The Years

Annie Ernaux's The Years, first published in French in 2008, is an unconventional memoir that merges one woman's autobiography with the collective social history of France from 1940 to 2006. Rather than narrating her life in the traditional first person, Ernaux uses an impersonal voice, alternating between "she," "we," "one," and "people," treating her own experience as inseparable from that of her generation. The book is structured around photographs described at intervals, each anchoring a particular stage of life, and punctuated by recurring family meals that mark the passage of time.

The book opens with a cascading catalogue of memory-images destined to vanish: a woman squatting behind a postwar shack, hundreds of photographed deportees on a museum wall, a newborn flailed in a delivery room. The litany expands to include words, slogans, songs, brand names, and family catchphrases. All these fragments, the text asserts, will disappear with the person who carries them. Memory "pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history" (5). This opening establishes the book's central imperative: to save something from the time where we will never be again.

The narrative moves to the 1940s. At holiday meals after the war, adults constructed a collective narrative of wartime experience in the "we" voice: the winter of 1942, hunger, bombardments, the mass exodus from the German invasion, and the Occupation. They spoke only of what they had personally witnessed; neither the crematoria nor the atomic bomb belonged to the same timeline as black market butter. The children at these meals did not listen yet remembered every detail, developing a secret nostalgia for the dramatic era they had missed. Alongside the war narrative, a second story emerged: the story of origins, in which family and social narrative merged as voices mapped territories of rural youth shaped by poverty that long predated the war.

The narrative broadens into the early 1950s. France was immense; most people never left their region, and Paris remained a distant, mythic entity. People lived in scarcity of objects, images, and explanations. Dead children appeared in every family, carried off by diphtheria and other sudden diseases. Boys and girls were kept strictly apart. New products appeared at intervals and were greeted with joyous surprise: Bic pens, bubble gum, the Solex motorbike. Religion provided the official framework of life, and school was a place of immutable knowledge. Beneath the surface of these ideals, sex was the root of all society's suspicions, dividing girls into a "right" and a "wrong" kind.

A photograph from July 1955 introduces a bespectacled fourteen-year-old at a convent school. She had never been to Paris, did not own a record player, and thought about boys constantly. Her awareness of world events included Stalin's death and the fall of Dien Bien Phu (the 1954 French military defeat in Indochina), though these registered only vaguely. At family meals, the war narrative was fading; the Occupation and rural childhoods merged into a single bygone era. By the late 1950s, a new photograph shows the same girl posing provocatively, aware of her social standing: Her family lacked a bathroom and a refrigerator. She imagined her future as a teacher, free and independent. Passing the baccalauréat (the diploma required for university entry) granted social existence. At summer camps, the sexes mingled far from parental eyes, and for girls, shame lay in wait at every turn; sexual reputation determined a girl's value on the marriage market.

A June 1963 photograph shows a young woman about to receive a university degree. She felt she belonged neither to the bourgeoisie nor to the working-class world of her childhood and saw education as a weapon against stagnation in a feminine condition. The years of early marriage and parenthood followed quickly. A 1967 photograph shows her as a wife, mother, and teacher, her time consumed by maintaining the family unit. In her diary she wrote that she had "no ideas at all" and felt like "a petite bourgeoise who has arrived" (87). She sensed a book writing itself behind her but could not begin.

May 1968 arrived. The Sorbonne closed, barricades went up, and hierarchies dissolved. Voices spoke with brutal frankness in newly opened institutional spaces. But the Communist Party and unions negotiated the Grenelle Agreement (a set of wage and labor concessions), elections were called, and cobblestones were put back in place. After 1968, new ideas flooded in: the works of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, philosopher Michel Foucault, literary critic Roland Barthes, and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, alongside ecology and structural analysis. The text declares that "1968 was the first year of the world" (102).

In the early 1970s, women reflected on their lives and realized they had missed their share of freedom. The Women's Liberation Movement arrived in the provinces. Thousands marched for reproductive rights, and activist women escorted pregnant women to private apartments for abortions. Under President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, elected in 1974, the voting age dropped to eighteen, divorce by mutual consent was established, and Simone Veil, the minister of health, defended the abortion law alone in the Assemblée nationale (the lower house of the French parliament) against fierce opposition. Consumer society acquired its name; television achieved a continuous recording of the world.

A photograph from Spain in the summer of 1980 shows a woman consumed by marital pain. She grasped for the first time the terrible meaning of "I have only one life" (129). In May 1981, François Mitterrand was elected president. Never within memory had so many reforms been granted so quickly: abolition of the death penalty, reimbursement of abortions, regularization of undocumented immigrants. But austerity followed. The Free Market was declared natural law. Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the extreme Right, made a comeback. AIDS transformed from a disease initially associated with gay men and people who used drugs into a universal fear. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, and people believed in "clean war" and "surgical strikes" before the hostilities ended in shame.

A 1992 photograph shows the narrator holding a cat in her garden, her husband remarried, her mother dead, her sons gone. She began imagining a book that would assemble multiple images of herself. Through the 1990s, disillusion deepened. Yugoslavia, Algeria, and Rwanda bled. Immigration became a charged political topic. The mobile phone arrived as the most miraculous and disturbing new object. The Internet transformed the world into discourse, and the depth of time disappeared. A 1999 photograph captures the narrator on a beach with her adult sons. In half-sleep after lovemaking, she experienced what she calls "the palimpsest sensation": feeling herself in several moments of her life simultaneously, as if past and present overlapped. She considered it a potential instrument of knowledge.

On a September afternoon in 2001, the Twin Towers collapsed. Fear took hold. In 2002, Le Pen eliminated Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin in the first round of the presidential election, forcing a mass mobilization to vote for the conservative Jacques Chirac. The minister of the interior declared he wanted to "clean out with a Kärcher pressure washer" the "scum" of the banlieue, the disadvantaged suburbs (210). Nothing seemed able to prevent the election of Nicolas Sarkozy.

A final photograph from Christmas 2006 shows the narrator at sixty-six, holding her granddaughter. She catalogs the intervening years: the end of a love affair, her retirement, a breast tumor, the death of her cat, whom she buried in the garden feeling as if she were burying everyone who had died, including her mother, who had Alzheimer's. She has lost her sense of the future and fears her memory will grow cloudy. The form her book must take is revealed: She will immerse herself in images from memory, identify the signs of the times, and try to hear the words people spoke. By retrieving the memory of collective memory within an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History. The book will be "a slippery narrative composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes" (223). There is no "I," only "one" and "we." The book closes with a final catalogue of things to be saved and a single imperative: "Save something from the time where we will never be again" (231).