosociobiographical literature and expand its form. This applies in particular to the available range of affects, which go hand in hand with the experience of social mobility and may, but do not always, result in uprootedness, as well as to the figure of the scholarship boy/girl and transclass, which often appears less heroic in the accounts analysed in this article. As has become clear, literature and sociology clearly influence each other here. With this new wave of works, however, autosociobiography in France ultimately appears as a dominantly academic genre. Not only because it is mainly sociologists who take up the pen – but also because it shows, perhaps with the exception of Alter, a preferably academic world and the individual trajectory within educational institutions. In contrast, sociologists increasingly explore the realm and potential of autobiographical narrative within their own discipline.

In a recent review, Lagrave recognised the danger that the abundance of autosociobiographies could play into the hands of critics of social reproduction theory. Lagrave (2023) herself fears that class defectors might, in the face of the success of the genre, no longer appear as exceptions to the ‘rule of social reproduction’. Paradoxically, the inherently critical genre of autosociobiography might thus become a poster child for the new meritocracy simply by virtue of its form and its mere existence. In the light of this analysis, one can recognise another danger: as welcome as the commitment of academics to the genre of autosociobiography is, both as a critical development of the form and as a critical reflection on their own institution and its rules, an increasing academisation of autosociobiography could easily be perceived as auto-communication among scholars and lose its broader impact. Two aged (white ¹⁸ ) sociology professors talk about themselves over a glass of wine and comment on each other’s books or narratives. Autosociobiographies thus might involuntarily fulfil a mission that elite schools and universities in particular have taken up as part of a campaign on social mobility in France: to draw media attention to themselves and increase their relevance by showcasing themselves as ‘factories of transclasses’. As grateful as these new cases of transclasses are to educational institutions, we as academics ourselves are probably more grateful to a genre that highlights the importance of ‘our’ institutions and thus our own social relevance. This also touches on the much larger question of the extent to which the literary tradition and the autosociobiographies presented here provide formal affordances for the representation of social mobility outside of (educational) institutions. Social mobility is not rooted solely in education and may be narrated in a very different way looking at social inequality and especially economic factors (Savage, 2021).

Will the social demand for transclass narratives be sustainable? There are good reasons for it, since the rise of autosociobiography is not only associated with central social challenges of our time. It is also rooted in two lasting literary themes and forms. First, in autobiography / autofiction as the hegemonic narrative form of the present. It thus participates in what Kornbluh (2024) describes as ‘authentication of situated knowing, the elevation of personal experience, the suspicion of grand narratives, the transposition of politics into ethos’ and the promotion of auto-narratives across disciplines. Second, in the persistent tradition of the ‘upward story’ that resists the decline of grand narratives and a generalised sense of a closed horizon and future by changing the shape and tone of the story. In the face of a general lack of social and political progress, autosociobiography may still offer some sort of compensation as an exceptional story of individual progress, yet fits into the current debate by turning its attention backwards rather than towards new horizons, by combining an individual ‘upward’ trajectory with a focus on the affective costs of ‘moving up’ and on what has been lost on the journey. The previous considerations have shown that autosociobiography also has a recognisable formal core that can be developed productively and beyond ongoing polemics. The main challenge of the genre today seems to lie in maintaining and adapting a productive connection between theory and literature, as well as striking a balance between reflecting on social realities and capturing the vividness of literary figures and processes of figuration. My comparative analysis of sociological research and autosociobiographical literature in France shows that this is particularly true with regard to the relationship between critical refinement which could lead to excessive academic self-reflection and adherence to strong traditions of social and literary figures such as the ‘miracle case’ and the scholarship boy which, paradoxically, may be used to assert the existence of an educational meritocracy. But the challenge also lies with us: the example of autosociobiography in France shows that texts that are highly self-reflective and academic require new forms of literary and cultural analysis. Simply changing the level of abstraction hardly works.