Alex Hughes. Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

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208

with Simone de Beauvoir. Trained as an aca-

demic philosopher, she devoted her first ener-

gies to developing the themes of existential-

ism within the terms set by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Early Beauvoirian existentialist essays are

Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944) and The Ethics of

Ambiguity (Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté)

of 1947. The ground-breaking The Second Sex

(Le Deuxième Sexe), published in 1949, trans-

formed the terms of the discussion of the

woman question, with its exploration of the

situation of the female subject in Western cul-

ture, and its challenging presentation of

woman as the object constructed by men’s fic-

tions and sciences and by the male-determined

rituals and conventions of family and social

life. Beauvoir argued for the need to remake

the heterosexual couple, to produce a better

life for both men and women, and for the im-

portance of women seeking economic inde-

pendence to free themselves from the chains

of domesticity. In her later novels and auto-

biographical writings, she pursued her analy-

sis in terms which always situated the personal

in its wider political context. Her political ac-

tivism in conjunction with Sartre, from the

1950s onwards, also produced political com-

mentaries—see, for example, The Long March

(La Longue Marche), published in 1957, re-

lating her visit to Mao’s China.

Not until the mid-1960s did Beauvoir char-

acterize herself as feminist; but her distinctive

intellectual style, with its rationalist analysis,

left-wing commitment, engagement with prac-

tical moral and political issues and constant

return to personal experience as the ground of

understanding has left a clear mark on suc-

ceeding feminist thinkers. The direct influence

of The Second Sex is apparent in, for exam-

ple, Benoîte Groult’s Ainsi soit-elle (1975), a

polemic account of the marginalization of

women in everyday life. The work of Christine

Delphy ploughs a distinctive furrow within the

tradition. An academic sociologist active in the

feminist movement in the late 1960s and early

1970s, and one of the founder members of the

MLF, as well as of the campaign for the legali-

zation of abortion, Delphy continues in the

1990s to produce theory linked closely to prac-

tical social action. She founded the radical femi-

nist collective Questions Féministes (1977),

and after the split in the collective on the issue

of radical lesbianism (whose separatist doc-

trines she opposed, including those of her erst-

while collaborator Monique Wittig), she co-

founded Nouvelles Questions Féministes, with

continuing editorial support from Beauvoir. A

Marxist, Delphy nevertheless conceives wom-

en’s oppression not in terms of class struggle

but as primarily a struggle against patriarchy,

which is conducted in the first instance within

the family, where unpaid female labour is ex-

propriated by the (male) head of household.

Delphy’s doctrine of materialist feminism views

gender as a social construct rather than a natu-

ral category, and she is opposed to psychoana-

lytical theories which look for definitions of

the difference of the female subject in terms

which invite biological essentialism. Her 1976

essay ‘Protofeminism and Anti-Feminism’

(‘Proto-Féminisme et antiféminisme’) was a

refutation of Annie Leclerc’s much-hyped Pa-

role de femme (1974), a lyrical celebration of

the ‘natural’ difference of woman which urged

women to abandon attempts to compete on

masculine terrain and seek instead to valorize

female discourse (giggles and gossip), the fe-

male reproductive capacity and the domain of

domesticity.

