Halfway through her autobiography The Years, French novelist Annie Ernaux gives her readers a political panorama of the mid-1990s:

The rumor was going around that politics was dead. The advent of a “new world order” was declared. The end of History was nigh. . . .  The word “struggle” was discredited as a throwback to Marxism, become an object of ridicule. As for “defending rights,” the first that came to mind were those of the consumer.

Born to working-class parents in 1940, Ernaux had already grown into one of her country’s most celebrated writers by the end of the 2000s. Published in French in 2008, her “collective autobiography” about postwar French society appeared shortly before Lehman Brothers went bust. An English translation only came about in 2017, already at the close of the “populist” decade.