Alex Hughes. Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

138

forms such as Butoh, Barata Natyam and

Kathak are represented, as well as flamenco,

folk dance and various forms of street dance,

especially hip-hop and break dancing. Some

of these events also encompass workshops,

pre- and post-performance talks and video

showings that allow non-professional danc-

ers, students and the general public to partici-

pate more fully, and further develop their in-

terests in dance.

As a result of these circumstances, France

has witnessed a remarkable expansion of

dance activities over the last few decades

which reached its height in the dance boom of

the 1980s, and in particular when 1988 was

designated as l’année de la danse. This expan-

sion has not only been quantitative, but has

qualitatively fostered the talents of a whole

generation of new choreographers who have

felt free to absorb inspiration from a wealth

of sources, and to combine apparently anti-

thetical dance ideas in forms that bear witness

to a developing cultural diversity in France.

With the changes of political climate in the

last five years, there has been some shrinkage

of dance activities, but as Jack Lang has said,

‘dance is an irreversible movement’ (see

Adolphe 1992). It is to be hoped not only that

the momentum of the 1980s can be main-

tained but also that, artistically, French dance

will be able to regenerate itself through what

could be more difficult times ahead.

FIONA WARNE

See also: Avignon and summer arts festivals;

choreographers; cultural policy; dance

troupes; poststructuralism

Further reading

Adolphe, J.M. (1992) ‘La Nouvelle Danse

française’, in W.Sorrell (ed.) The Dance Has

Many Faces, Chicago: Acapella Books (a

very good overview of French modern

dance with parallel articles on British and

German situations as well as chapters out-

lining the ideas of the pioneers of modern

dance through the century).

Au, S. (1988) Ballet and Modern Dance, Lon-

don: Thames and Hudson (a concise, very

readable historical overview).

Clarke, M. and Crisp, C. (1973) Ballet: An

Illustrated History, New York: Universe

Books (useful for sections relating to French

ballet).

Dance Théâtre Journal (1989), 7, 1 (summer),

London: Laban Centre (this issue was en-

tirely devoted to contemporary French

dance).

Lambert, É. (ed.) (1983) Fous de danse, Paris:

Autrement, série Mutations no. 51 (lots of

short articles on a wide variety of dance-

Further reading

Dasté, J. (1977) Voyage d’un comédien, Paris:

Stock (observations on theatre by Dasté).

Debray, Régis

b. 1940, Paris

Intellectual

From his Marxist-Leninist period in the 1970s,

through his work as Third World adviser to

President Mitterrand in the 1980s and thence

to his important work on the evolution of the

media and the different kinds of ideas and dis-

courses they enable, Debray has been one of

the most prominent French thinkers of the last

quarter-century. His widely divergent work

centres around a series of key themes: the im-

portance of the nation-state; that of the weap-

ons with which it defends and the mediations

through which it articulates itself; the neces-

sarily compromised status of the intellectual;

and an abiding nostalgia for the now-dis-

placed culture du verbe. His imprisonment in

Bolivia for three years (the original sentence

was thirty) from 1967 focused much attention

on Revolution in the Revolution? (Révolution

Daney, Serge

141

dans la révolution?), a theoretical justification

of the Castro-Guevarist strategy of guerrilla

warfare. His denunciation of the power exer-

cised by the media over French intellectual life,

in Writers, Teachers, Celebrities (Le Pouvoir

intellectuel en France) of 1979, served as the

starting point for a sustained examination of

different types of mediation and their evolu-

tion from ‘logosphere’, via ‘graphosphere’, to

the contemporary ‘videosphere’ (Vie et mort

de l’image of 1992, L’État séducteur of 1993).

His 1990 defence of an idealized de Gaulle,

Charles de Gaulle: Futurist of the Nation (A

demain de Gaulle) rests on his admiration for

de Gaulle as homme du verbe and on their

shared belief in the centrality of the nation-

state. His novel La Neige brûle (The Snow is

Burning) won the Prix Femina in 1977.

KEITH READER

Further reading

Reader, K. (1995) Régis Debray, London:

Pluto Press (the only monograph on his life

and work).

decolonization

Decolonization is the process whereby the Eu-

ropean colonial powers, including France, re-

treated from their overseas empires in the post-

war period, sometimes under peaceful circum-

stances but often as a result of long and bloody

wars.

