He attended college at Saint-Girons, high school in Toulouse and then at Lycée Buffon in Paris, achieving a bachelor's degree.

Originally titled The Bastard, his narrator Urban Gorenfan / Aubain Minville relates the quest for identity of a young man not recognized by his father, who seeks to know how the child would have been if he had been legitimate.

"Take the high ground, do not fear what dictates the imagination, take care of the balance between reality and fiction, these are my constant concerns as a novelist.

In this audacious novel with its salacious passages, His Excellency the Lord began climbing, with his old mother, this huge rocky spur that points to the sky in a singular struggle.

[5] After the election of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing to the presidency, he kept up with politics, joined the Socialist Party and actively campaigned in the following years.

It tells the drifts coercive when a group of young people from a village in the Ariège intend to oppose a rally of the Advanced Liberal Youth: "shuns violence is something undemocratic, approve the hunt active minorities is another.

"[6] In 1981, in Wounds and Bumps, resulting from interviews with Maurice Chavardes, he took stock of his career, re-distanced himself from politics and announced the writing of several novels.

The Pompeii (1985) brings back the dark days of the Occupation and its sequel The Demons of the Court of Rohan (1987) addresses the issue of leftism of the 1970s and its shift into terrorism.

The Fakir (1995) brings back the Algerian past of the master pollster Lenoyer (torture, methods of pacification), a period of which there is silence, whose vicissitudes have serious consequences even today.

In Christ (1997) the inhabitants of a village, guardians of the last vestiges of Cathar, see their tranquillity disrupted by the arrival of an American scientific expedition.

Philidor's position (1992), a detective novel that details ambitious young professionals going to a mountain village where a crime occurs.

In his latest novel Henbane (1999), Aubain Minville and Urban Gorenfan, the heroes of Rhubarb, reappear in an investigation into the murder of a young anti-nuclear activist.

JP Damour analyses Pilhes' writing noting his fondness for the winks, the use of narrative platitudes and psychoanalytic clichés (cf.

Rhubarb and The Loum): "It arises from the accumulation process ostensibly a baroque composition, often parodic, which sometimes turns the main characters' quest into a sort of epic slapstick.

"[9] Concerned about the literary legacy he would leave, and willing to defend and promote knowledge of his work, he maintained a blog in which he reported on some critics who had praised him during his career and delivered some keys to reading his novels.

Of the controversy around The Hitler, twenty years after its release, Pilhes said he has been accused of anti-Semitism and as a result has been subject to legal attack.

In the dictionary of Jérôme Garcin, in his own written record just after The Hitler, he justified himself thus: "the author wanted to show a sample of what would be a neo-antisemitic speech.