Alex Hughes. Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

178

technologique in 1986) was created, and the

baccalauréat professionnel was introduced the

same year. The reform of the lycée curricu-

lum, launched in 1992 and completed in 1995,

should be viewed in the same perspective. The

trend is now for lycées to become polyvalents,

that is to say to to develop all three strands

within the same institution, so as to facilitate

interchange and mitigate the relative disfavour

which which the non-generalist strands (espe-

cially the ‘professional’ strand) are viewed.

Mention should also be made of two

branches of higher education to which some

lycées are host: the sections de techniciens

supérieurs (STS) and the classes préparatoires

aux grandes écoles (CPGE). The former pro-

vide two-year courses leading to an advanced

technical diploma in a range of options, some-

times linked to the needs of local industry, and

designed to produce qualified supervisors and

middle managers. The latter prepare candi-

dates for the competitive examinations upon

which recruitment to the elitist preserve of the

grandes écoles is based.

Since the 1989 Education Act, all schools

are required to produce an institutional plan

showing how the sum total of their activities—

curricular and extracurricular—combine to

make up the school’s distinctive contribution

to achieving the aims and objectives laid down

nationally. Such a plan, if sufficiently impres-

sive, may ensure additional funding.

RON HALLMARK

See also: educational elitism: the grandes

écoles; universities

Further reading

Auduc, J.-L. and Bayard-Pierlot, J. (1995) Le

Système éducatif français, 4th edition,

Créteil: Centre Regional de Documentation

Pédagogique (an up-to-date guide to the sys-

tem; a revised edition is produced every year).

Ministère de [‘Education Nationale, de

l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche

(1996) De la 6e au BAC, Paris: Les Dossiers

de l’Office National de l’Information sur les

Enseignements et les Professions (ONISEP)

(subtitled ‘how to help your child succeed’,

it is a practical guide for parents to the work-

ings of the system).

Vasconcellos, M. (1993) Le Système éducatif,

Paris: Éditions La Découverte (gives a good

perspective on how the system developed

into its current form).

education, the state and the

church

The French constitution guarantees equal ac-

cess to educational opportunity for all citizens.

Public education is free and secular, and its pro-

vision is an obligation upon the state. Yet, in

the 1990s, almost 1 in 5 children is taught in a

private—that is to say, for the most part (92

per cent) Catholic—school. Nowadays, despite

traditional antagonism between the public and

private sectors, the vast majority of private in-

stitutions enjoy a contractual relationship with

the state, which gives them access to state fund-

ing. Given transfers at crucial moments of fail-

ure, educational progression or choice of stream,

it has been estimated that as many as 1 in 3

pupils may, during their school careers, take

advantage of the ‘freedom of choice’ represented

by the private sector (l’école libre).

Until the Revolution, virtually all education

was under the control of the church. The abo-

lition of this monopoly in 1789 heralded more

than a century of strife, as the state strove to

take control of education in the face of stern

opposition from the church, which considered

teaching as one of its basic missions. Succes-

sive governments laboured to build up the

capital and manpower resources, building and

opening schools, and setting up training col-

leges for lay teachers (écoles normales) where

anticlericalism was rife. While the church’s

authority was on the whole consolidated un-

der the Restoration and the First and Second

Empire, state control was eventually estab-

lished under the Third Republic, in a series of

measures associated in particular with Jules

Ferry, minister from 1879 to 1883. In 1881–2,

education, the state and the church

179

primary education was made compulsory, and

free state schooling was introduced. In 1886,

it was ruled that state education was to be

dispensed exclusively by lay teachers, and re-

ligious education was replaced in the curricu-

lum by ‘moral and civic education’. Hence,

the framework for a basic free, secular, com-

pulsory state system was in place well before

the formal separation of church and state in

1905 and the closure of the religious schools

run by teaching Orders.

Catholic education did not disappear, how-

ever: two acts of parliament, the Guizot law

(1833, for primary education) and the famous

Falloux law of 1850 (for secondary education),

had recognized the right of any authorized

person or body to open and run a school, and

hence endorsed the ‘freedom’ of families to

choose the form of education for their chil-

dren. These provisions remain in force today.