Although frequently compared unfavour-

ably with Britain’s relatively orderly with-

drawal from her overseas empire after World

War II, French decolonization can by no

means be equated simply with the successive

wars in Indochina (1945–54) and Algeria

(1954–62). For, while the violence in France’s

two principal colonies cannot be ignored, nei-

ther should the real achievements of French

decolonization in sub-Saharan Africa and else-

where be overlooked. Both the relative suc-

cesses and the conspicuous failures of French

decolonization may be understood in terms of

the specificity of the French colonial project

on the one hand and the impact on the empire

of World War II on the other.

It is a convenient commonplace to contrast

the pragmatic mercantilism and indirect rule

commonly held to have been the twin founda-

tions of the British imperial edifice, and the

assimilationist rhetoric and centralizing prac-

tice constitutive of the French colonial enter-

prise. Rooted in notions of civilizing mission,

the much-vaunted project of creating ‘the

France of a hundred million Frenchmen’ may

have remained largely mythical, but neverthe-

less was to constitute an important psycho-

logical barrier to decolonization after 1945.

Yet, paradoxically, the French colonies had

never previously generated anything to com-

pare with the popular imperial enthusiasm so

familiar in the British context. Neither private

capital nor willing settlers proved to be forth-

coming in the volumes necessary for effective

colonial consolidation. So, for instance, Alge-

ria, France’s foremost colony, would through-

out be dominated by the armed forces—for

whose colonial regiments (and especially the

Foreign Legion) it became a spiritual home—

and settlers of Spanish, Italian, Maltese and

various other non-French origin.

However, the role played by the French

empire after the fall of France in June 1940

was radically to transform the perceptions of

French policy-makers and the general public

alike. In the wake of the armistice, and more

particularly General de Gaulle’s historic ap-

peal to the French to continue their struggle,

the colonies took on a new importance. The

rallying to the Free French cause of dependen-

cies in the Indian subcontinent, the Pacific

Ocean and sub-Saharan Africa provided de

Gaulle with his first real political base, and

constituted a potent symbol of national conti-

nuity and resistance. With the Allied landings

in North Africa in November 1942, France’s

territories in the Maghreb became a spring-

board for the forthcoming attack on the

decolonization

142

southern flank of Hitler’s ‘fortress Europe’ and

thus, ultimately, for the Liberation of France

itself (with colonial troops, both ‘European’

and ‘native’, playing a significant part in the

Free French contribution to the Allied war ef-

fort). De Gaulle’s subsequent establishment in

Algiers of the French Committee of National

Liberation (CFLN), which became the Provi-

sional Government of the French Republic

(GPRF), was to provide another powerful

symbol of imperial continuity.

The role of the empire, real and symbolic,

in the liberation of the ‘mother country’ en-

couraged the emergence of an unprecedented

colonial consensus after the war. The neces-

sity of maintaining France’s overseas territo-

ries in order to re-establish the nation’s ‘great

power’ status became an article of faith for

many veterans of the internal and external

Resistance. However, what these policy-mak-

ers failed to appreciate was that the colonized

peoples of the French empire had drawn di-

rectly contradictory conclusions from the war-

time spectacle of French military defeat, Oc-

cupation and division. Where prewar colonial

nationalists had tended to favour legal routes

to reform within the French empire, their more

militant postwar replacements now looked to

full independence. Moreover, they were in-

creasingly prepared to take up arms to achieve

this outcome. On the French side, the fact that

many soldiers were to be involved in a succes-

sion of campaigns spread over a quarter of a

century and three continents led to a

marginalization and, crucially, a politicization

of the officer corps which would ultimately

constitute a serious threat to the very exist-

ence of the Republic.

Thus, just as the other European powers—

led by the British in India—began loosening

their military, political and emotional bonds

with their colonies, France sought to reimpose

its authority on an empire permanently altered

by its wartime loss of control. De Gaulle’s own

thinking on the future of the empire became

apparent with the conference organized for the

governors of France’s tropical African colo-

nies in Brazzaville (Congo) in January 1944.

The complete absence of representatives of the

African populations of these territories was in-

dicative of the paternalist vision which in-

spired the conference’s real, but strictly lim-

ited rethinking of France’s colonial vocation.

For what was proposed at Brazzaville was not

independence, but rather a measure of admin-

istrative decentralization which might eventu-

ally lead to limited self-government within a

notionally federal structure.

