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

The Polish poet Czes?aw Mi?osz is famously credited with the line: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” In contemporary European literature, a book these days is often the beginning of a familial feud. With thinly disguised autobiographical accounts of family strife undergoing a sustained boom across the continent, it can increasingly lead to family reunions in courtrooms.

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

“The author’s resentment toward the targeted individuals permeates the entire work, which is conceived as a genuine act of family vengeance,” the plaintiffs said in their legal complaint. They claimed there was an “absence of evidence” for the novel’s central plot, a woman’s collaboration with the Nazis, and asked for the book to be withdrawn from the market and pulped.

In the novel, which was longlisted for the Prix Goncourt in 2023 and, in Natasha Lehrer’s English translation, praised as a “clever and vivid book” in the Guardian, the narrator, Coline, tells the story of her morphine-addicted mother, Lucie, betrothed in her first marriage to a “convinced pro-Nazi” and designer of propaganda posters during the Vichy occupation.

While the author has rejected the book’s classification as a roman à clef – a novel in which real people may be thinly disguised as fictional – she has made no secret of being inspired by her own childhood. “Most of the protagonists I was able to draw inspiration from were dead, so there’s a liberation of speech,” she told French television in 2023.

Desprairies’ book can be grouped in the genre of life writing that the French author and literary critic Serge Doubrovsky in 1977 christened autofiction, a hybrid of autobiography and experimental fiction that has made inroads on the bestseller lists over the last decade via the Italian writer Elena Ferrante’s My Beautiful Friend and the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle.

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

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

These threats never materialised into court action and in Norway families portrayed in autofiction have tended to find satisfactory retribution via creative means rather than legal channels. Knausgård’s former spouse Linda Boström Knausgård has published a novel that appears to dispute her ex’s fictionalised account of their breakup, while Hjorth’s sister Helga and a rumoured former lover, Arild Linneberg, a literary critic, have written their own “counter-novels”.

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

In France, however, novelisation has been less successful at shielding seemingly autobiographical accounts against court action, which may have emboldened Desprairies’ relatives.

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

Natalie Edwards, a professor of French and head of modern languages at the University of Bristol, said: “It’s striking that there has also been a huge memoir boom meeting a very litigious culture in the US, but we haven’t seen as many legal disputes as in France. In France, a very vague law around privacy has met a very vague writing style.”

In Desprairies’ case, the situation is different in that her relatives are suing her not for invasion of privacy but for “public defamation of the memory of the dead”. Mark Stephens, an English solicitor who specialises in media law, intellectual property and freedom of expression, believes they should not get their hopes up.

“The law on the freedom of the press of 29 July 1881, the law that defines defamation in France, only protects the privacy rights of living people,” he said. “Descendants cannot sue for a blot on a family’s honour unless they can convince a court that their own reputation has been denigrated.”

In her plea, Desprairies’ lawyer argued that linking the story of the book to the author’s living relatives would require “an extreme knowledge of genealogy or a power of divination, which readers do not have”.

Stephens said: “As it stands, their claim looks pretty weak, if not to say impossible. French courts will be slow to muzzle a novelist exposing uncomfortable truths. Family pride makes poor law, and even worse literature.”

A verdict in the case is expected on 17 March.