Current relationships between the state and

private education are regulated by acts of the

Fifth Republic (the Debré law of 1959 and the

Guermeur law of 1977) which offered private

institutions a choice between independence

outside the state system (where their income

would be derived from fees), complete integra-

tion or association by contract. The last of these

has been the choice of the overwhelming ma-

jority of such institutions. Under the two forms

of contract that exist, the state assumes respon-

sibility for the payment of staff salaries and

teaching materials, and the competent local

authorities (under decentralization) are re-

quired to make a contribution to overheads

and running costs. In return, the state retains

control over staff appointments, curriculum

and the creation of new establishments, as

places at private schools are counted in terms

of the planning of resources. Contracting in-

stitutions must guarantee equal opportunity of

access for all, irrespective of race or religion.

Antagonism remains deep-seated, however,

and intermittently resurfaces. In 1982–4, at-

tempts by the Socialist government to imple-

ment President Mitterrand’s election promise

to make education ‘a unified, secular public

service’ saw battle again joined along tradi-

tional lines. The proponents of secularism, led

by the Comité National d’Action Laïque

(CNAL), restated their opposition to the per-

petuation of the ‘dual’ provision fostered by

the current system of contracts; the defenders

of ‘freedom of choice’, with the Comité Na-

tional de l’Enseignement Catholique (CNEC)

to the forefront, opposed any suggestion of

integration or assimilation with the state sys-

tem. After mass demonstrations by both

camps, the proposed legislation was with-

drawn as it was proving so socially divisive.

Yet traditional Catholic religious positions

are not alone in posing a challenge to secular-

ism in today’s multicultural society. In 1989,

when three girls were suspended from school

in Creil for wearing the traditional Muslim

headscarf (chador) during lessons—on the

grounds that this represented a breach of the

obligatory secular stance (laïcité), to which all

state educational establishments are bound by

law—there ensued counter-claims of racial and

cultural discrimination. In an attempt to pre-

serve tradition, in such a way as to rebut such

claims, and also to cater for the right to free-

dom of conscience which the Conseil d’État,

when consulted, was anxious to affirm,

François Bayrou, the government minister,

eventually issued a circular distinguishing be-

tween ‘discreet’ signs of religious allegiance

(which are to be tolerated) and ‘ostentatious

symbols’ which, amounting to proselytism, are

potentially divisive and are therefore banned.

Schools were instructed to incorporate a clause

to this effect in their house regulations, though

ultimately it was left to heads of schools to

police this regulation and pronounce in indi-

vidual cases.

RON HALLMARK

See also: Catholicism and Protestantism; edu-

cation, primary; education, secondary:

collèges, lycées, etc.; immigration; Islam; rac-

ism/-anti-semitism

Further reading

Durand-Prinborgne, C. (1994) L’Éducation

nationale: une culture, un service, un système,

education, the state and the church

180

2nd edition, Paris: Nathan (this contains

good, succinct sections on the private sector

in context, and the current state of issues).

Gilsou-Bézier, F. (1989) Connaissance du

système éducatif français, Paris: Éditions

Castella (an especially useful source for the

legislative framework of the system).

Langouet, G. and Léger, A. (1991) Public ou

privé? Trajectories et réussites, Paris:

Éditions Publidix—Éditions de l’Espace

Européen (an up-to-date study of trends

and social contexts).

Parias, L.-H., Rémond, R., Rouche, M.,

Lebrun, F., Venard, M., Quéniart, J.,

Mayeur, F. and Prost, A. (1981/2) Histoire

général de l’enseignement et de l‘éducation

en France, published under the direction of

L.-H.Parias, preface by R.Rémond, 4 vols,

Paris: Nouvelle Librairie de France (a well-

documented general history; volume 3

traces the nineteenth-century struggle).

Le Monde (1984) ‘L’École privée: les vrais

enjeux’, Le Monde, 3 March (an excellent

review of the issues and of the state of play

at the time of the attempt at major reform).

educational elitism: the grandes

écoles

A very distinctive aspect of the French higher

education system, the grandes écoles are a

range of small, highly selective, mainly inde-

pendent institutions which exist in parallel to

the universities and form the privileged train-

ing ground of top politicians, civil servants,

and chief executives in modern-day France.

It is difficult to generalize about the grandes

écoles because they are both so numerous (well

over 150) and so diverse in legal status, spe-

cialist fields, regimes and modes of finance.

Their dominant role in the late twentieth cen-

tury does not mean that they are modern foun-

dations. Many of the most prestigious among

them date from the nineteenth (or even eight-

eenth) century: the École des Ponts et Chaussées

was founded in 1747, and others go back to

the Revolution or the Empire. On the other

hand, perhaps the most famous of all, the École

Nationale d’Administration (ENA), with its

awesome reputation for turning out, not only

top civil servants, but also senior diplomats,

politicians and presidents of the Republic, was

established as recently as 1945.

