Constance Debré was born in Paris in 1972. She attended the prestigious Lycée Henri IV preparatory school and later studied law at Paris-Panthéon-Assas University. After completing her studies, she worked as an attorney and defense lawyer in various capacities, for example, for her father who was charged with embezzlement in 2011 together with former French president Jacques Chirac. During this phase of her life, Debré also launched her literary career with Un peu là beaucoup ailleurs, for which she won the French literary prize Prix Contrepoint in 2005. In 2015 she gave up her law career and left her husband in order to dedicate herself fully to writing.

In her inaugural lecture, Debré will discuss her writing practice as an author and draw connections between Play Boy and Love Me Tender in addition to her other works, such as Nom and Offenses. These texts will serve as the basis for the author’s presentation and exploration of topics in her seminar “Writing Against,” which she will offer this summer semester. Students in the seminar will engage with literature as a mode of writing against social conventions and existential concerns.

Debré’s Autofictional Works Grapple with Questions of Identity and Social Norms

Debré’s novels are often autofictional. In them she works through her relationship to her celebrity family, her parents’ drug addiction, her coming-out as queer, as well as the legal battle for custody of her son. Her literary breakthrough came in 2018 with the publication of Play Boy, a biting and provocative reflection on her radical rejection of bourgeois Parisian life. In 2020 the illustrious publishing house Éditions Flammarion published Love Me Tender, in which Debré deepens her critique of the bourgeoisie, describes her path to self-determination as a queer woman, and explores freedom through forms of physical desire. This novel was Debré’s first work to be translated into German and was published in 2024 by Matthes & Seitz. The German translator of the novel, Max Henninger, also recently translated Play Boy, which was released in March 2025 by the same publishers.

While her 2022 novel Nom revisits similar themes, Debré most recent work, Offenses from 2023, delves into the French legal system with a story about an elderly woman who is murdered by a drug addict due to financial problems.

Constance Debré Is the 52nd Samuel Fischer Visiting Professor

As Samuel Fischer Visiting Professor, Constance Debré will offer a seminar this summer semester entitled “Writing Against.” The course will examine how literary writing functions as an act of resistance against social conventions and at the same time serves as a mode of addressing existential concerns. Through an innovative reinterpretation of the famous quote by G. K. Chesterton, “What’s wrong with the World? – I am,” Debré will investigate literary works from a variety of authors both past (e.g., Dante, Charles Baudelaire, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Bernhard) and present (e.g., Joan Didion, Bret Easton Ellis, Ágota Kristóf). In analyzing these works, students will also be asked to write their own texts and discuss them in the seminar.

The Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin has awarded the Samuel Fischer Visiting Professorship for Literature regularly since 1998. It is funded by Freie Universität Berlin, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), S. Fischer Verlag publishing house, and Holtzbrinck Berlin – Inspire Together. Writers from different literary traditions and cultural backgrounds are invited to teach at the institute for a semester and engage in a critical reflection on literature from around the world.