Pierre Lemaitre: "I come from a working-class family and I feel the need to do things well"

BarcelonaPierre Lemaitre (Paris, 1951), the best-selling French author of the 21st century, is still going strong. At 56, he turned to professional writing at the insistence of his wife, Pascaline, and in 2014 he won the prestigious Goncourt Prize because of the novel See you up there (Bromera), which catapulted him to fame and became the first part of a trilogy about the interwar period. When the endThe author began a tetralogy dedicated to the period of the Thirty Glorious Years. He started it with The big world (Bromera, 2023), continued it with Silence and rage(2024) and A bright future (2025), and now closes it with The beautiful promises (Joke), translated by Núria Busquet Molist.

"The beautiful promises "This is the fourth installment in a series covering the period we in France call the Thirty Glorious Years, from the end of World War II in 1975," Lemaitre explains. "During these years, French capitalism functioned very well, and many French people were confident that their children's lives would be better than their own. This led to the perception that all of France was doing well. However, as a writer, I want to show that there were also many families who were excluded from social mobility," he clarifies.

To illustrate the reality of those "left behind," the author focuses on a Spanish family in the agricultural sector. "I show their difficulties integrating, like all immigrants, and I explain how the view of immigration was very colonial," says Lemaitre, who chose a Spanish family for two reasons. "The first is that France has had several waves of immigration (from Poland, Portugal, Spain, etc.), and it seemed to me that the Spanish were the most relevant. I wanted to explain the situation of second-generation immigrants," he says. The second reason is more personal: "My first partner was Spanish, her name was Soledad, and the older I get, the more I feel nostalgic for the past."

Furthermore, family sagas are a well-established literary tradition. "I think writers have often been fascinated by families," says Lemaitre. "They are miniature societies where all passions play out, and of course, for a writer it's much easier to talk about a family than about an entire society."

Another highly symbolic element is the car. "To illustrate the spirit of the times, I was looking for an emblematic object, like industrial parks," says Lemaitre. "The car seemed to me a perfect object: it represents independence, freedom, mobility... And it perfectly marks upward social mobility: whoever could buy a car demonstrated a certain purchasing power," he concludes.

The novel is a vivid portrayal of 1960s Paris. At the time, Lemaitre was a teenager, a stage of life he compares to France itself. "In adolescence, you look to the future with hope and enjoy the present wildly, without thinking about the consequences. France during that period was like that, and, for example, it didn't take the ecological disaster into account," he says.

Lemaitre has been working closely with historian Camille Cléret for years, and with these books he aims to begin a "genealogy" explaining how France arrived at its current state. He has therefore announced a new trilogy covering the years 1970-1990, which will include the rise of the far right. "It takes me approximately 18 months to write each book. So, I estimate I can have all three books finished in four or five years, when I turn 80. I don't know if that's an ambitious or realistic estimate," says the author. He adds, "I come from a working-class family and feel the need to do things well. Although I haven't finished, I'm relieved to have completed 70% of the work."