Some establishments are privately financed,

others are publicly funded by Ministries of

State (Defence, Agriculture, Transport, etc.),

while yet others come under public commer-

cial bodies such as the Chambers of Com-

merce. Some charge fees, some are free, some

even confer salaried status upon their entrants,

usually subject to an undertaking to enter state

employment upon graduation: as

fonctionnaires-stagiaires, entrants to the four

Écoles Normales Supérieures receive about

8,000 francs per month. Lengths of courses

vary (though three years would be the norm),

as does the timing of recruitment.

However, various features are shared by

most of these institutions. Although they have

expanded over the last twenty years, they re-

main, unlike the universities, small and exclu-

sive, with rarely many more than a thousand

or so students. Given the increasing demand

for such prestigious studies, and the lure of

job prospects upon graduation, they can af-

ford to be highly selective on entry. In most

cases, this selection is based upon competitive

examinations requiring special preparation,

typically in the Classes Préparatoires aux

Grandes Écoles (CPGE), which form part of

the post-baccalauréat provision in the big

lycées and to which entry is itself selective. The

CPGE represent two years of intensive, highly

competitive and stressful study of one of three

main branches of learning—humanities, eco-

nomics or science—without any guarantee of

success. Students often have to—or choose

to—repeat a year, and by no means all obtain

places in the end; but the jobs to which suc-

cessful candidates may aspire at the end of

study in a grande école—senior, highly paid,

executive posts in the civil service or the pri-

vate sector—are such that increasing numbers

of applicants come forward each year.

As well as being small and selective, the

grandes écoles are also professionally orientated.

educational elitism: the grandes écoles

181

Their statutes are often defined, not in terms

of the disciplines they teach, but of the end

product: the École Polytechnique, for exam-

ple, is committed to ‘give its students a gen-

eral and scientific education which will equip

them for highly qualified positions of respon-

sibility in the scientific, technical or economic

sectors in state civil or military departments

and the public services, and more generally in

the activities of the Nation as a whole’. Active

professionals and industrialists assist in the

design of syllabuses and in their updating, and

are often involved in the teaching. Practical

placements form an essential part of the cur-

riculum in many cases. The value of an indi-

vidual school’s diploma, for which, in addi-

tion, each graduand is ranked in order within

the year’s cohort, is assessed partly in terms of

the jobs and salaries commanded by its gradu-

ates. A fierce sense of loyalty is engendered

within the student bodies, which, after gradu-

ation, continue to pursue activities on behalf

of the institution through networks of alumni.

Amid all the diversity indicated above, it is

possible to identify certain significant group-

ings. The four Écoles Normales Supérieures,

which admit some 3,000 students in all, train

top-level researchers, teachers and more gen-

erally administrators in a range of basic disci-

plines (including literature and the arts, the

sciences and technology). The engineering

schools (École Nationale Supérieure des

Mines, des Ponts et Chaussées, des

Télécommunications, etc.) provide senior

managers and technical experts for the public

services and for industry. The title ‘engineer’

is prestigious and highly sought-after in

France, and the right to confer this title is

strictly regulated. L’École des Hautes Études

Commerciales (HEC) and the various Écoles

Supérieures de Commerce train business ex-

ecutives, accountants, financial consultants,

etc. Finally, a clutch of establishments prepare

their students specifically (though not exclu-

sively) for careers in government administra-

tion: the ENA (referred to above) and the nine

Instituts d’Études Politiques.

With their unabashed elitist approach, the

upper-middle-class bias of their social compo-

sition, their tendency to teach conformist atti-

tudes, and their capacity for internal self-per-

petuation, the grandes écoles have come un-

der increasing criticism in the 1980s and

1990s. There is no doubt about their influ-

ence in French society, however, or the stran-

glehold they have on senior posts in both the

public and private sectors. A survey in 1993

revealed that, in the 200 leading French com-

panies, 73 per cent of the top executives were

products of the grandes écoles; almost 50 per

cent of them were diplomates of either ENA

or the École Polytechnique.

RON HALLMARK

See also: education, secondary: collèges,

lycées, etc.

Further reading

Fauconnier, P. (1992) ‘Le Vent de la révolte:

les grandes écoles dans le colimateur’, Le

Nouvel Observateur, 21 May 1992.

Gaillard, J.-M. (1987) Tu seras président, mon

fils. Anatomie des Grandes Écoles et mal-

formations des élites, Paris: Éditions

Ramsay (critique of the training provided,

and of its inadequacy to meet the challenges

of the year 2000).

