Historical Context

Ernaux's work documents France's postwar transformation—modernization, urbanization, the rise of consumer society, the evolution of class structures. She witnessed and embodied these changes, moving from provincial poverty to Parisian intellectual life, from working-class origins to bourgeois status, from traditional gender roles to feminist consciousness.

Her generation was the first to benefit massively from educational democratization. The French state's expansion of secondary and higher education allowed unprecedented social mobility. But this mobility came with costs Ernaux meticulously documents—the shame of origins, the impossibility of return, the violence of assimilation into dominant culture.

The May 1968 events found her teaching in lycée, married with children, watching revolution from the sidelines. But the period's ideas—especially feminism and class analysis—provided frameworks for understanding her own experience. She began seeing her personal struggles as political, her family story as history.

The rise of feminism in the 1970s gave her permission to write about women's bodily experiences—abortion, desire, motherhood—as legitimate literary subjects. But she resisted both confessional writing and ideological simplification, seeking instead to understand how gender and class intersect in forming consciousness.

The neoliberal turn of the 1980s-90s, with its mythology of individual success, made her work more urgent. As France celebrated entrepreneurship and meritocracy, Ernaux documented what these narratives concealed—the persistence of class structures, the pain of mobility, the ways inequality reproduces itself through culture as much as economics.