English translations of these concepts: several landmarks

Transfuges, transfuges de classe, and transclasses, which thus attest to three very different histories, were nevertheless all coined within the context of French literature and philosophy. Having quickly delineated the contexts of their production and circulation in French, we can now examine the circulation of these terms in English via their translation to see if any sociologically pertinent constants emerge. Insofar as the term transfuge² test plus long belongs to everyday language, it is impossible to satisfactorily trace its successive uses across time. If we consider the occurrence found in Distinction, we see that Richard Nice’s translation (1984) is meaningful, as transfuge becomes “solitary renegade.” We see that the semantic field of betrayal is thus accentuated, the adjective “solitary” fortifying this negative connotation. Around the same  time that Annie Ernaux’s La Place [A Man’s Place] was published, in a context of the disappearance of the language of social class in favor of representing a society without divisions, Richard Nice responded to the demand for lexicon linking social groups and conflict .

The procedure seems to be the same for Annie Ernaux, who thus imported at the same moment the language of class into literature with the expression transfuge de classe. As she herself explains, if sociology gives her the language and the means to conceptualize her literary  project, it cannot replace it. Sociological concepts are seldom used in Ernaux’s literary writings. Rather, they appear in the discourses that accompany them, such as interviews with researchers and journalists, or in commentaries. It therefore seems unnecessary to examine the English translations of her books, beginning in the 1980s, to concretize the dissemination of the expression in English. One can however hypothesize that Alison L. Strayer’s translation of Ernaux’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech (2023) and the rendering of the phrase transfuge de classe as “class defector” contributed to a renewal of the process of translating the expression into English (Hugueny-Léger, 2025). Another research hypothesis: it’s useful to include English translations of successful narratives that extended the literary approach initiated by Annie Ernaux, such as Didier Eribon’s Retour à Reims [Returning to Reims] (2013) and Édouard Louis’ En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule [The End of Eddy] (2017) – both translated by Michael Lucey – to understand the dissemination of the expression in the anglophone world. One should note that works by these three authors have been adapted for the stage and screen (Edy, 2025), having perhaps played an important role in the circulation of the expression transfuge de classe in the anglophone world.