Alex Hughes. Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture
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The enunciative stance of BD draws upon
some of the codes of classic cinema in order,
in some cases, to transgress them: Tintin gazes
out at the reader from the cover of The
Castafiore Emerald (Les Bijoux de la
Castafiore), as do some of the bewildered sol-
diers in Tardi’s La Guerre des Tranchées
(Trench Warfare). The artist Bilal draws him-
self in La Croisière des oubliés (The Crusade
of the Forgotten Ones) and gives himself a
speech bubble justifying the drawing style of
the frames on the page. Authors vary in the
extent to which they make use of récitatif
(voice-over): some, such as Hergé, consider
descriptive prose to be redundant in a visual
narrative, and limit their use of it to brief indi-
cations of changes in time and place. Others,
such as Charlier and Giraud in the western
saga of the adventures of Blueberry, take the
opportunity to underline the epic quality of
their subject matter with a certain grandilo-
quence of tone. There may be a disjunction
between what is written in the récitatif and
what is shown: Tardi juxtaposes extracts from
speeches of generals and politicians with im-
ages of the horror of war.
Unlike cinema, BD is silent and immobile.
It has, however, a number of resources for
evoking sound and movement. The ‘sound-
track’ of BD consists both of onomatopoeic
words, whose thickness varies according to the
loudness of the sound, and of dialogue con-
tained in speech bubbles. Speech bubbles and
onomatopoeia occupy space within (or over-
lapping) the frame, and may become visual
elements in their own right: Giraud uses a
speech bubble to obscure the face of a charac-
ter in a ‘Blueberry’ album which is all about
spying and hiding. The narrative may, though,
be carried by pictures alone: Arzach by
Moebius is thirty-two pages long and has only
one speech bubble at the very end.
BD is discontinuous. Ellipsis occurs not just
between actions but within them, and readers
must complete the movement in their imagi-
nation. The codes of BD are therefore differ-
ent from those of the animated cartoon, which
recomposes all the stages of a movement,
frame by frame. BD can convey great energy
by portraying only the most extreme stage of
a movement.
The issue of realism is posed differently for
BD and film: since BD does not involve me-
chanical recording, it does not have to have
any relationship to the external world at all.
In practice, although many artists reject the
meticulously encoded documentary realism of
the ligne claire, it is hard to imagine a BD that
would be completely non-representational and
still fulfil the criterion of being narrative art.
The medium allows for spectacular departures
from the laws which govern the natural world:
villages may float in the air, strange pyrami-
dal structures may engulf cities, and the de-
tailed architectural façades drawn by François
Schuiten may suddenly reveal themselves not
to belong to three-dimensional buildings but
to be based on a two-dimensional illusion. A
significant current in BD aims at a form of
realism which is based on the faithful repro-
duction of the iconography of film genres such
as the western or the film noir, the latter most
often in black and white with an expressionist
use of shadows and contrast. Colour is not
necessarily used in BD to enhance the effect of
realism, but may add an emotional tonality to
the frame. Colour is normally added in the
final stages of the process of production of a
BD, often not by the artist but by a colourist.
Artists such as Bilal and Barbier have worked
directly in coloured paint, however, with no
prior drawing.
The maturity of the medium is not in any
doubt. A work like Partie de chasse by Christin
and Bilal, in which officials of Eastern bloc
countries settle scores during a weekend at a
hunting lodge, is acknowledged as a master-
piece of narrative and visual art by the critics
of the serious press, although in general media
coverage of BD is scant and its status remains
that of a minority cult interest rather than a
mainstream art form. The future of BD is un-
certain: publishers are unwilling to take risks
with untried authors and, in the absence of the
outlet for new creative work formerly provided
by the journals, conservatism threatens to stifle
the industry. Its best hope may lie in the resur-
gence of small publishing collectives which will
comic strips/cartoonists
119
free authors and readers from the tyranny of
the series and the superhero.
ANN MILLER
See also: beur comics; youth culture
Further reading
Bilal, E. and Christin, P. (1983) Partie de
chasse, Paris: Dargaud.
Fred (1994) Le Corbac aux baskets, Paris:
Dargaud.
Hergé (1960) Tintin au Tibet, Paris,
Casterman.
Peeters, B. (1991) Case, planche, récit: lire une
bande dessinée, Paris: Casterman (formal
analysis).
