Alex Hughes. Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

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arena. In 1972 the company moved to the

Théâtre d’Orsay, where it constructed a port-

able theatre space, and performed a varied

repertoire, alongside companies such as the

Grand Magic Circus, also permitted to per-

form here. In 1981, the company moved its

portable theatre to the Théâtre du Rond-

Point, where it remained until Barrault’s

death.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre; Theatre of the Absurd; thea-

tres, national

Further reading

Whitton, D. (1987) Stage Directors in Mod-

ern France, Manchester: Manchester Uni-

versity Press (contains a useful chapter on

‘total’ theatre).

Barre, Raymond

b. 1924, St-Denis-de-la-Réunion

Politician

A former professor of economic history and

European Commissioner, Barre was ap-

pointed prime minister in 1976 by President

Giscard d’Estaing and, in response to eco-

nomic recession, undertook a policy of

budget cuts and industrial rationalization.

His blunt pedagogical style did not endear

him to the public. In opposition in the 1980s,

however, his plain speaking came to be appre-

ciated as a mark of independence and sincer-

ity. First elected to parliament in 1978, he

stood in the presidential election of 1988, but

was eliminated in the first ballot. Identified

with the centrist component of the conserva-

tive coalition, he was elected mayor of Lyon

in 1995.

LAURENCE BELL

Further reading

Grendel, F. (1978) Raymond Barre ou les

plumes du paon, Paris: Régine Deforges (a

short, laconic, journalistic sketch written

during Barre’s premiership).

Barrière, Alain

b. 1935, La Trinité-sur-Mer,

Morbihan

Singer-songwriter, composer,

real name Alain Bellec

Alain Barrière’s Breton roots have left their

imprint on his compositions, which are often

characterized by their vague, suggestive quali-

ties but also by their wistful treatment of the

theme of love. He remained extremely popu-

lar in the 1960s and 1970s. Hit songs include

Plus je t’entends (The More I Hear You), Ma

vie (My Life) and Tu t’en vas (You Are Going

Away).

IAN PICKUP

Further reading

Bibliothèque Nationale (1978) André Barsacq,

cinquante ans de théâtre, Paris:

Bibliothèque Nationale (exhibition cata-

logue).

Barthes, Roland

b. 1915, Cherbourg;

d. 1980, Paris

Writer and literary critic

Barthes reshaped literary studies between the

1950s to 1980 by championing innovative

practices ranging from the new novel (nouveau

roman) and structuralism to semiology and the

study of affect from love to mourning. At the

Sorbonne between 1935 and 1941, he studied

classics and theatre before tuberculosis ended

his hopes of a university teaching career. It was

while undergoing treatment for tuberculosis

during the Occupation that Barthes first pub-

lished short essays on culture and tragedy,

André Gide’s Journal, and the style of Albert

Camus’s The Stranger (L’Étranger).

In August 1947, a piece in Combat was the

point of departure for the essay published six

years later as Writing Degree Zero (Le Degré

zéro de l’écriture). Barthes drew in this first

book on definitions of prose and poetry that

Jean-Paul Sartre in 1947 had set forth in What

is Literature? (Qu’est-ce que la littérature?) for

his programme of committed literature. But,

whereas Sartre rejected poetry in favour of a

transparent prose that propelled the writer

through language and into the world, Barthes’s

notion of writing (écriture) set between lan-

guage and style asserted a morality of form

over literary genres. Similar concerns for moral

dimensions of writing in Barthes’s 1954 mono-

graph on the nineteenth-century historian, Jules

Michelet, prophesied the introspection, mix-

ing of genres, and fragmentation of the Roland

Barthes by Roland Barthes (Roland Barthes

par Roland Barthes) that Barthes contributed

twenty-one years later to the same series,

known informally as X par lui-même.

In Mythologies (1957), Barthes explored the

mass cultures of postwar France across high

and low expressions, ranging from advertis-

ing campaigns for margarine and the face of

Greta Garbo to the annual Tour de France bi-

cycle race and Citroën model DS automobile.