This top-down attempt at colonial moderni-

zation was variously prompted by the insights

of reformers, the agitation of the increasingly

well-organized nationalists and, especially, the

avowed hostility to continued colonial rule, in

the French empire as elsewhere, of the United

States. The new French Union envisaged a rosy

colonial future in which ‘associated states’

would freely consent to continued French con-

trol in return for political and economic con-

cessions. However, such thinking was fatally

outmoded in an age when the self-affirmation

of the colonized peoples was daily becoming

more apparent. Leading French intellectuals

such as Jean-Paul Sartre were instrumental in

drawing attention to the political implications

of cultural movements such as the négritude

championed by Léopold Sédar Senghor in Sen-

egal and Aimé Césaire in Martinique, while

the elected representatives of newly

enfranchized colonial voters such as Félix

Houphouët-Boigny in the Ivory Coast and

Lamine Gueye in Senegal gave a fresh voice to

colonial aspirations. Other signs of the strength

of the decolonizing ‘winds of change’ blowing

in this period included some particularly vi-

cious clashes between colonizers and colonized,

of which the most bloody—and most ruthlessly

suppressed—occurred in the Sétif region of

Algeria in May 1945 and Madagascar in 1947–

8. However, it was in Indochina that the op-

position to France’s attempted reimposition of

its colonial authority was to manifest itself

most violently.

Having lost effective control of its South-

east Asian ‘protectorate’ with the Japanese in-

vasion in July 1941, French armed forces were

unable to participate in the liberation of the

territory in August-September 1945. This role

fell instead to the indigenous nationalist

decolonization

143

resistance, supported, very ironically in the

light of later developments, by the United

States. On 2 September 1945, the Viet Minh’s

leader Nguyen Ai Quoc, better known as Ho

Chi Minh, proclaimed the independence from

France of the Republic of Vietnam; a move

which, following the breakdown of negotia-

tions between the two sides, was to lead di-

rectly to war. After an eight-year jungle con-

flict, the French army was catastrophically

defeated at Dien Biên Phu on 7 May 1954.

Although the peace agreements that sealed the

French withdrawal were signed before the end

of July, neither Vietnam nor France would be

at peace for long: Vietnam would soon be

obliged to engage the military might of the

United States as the priorities of the Cold War

replaced the latter’s erstwhile decolonizing

zeal; France, for its part, would end one colo-

nial war only to embark on another.

The Algerian war represents the greatest fail-

ure of French colonial policy after 1945. The

effective autonomy enjoyed by the governing

coalition of settlers and soldiers in Algeria meant

that even the most moderate reforms belatedly

proposed by Paris could without difficulty be

blocked or circumvented on the ground. In the

face of such intransigence, the Algerian nation-

alists—including many who, like future presi-

dent Ahmed Ben Bella, had wartime experience

in the French army—had little option but to

launch an armed struggle for independence.

When the war of national liberation finally be-

gan on 1 November 1954, Algeria’s special sta-

tus as France’s most economically, politically,

administratively and psychologically assimilated

overseas territory meant that the government

of Pierre Mendès France, recently elected pre-

cisely to extricate France from the débâcle in

Indochina, opted without hesitation to use force

in response to the nationalists’ demands. Such

was the determination of François Mitterrand

(Minister of the Interior at the time) to defend

Algérie française that he ordered the mobiliza-

tion of conscripts for military service in Alge-

ria, something which had never been done in

Indochina. Once set on this course, it proved

impossible for the chronically unstable govern-

ments of the Fourth Republic to overcome the

momentum generated by the war, as the Mollet

administration’s involvement in the Suez fiasco

of 1956 graphically demonstrated. So, whereas

Morocco and Tunisia were permitted to accede

to independence with relative ease in 1956,

France’s principal colony was to remain gripped

by a conflict which is still a source of heated

debate in France and which may straightfor-

wardly be linked to the vicious civil war being

waged in Algeria today between the successors

to the FLN and Islamic fundamentalists.

It was only with de Gaulle’s return to

power in 1958 that a way out of the Algerian

impasse became possible. The ability of de

Gaulle accurately to identify the stalemate in

Algeria, coupled with his determination to

shift metropolitan public opinion decisively

away from an imperial conception of French

grandeur and towards a modern and Europe-

centred one, meant that he was ultimately

able to prevail over the supporters of Algérie

française. De Gaulle was undoubtedly helped

in this task by the series of revelations which

had been made concerning the abhorrent

‘pacification’ methods used by the army in

Algeria—often by returning conscripts and re-

layed by sections of the French press, despite

strict government censorship—and which led

to concerted antiwar campaigning by such

contrasting intellectuals as Sartre and

François Mauriac.