Sadoul, N. (1989) Entretiens avec Hergé,
Paris: Casterman (interviews).
Tardi (1993) C’était la guerre des tranchées,
Paris: Casterman.
Tisseron, S. (1990) La Bande dessinée au pied
du mot, Paris: Aubier.
committed literature
This term describes a movement encompass-
ing fiction and non-fiction which was inspired
by the underground press and clandestine pub-
lishers during the Occupation.
Wartime prototypes of littérature
engagée—the adjective translates into English
as both ‘engaged’ and ‘committed’—were typi-
cally collective efforts among various left-wing
groups united by circumstance against the cen-
sorship imposed by the Nazis and those in
France who collaborated with them. Later
forms and expressions were determined less
by the specific experience of the Occupation
than by the longer French tradition of the
writer or artist responding to his or her his-
torical moment in a wide public sphere.
A first major attempt to extend collective
wartime efforts following the Liberation began
in late 1944 when Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de
Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty launched
Les Temps modernes as an alternative to the
more or less apolitical (‘disengaged’) Nouvelle
Revue française, which had dominated French
literary monthlies between the wars.
Between January and June 1946, Les Temps
modernes ran a series of articles written by
Sartre in response to the general question,
‘What is literature?’ These articles, republished
in book form a year later, served as a mani-
festo of the programme of an engaged litera-
ture that—in line with a tradition going back
to Plato’s Republic—excluded poetry, whose
sonorous and semantic density Sartre saw as
an obstacle between the writer and the world
of historical change. Sartre’s exclusion of po-
etry made clear the extent to which his pre-
ferred medium was a transparent prose whose
mission he prescribed as being that of protect-
ing individual and collective freedom by dis-
closing any and all threats to it. Yet, because
this exclusion asserted engagement as a con-
scious choice on the part of the writer, the
Sartrean programme set forth in What is Lit-
erature? was arguably less concerned with lit-
erature as an end in itself than with the prac-
tice of an engaged writing whose objective was
to transform the writer into a (bad) conscience
of his or her historical age.
The Sartrean programme set forth in What
is Literature? drew its theoretical grounding
from distinctions between prose and poetry de-
fended earlier by Paul Valéry, and by virtue of a
parallel distinction set forth by Stéphane
Mallarmé. At the same time, Sartre’s charac-
terization of the writer as the bad conscience of
his or her age evoked the turn-of-the-century
figure of the public intellectual (one thinks first,
here, of Émile Zola and ‘J’accuse’) linked to the
Dreyfus Affair. It is this second sense of
littérature engagée (i.e. of a literature linked to
debating social and political issues in a public
sphere) that evolved beyond the Sartrean pro-
gramme of the late 1940s into a wider practice
of a socially responsible mode of writing that
ranged from novel and essay to theatre and—
Sartre’s exclusions notwithstanding—poetry.
Two further points need to be made here. First,
this broader model of littérature engagée, equated
with the figure of the public intellectual, goes
committed literature
120
back at least as far as the period between the
wars to include writers such as Roger Martin
du Gard, Julien Benda, Paul Nizan, André
Malraux and Emmanuel Mounier. (Even André
Gide published a 1938 collection of essays
entitled Littérature engagée). Second, a con-
siderable debate surrounds the question of
whether the writer expresses commitment in-
directly, by depicting issues of political involve-
ment, or instead by a more direct personal in-
volvement ranging from essay and/or editorial
to the picket line, demonstration and similar
activism. To restate the question even more
pointedly, one might ask whether commitment
is an attribute of the writing or of the writer.
Debate surrounding the nature of committed
literature extended between 1945 and 1970
beyond Sartre’s early postwar paradigm to-
ward a sense of the term as political involve-
ment on the part of Left-leaning writers and
artists.
Involvement in this wider sense was, in turn,
equated with position-taking (prise de position)
on specific matters and—often—removed from
formal partisan affiliation. One consequence
of this wider practice was that committed lit-
erature came increasingly to include non-liter-
ary forms of writing such as journalism and
the topical essay. This evolved sense of com-
mitted literature as committed writing was
driven by what Simone de Beauvoir aptly re-
ferred to in her memoirs as the ‘force of cir-
cumstance’. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s,
debates in literary journals, as well as in news-
papers, lecture halls and congresses, centred
on how the committed writer might best re-
spond to the issues ranging from France’s co-
lonial policies in Indochina and Algeria to the
1956 Soviet suppression of Hungary, Fidel
Castro’s takeover in Cuba, American military
presence in Vietnam, and the question of Isra-
el’s territorial claims in the Middle East.