Ministère de l’Education Nationale, de

l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recher-

che (1996) Après le BAC: réussir ses études.

Le Guide des études supérieures 1996,

Paris: Les Dossiers ONISEP (up-to-date re-

view of the options and procedures).

electronic revolution

The electronic revolution affects many areas

of French life. According to President Chirac,

its most important realization, the informa-

tion revolution, will be the third such major

upheaval for mankind, following the agricul-

tural and the industrial revolutions. The

Minitel telephone-based information system,

started early, is popular and widespread;

electronic revolution

182

computer-based learning has been massively

supported in education; in entertainment, tel-

evision, video, games and CDs have become

normal features of everyday life; the informa-

tion society—bringing together information,

entertainment and the exchange of opinion

and channelled through new information

highways—is being prepared through specific

government (and to a lesser extent commer-

cial) action. Perhaps more so than in other

countries, ‘language engineering’ has played a

significant part: the specific problems and role

of French language have been at the forefront

of official concern, although French is invent-

ing neologisms to cope.

The French Teletel network, Minitel, was

formed in 1980 as a response to Prestel, but

followed an original approach widening pro-

vision from business to the general public.

France Télécom provided minicomputers free

to telephone subscribers, and incidentally gave

massive support to the French computer in-

dustry. Individuals and commercial enterprises

were encouraged to set up their own servers,

and are paid for whatever service they make

available with money collected on their behalf

through phone bills. The approach had enor-

mous success, with 6.5 million interactive ter-

minals by 1995, and 25,000 on-line services

ranging from newspapers to bulletin boards,

from sober bank transactions and the book-

ing of tickets for trains or concerts to

messageries roses, enabling usually erotic pic-

tures and messages to be anonymously accessed

and exchanged—with no public outcry. Giv-

ing access to everybody and familiarizing us-

ers with computer screens, Minitel popularized

the electronic revolution and brought home

how useful and indeed interesting and enter-

taining technology could be. Even by 1985,

some 42 per cent of Minitel time was devoted

to games and messages, while during 1994 the

French made 1,913 million calls, used the sys-

tem for 110 million hours and spent 6.6 bil-

lion francs. However, the system has remained

almost exclusively French, and hopes of France

leading the world were not realized.

Computer-based learning has been mas-

sively supported in education: computers have

been given to schools, and widespread train-

ing offered to teachers. As in most countries,

however, the incredible speed of change has

reduced the value of early large-scale initia-

tives, and computers have not yet become ei-

ther required or integral parts of the learning

process. In entertainment, television, video

and games have become normal features of

everyday life. Cable and satellite television

have provoked the creation of new French TV

channels, although much that is on offer is in

English. CD-Roms, both for educational and

entertainment purposes, and both audio and

audiovisual, have followed earlier forms of

electronic diffusion. Laser shows have trans-

formed Paris for official celebrations as well

as for concerts. Arcade games and consoles

are enormously popular with the young, and

sales of multimedia PCs are booming.

Government and other public authorities,

rather than private industry, have led the way,

developing information highways—cable, sat-

ellite transmission and the Internet. The French

public has become used to many outward signs

of electronic technology—constantly changing

municipal notice-boards in every town’s pe-

destrian area, driverless trains on light passen-

ger railways, destination boards on buses. Be-

hind these outward signs, industrial and par-

ticularly transport technology is heavily de-

pendent on computerization and such interna-

tional developments as the Global Positioning

System. But the French tradition of high pro-

tectionist barriers and centralized methods of

control has offended European competition

laws, and more significantly may find it diffi-

cult to withstand the anarchic explosion of the

Internet or the commercial pressures from non-

French manufacturers.

Perhaps more so than in other countries,

‘language engineering’ has been a significant

element in the electronic revolution. The stakes

are high: President Chirac is on record in De-

cember 1995 as saying, ‘if, in the new media,

our language, our programmes, our inventions

are not significantly present our future gen-

erations will be both economically and cultur-

ally marginalized’. Language engineering is the

concern of the language industries, concerned

electronic revolution

183

with the creation and manipulation of (mono-

lingual and multilingual) text, documents of

any size from memos to encyclopedias, mix-

tures of text and images. These industries have

many profitable outlets: simple word process-

ing, office management, automatic translation,

full-text information held in data banks, and

a whole range of software for finding it. Most

of these applications, and particularly the

databases, use American English, and indeed

the enormous economic and commercial

power of American industry and media across

the world impose the use of this lingua franca;