Alongside the insights provided by individual

texts, Mythologies disclosed a predilection for

system and theory that spanned traditional

rhetoric and emergent structuralism. Over the

next decade, Barthes wrote increasingly against

the grain of academic criticism. In Sur Racine

(1963), he recast critical terms borrowed from

psychoanalysis and linguistics into a direct

challenge to the writings of the Sorbonne spe-

cialist, Raymond Picard. If, as Barthes once

confessed, he wrote On Racine (Sur Racine)

because he had never really taken to Racine’s

tragedies, his oppositional stance towards clas-

sical tragedy and academic criticism matched

the contentiousness of the future soixante-

huitards who were to question a cultural her-

itage (patrimoine) with which they could not

identify. By 1968, Barthes’s writings—along

with those of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel

Foucault and Jacques Lacan—had captured the

imaginations of youths, students and intellec-

tuals smitten by the force of the moment. At

the same time, Barthes’s frequent contributions

to journals such as Tel quel, Communications

and Critique solidified his ties to a Parisian

avantgarde linked with structuralism.

S/Z (1970) marked a turning point in

Barthes’s critical practices by breaking

Balzac’s twenty-five-page story, ‘Sarrasine’,

down into 561 units of meaning (lexies) inter-

spersed with a number of critical asides. The

result was a close analysis that revealed as

Barthes, Roland

much about the reader and reading process as

it did about the text in question. Rather than

simply dissecting the form and structure of

Balzac’s story, S/Z plotted how the interaction

of text and reader fashioned meaning around

a set of codes open to variation from reader to

reader and from one reading to the next. In

sum, S/Z illustrated the extent to which a turn

towards introspection had replaced Barthes’s

earlier involvement with the structuralist

dream of a science of literature.

In 1973’s The Pleasure of the Text (Le

Plaisir du texte), Barthes explicitly practised

the concepts of text and writing that he had

theorized elsewhere. In place of expository

prose, terse aphorisms in alphabetical order

enhanced the disjointedness of a fragmentary

writing whose form was closer to the texts of

Pascal and La Rochefoucauld than to those of

Greimas, Lévi-Strauss and Propp. Newly fash-

ioned binaries such as readerly/writerly texts

and texts of pleasure/bliss (texte lisible/texte

scriptible and texte de plaisir/texte de

jouissance, respectively) recast Barthes’s criti-

cal vision into a mode that was personalized

and intuitive. Two years later, Roland Barthes

dispersed the first person pronoun into an un-

stable mix of essay, autobiography and fiction

seemingly adapted from Lacan’s account of

subjectivity constructed by an ongoing inter-

play of imaginary and symbolic modes.

1977’s A Lover’s Discourse (Fragments d’un

discours amoureux) illustrated the full extent

to which Barthes’s writings of the previous dec-

ade had redirected structural analysis towards

a personalized semiology concerned less with

the science or analysis of literature than with

the critical self or subject. A Lover’s Discourse

none the less developed a critical reflection on

language that fashioned the persona of the lover

through utterances (énonciations) whose con-

fessional nature once again played off conven-

tions of genres by overlapping essay, novel and

autobiography. It is no small irony that Cam-

era Lucida (La Chambre claire), Barthes’s note

on photography, was published less than two

months before his death in March 1980: the

signs of time’s passage that Barthes sought in

the faces of the subjects depicted in the book’s

photos were a way of contending with his moth-

er’s death in 1977. What Barthes expressed as

the studium/punctum binary set language and

culture against the perceived detail that broke

through language to disclose the reality of death.

La Chambre claire was, then, both an essay or

meditation on photography and a book of

mourning, whose parallels with Marcel Proust’s

Remembrance of Things Past (A la recherche

du temps perdu) were hard to misconstrue.

