The Secret Agent

Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel tells the story of a spy-for-hire who infiltrates the ranks of a radical French commune.

September 19, 2024 issue

Reviewed:

by Rachel Kushner

Scribner, 407 pp., $29.99

On November 11, 2008, 150 police officers surrounded the tiny village of Tarnac, in central France. They had come to arrest members of a small leftist commune that had been operating a farm, along with a general store and a bar, for the previous four years. The charge was terrorism, or rather being part of an “association of wrongdoers in relation to a terrorist undertaking”—in this case the use of iron rods to disrupt several high-speed rail lines in the area.

Industrial sabotage is a venerable French tradition; the rods had caused significant delays, but there had been no chance of anyone getting hurt. It quickly became clear that the Tarnac Nine—as the main suspects were known—had been taken into custody for another reason, namely that government officials believed they were behind a political tract called The Coming Insurrection, written by a group going by comité invisible, or the Invisible Committee.

Published in 2007, The Coming Insurrection is an anticapitalist, anarchist treatise that advocates for the formation of autonomous communities, or communes, as a means of building resistance to state power. It’s written in a punchy, confrontational style with no shortage of bons mots: “The economy is not ‘in’ crisis, the economy is itself the crisis.” “We are not depressed; we’re on strike.” “An authentic pacifism cannot mean refusing weapons, but only refusing to use them….It’s only in an extreme position of strength that we are freed from the need to fire.” The book caught the attention of the American conservative pundit Glenn Beck, who held up a copy of it on his Fox News show. “It is a dangerous book,” Beck insisted. “Don’t dismiss these people. Don’t dismiss them.”

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