A definite anti-totalitarian shift on the Left
in the mid-1970s was prompted by the publi-
cation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Ar-
chipelago. This shift was soon enhanced by the
visibility of a post-May 1968 generation of
‘new’ philosophers such as Bernard-Henri Lévy
and André Glucksmann, who increasingly ap-
propriated the role of public intellectual for-
merly held by Sartre and his contemporaries.
On the domestic front, since the 1970s, young
figures of popular song and film such as
Renaud and Coluche raised public awareness
concerning racism and the homeless.
A related shift since the mid-1970s
stemmed from practices of committed litera-
ture in support of identity issues involving
feminism and decolonization as well as prac-
tices that raised awareness concerning op-
pressed minorities such as gays and Jews.
These writings recalled earlier texts by writers
such as Albert Memmi, Jean Genet, Frantz
Fanon and Albertine Sarrazin that illustrated
persistent prejudice and oppression as obsta-
cles to be recognized and overcome.
STEVEN UNGAR
See also: Algerian war; existentialism; gay
writing; racism/anti-semitism; women’s/les-
bian writing
Further reading
Judt, T. (1992) Past Imperfect: French Intel-
lectuals, 1944–56, Berkeley: University of
California Press (traces evolving attitudes
of leftist intellectuals towards Soviet Rus-
sia; critical and provocative).
Schalk, D. (1979) The Spectrum of Political
Engagement: Mounier, Benda, Nizan,
Brasillach, Sartre, Princeton: Princeton
University Press (a key reference for inter-
war practices and their postwar evolution).
Stoekl, A. (1992) Agonies of the Intellectual:
Commitment, Subjectivity, and the Perfor-
mative in the Twentieth-Century French
Tradition, Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press (essential background reading).
Compagnons de la chanson, Les
Singers
Originally made up of nine singers when
formed in 1944, the Compagnons de la
Compagnons de la chanson, Les
121
chanson spent two years singing with Edith
Piaf after the war (for example, The Three
Bells (Les Trois Cloches)), but gained more
fame on their own in France and abroad. The
Compagnons survived many changes of musi-
cal fashion, without deviating from their rigid
harmonic style and without seeing their popu-
larity wane. The group split up in 1980 after
the death of one of its members.
IAN PICKUP
See also: song/chanson
concert music
The situation of concert (defined here as or-
chestral) music in France is marked by the
problems besetting orchestral music in the rest
of the Western world. One should not really
regard it as a crisis; it is rather a profound
sociological and aesthetic change that has
characterized music since 1945.
In the first place, musical audiences are di-
minishing; partly as the result of the popular-
ity of recordings, partly as a result of a reduc-
tion of interest and the power of discrimina-
tion. Much of this deterioration is due to the
fact that the grand continuity of musical edu-
cation, from the classical period until the dawn
of modernity, towards 1910, has been dis-
rupted. Audiences tend to be either hostile or
impatient toward the avant-garde music of the
earlier part of the twentieth century, although
a number of works by Bartók, Stravinsky and
Berg have entered the concert repertory; but
the important music written after 1945, with
very few exceptions, has not even been played
widely, and therefore audiences are not likely
to become interested. Since it is generally diffi-
cult for young composers to get a hearing in
the concert hall or on radio stations specializ-
ing in classical music, they have found a vi-
able solution by composing for smaller ensem-
bles that can be formed in conservatories and
around universities; and the obvious result of
this situation means small but dedicated audi-
ences. Another fact to be taken into consid-
eration is that this music is frequently difficult
to perform and requires special understanding
in order to play it at all. These aesthetic con-
siderations, along with the economic realities
of concert halls and orchestras that are obliged
to cater to and satisfy upper-middle-class con-
sumers (even when these organizations are
subsidized by the state), are keeping contem-
porary music in a precarious state of insecu-
rity, and the future of concert music is by no
means reassuring.
