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.

For Eribon’s parents’ generation, being on the Left was as much a way of sticking together as it was of sticking it to the oppressor. But this antagonistic sense of class identity came into crisis in the late 1970s when left-wing parties abandoned all vestiges of class conflict and instead embraced a technocratic, managerial style of politics. Orphaned, workers like Eribon’s parents took their grievances elsewhere.

Fifteen years after publishing Return to Reims, Eribon revisited his relationship with his family in a second memoir, The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman, which appeared in French in 2023 and in English this year. It recounts the death of Eribon’s mother, who passed away shortly after entering a nursing home. In many ways, it is the spiritual successor to his first memoir.

Not only does the book adopt a similar form, mixing harrowing anecdotes from his mother’s last years with passages from Norbert Elias, Simone de Beauvoir, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but it also revisits many of Returning to Reims’s episodes. Eribon’s parents’ unhappy marriage as well as his mother’s racism are recurring themes. So, too, is the central problem of upward social mobility and its alienating effects.

There is nothing extraordinary about Eribon’s mother’s death — but this makes it all the more horrifying. The French health care system that oversaw her last days has been deracinated by austerity, and the dominant neoliberal mindset views the elderly either as a liability or a business opportunity.

Before being consigned to a nursing home, his mother would often fall in her home. Unable to lift herself up on her own, she would call the fire department, which, after breaking into her house a few times, threatened to charge an “emergency lifting fee.” In her last days, she was too weak to walk; care workers, overworked and in short supply, would allow her to leave her bed once a week to shower. Effectively, she became a prisoner, detained for the crime of being old and ill.

What worries Eribon about his mother’s fate is that it reveals the fundamental alienation that comes with old age. The inability, due to physical and mental decline, to forge new bonds and take part in the world of politics is a depressing prospect. Informing these concerns is a Sartrean belief that human beings are fundamentally social beings — an argument echoing the one Eribon made in Returning to Reims to describe the distress caused by abandoning one’s working-class origins. Individuals are at their most authentic, “most themselves,” when they step out of their atomized everyday existence, what Jean-Paul Sartre called “seriality,” and instead join a group or community that allows them to be part of something greater than themselves.

Old age is effectively enforced seriality. It is not just that becoming old entails a “progressive withering” of ties outside of those with one’s immediate family. To be admitted into a care home is to enter a “total institution” where fully fledged individuals are flattened into patients or inmates at the mercy of a “sovereign” medical authority.

Eribon’s analysis is clearly colored by his mother’s experience. She died, according to him, of what the French call “syndrome de glissement” — a form of unconscious suicide driven by a lack of desire to live. For him, no worse fate could be imaginable, especially for a working-class woman like his mother whose life was made rich by social interactions with friends, fellow workers, and neighbors.

While class exploitation and oppression are obsessions of Eribon, death, the focus of this latest book, is not purely sociological or even political. It concerns our fundamental relationship to our own finite existence, more of a metaphysical and existential issue than anything else. No amount of redistribution or investment in public well-being or science is likely to eliminate death as the final destination for all human life — even politics cannot win against entropy.

Throughout The Life, Eribon does not reference a single statistic or report that might illuminate the specific condition of the elderly in contemporary France. Eschewing sociology for philosophy, he turns in the book’s final chapters to Simone de Beauvoir’s little-known classic Old Age. This gives The Life a more pessimistic, less political, tone than Returning to Reims, which was a rallying cry for reinclusion of the working classes in the discourse of the Left. If old age is defined by a condition of weakness, if the elderly cannot speak and act for themselves, someone must do it on their behalf. But who will this spokesperson be?

Eribon quotes the ending of Annie Ernaux’s A Woman, which includes the Nobel Laureate’s account of the death of her working-class mother. Losing her mother, Ernaux writes, meant losing the last witness of her childhood. A similarly elegiac tone takes hold in The Life’s final sections, which cast the death of its author’s mother as signifying the disappearance of a world of working-class culture and mass politics. Eribon’s is a book laden with melancholy, but one that stresses the importance not just of solidarity and political struggle but also the fundamental social dimension of existence, and what we lose when we are cut off from others.