Julia Kristeva, a former member of the in-

fluential Tel quel collective, whose work builds

on that of Barthes, Bakhtin and Lacan, defines

her intellectual project as the exploration of

the positioning of the subject in language. Her

work has enriched feminist thinking with the

fresh dimensions it has brought to considera-

tion of the relationship between language and

meaning. In her Revolution in Poetic Lan-

guage (La Revolution du langage poétique) of

1974, Kristeva drew together linguistics, phi-

losophy and psychoanalysis for an analysis of

the revolutionary subject in post-Mallarmean

literature. She set out her discussion of lan-

guage and meaning (and, especially, the sub-

version of meaning) in gender terms, present-

ing the production of meaning as involving

the interaction of two types of signifying proc-

ess. The semiotic, pre-linguistic, involves the

feminist thought

209

imprinting of the child with social and famil-

ial structures mediated through the maternal

body. The symbolic has to do with sign and

syntax and with linguistic and social laws, and

is said to be a paternal function. In its expla-

nations of some of the difficult new concepts

it was inventing, Kristeva’s early work used

some very traditional metaphors based on gen-

der (for example, the traditional association

of women and nature), which her later work

has reassessed. But even at that early stage,

she developed the metaphors in ways that were

productive for feminist political positions. See,

for example, About Chinese Women (Des

Chinoises), published in 1974; Polylogue,

1977). The Powers of Horror: An Essay in

Abjection (Pouvoirs de l’horreur) of 1980 is a

powerful critique of the conventional associa-

tion of woman with nature and its monstrous

repressions; which has produced, Kristeva ar-

gues, the Western fear of the archaic mother.

The work of Luce Irigaray is conceived in

sustained opposition to the philosophical and

psychoanalytic masters who organize the acad-

emy. It challenges the masculinist terms of their

logic, questions their right to lay down the laws

of debate, and sets up in opposition radically

different feminine sets of images for thought.

Speculum of the Other Woman (Speculum de

l’autre femme), published in 1974, addresses

itself to the question of what constitutes femi-

nine difference, which it describes as the burn-

ing question of our age. Freud is dismissed for

having assimilated the formation of the femi-

nine subject to a system expressed in terms of

the phallus, and is attacked for the contradic-

tions and ill-disguised self-interest of his logic.

Plato is swept up in the condemnation, as one

of the originating masters of masculine

thought. Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche

(Amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche) from

1980 attacks this other significant pole of con-

temporary Western philosophy, as yet another

emblem of the sameness of masculine thought,

always reducing feminine Other to its mirror.

Irigaray attacks specifically Nietzsche’s celebra-

tion of the will to power, his emphasis on re-

currence, the sharp binary oppositions that his

thought imposes, and its aspirations to pos-

sess its object. Against these, she places the

preoccupation with change, difference,

inclusiveness, openness and sharing, which she

claims as the property of feminine thought.

Marine Lover is a major text for reading

Irigaray’s famous association of the feminine

with fluidity (the mobile, all-embracing, crea-

tive sea) and, again, her opposition to the ra-

tionalist tradition. This time it is Socrates who

is called to the tribunal, along with his mod-

ern heir. Re-evaluation of modes of thought

carries with it the re-evaluation of personal

relationships. This Sex Which Is not One (Ce

sexe qui n’en est pas un) of 1977 collects im-

portant essays on feminine sexuality and writ-

ing, including a reconsideration of mother/fa-

ther roles. A fresh version of the bonds between

mother and daughter appears in And One Does

Not Move Without the Other (Et l’une ne

bouge pas sans l’autre) of 1979. More empiri-

cal investigations into the different ways men

and women use language figure in, for exam-

ple, Sex and Gender Through Language (Sexes

et genres à travers les langues) published in

1990, and/e, tu, nous (1990).

The reputation of Hélène Cixous, founder

in 1977 of the influential Centre d’Études

Féminines, rests principally in her creative writ-

ing, which itself constitutes an exploration into

key theoretical issues concerned with the na-

ture of the feminine subject, and the relation to

writing of feminine desire and the female body

(écriture féminine). Her work is closely associ-

ated with the psychoanalytic theory of the

group Psych et Po. But her thinking on the re-

lations of body, history and language, and also

her distinctive style, is at least as heavily in-

debted to the Irish modernist James Joyce, on

whom she wrote her thesis. The images and

structures of her writing embody the search

theorized by Kristeva and Irigaray for a mode

of writing that models what is characterized as

the specific nature of feminine desire—see, for

example, The Laugh of the Medusa (Le Rire de

la Méduse) from 1975, ‘Coming to Writing’

and Other Essays (La Venue à l’écriture) from

1977, and The Newly Born Woman (La Jeune

Née) of 1975. The play Portrait de Dora (1976)

turns back against Freud the content and form

feminist thought

210

of the case study in which he tried to pin down

the ‘hysteric’ Dora in the imprisoning catego-

ries of his psychoanalysis. More recent plays

go beyond the perspective of women’s repres-

sion to explore in the wider perspective more

general questions of identity and freedom in

language and history.