In some respects, one might say that the
nineteenth century, in which concert music
became a major modern ritual (like opera) pri-
marily patronized by the wealthy middle class,
came to an end by the time World War I be-
gan, and certainly by the time World War II
ended. The nineteenth century marked the tri-
umph of the symphony in the concert hall; and
in some way, the situation of concert music in
our time parallels the dilemma of the symphony
after Mahler. Moreover, it is worth noting that
Debussy and Ravel, the leading French con-
temporaries of Mahler, were simply not inter-
ested in writing symphonies. It is arguable that,
after 1945, the symphony ceased to exist as a
compositional genre (there are, however, some
noteworthy exceptions); in its wake, sym-
phonic music also suffered neglect, sometimes
disdain, on the part of the new generation of
composers. Among the group of French com-
posers, formerly known as Les Six, who lived
beyond 1945, one might say that their princi-
pal work had been done before 1939. This is
largely true of Milhaud and Honegger. In the
case of Francis Poulenc (1899–1963), we must
nevertheless note the fact that his three op-
eras—Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1944), a set-
ting of Apollinaire’s play; Dialogues des
carmélites (1953–6), based on a text by
Georges Bernanos; and La Voix humaine
(1958), using a libretto by Jean Cocteau—are
impressive achievements. The Dialogues have
been widely performed, with much success.
The most original of the younger compos-
ers that came to (limited) prominence after
1945 is Henri Dutilleux (1916–), who is actu-
ally in the succession of Debussy and Ravel
and at the same time open to serial techniques.
concert music
122
As a result, his works are full of original
touches, harmonic as well as structural. Two
individual traits that are constantly encoun-
tered in his works are the predilection for ti-
tles and subtitles either derived from Baudelaire
or reminiscent of the enigmas of the
correspondances central to symbolist poetry;
and the design of developing thematic trans-
formations throughout his compositions for
which the title Métaboles is splendidly appro-
priate. The title of that composition (1962–4)
could as easily have been Métamorphoses,
which means more or less the same thing.
Dutilleux has written two symphonies (1951
and 1959): the second one, ‘Le double’, uti-
lizes an instrumental group of twelve soloists
along with the orchestra but keeps the two
groups independent from each other and thus
explores the sonorities that can be produced
by this arrangement. A later work, Timbres,
espace, mouvement (1977–8) reinforces the
notion implicit in Dutilleux’s work since the
1950s that his dominant interest lies in sonor-
ity and in the problem of the spatialization of
music, which is one of the major preoccupa-
tions of the music of the second half of the
twentieth century (Stockhausen, Boulez, Ligeti,
Carter and Birtwistle come to mind).
The most important composer by far to
come out of the Jeune France movement of the
1930s, and certainly one of the most important
shapers of music of the last fifty years, has been
Olivier Messiaen (1908–92); most of the ex-
perimental composers in France were his stu-
dents at the Conservatoire (Boulez, Barraqué,
Xenakis). Messiaen’s compositional journey
has been from organ composition to orchestral
works, plus a large and important body of pi-
ano works, stretching over a period of more
than sixty years. The symphonic piece that
made his name famous as an orchestral com-
poser was the Turangalîla-Symphonie (1946–
8), a ten-movement work requiring large or-
chestral forces, including a piano soloist, ondes
Martenot and enlarged percussion. The char-
acteristic ‘signatures’ of this large work are the
unusual rhythms and sonorities, many of them
derived from Hindu musical practice; the over-
all sound comes close to a kind of super-
gamelan (many contemporary composers have
made attempts to find Western equivalents of
the Balinese gamelan). In Chronochromie
(Time Colour), ten years later, as the title indi-
cates, these timbral effects are treated with
greater sophistication and economy; and by
that time a new ingredient that is to be found in
most of Messiaen’s later works, namely the use
of birdsong, has become an important part of
his orchestral palette. (Messiaen always in-
sisted that certain chords were ‘coloured’.) The
same thing is true of the Sept Haïkai, esquisses
japonaises (1963), scored mainly for wind and
percussion, and Couleurs de la cité céleste, in
the same year, which dispenses with strings al-
together. It is also true of the remarkable Et
exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum (1964).
The two last-mentioned works are indices of
the profound attachment of Olivier Messiaen
to his Catholic faith. It can be said without ex-
aggeration that every one of his works is a cel-
ebration of Catholic belief and doctrine, and
that music is the language in which this belief
can best be expressed. During the following
years Messiaen was at work on a huge work
for large chorus and orchestra entitled La
Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-
Christ; a few years later came a very large sym-
phonic work, Des canyons aux étoiles, which
is also a tribute to the landscape (and birdsong)
of the western United States. The most striking
final work is the four-hour opera Saint
François d’Assise which occupied Messiaen be-
tween 1975 and 1983 and which was per-
formed at the Paris Opéra in the following
year. It is clear that a work about the saint who
preached to the birds had always been dor-
mant in Messiaen; the opera is most impressive
and constitutes, in some ways, a summary of
Messiaen’s musical and religious commitment.
