In Contre, published in 2002 by Gallimard's Editions Verticales as an audio CD accompanied by a book, Lydie Salvayre tells the story of a profound disadequation she—or rather, the speaker of her poetic text—feels with her culture, and specifically her nation. Like a traveler out of utopian tales of yore returned to tell her tale, she says she is just recently ‘revenue’ [returned] from an ‘étrange république’ [strange republic] (11). However, this republic is neither far away nor utopian. It is a France where ‘les hommes s’éteignent à force de se soumettre’ [men's submission extinguishes them]. These citizens ‘n’ont plus d’yeux ni de langue’ [no longer have eyes or tongues], they say ‘oui à tout’ [yes to everything], and they ‘s’attelent aux machines qui les tiennent captifs’ [attach themselves to machines which hold them captive] (12). They ‘reculent’ [recoil] instantly when someone attempts a ‘geste de douceur’ [kind gesture] (13). ‘Respect,’ in this republic, is accorded not to the likes of ‘saints, héros, et bandits de grand calibre’ [saints, heros, and high-calibre bandits] but, rather, to ‘les riches, les bellâtres, les imbéciles, les commerçants’ [the rich, the fops, the imbeciles, the merchants]. Indeed, its customs are such that ‘commerçants’ are not even systematically ‘mis à mort’ [put to death], contrary to the usage ‘qui partout se pratique’ [which is everywhere practiced] (15). Rather, the citizens of that republic submit to commerce—in short, to that recurring ‘enemy’ of society in Salvayre's oeuvre: ‘liberal politics’ (Huglo and Lapidus, ‘The Salvayre Method,’ 41).

Listening to the recording of Contre, where the author's voice is accompanied by the eerie guitar improvisations of Serge Teyssot-Gay of Noir Désir, readers of Salvayre detect that her more typical satirical ‘refusal of the serious’ (Huglo and Lapidus, 35) is suspended here. On some level—even if it is only because we hear Salvayre's actual voice on the recording—we gather she is speaking ‘for once in her own voice’ (Motte, ‘Lydie Salvayre and the Uses of Literature,’ 1017) with an unusual directness. She delivers a modern-day J’accuse against the ills befalling her ‘republic.’