A more traditional approach to academic

philosophy appears in the work of Michèle Le

Doeuff, who has highlighted the institutional

barriers to women’s careers in the academic in-

stitutions. Hipparchia’s Choice (L’Étude et le

rouet), from 1989, sets her own work in the tra-

dition of Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de

Beauvoir, and defines her own philosophical ap-

proach as contestatory, exploratory, analytical

and rationalist. Like Irigaray’s, but in more con-

ventional and accessible terms, her texts explore

statements on women by male philosophers and

demonstrate their theoretical weaknesses. Le

Doeuff’s language is also that advocated by

Catherine Clément, teacher of philosophy and

former professional diplomat, who, in La Jeune

Née, played devil’s advocate to Cixous, arguing

that rationalist speech, being more generally com-

prehensible, was politically more effective than

hysterical and lyrical discourse. Clément’s study

of opera—Opera, or the Undoing of Women

(L’Opéra ou la défaite des femmes) from 1979—

offers a feminist critique of the myths of femi-

nine hysteria carried in the libretti, and an analysis

of the relation of myths and music.

The transformations in academic history

effected by the Annales school helped prepare

the ground for a new generation of women

historians, of whom the doyenne is Michelle

Perrot, general editor of the Histoire des

femmes (1990–2). History blends with phi-

losophy in the work of Élisabeth Badinter,

which has brought fresh perspectives to the

discussion of motherhood. More recently,

Badinter used the historical perspective to con-

tribute to the debate on the ‘crisis’ in mascu-

line identity generated by the rise of feminism.

JENNIFER BIRKETT

See also: abortion/contraception; autobiography;

feminism (movements/groups); Marxism and

Marxian thought; women’s/lesbian writing

Further reading

Jackson, S. (1996) Christine Delphy, London:

SAGE Publications (a richly detailed account

of an important sociological body of work).

Lechte, J. (1990) Julia Kristeva, London:

Routledge (a rewarding overview of

Kristeva’s work).

Marks, E. and de Courtivron, I. (eds) (1981)

New French Feminisms: An Anthology,

Brighton: Harvester Press (the first collec-

tion of its kind, offering short extracts with,

by and large, insufficient context for the

new reader to evaluate them; nevertheless,

it retains its value).

Moi, T. (1987) French Feminist Thought: A

Reader, Blackwell: Oxford (a compendium

of well-presented substantial extracts from

a broad range of writers, with a useful in-

troduction ).

——(1994) Simone de Beauvoir: The Making

of an Intellectual Woman, Oxford and

Cambridge, MA: Blackwell (readable and

scholarly; in the Beauvoirean tradition, it

situates the private subject in the public

sphere).

Oliver, K. (1995) Womanizing Nietzsche: Phi-

losophy’s Relation to the Feminine, New

York and London: Routledge (includes use-

ful sections on the implications for social

structures of Kristeva’s and Irigaray’s work

on the family triangle).

Whitford, M. (1991) Luce Irigaray: Philoso-

phy in the Feminine, London and New

York: Routledge (the standard text).