It is subtitled ‘Scènes franciscaines’ and, in-
stead of relying on plot, it is panoramic. The
static quality of this opera is typical of
Messiaen’s music, which is predicated to tran-
scend time and to ‘intimate’ the presence of
eternity within its musical duration. The opera
was followed by a large orchestral work,
Éclairs sur l’au-delà (Illuminations of the Be-
yond).
concert music
123
The example of Messiaen’s orchestral mu-
sic points up the fact that the conception of
writing for the orchestra was rapidly chang-
ing after 1945; and these ideas, quickly trans-
mitted to his more impatient and radical pu-
pils, have enriched the concert repertoire in
France since 1945. It is necessary, however, to
make one proviso: obviously the notion of
‘concert music’ is now somewhat different from
what it was during the first half of this cen-
tury, the seeds having been planted in the years
1908–20 by Stravinsky and the Viennese
twelve-tone composers. As a matter of fact,
virtually all of the younger composers have
been exposed to serial composition and have
been clearly marked by it. Because of the new
interest in sonorities and timbre, most of the
newer compositions are for specialized ensem-
bles, usually limited in number, and ‘unortho-
dox’ from the point of view of the normal con-
cert-hall expectations. Younger composers in
France have been fascinated by the possibili-
ties of the music of Asia, particularly the
gamelan; and many of them encountered the
influence of Edgard Varèse, who opened the
way for large percussion works as well as con-
struction in terms of blocks of sound. Another
influence in the 1950s is that of John Cage and
aleatoric (‘chance’) music; and of course the
advent of musique concrete in the laborato-
ries of Pierre Schaeffer at the RTF (Radio et
Télévision Française) during the same period.
This experimentation with artificially created
soundscapes and patterns led naturally into the
technologically more sophisticated regions of
electronic music; almost all experimental com-
posers tried electronic composition—and usu-
ally left it behind.
Among the more important composers of
that generation, two deserve brief mention, and
one is absolutely central to an adequate com-
prehension of what has been accomplished in
the second half of the century. Iannis Xenakis
studied with Messiaen, and is in many ways
closer to Varèse, in view of the strongly per-
cussive nature of his music. He is also known
for his ‘stochastic’ method, a method of devis-
ing structures by mathematical means, using
the calculus of probability. Many of his larger
works, such as Metastasis and Pithoprakta, are
remarkable in their powerful new sonorities.
In Nomos gamma the orchestra is deployed
among the audience, and there are numerous
compositions for tape and for smaller groups,
most of them highly intriguing.
Jean Barraqué (1928–73), another disciple
of Messiaen and a serial composer of remark-
able talent, died too early to accomplish his
lifetime ambition to set to music extensive ex-
cerpts of Hermann Broch’s novel The Death
of Virgil; a few excerpts were completed. It
will be a matter of time before Barraqué’s ex-
tremely difficult music can reach a larger pub-
lic; however, his final completed work, a clari-
net concerto, offers a good index of Barraqué’s
impressive abilities.