The Évian agreements which eventually

concluded the war included temporary guar-

antees for preferential French access to newly

discovered oil and gas deposits in the Sahara

desert, as well as the continued use of certain

military and naval installations. They also in-

cluded provisions for the future of Algeria’s

European population. However, the scorched-

earth policy implemented by the European ter-

rorists of the Organisation Armée Secrète

(OAS) rendered inevitable the exodus of a mil-

lion settlers in considerable confusion and

panic. Never envisaged by de Gaulle or his

negotiators, this massive transfer of popula-

tion was only made possible by the booming

French economy. In a period of full employ-

ment, the pieds-noirs were assimilated remark-

ably rapidly into metropolitan French society.

decolonization

144

If the Évian agreements proved to be a

dead letter, de Gaulle’s attempts at orderly

decolonization were more successful in sub-

Saharan Africa, where they have resulted in

the maintenance of a real economic and cul-

tural influence, often as well as a significant

military presence. While the truly federal

‘French Community’ outlined by de Gaulle

never came into being, its notional existence

allowed the rapid achievement of full inde-

pendence by the territories involved, while

continued French economic and technical as-

sistance have provided the basis of the mod-

ern project of co-operation most often re-

ferred to nowadays as la francophonie. In a

few cases, of course, the avowed French

project of assimilation was actually carried

through, with such fragments of the colonial

empire as Martinique and Guadeloupe now

firmly established as fully integrated overseas

départements or territories (DOM-TOMs).

PHILIP DINE

Further reading

Ageron, C.-R. (1991) La Décolonisation

française, Paris: Armand Colin (a concise

French-language account).

Clayton, A. (1994) The Wars of French

Decolonization, London: Longman (best

and most up-to-date English-language ac-

count).

Hargreaves, J. (1996) Decolonization in Af-

rica, 2nd edition, London: Longman.

Kahler, M. (1986) Decolonization in Britain

and France: The Domestic Consequences

of International Relations, Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press.

Marseille, J. (1986) Empire colonial et

capitalisme français: histoire d’un divorce,

Paris: Albin Michel.

Pervillé, G. (1991) De l’empire français à la

décolonisation, Paris: Hachette.

Ruscio, A. (1987) La Décolonisation tragique,

1945–1962, Paris: Messidor/Éditions

Sociales.

Decroux, Étienne

b. 1898, Paris;

d. 1991, Boulogne

Actor and mime expert

An actor famous for pioneering physical thea-

tre and mime, who worked with many famous

theatre directors including Copeau and

Barrault, as well as in films such as Carné’s

Les Enfants du Paradis. After the war, he

opened his own school, and produced famous

mimodrames such as Les Arbres (The Trees),

L’Usine (The Factory) and Le Combat antique

d’Antoine et Cléopatre (The Ancient Struggle

between Antony and Cleopatra).

ANNIE SPARKS

Further reading

Aldrich, R. and Connell, J. (eds) (1989) France

in World Politics, London: Routledge &

KeganPaul (the beginnings of current de-

bates).

Deguy, Michel

b. 1930, Paris

Poet, translator, critic and theorist

Deguy is in many ways a truly experimental

poet. His earliest interest was philosophy,

which he taught from 1953 to 1968. He re-

gards poetry as a mode of knowledge—for

example, Actes (Deeds) of 1966—and wishes

to make it reflect the ambiguity of our world;

hence he can call ruins a ‘spiritual contour’ in

one of his poems. The earliest collections are

Fragments du cadastre (Fragments of Land

Survey) in 1960, 1962’s Poèmes de la presqu’île

(Poems of the Peninsula) and Biefs (Canal-Lev-

els) of 1964, followed by the collection with

the suggestive title of Ouï dire (Hear Say) in

1966. In later collections, such as Figurations

(1969), he proposes a new kind of poem, the

poème sourd (mute poem), gravitating between

prose and verse as a means of providing a

meeting ground for language and philosophy.

WALTER A.STRAUSS

Further reading

Boundas, C.V. (ed.) (1993) The Deleuze

Reader, Oxford: Columbia University Press

(an edited collection of important extracts,

with an informative introduction to

Deleuze’s work).

Delon, Alain

b.1935, Paris

Actor

One of the great stars, his career has been in-

ternational from the start, with major roles in

films by Visconti and Antonioni in the 1960s.

He is best known as the archetypal hero of the

police thriller, the best example being

Melville’s cult Le Samourai (1967). By the

1970s, his roles were stereotyped, and it was

not until the late 1970s that he found roles

worthy of his considerable talents: the hero of

Losey’s Monsieur Klein (1976), Baron Charlus

in Schlöndorff’s Swarm in Love (1984), the

hero of Blier’s Notre Histoire (1984) and

Godard’s Nouvelle Vague (1990).

PHIL POWRIE