Fernandez, Dominique

b. 1929, Neuilly-sur-Seine

Writer, essayist and critic

The son of the literary critic and collaborator

Ramon Fernandez, Fernandez is a prolific nov-

elist, distinguished Italianist, travel writer, and

literary and music critic. He began writing

psychobiographies of Pavese and Eisenstein

Fernandez, Dominique

211

based on Freudian theories of sublimation (a

method he also applied to Mozart and

Michelangelo). His most interesting novels are

L’Étoile rose (The Pink Star), a magisterial por-

trayal of postwar gay culture in France and

America, published in 1978; Dans la main de

l’ange (In the Hand of the Angel), winner in

1982 of the Prix Goncourt, which retraces the

tragic itinerary of Pasolini; and La Gloire du

paria (The Glory of the Pariah), a 1987 exami-

nation of the value of human suffering caused

by AIDS. While Fernandez believes in the nor-

mality of homosexuality, he also claims that

AIDS restores to gay men an outlaw status fun-

damental to artistic creativity. In Le Rapt de

Ganymède (The Abduction of Ganymede), an

excellent literary and cultural history of gay rep-

resentation published in 1989, he argues that

only when homosexuality is an object of con-

testation does it become a properly creative sub-

ject for literature. By turns baroque, sober, sub-

tle and fastidious, Fernandez’s style is distin-

guished by its impressive probity.

JAMES WILLIAMS

Further reading

Robinson, C. (1995) Scandal in the Ink: Male

and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-

Century French Literature , London:

Cassell (includes a sensitive discussion of

all aspects of Fernandez’s gay writing)

Ferrat, Jean

b. 1930, Vaucresson

Singer-songwriter,

real name Jean Tenenbaum

A leading anti-establishment figure in French

chanson, particularly during the 1960s, Ferrat

earned initial recognition in 1954 with the

populist Ma Môme (My Girl). He expressed

his Communist sympathies in En groupe, en

ligue, en procession (In Groups, in League, in

Procession). His father’s detention in the Nazi

concentration camps inspired Nuit et

Brouillard (Night and Fog). Ferrat’s output is

often romantic, as in Je vous aime (I Love

You), Potemkine, and environmentally aware;

for example, in La Montagne (The Mountain).

He has paid tribute to Vian, Brassens and

Lorca, as well as Aragon, whose poetry he set

to music.

CHRIS TINKER

Further reading

Fléouter, C. (1996) Léo, Paris: Laffont (biog-

raphy).

Letellier, C. (1993) Léo Ferré, l’unique et sa

solitude, Paris: Nizet (biographically ori-

ented study).

Figaro, Le

Newspaper

Leading right-wing quality broadsheet, Le

Figaro is a morning newspaper and France’s

oldest national daily. Launched as a weekly

by Hippolyte de Villemessant in 1854, it be-

came a daily in 1866. Publication was inter-

rupted from November 1942 to August 1944

as a result of the Occupation, but after the

Liberation Le Figaro flourished, as many

right-wing rivals had now disappeared.

Under Pierre Brisson’s leadership (1936–

64), the newspaper gained a reputation for

editorial independence despite a succession of

owners. However, Brisson’s death in 1964

provoked a series of crises culminating in the

purchase of Le Figaro by Robert Hersant in

1975, and the subsequent departure of numer-

ous journalists (including Raymond Aron,

who had written for Le Figaro for many

years). Staff were unhappy with the new own-

er’s political ambitions, editorial interference

and ruthless management style.

Figaro, Le

213

Circulation fell, but in the early 1980s con-

servative dissatisfaction with the Socialist

government led to a rise in Le Figaro’s for-

tunes. New Saturday supplements also

proved successful: Le Figaro magazine cre-

ated in 1978, Le Figaro Madame in 1980,

and TV magazine since 1987. The aim is to

appeal to the whole family by covering a wide

range of interests.There are economic and lit-

erary supplements, and Figaroscope, a guide

to events in the Paris area. The paper contains

practical pages, offering advice on tourism,

sales bargains, and classified advertisements,

especially for jobs and property. Readers are

predominantly from the professional middle

and upper classes, with above average in-

come. Consequently, Le Figaro is attractive to

advertisers and, depending on the economic

climate, advertising accounts for up to 70 per

cent of its revenue. Compared to Le Monde,

Le Figaro provides fuller financial and busi-

ness information, much appreciated by indus-

trialists, businessmen and investors. It has a

reputation as tribune of the right-wing intelli-

gentsia, thanks to supplement Le Figaro

littéraire and regular contributions from

members of the prestigious Academic

Française such as Jean d’Ormesson and Alain

Peyrefitte.

