The French sociologist Didier Eribon’s memoir Returning to Reims defined how a generation came to understand what he called “the hidden injuries of class.” Originally published in 2009, when the rise of the far right was still only a looming threat, not the defining feature of politics in the advanced capitalist world, it offered a prescient reflection on the causes of working-class support for reactionary politicians.

Returning to Reims took off from the death of its author’s long-estranged father. This event provided Eribon with an occasion to think about what it meant to be a “class traitor.” The same feelings of injury and shame that motivated him to disown his working-class upbringing explained why his parents — militant factory workers who voted Communist for most of their lives — shifted their allegiances right and even began supporting the National Front.

As a gay youth with dreams of becoming an intellectual, he distanced himself from his upbringing as soon as he moved to Paris to study philosophy. This was a process of reinvention that intensified as he ingratiated himself with members of the upper echelons of French intellectual elite. In Paris, he could finally live his sexuality freely and come into his own. But becoming part of the nominally left-wing intellectual elite entailed swapping one form of repression for another. Soon he found that he had replaced the linguistic expressions, mannerisms, and other signifiers of his origins and class affiliation with ones that fit in more comfortably within the milieu of Paris’s educated bourgeoisie.