But the central figure is Pierre Boulez, cer-
tainly the most important composer/conduc-
tor/theorist of the century. After his gradua-
tion from the Conservatoire (where Messiaen
was his major teacher), he immediately mani-
fested his uncompromisingly austere and bril-
liant intellectual and compositional genius by
creating a number of works that carried
serialism to its final conclusion—total seriali-
zation of all the compositional aspects of mu-
sic—particularly the two books of Structures
for two pianos (1951–61). His orchestral
works during those years make use of texts by
René Char: Le Visage nuptial and Le Soleil
des eaux. The most famous and important of
these Char settings is for a small ensemble, Le
Marteau sans maître, the work that made him
internationally famous as a composer. The
largest Boulez orchestral work is Pli selon pli
(1957–62), a powerful hommage to Mallarmé,
with whom Boulez has many affinities (disci-
pline, frequent revision, precision, clarity and
a strong lyricism that is often veiled by these
severe compositional constraints). In the
1960s, Boulez became internationally ac-
claimed as a conductor. His compositions went
forward at a somewhat slower pace; now he
was absorbing the impact of aleatoric music,
which he nevertheless kept under strict
compositional control. Outstanding large-scale
works in this category are Figures-Doubles-
Prismes for large orchestra, Éclat/Multiples,
concert music
124
Domaines (for clarinet and six instrumental
groups) and Rituel in memoriam Maderna for
eight orchestral groups. Since 1977, with the
Foundation of IRCAM (Institut de Recherche
et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique),
Boulez has been active in research into experi-
mental techniques and acoustical problems (in
addition to a lively conducting schedule). The
two most impressive outgrowths of this activ-
ity (besides the creation of the Ensemble
Intercontemporain to perform these works)
have been Répons for six instrumental solo-
ists, instrumental ensemble and electro-acous-
tic equipment. In this work, which requires a
spatial arrangement altogether different from
the ordinary concert hall, the conductor and
the electronic engineer are placed at the cen-
tre, the instrumental ensemble is located in
front of the conductor, and the audience is
seated around the hall, the soloists being situ-
ated on the periphery, along with six loud-
speakers. The task of the electronic expert is
to distribute and manipulate the sound, so that
the music is literally deployed within a spatial
site. One of his most recent works is similar in
nature, ‘… explosante-fixe…’, once again with
the disposition of the audience in a space of
electronically distributed sound. These works
point toward a radically new conception of
how music can be produced, and requires a
new way of listening—all of these factors be-
ing a sort of synthesis of what most contem-
porary experimental music has been trying to
achieve.
WALTER A.STRAUSS
See also: song/chanson
Further reading
Griffiths, P. (1994) Modern Music: A Concise
History, New York: Thames and Hudson
(most concise overview of modern music
presently available).
Hodeir, A. (1961) Since Debussy: A View of
Contemporary Music, New York: Grove
Press (an older, but still interesting study of
the major modern composers).
conservation zones
Conservation zones (secteurs sauvegardés)
were introduced in 1962 by national legisla-
tion known today as the Malraux act, after
André Malraux, the then Minister for Cultural
Affairs, its chief sponsor. They are areas des-
ignated in historic towns (some seventy-five)
within which the historic architectural and
urban heritage is not only protected but also
positively enhanced. Some spectacularly beau-
tiful enhancement schemes have been effected
within secteurs sauvegardés (as in the Marais,
Paris) but, due to lack of finance and political
opposition to the radical nature of the works,
they have not brought about the general ren-
aissance of the French urban past which André
Malraux intended.
ROGER KAIN
See also: Marais plan; renovation projects
constitution of the Fifth
Republic
The constitution of the Fifth Republic was
drawn up by Charles de Gaulle and Michel
Debré in the summer of 1958 and gained mas-
sive public approval in a referendum held on
28 September 1958. The constitution marked
a significant break with the principles and prac-
tices of French Republican institutions and its
radicalism was emphasized by a controversial
amendment in 1962 which introduced the di-
rect election of the president of the Republic.
Over time, however, it has acquired a signifi-
cant degree of political legitimacy.
The immediate origins of the 1958 consti-
tution lay in the inability of the weak coali-
tion governments of the Fourth Republic to
resolve the bitter war with the Front de la
Libération Nationale (FLN, or National Lib-
eration Movement) and the supporters of
French Algeria. By 1958, sections of the French
armed forces were on the verge of open rebel-
lion and the authority of the civil power was
crumbling. Faced with this crisis, the majority
conservation zones
125
of the party leaders reluctantly accepted the
return to power of General de Gaulle, whom
they saw as the only man capable of solving
the Algerian war without turning France into
a military dictatorship. For de Gaulle, how-
ever, Algeria was only a symptom of what he
regarded as the fundamental weakness in
French politics, namely the absence of strong
government and the excessive power of the
political parties. Ever since the military and
political collapse of 1940, de Gaulle had be-
lieved that only by the exercise of leadership
could France survive as an independent nation.
He was thus determined to use the opportu-
nity provided by his return to power to reshape
France’s political insitutions. He took personal
control of the drafting of the constitution, made
sure that the parties were barred from any sig-
nificant say in its contents, and excluded par-
liament from the ratification process by appeal-
ing directly to the electorate via a referendum.