Politically, Le Figaro is extremely con-

servative, and was closely associated with the

Gaullist Rassemblement pour la République,

having well-known RPR politicians among its

staff. However, overt bias in favour of Jacques

Chirac in the 1988 presidential election, at the

expense of other right-wing candidates, led to

falling sales, and Le Figaro was forced to

moderate its tone and move towards the Cen-

tre. This was demonstrated in the appoint-

ment of Franz-Olivier Giesbert, formerly of

Le Nouvel Observateur, as editorial director,

and the reduction in prominence of hard-liner

Max Clos.

In 1995, although outsold by Le Parisien,

Le Figaro was the leading upmarket daily,

with an average circulation of 391,533 cop-

ies. However, financial problems resulting

from questionable business decisions, such as

the investment in new printing facilities at

Roissy in 1988, prompted Hersant to fire

group director Philippe Villin in 1994 and,

following Hersant’s death in April 1996,

questions surround Le Figaro’s future.

PAM MOORES

See also: national press in France; parties and

movements

Fini, Léonore

b. 1918, Buenos Aires, Argentina;

d. 1996, Paris

Artist, theatre designer and illustrator

Brought up in Trieste, Fini received little for-

mal art training. Influenced by Italian Man-

nerism, German Romanticism, and Surreal-

ism, her paintings, executed in meticulous de-

tail, suggest enigmatic dreams. Although

close to the Surrealists she was not a formal

member of the group. Her often hallucinatory

compositions present images of mysterious

rituals in theatrical spaces, female warriors

(La Chambre noire), hybrid creatures half-fe-

male, half-animal (Les Mutantes), and a

number of self-portraits (Le Bout du monde).

Drawing from the hermetic tradition, she ex-

plored images of petrification (Mémoire

géologique) and decomposition and regenera-

tion (Sphinx Regina). She designed theatre

sets and costumes, including Bérénice for

Barrault and The Maids (Les Bonnes) for

Genet.

ELZA ADAMOWICZ

Finkielkraut, Alain

b. 1949, Paris

Writer and essayist

Finkielkraut is a writer who, having been

Finkielkraut, Alain

214

influenced by philosophers such as Michel

Foucault and Emmanuel Levinas, has written

a number of trenchant essays whose common

theme is to attack the false premises on which

the supposed ‘liberties’ of the modern indi-

vidual have been based. After a series of

works on Jewish identity and memory, he

achieved notoriety principally for his attack

on modernity in The Undoing of Thought (La

Défaite de la pensée). Here he develops his

critique of postmodern culture, reflecting a

major concern of his (shared with several con-

temporary intellectuals) that ‘non-thought’

threatens the continuity of French cultural

identity.

MARTYN CORNICK

Major works

Finkielkraut, A. (1982) L’Avenir d’une

négation, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

——(1983) Le Juif imaginaire, Paris: Éditions

du Seuil.

——(1988) The Undoing of Thought [La

Défaite de la pensée], London: Claridge.

——(1992) Comment peut-on être croate?,

Paris: Gallimard.

Flammarion

Publishing house

Flammarion was founded in 1876 by the pub-

lisher Ernest Flammarion (1846–1936).

Among the popular authors it launched were

Daudet, Zola, Gyp and, later, Henri Troyat

and Guy des Cars. It publishes novels, aca-

demic works and art books, as well as afford-

able and popular collections such as ‘J’ai lu’

(3,850 titles 1958–94), ‘Père Castor’ (for chil-

dren) and ‘GF-Flammarion’ (600 titles of

French literature).