Throughout his career, numerous short texts

set Barthes’s major writings within the extended

engagement with ideas and culture that he con-

veyed to his students at the École Pratique des

Hautes Études and École des Hautes Études en

Sciences Sociales. Focusing on subjects as di-

verse as wrestling, frites, Schubert’s last com-

positions and the art of Cy Twombly, Barthes

combined the traits of intellectual and sensual-

ist, ever open to what Stephen Heath has aptly

termed the ‘dizziness of displacement’. This

openness—an offshoot of Gide’s disponibilité—

remains the long-term legacy of the texts he

wrote and the personal example he lived.

STEVEN UNGAR

Further reading

Calvet, L.-J. (1995) Roland Barthes,

Bloomington: Indiana University Press (bi-

ography).

Heath, S. (1974) Vertige du déplacement: lec-

ture de Barthes, Paris: Fayard (a French-

language study by Barthes’s major British

exegete).

Lavers, A. (1982) Roland Barthes: Structural-

ism and After, Cambridge: Harvard Uni-

versity Press (concise presentation of writ-

ings through the mid-1960s).

Roger, P. (1986) Roland Barthes, roman, Paris:

Grasset (a fictionalized biography).

Thody, P. (1977) Roland Barthes: A Conserva-

tive Estimate, London: Macmillan (uneven,

but provocative).

Ungar, S. (1983) Roland Barthes: The Profes-

sor Desire, Lincoln: University of Nebraska

Press (a major analytic study).

Barthes, Roland

Bataille, Georges

b. 1897, Puy-de-Dôme;

d. 1962, Paris

Intellectual and writer

The work of Georges Bataille is seemingly

composed of contradiction. Early texts, from

the late 1920s, such as ‘W.C.’, ‘L’Anus solaire’

(Solar Anus) and ‘L’Oeil pinéal’ (The Pineal

Eye) can be read as a violent reaction, in-

formed by a reading of Nietzsche and Freud,

to a pious and conformist youth. His influen-

tial journal Documents (1929–31) engaged in

an ethnography of the everyday, directly con-

trasting high and low culture or Western and

non-Western society, in order to arrive at a

‘base materialism’. The 1935 Contre-Attaque

movement to which he adhered was an anti-

Fascist and anti-Stalinist resistance to the

Popular Front that involved a short-lived col-

laboration with Surrealism. His recognition

of the Durkheimian principles of the College

of Sociology, which he co-founded in 1937

with Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois, was

implicitly contested by his parallel formation

of Acéphale, a conspirational and ‘headless’

society devoted to the realization of ritual

transgression and sacrifice. These essentially

collaborative manifestations of the sacred in

contemporary life collapsed with the advent

of the war, giving way to an intense internali-

zation of sacred experience culminating in the

1943 Inner Experience (L’Expérience

intérieure). His new journal, Critique,

founded in 1946 and still in existence, stands

in direct contrast to the short-lived Docu-

ments with its challenge to academic classifi-

cation, being based on extended book re-

views. At the same time, their heterogeneous

nature (the areas covered being ‘literary crea-

tion, philosophy and historical, scientific, po-

litical and economic knowledge’) sought to

contest the orthodoxies of existentialism. Cut-

ting across these critical works, in turn, was

an equally transgressive production of novels

and stories, culminating in L’Abbé C (pub-

lished in 1950 but set during the war) and

Blue of Noon (Le Bleu du ciel), published in

1957 (but finished in 1935), the same year as

Literature and Evil (La littérature et le mal), a

collection of essays which had appeared in

Critique, and Eroticism (L’Érotisme). This

last text, probably Bataille’s best known, and

(if we can say this) the summation of his

work, presents eroticism and its relation to

transgression and death as central to the hu-

man condition. The recovery of this eroticism,

repressed by Christian culture, is the task of

an atheism. Such tensions and transgressions

are defined by Bataille himself as the contra-

diction between solidity, involving the ortho-

dox isolation and analysis of an object, and

sovereignty, a key term in Bataille which des-

ignates a rejection of preservation and reserve

in favour of the dynamics of excess and ex-

penditure. On a personal level, sovereignty

may be experienced and celebrated via the

mucosity of the body, the extremity of the

emotions and the uselessness of human activ-

ity (play, crime, eroticism, poetry); on an eco-

nomic level, as Bataille attempts to show in

The Accursed Share (La Part maudite), this

involves replacing a scarcity model with the

notion of the circulation of excess. Such desig-

nations indicate, of course, how the idea

of contradiction is ultimately inadequate

to the task of reading and applying Bataille.

