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‘When I arrived in Paris for school, all these bourgeois kids would say Eddy Bellegueule, what a funny name’   A year before the publication of his internationally acclaimed first novel, The End of Eddy, Edouard Louis edited a collection of essays in homage to the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu Like Bourdieu, Louis identifies as a ‘transfuge de classe’, which can translate as something between class-crossover and class ‘defector’: someone who has been impelled by class humiliation to transcend their social identity In the collection’s opening essay, Louis describes the ‘folie sociale’ (social madness) which took him over after moving to Paris in his late teens, when he started actively and obsessively pursuing entry into the capital’s most selective milieux out of a desire to erase his modest social origins Bourdieu’s work on social distinction and class identity — which describe his own successive social reinventions — informed Louis’s own writing on that transfer; it also influenced the work of two of Louis’s contemporaries and literary models, Didier Eribon and Annie Ernaux, who each contributed an essay to the collection Like Louis, Eribon and Ernaux have written about their respective transfers from poverty to middle-class life through their access to education and, later, to writer status Bourdieu wrote, referring to Flaubert, of his own futile desire to ‘live all the lives in one life’ All these writers, too, address their ambitions to live multiple lives at once, and interrogate the problematic nature of that ambition All are confronting a complex problem: is it possible to write about the transcendence of working-class condition in a way that is not effectively betrayal, or an implicit praise of bourgeois life?   I grew up in a Picardy town about 100 km west from Louis’s home village of Hallencourt, and many moments in Louis’s autobiographical novel take me straight back to childhood: the image, for example, of three children riding a single bike around a stone structure commemorating the dead of the First World War, the kind that peppers the landscape of so many towns in northern France