MARTYN CORNICK

Further reading

Martin, H.-J., Chartier, R. and Vivet, J.-P. (eds)

(1986) Histoire de l’édition française, vol.

4, Le Livre concurrencé 1900–1950, Paris:

Promodis (essential reading).

Parinet, E. (1992) La Librairie Flammarion

(1875–1914), Paris: IMEC.

folk music

The word folklore in French, as its derivative

folklorique attests, has always had a deroga-

tory connotation. Music scholars would pref-

erably refer to musique traditionnelle or

musique ethnique. This domain extends to

chansons. French folk-song’s heritage is rich

and its diversity reflects France’s geographical

and linguistic variety. If this heritage still

nourishes the collective mentality through fa-

milial, parochial and educational channels

(sea shanties, Christmas carols, drinking

songs, lullabies, etc. from different regions),

the creative sources of new folk-songs are

more likely to be found at the periphery: Brit-

tany, Basque and Occitan country, Alsace.

The folk music revival in the 1960s and

1970s coincided with the creation, under

Malraux of the maisons de la culture. After

the events of May 1968, folk music’s green

messages appealed to the generation of

soixante-huitards (literally ‘sixty-eighters’;

young people who followed for a while the

ecological and libertarian ideal, away from

consumer society). Their audience was also

exposed to Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Leonard

Cohen, as well as to the country-and-western

repertoire through Hugues Aufray, who spe-

cialized in adapting them in French. Folk clubs

appeared everywhere.

The folk group of the period was

Malicorne, formed in 1974 by a whole group

of musicians who mastered traditional instru-

ments (spinet, dulcimer, hurdy-gurdy), while

at the same time introducing modern arrange-

ments. Their best album was Almanack, and

Flammarion

215

they triumphed at the Cambridge Folk Festi-

val in July 1975, but the group fell apart,

separated in 1981 and attempted a comeback

with their last album, Les Cathédrales de

l’industrie (The Cathedrals of industry), in

1987. Another well-known group was La

Bamboche from Berry, musically talented and

full of humour and joie de vivre. Roger Siffer

in Alsace rein-, vented with humour the herit-

age of his region.

A special case must be made for Occitan

and Breton folk-singers. South of the Loire

valley, folk music became the instrument or

the context of a revival of Occitan cultural

identity, with Marti, Patric and Joan Pau

Verdier. In Brittany, Alan Stivell led the rise of

Celtic folk and pop, followed by Glenmor and

Gilles Servat, whose Blanche Hermine (White

Ermine) became the hymn of minorities ne-

glected by central government. The Breton

folk-singers survived the doldrums of the

1980s and early 1990s, in which folk music

in France seemed to have declined, drawing

their strength from their traditional Celtic

musical heritage mixed with modern idioms.

Since 1994, there are signs of a revival in folk

music in France, and again some regions with

a strong singular cultural identity are provid-

ing the talents: Brittany (with Tri Yann and

Dan Ar Braz), the Basque country (with Peio

Serbielle), Alsace and Corsica.

GÉRARD POULET

See also: regional music; regionalism; song/

chanson

Further reading

Coulomb, S. and Varrod, D. (1987) Histoires

de chansons 1968–1988, Paris: Balland (an

informative survey, with some entertaining

pages on ‘Le Folk à travers les âges’).

Krümm, P. and Ribouillault, C. (1995) ‘Les

Musiques traditionelles en France’, in

Musiques en France, Paris: ADPF (a brief

overview, with a very useful bibliography

on traditional instruments and folk-songs).

football

Football has been an extremely popular sport

in France since the late nineteenth century (Le

Havre, the first club, was founded in 1872)

but it was only in 1984 that the country, cap-

tained by Michel Platini, won its first major

trophy when it hosted the European Nations’

Championship. France also won the Olympic

title in the same year. Although it has been

rocked by scandals in the 1990s (allegations

of drug taking among players, of financial ir-

regularities and bribes, and the embarrassment

of seeing the country’s first European Club

Champions, Olympique de Marseille, rel-

egated after match-fixing bribes were shown

to have been offered), French football none

the less retains its high profile in the media

and the French Football Federation boasts

something in excess of 1.7 million registered

players. Paris-St Germain’s victory in the 1996

European Cup Winners’ Cup and the national

team’s showing in Euro 96 did much to repair

the damage. The country hosted the World

Cup in 1998.