His work has enormously influenced

poststructuralist theorizing.

SEÁN HAND

See also: erotic writing; literary journals;

poststructuralism

Further reading

Hollier, D. (1990) Beyond Architecture, Cam-

bridge: MIT Press (a theoretical, involved

attempt to realize the implications of

Bataille’s theories for the notion of critical

discourse).

Surya, M. (1987) Georges Bataille: la mort à

l’oeuvre, Paris: Séguier (the essential biog-

raphy).

Bataille, Georges

Bataille, Nicolas

birthdate not known

Director and actor

Bataille is most noted for his directing work

during the 1930s and 1940s of experimental

Surrealist plays, by authors such as Ionesco,

including the first performances of Ionesco’s

still-running The Bald Primadonna (La

Cantatrice chauve). After the war, he worked

mainly in the small theatres of the Latin

Quarter.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre; Theatre of the Absurd

Baudrillard, Jean

b. 1929, Reims

Intellectual and social theorist

Baudrillard has become one of the most influ-

ential and controversial intellectual figures in

postwar France. He is often seen as one of the

major thinkers of postmodernism, a label

which, however, he rejects.

His work has explored the world of objects

and, latterly, the contemporary tendency of

the world to become a pure object; the ‘re-

venge of the crystal’ as he calls it. This ‘objec-

tive’ world resists human strategy, becoming a

prosthesis of the human body. It is a world of

seduction, simulation, hyperreality and ‘fatal’

strategies. His first important works, includ-

ing The Object System (Le Système des

objets), initiate the important themes of the

interpretation of objects and of a concentra-

tion on consumption rather than production.

He is convinced that consumer society is a

new and completely distinctive phase of capi-

talism. Influenced by Marx, the situationists,

Marcuse, Lewis Mumford, Barthes, McLuhan

and Lefebvre, he develops a sophisticated

analysis of a new spatial system of objects,

technology and media. This system creates a

‘seductive’ and transparent coherence which

makes humanist ideologies incoherent. In this

way he develops McLuhan’s celebrated state-

ment that ‘the medium is the message’.

Baudrillard is never really satisfied with a

Marxist notion of alienation and turns in-

creasingly in the 1970s towards ‘pataphysics’,

a science fiction of ‘imaginary solutions’. He

has remained an admirer of J.G.Ballard since

writing an appreciative review of Crash in

1976, and his own writing has begun to incor-

porate elements of science fiction and poetry.

By the mid-1970s he dispensed with aliena-

tion and any notion of an alternative mode of

production, and in Symbolic Exchange and

Death (L’Échange symbolique et la mort) the

influence of Mauss and Bataille is evident. The

pataphysical ‘solution’ offered to counter the

world of simulation is that of a return to a

‘symbolic’ order. Marxist critique can only

think in terms of a contradiction between use-

value and exchange-value. Mauss’s analysis of

the symbolic violence of the gift, on the other

hand, helps Baudrillard to think in terms of a

Symbolic Order which challenges the seduc-

tion of hyperreality. He also draws on

Bataille’s notions of excessive expenditure and

sacrifice, at times evincing a nostalgia for

‘primitive’ symbolic exchange. Baudrillard is

scathing about what he sees as the project of

modernity, premissed as it is upon the para-

digms of progress and accumulation. The po-

etic mode becomes for Baudrillard a way of

rejecting the principle of accumulation, and as

such it is a principle that he applies to his own

work. In interviews, he has alluded to his

peasant origins, and points to the principle of

discretion and conservation of productive en-

ergy as the converse of excess. Poetry as a

pared-down form respects this principle of

discretion, and can even, as Saussure shows in

his notebooks on anagrams, point towards its

own disappearance. In the 1980s and 1990s

Baudrillard largely effaced the distinctions

between theory, poetry and autobiography in

his work. He has published three volumes of

aphorisms which are drawn from his own

journals. It is here that he presents a concise

Bataille, Nicolas

summary of his own development, from

pataphysician at 20 to ‘viral and metaleptic’

at 60.

