The working-class woman of Didier Eribon’s book is his mother. With immense reluctance, about which he is blunt, he writes as a son. But he is much more comfortable thinking sociologically – he is a distinguished professor of sociology at the University of Amiens – and meditates on her life, old age and death as if she were an anonymous representative of a class (she is never named). Intellectually, Eribon can place his mother in a social system he understands as having done her great harm.

Eribon describes himself as ‘a class renegade’. He has always disliked being reminded of his working-class origins. In Returning to Reims (published in French in 2009), he gave a gripping account of his escape into the Parisian uplands of culture, music, ideas and discussion. Academic achievement made this possible and it required, in his view, a complete break with the people of his upbringing in the poorer suburbs of Reims. Those people, who included his family, he characterised in universally negative terms. They were racist, homophobic, mindlessly right wing, emotionally incontinent (always ranting and raging), not feminist.

His escape was a ‘miracle’, he explains, for the social system was designed to ensure a working-class child stayed in the working class. (Reading this as a British escapee of comparable vintage is to feel grateful for the 1944 Education Act, which ushered in a period of meritocracy.) Determinedly scholarly