The principal innovations of the 1958 con-
stitution were the strengthening of the powers
of the president and the weakening of parlia-
ment’s role to disrupt government. The presi-
dent was given a range of prerogative powers
designed to enable him to control the political
situation—the right to declare a state of emer-
gency, to dissolve the National Assembly, to
make nominations to senior positions in civil
and military offices as well as to the office of
prime minister—and his authority was empha-
sized by the statement in Article 5 that he rep-
resents national unity and is responsible for
the proper working of the constitutional pow-
ers. At the same time, the powers of the Na-
tional Assembly were reduced. Its ability to
harass government was curtailed, the length
of its sessions was reduced, its monopoly over
legislation was broken by the introduction of
referenda and by the creation of a Constitu-
tional Council able to veto laws deemed un-
constitutional. Strengthening the presidency
and curtailing the National Assembly marked
a clear break with the principles of democratic
Republicanism, which argued that the Na-
tional Assembly was the sole repository of the
national will and that a strong presidency was
incompatible with political liberty.
It is, however, important to note that the
1958 constitution did not challenge other key
elements in the constitutional code of French
Republicanism. It states that the Republican
form of regime is not subject to revision and
that the Tricolour flag (the symbol of the
French Revolution) is the national flag. It also
reaffirms the secular nature of the state and
includes in the preamble the 1789 Declara-
tion of the Rights of Man and the Citizen as
extended by the 1946 constitution of the
Fourth Republic. To these essentially symbolic
continuities should be added the more politi-
cally charged clauses respecting the core prin-
ciple of French Republicanism that the execu-
tive power should be responsible to the Legis-
lature. The constitution establishes a prime
minister and government who are responsible
for the formulation and implementation of
policy, and who cannot continue in office
without the confidence of the directly elected
National Assembly. It is true that the presi-
dent appoints the prime minister; but the text
clearly implies that the power to remove him
or her resides with the National Assembly. It
also lays down that constitutional revision is
the prerogative of the Legislature.
The 1958 text thus provides both for par-
liamentary government and for a ‘two-headed’
executive, and in doing so left unanswered the
key question, ‘Who rules?’ That it did so re-
flects the fact that the constitution is a com-
promise between de Gaulle’s vision of the
president as national leader and the Republi-
can’s insistence that democracy was only safe
when government was accountable to parlia-
ment. Each side could appeal to the lessons of
historical memory—de Gaulle to the impo-
tence of the presidency in 1940, parliament to
the rape of the Second Republic by Louis Na-
poleon in 1851. It was the latter fear which
explains why the 1958 constitution made no
provision for the election of the president of
the Republic by universal suffrage. So long as
the Algerian war continued, de Gaulle and the
parties were willing to stand by the 1958 com-
promise. Once it ended, the real battle for the
constitution began. De Gaulle was determined
to base presidential power not simply on his
constitution of the Fifth Republic
126
own charisma (which by definition was not
transferable to anyone else) but on the legiti-
macy of universal suffrage. He thus intro-
duced, by a dubious procedure, a constitu-
tional amendment establishing a directly
elected presidency. To almost all the political
parties, this represented an unacceptable as-
sault on Republican democracy. Secure in the
knowledge that, with the Algerian crisis over,
de Gaulle was no longer necessary, they at-
tacked him in the only way they could by vot-
ing a censure motion on his government. De
Gaulle promptly responded by exercising his
constitutional right to dissolve the National
Assembly. After a highly charged election cam-
paign, de Gaulle won a comfortable (though
not overwhelming) majority for his referen-
dum and, shortly afterwards, an overwhelm-
ing vote in the parliamentary elections.