IAN PICKUP

Further reading

Mercier, J. (1979), Le football, Paris: PUF (an

account of the history, development and

organization of football in France).

foreign policy

Foreign policy since 1945 has contributed

much to defining public perceptions of France

and Frenchness in France, as well as to creat-

ing a distinctive profile for France internation-

ally. Postwar, French foreign policy has nego-

tiated decolonization and post-imperial diplo-

macy, partnership with Germany in develop-

ing the European Union and (partly thanks to

foreign policy

216

defence and security policy based on nuclear

deterrence) independence vis-à-vis the Cold

War superpowers. Foreign policy is still

strongly marked by de Gaulle, whose vision

of France in the 1960s initially moulded con-

temporary French international relations by

suggesting that France was not herself with-

out grandeur.

Until the 1960s, foreign policy was mainly

concerned with establishing a relationship

with the US, co-operating with Germany in

face of the USSR and reconsidering the Em-

pire (renamed Union française), under pres-

sure of colonial unrest. French pride was ini-

tially hurt by Allied underevaluation of

France’s part in victory, the rejection of French

representation at Yalta and Potsdam, the pro-

posal to run liberated France through an Al-

lied military government, and by the grudging

inclusion of France in the administration of

Germany. Marshall aid heightened French sen-

sitivity towards the United States, and exacer-

bated divisions between the Communists (or-

dered by Moscow to oppose it) and parties

more mistrustful of the USSR. With the estab-

lishment of NATO (1949) and the ECSC

(1952), the way was cleared to France’s found-

ing role in the EEC (1957), marking an open-

ing of the protected French economy. Simulta-

neously came crisis in colonial Algeria, and

the return of de Gaulle. Following humiliat-

ing disengagement from Indochina (1954), de

Gaulle tortuously negotiated Algerian inde-

pendence (1962), after an Algerian war costly

in financial, political and human terms. French

culture was marked by the resettlement of ap-

proximately 1 million pieds noirs (European

Algerians) and by the trauma suffered in the

‘savage war of peace’ by more than 3 million

conscripts, as well as by the political divisions

created by decolonization.

After losing Algeria, France developed her

deterrent force and structured foreign and de-

fence policies around indépendence nationale.

Gaullism favoured a multipolar international

system, a Europe of nation-states and a net-

work of francophony; these aims were fur-

thered through encouraging nationalism (for

example, Quebec), by reluctant European in-

tegration (including veto of British entry be-

cause of feared Atlanticism), and by links with

former colonies. Giscard d’Estaing pursued

mondialisme (internationalism), expressed in

intervention in francophone African countries,

contributions to North-South debates, action

in favour of disarmament while maintaining

strong military capability, and rapprochement

with Germany in Europe. Under Mitterrand

and Chirac, France has continued support of

European integration, and in the context of

global interdependence and economic rigour

has started to reassess its ambitions of total

independence. Nevertheless, much of French

diplomatic rhetoric and public opinion is still

heavily coloured by France’s grandeur, and by

mistrust of the perceived US military, finan-

cial and cultural hegemony, although France

did participate as a minor allied partner in the

Gulf War. French foreign policy is still trying

to build France a home in the post-colonial,

post-Cold War international system.

HUGH DAUNCEY

See also: European economic integration; par-

ties and movements

Further reading

Cerny, P.G. (1980) The Politics of Grandeur,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

(the definitive treatment of the implications

of Gaullist foreign policy).

