Alexandre Jardin, the journey of a popular writer who became the pen of the "Gueux"

A man appears, holding a copy of Libération : "Are you Alexandre Jardin ? I'm a beggar. I support your fight." Neat overalls over a finely striped sailor shirt, small glasses and a mop of gray hair, the build of a sixty-year-old on a hike: he looks like an actor disguised as a reader of Libération. Is he an accomplice playing the fan in this Parisian café near Parc Monceau? The stranger did not want to leave his phone number for an interview. Jardin smiles: "It happens to me less in Paris, but when I travel around France, I am accosted thirty times a day." These are not nostalgics for his first novels Bille en tête (1986), le Zèbre (1988), Fanfan (1990), but fans of his book Les #Gueux (Michel Lafon, March 2025) , who hail him.

Forty-seven incendiary pages in the form of a leaflet to denounce the gap between rich and poor created by low-emission zones (LEZs). The 60-year-old author wrote it as he tweets, emphatically: "I'm assuming a language that isn't usually mine," he says. "I want to be understood by everyone." For several months, the medieval term "beggar" has been taken up by