The constitutional expert Maurice
Duverger said of the 1962 amendment that it
gave the president no new powers, but that it
gave him power. By this he meant that the
president henceforth possessed a democratic
mandate at least as strong as that of the Na-
tional Assembly. Over the next two decades,
the preeminence of the president, and the sub-
ordinate status of the prime minister, became
entrenched in practice and acceptable in
theory, particularly once the democratic Left
under Mitterrand decided to work with, rather
than against, the system. Thus there have been
relatively few changes to the constitution,
apart from the 1974 amendment extending to
parliamentarians the right to appeal to the
Constitutional Council and various measures
designed to incorporate European Community
legislation into constitutional law. The biggest
test to the constitutional convention estab-
lished in 1958–62 came in 1986 when the in-
cumbent President Mitterrand lost control of
the National Assembly to his conservative op-
ponents led by Jacques Chirac. In what be-
came known as the ‘cohabitation’ experience
(which would be repeated in 1993–5 with
Mitterand and Balladur and again, this time
with Chirac as president and Lionel Jospin as
prime minister, following the left-wing coali-
tion’s victory in the 1997 parliamentary elec-
tion), the president effectively gave up control
of the domestic policy agenda to the prime
minister but maintained his status as guardian
of the constitution and head of national de-
fence. Cohabitation demonstrated, first, that
the exercise of the full extent of presidential
powers depended on a supportive parliamen-
tary majority and, second, that the Gaullist
reading of the constitution was not the only
one. The fact that the Fifth Republic constitu-
tion could survive, first, the victory of its
former opponents and, second, the breakdown
of the president/parliament axis on which
since 1962 it had worked, is a tribute to its
flexibility. It is now second only to the Third
Republic as France’s longest-lasting constitu-
tion since the Revolution.
PETER MORRIS
See also: legal system; parties and movements
Copi
b. 1939, Buenos Aires;
d. 1987, Paris
Humorist, writer, designer
and performer
real name Raúl Damonte
The writer and performer of his own humor-
ous, sometimes shocking short plays, includ-
ing L’Homosexuel ou la difficulté de
s’exprimer (Homosexuals or the Difficulty of
Self-Expression) in 1971, and his 1988 Une
Visite Inopportune (An Untimely Visit). This
last play, under direction from Lavelli, is about
his own death.
ANNIE SPARKS
See also: theatre
Cormann, Enzo
b. 1954, Coublevie
Copi
127
Playwright,
real name Bernard Vergnes
A contemporary and frequently performed play-
wright, known for his experimentation with
style and form, particularly monologue. He is a
regular collaborator at the Théâtre Ouvert.
Works include Noises, Corps Perdus (Lost Bod-
ies), Sang et Eau (Blood and Water), Takiya!
Tokaya! and Âmes Soeurs (Sister Souls).
ANNIE SPARKS
See also: Attoun, Lucien; theatre
Cousin, Gabriel
b. 1918, Droué
Poet and playwright
An ex-sports teacher, who at the age of 40
began writing plays dealing predominantly
with themes such as war, famine and capital-
ism. He founded a research centre in Grenoble
in 1972, and has experimented with other ar-
tistic forms, such as puppetry, radio drama
and ‘total theatre’.
ANNIE SPARKS
See also: theatre
Cousse, Raymond
b. 1942
Writer, actor and playwright
Cousse was a novelist until the 1980s, when
he began to write for the theatre. He is best
known for his dramatic monologues, which
he often performs himself, such as These
Childish Things (Enfantillages) and Strategy
for Two Hams (Stratégie pour deux jambons),
based on one of his novels. His writing is in-
fluenced by the Theatre of the Absurd, espe-
cially Beckett, with whom he corresponded
regularly.
ANNIE SPARKS
See also: theatre
Major works
Cousse, R. (1989) New French Plays, Methuen:
London (edited by C.Schumacher, with a
translation of These Childish Things).
Cresson, Édith
b. 1934, Paris
Politician
Édith Cresson holds the distinction of being
the first woman prime minister of France and
of holding that office for the shortest time in
the history of the Fifth Republic. Born to a well-
off Parisian family, she broke with her back-
ground and became a devoted lieutenant of
François Mitterrand, who would be her pa-
tron throughout her political career. She held
a series of ministerial offices in the Socialist
governments of the 1980s and established a
regional base as deputy mayor of Châtellerault
(Indre et Loire). Her appointment as prime
minister in 1991 owed less to her ministerial
achievements, or to her clout in the Socialist
Party, than to her closeness to Mitterrand and
to the latter’s determination to be rid of the
incumbent, Michel Rocard. It proved to be a
disastrous miscalculation by both Mitterrand
and Cresson. The new prime minister was un-
able to impose her authority on the members
of her government or on the male-dominated
preserve of the higher administration, whose
fury she aroused by insisting that its training
school, the École Nationale d’Administration,
should be moved from Paris to Strasbourg.
Although she was unquestionably the victim
of sexism—and of the sudden decline in the
popularity of the Socialist Party—she lacked
Cresson, Édith