JOHN MARKS

Further reading

Gane, M. (1991) Baudrillard’s Bestiary:

Baudrillard and Culture, London:

Routledge (a clear and wide-ranging intro-

duction to Baudrillard’s work).

——(ed.) (1993) Baudrillard Live: Selected

Interviews, London: Routledge (these inter-

views provide an illuminating insight into

Baudrillard’s main ideas).

Baye, Nathalie

b. 1948, Maineville

Actor

Baye’s career began in 1970. She has made

films with many of the major directors: Blier

(Beau-père), Pialat (La Gueule ouverte),

Godard (Sauve qui peut (la vie), Détective, in

which she starred with her then-partner

Johnny Hallyday), Truffaut (L’Homme qui

aimait les femmes, La Chambre verte) and

Tavernier (Une semaine de vacances). She has

tended to play sensitive women, but received

a César as best actress for the uncharacteristic

role of prostitute in Swaim’s La Balance

(1982). She also received awards for best sup-

porting actress in 1981 and 1982.

PHIL POWRIE

Further reading

Bair, D. (1990) Simone de Beauvoir: A Biog-

raphy, London: Jonathan Cape (the most

extensive biography of Beauvoir, published

unfortunately prior to the publication of

her controversial correspondence with

Sartre and war diary).

Fallaize, E. (1988) The Novels of Simone de

Beauvoir, London: Routledge (scholarly

feminist study; focuses especially on

Beauvoir’s narrative strategies and remains

unsurpassed as a study of her fiction).

Heath, J. (1989) Simone de Beauvoir, Hemel

Hempstead: Harvester (valuable feminist

Lacanian discussion of Beauvoir’s memoirs

and some of her fiction).

Moi, T. (1994) Simone de Beauvoir: The Mak-

ing of an Intellectual Woman, Oxford:

Blackwell (scholarly, stimulating and wide-

ranging examination of Beauvoir’s trajec-

tory as an intellectual and writer; essential

reading).

Simons, M.A. (ed.) (1995) Feminist Interpre-

tations of Simone de Beauvoir, Pennsylva-

nia: Pennsylvania State University Press

(wide-ranging collection of essays on

Beauvoir’s philosophy).

Bébête-Show

Television programme

The Bébête-Show was a political satire pro-

gramme broadcast on the main commercial

television channel TF1 between 7.50 p.m. and

7.55 p.m. each evening, just before the main

news programme. It was first transmitted dur-

ing the 1988 presidential election campaign

and its final broadcast took place just after

the 1995 presidential elections. Its most fa-

mous character was Kermitterrand, a frog-like

puppet of President Mitterrand based on

Kermit in The Muppets. The success of the

Bébête-Show, with a nightly audience of be-

tween 8 and 13 million viewers, gave rise to

other satirical programmes featuring puppets,

notably Les Guignols de l’info on Canal Plus.

RAYMOND KUHN

Bécaud, Gilbert

b. 1927, Toulon

Singer-composer,

real name François Silly

Having worked as Jacques Pills’s pianist,

Bécaud wrote songs with Pierre Delanoë be-

fore making a triumphal appearance at the

Olympia in 1954. An outstanding stage per-

former known as Monsieur 100 000 volts,

Gilbert Bécaud remains popular today, and

with some justification claims to be the most

widely sung composer in popular music

worldwide. Hits include What Now My Love?

(Et maintenant) and La solitude, ça n’existe

pas (There’s no Such Thing as Loneliness).

IAN PICKUP