Alain Soral - Life and Career

Life and Career

Soral was born in Aix-les-Bains, Savoie and grew up in the suburbs of Annemasse (department of Haute-Savoie), where he attended a local primary school. When Soral was about 12, his family moved to Meudon so that he could go to a reputable private Catholic high school, the Collège Stanislas de Paris. Soral spent two years doing small jobs before being accepted into the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts at 20, where he studied for two years. Soral was then taken in by a family of academics, who encouraged him to enrol at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he attended lectures given by Cornelius Castoriadis.

Following his studies, and working with Hector Obalk and Alexandre Pasche, Soral wrote a book on the sociology of trendiness: Les mouvements de mode expliqués aux parents, as well as a fictionalised autobiography: Le Jour et la nuit ou la vie d'un vaurien. The latter work sold badly, and this led Soral to turn away from writing for a time.

Soral then focussed on cinematic techniques, and after 2 promotional films, wrote and directed his first short film: Chouabadaballet, une dispute amoureuse entre deux essuie-glaces. After a stint as a reporter in Zimbabwe, Soral wrote and directed his second short film: Les Rameurs, misère affective et culture physique à Carrière-sur-Seine.

In the mean time, Soral had joined the French Communist Party. He became interested in the works of Karl Marx and other Marxist thinkers such as Georg Lukács, Henri Wallon, Lucien Goldmann and Michel Clouscard. He published Sociologie du Dragueur ("sociology of the womaniser"), his most successful sociological essay to date.

Soral performed in Catherine Breillat's 1996 film Parfait Amour !, in the role of Philippe.

He then published another polemical essay: Vers la féminisation ? - Démontage d'un complot antidémocratique ("Towards feminisation? analysis of an antidemocratic plot"), and spent the following couple of years writing and directing his first full-length movie: Confession d'un dragueur ("Confessions of a womaniser"), which was a commercial and critical failure. Disgusted by what he called "a lynching", Soral gave up cinema altogether and returned to writing. He published Jusqu'où va-t-on descendre? - Abécédaire de la bêtise ambiante ("Down to where are we descending? ABC of ambient stupidity"), followed by Socrate à Saint-Tropez (2003), and Misères du désir (2004).

Soral's penultimate book, CHUTe ! Éloge de la disgrâce (subtitled Roman (novel)), was published in France on 6 April 2006.

In the 2007 he became part of the central committee of Front National, trying to place social issues in the program of the party. He left the party in the 2009.

His latest essay Comprendre l'Empire will be published in France on February 10, 2011.