In February, Le Monde diplomatique published a text by the writer Annie Ernaux entitled “Walking Tall Again.” In it, the 2022 Nobel Prize winner for literature recalls her memories of the 1995 social movement against then prime minister Alain Juppé’s plan to reform pensions. She also refers to the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who took up the cause of the strikers: “Bourdieu’s political commitment to the strike made me see it as my duty as a writer not to remain a passive onlooker in public life. To see this internationally recognized sociologist getting involved in social conflicts, and to hear him, was an immense joy, a liberation.”

When Damien Iozzia, a supervisor and secretary of the UFCM-CGT union (which represents railway staff in management and supervisory positions) at Paris’s Montparnasse station, read her text, he saw it as “an invitation to ask Annie Ernaux to come here.” He contacted publisher Gallimard to suggest that the author come and talk not only to workers who had mobilized at the SNCF national rail company but also to an employee from the energy sector.

On March 14, ahead of the eighth day of protests against Emmanuel Macron’s reform raising the legal retirement age from sixty-two to sixty-four, the writer showed up at a small union hall in the Vaugirard station, a stone’s throw from Montparnasse. The room rattles every now and then as trains pass by. She was accompanied by friends — the sociologists Jean-Marc Salmon and Didier Eribon, and publisher and writer Jean-Marie Laclavetine.