consequently much effort in France has been

deployed on language planning. As far as pos-

sible, government organizations like the

Délégation Générale à la Langue Française

must discover French terms to replace Ameri-

can ones and enforce their use; American must

be translated to French in every aspect of com-

munication media; and as far as possible

French software and hardware should be sup-

ported. There have been some successes: the

ubiquitous suffix -ique (informatique,

bureautique, robotique) is fruitful in neolo-

gisms; words like logiciel (software), convivial

(user-friendly), baladeur (walkman) have be-

come common usage. But the inventiveness of

people has another outlet: writing on screens,

as in Minitel, has created a whole new short-

hand and spelling, with k replacing qu, c re-

placing c’est, and words telescoped: oqp

stands for occupé (busy).

DENNIS AGER

See also: economy; linguistic regulation; mu-

sic industry; pop video

Further reading

Ager, D.E. (1996) Language Policy in Britain

and France: The Processes of Policy, Lon-

don: Cassell (examines the processes used

in France for language planning, together

with the policy itself).

Noreiko, S.F. (1993) ‘New words for new tech-

nologies’, in Sanders, C. (ed.) French Today:

Language in Its Social Context, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, (a useful gloss

of the relationship between language and the

electronic revolution in France).

Elkabbach, Jean-Pierre

b. 1937, Oran, Algeria

Broadcaster

He is an eminence grise of French television,

where he became director of news at Antenne

2 in 1977. It was during an interview with him

in the run-up to the 1978 legislative elections

that Georges Marchais lost his cool and en-

deared himself to much of the audience by in-

structing him to ‘Shut up, Elkabbach!’ (‘Taisez-

vous, Elkabbach!’—later to be the title of

Elkabbach’s autobiography). Eased out under

the Socialists, he has since 1992 been director

of the channels France 2 and France 3.

KEITH READER

Further reading

Bonvoisin, S-M and Maignien, M. (1986) La

presse féminine, Paris: PUF (a useful intro-

duction to the women’s periodical press).

Presse et Statistiques (1994), Paris: SJTI (sta-

tistical information relating to the press).

Wadia, K. (1991) ‘Women’s Magazines: Com-

ing to Terms with Feminism Post-May

1968’, French Cultural Studies 2, 6 (an ex-

amination of the influence of second wave

feminism upon the ideology and discourse

of femininity as encountered in women’s

magazines ).

Éluard, Paul

b. 1895, St-Denis, Paris;

d. 1952, Charenton-le-Pont

Poet, real name Eugène Grindel

He has the distinction of being the foremost

poet of the Surrealist movement and the most

celebrated of the Resistance poets. In keeping

with the objectives of Surrealism, his poetry

abounds in images, and yet the effect of the

poetry is virtually ‘classical’ because of

Éluard’s gift for elegant control and sensuous-

ness. Almost all of the poetry celebrates the

fascination of Woman and the erotic power

she exercises over men. One often has the im-

pression that Éluard is continuing the grand

tradition of troubadour poetry. In the years of

the Resistance, the subject matter of the po-

ems widens to include the themes of fraternity

and liberty. The enormous quantity of poetry

written over a period of thirty-five years is

collected in the Pléiade edition of his Poésies

complètes (1968). Éluard was a close friend

of Picasso and knew most of the Cubist and

Éluard, Paul

185

Surrealist painters well; they often illustrated

his works.

WALTER A.STRAUSS

Further reading

Bouvier, P. (1991) Le Travail, Paris: PUF (a

concise account of the way in which work

is structured in contemporary France).

Grangeas, G. and Le Pagé, J.-M. (1992) Les

Politiques de l’emploi, Paris: PUF (a neat

description of state policy towards employ-

ment and unemployment in France).

Équipe, L’

L’Équipe, France’s best-known and oldest

sports newspaper (it celebrated its fiftieth birth-

day in February 1996), is published daily ex-

cept Sunday and has a weekly magazine which

is also devoted exclusively to sport. With a

readership often in excess of half a million,

L’Équipe, which uses the most advanced tech-

nology available, is noted for the range of

sports that it covers and for its esoteric style,

often relying heavily on specialized vocabulary,

literary allusions, pun and wordplay.

IAN PICKUP

See also: national press in France; sport

Ernaux, Annie

b. 1940, Lillebonne

Writer

Ernaux’s literary corpus, initiated by the 1974

novel Cleaned Out (Les Armoires vides), fo-

cuses particularly on the theme of social class.