Forrester, Viviane

b. 1925, Paris

Literary critic, historian and writer

A creative writer and feminist literary critic

whose work has focused on Anglo-Saxon

women authors, especially Virginia Woolf,

Forrester’s best-known work is La Violence

du calme (The Violence of Calm). Published

in 1980, this study offers a radical critique of

Forrester, Viviane

217

history, as generative of a culture of coercion

and repression.

ALEX HUGHES

See also: feminist thought; women’s/lesbian

writing

Foucault, Michel

b. 1926, Poitiers;

d. 1984, Paris

Intellectual historian

Michel Foucault stands among the most im-

portant philosophers and writers in postwar

France. His work explores at least six interre-

lated areas: art and literature as what describes

a space outside of cognition and reason; mad-

ness as that which defines the way a culture

and its history can be understood; the symp-

tomatic relation of word to things in classical

and modern culture; the clinical ‘gaze’ as a

determiner of relations of societal and sexual

difference; sexuality as the very basis for study

of ideology; the history of penality as the area

in which is mapped out the birth of the mod-

ern or ‘disciplinary’ state.

Foucault’s Death and the Labyrinth: The

Work of Raymond Roussel (Raymond Roussel)

and ‘This is Not a Pipe’ (‘Ceci n’est pas une

pipe’) constitute a dictionary and an exemplary

indicator of his style of analysis. In the former,

published in 1963, the novelist is seen as pro-

viding a language of extreme platitude which

in fact makes the reader aware of an extraordi-

nary violence that inhabits the literary cliché.

Roussel makes us aware, says Foucault, of a

‘lacunary reserve’, like the unconscious, that

inhabits all language, and that is paradoxically

neutral or of ‘zero-degree’ inflection in modern

writing. Similarly, 1968’s ‘Ceci n’est pas une

pipe’ suggests that the word-image relations in

Magritte’s paintings attest to an imponderable

paradox of identity and difference of language

and visual form. What is indicated in an act of

deixis (ceci or ‘this…’) is not, as an image, what

is either stated or written in the discourse de-

scribing it. Yet, too, it is, since the trick of the

painter is to present a pipe, or a lure, that in-

habits the ‘pipe’ which is before our eyes.

Foucault shows that whenever the memory of

ideograms and pictograms is recalled, as they

are with Roussel and Magritte, meaning and

institutions that are built on the illusion of con-

ventional communication begin to totter.

In The Order of Things (Les Mots et les

choses), published in 1966, Foucault maps out

a history of constitutive differences of the kind

begun in his work on art and literature. Its

sweeping vision leads the reader from the early

modern realm of linguistic analogy, in which

words and the objects to which they referred

shared a common substance and malleability,

to the regime of representation, in which

words ‘stand for’ or are the procurative agents

for things that are no longer there or present.

This radical change, begun with the advent of

seventeenth-century science (and felt in the gap

between, for example, Montaigne of the 1580s

and Descartes of the 1640s), inaugurates the

modern world. It leads forward to the age of

the psychoanalyst and the ethnologist.

Foucault designed his study to show how

relations of identity are constitutive of the

modern subject. In its companion volume,

Madness and Civilization (Folie et déraison),

which was his doctoral thesis, and was pub-

lished in 1961, Foucault begins in roughly the

same areas and reaches similar conclusions,

except that the approach is cued to relations

of difference. How madness is defined, and

then how it is legislated and managed, be-

come the counterpart to his work on same-

ness. Van Gogh and Artaud become in this

work what the analyst and the anthropologist

were in The Order of Things. They crown a

work that begins with the Erasmian drive to

bring madness into civilization, and illustrates

how madness becomes implicated with prac-

tices of incarceration in the Classical Age,

then finds itself reborn and renamed in the

growth of the human sciences.

The backdrop of these two studies indicates

why Foucault’s greatest work, the 1975 Disci-

pline and Punish (Surveiller et punir), was

Foucault, Michel