The only daughter of working-class parents, a

number of the autobiographical fictions she

published in the 1980s—Positions (La Place),

Une Femme (A Woman) and La Femme gelée

(The Frozen Woman)—address the gulf be-

tween the ‘classe dominée’ into which Ernaux

was born and the ‘classe dominante’ to which

university education permitted her to accede,

and the consequences of the kind of social

metamorphosis Ernaux herself underwent.

While she is by no means a militant feminist,

gender-role formation and (female) sexuality

Équipe, L’

187

also feature as key themes in Ernaux’s writ-

ing, dominating Ce qu’ils disent ou rien (What

They Say or Nothing), published in 1977, and

1991’s more recent Passion simple (Simple

Passion). One of France’s leading contempo-

rary women writers, Ernaux’s latest work in-

cludes Journal du dehors (A Diary of the Out-

side) and La Honte (Shame).

ALEX HUGHES

See also: autobiography; women’s/lesbian

writing

erotic writing

In the decades following the war, authors of

erotica had to contend with a prolongation of

the moral order imposed by Vichy, and with a

climate of repression which made publication

problematic. From the mid-1970s onward, the

situation became less restrictive, and in the late

twentieth century French erotic literature ap-

pears to be flourishing. Any review of post-

war erotico-literary production in France needs

to focus upon those texts which, if they occa-

sionally or even regularly employ the motifs

of commercial pornography, nevertheless tran-

scend the limitations of a crudely pornographic

model (see Frappier-Mazur 1988). Addition-

ally, such a review must take account, not only

of the sociohistorical landmarks punctuating

the evolution of the erotico-literary genre and

the publishers associated with that genre, but

also of the diverse ‘categories’ of erotica it has

engendered.

In the introduction to her very useful an-

thology, Écrire d’amour, Claudine Brécourt-

Villars isolates laws passed in 1930, 1939,

1949, 1958 and 1967 as generative of the con-

trols to which the publication of erotica was

subjected in France for the first thirty years of

the postwar period (Brécourt-Villars 1985). She

cites also, as significant moments in the evolu-

tion of the erotico-literary field, 1964 (a year

which witnessed a ‘new erotic offensive’) and

1970 (the year in which an ‘unprecedented

wave of erotica’ burst upon the literary scene).

Her essay makes the further point that if liter-

ary erotica managed to survive in postwar

France, this was because it was defended by

the country’s intelligentsia. This fact is evi-

denced by the enthusiasm for the works of Sade

displayed in the writings of authors such as

Beauvoir, Georges Bataille, Blanchot and

Lacan. Indicative also of intellectual support

for erotico-literary freedom is the way in which

public and literary figures voiced their opposi-

tion, in 1945 and 1973, to the prosecutions of

the Denoël publishing house (Henry Miller’s

French publishers) and of Régine Deforges,

whose maison d’édition L’Or du Temps spe-

cialized in erotica.

Deforges is not the only specialist publisher

whose name springs to mind in the context of

literary erotica. Éditeurs in this field include

Éric Losfeld, a Surrealist who published erotic

works clandestinely (‘sous le manteau’) and

officially; Claude Tchou, whose Cercle du

Livre Précieux series included erotic ‘classics’

and new texts; and Jean-Jacques Pauvert,

whose efforts to bring out new editions of the

works of Sade encountered legal obstacles in

the 1950s. Yet other publishers specializing in

the erotico-literary domain are Christian

Bourgois, La Jeune Parque, Spengler, and

Zulma. As Brécourt-Villars indicates, after

1964 mainstream maisons d’édition such as

Gallimard also began to publish erotic fiction

(Brécourt-Villars 1985).

For review purposes, we can divide post-

war erotic writing into two key subsections—

male-and female-authored erotic discourse—

and subdivide these bodies of writing into a

further series of categories. According to Anne-

Marie Dardigna’s study Les Châteaux d’Éros,

a good many postwar, male-authored, hetero-

sexually oriented erotic texts—the creations of

writers such as Leiris, Klossowski and

Mandiargues—associate the erotic with the

mystical and the metaphysical, and/or privi-

lege quasi-religious motifs such as transgres-

sion and profanation (Dardigna 1980). The

fusion of the erotic and the metaphysical/spir-

itual is likewise a central theme in Bataille’s

influential 1957 essay Eroticism (L’Erotisme),

as it is in his own prewar erotic tales. The first

erotic writing