Françoise Giroud

Françoise Giroud, a French writer and politician, died on January 19th 2003, aged 86

The brave ambition of Françoise Giroud was, as she put it, “to move France out of its rut”. Americans, she thought, had the right idea. They never seemed to get into a rut. On her first visit to New York soon after the end of the second world war she had been struck by “the degree of optimism, the exhilaration” she had found there. That view stayed with her: “There is a strength in the United States that we in Europe constantly tend to underestimate.” Miss Giroud’s views were not always well received by the French, who do not consider themselves in any way inferior to the Americans, or indeed to anyone else. They denied they were in a rut, but even if they were it was one of elegant and enviable proportions.

Miss Giroud’s weapon to give more pace to French life was language. During her long life she worked in films, was a journalist and a government minister. The thread that linked these jobs was a way with words. For many French people she became an addiction, whether they agreed with her or not. She edited two magazines entirely new to France, Elle and L’Express. Elle aimed to be provocative. An article Miss Giroud wrote in 1951 was entitled “Is the Frenchwoman clean?” A woman would buy a new dress because she wanted to look good, she wrote. “But under the dress, what are you wearing? A garter-belt that has not been washed in two years. That is the national average.” The indignation Miss Giroud aroused by discussing personal hygiene quickly became of lesser importance amid a national debate that ensued over whether La France herself was clean. In the years after the second world war many French people were feeling that the stain of the German occupation, and its accompanying collaboration by the Vichy government, had not been cleansed. Others argued passionately that France had to give up Vietnam and Algeria and abandon the dirty ways of colonialism. Elle offered Frenchwomen a view of the world beyond the home.

L’Express, France’s first weekly news magazine, was a challenge to xenophobic French. The French, Miss Giroud said, were among those westerners “most ill-informed about themselves”. News magazines keep Americans informed. Try ours. The French did and they liked it. Perhaps they were moving out of their rut.

In 1974 Jacques Chirac, the then prime minister, created for Françoise Giroud the new job of minister of women’s affairs. She was later made culture minister. But although she came to be described as a feminist, she was never a campaigning American-style sister. Nor was she in the philosophical mould of Simone de Beauvoir. More practically, she sought to help French women find their way through what she called “the fog” of a male-run world. Women bought most of the products consumed in the home, but were ignorant of how they were made or the economics of their marketing. In politics, especially, the fog was thick, and remains so. In the lower house of the present French parliament fewer than 11% of its members are women, one of the lowest proportions in Europe. Three women are in the cabinet but, said Miss Giroud, “we have had women ministers for decades”. Nor did she approve of the jobs they were often

given. A ministry for women was “a shallow answer to a non-existent problem”.

As Miss Giroud became well known she was pressed for details of her own life, and obligingly offered some colourful stories, such as when she was an aide to Jean Renoir in 1937 while he was making La Grande Illusion, regarded as one of the greatest of anti-war films. “You have gifts,” he told her.

In her book I Give You My Word she tells of being arrested towards the end of the war by the Gestapo on suspicion of helping the resistance. She was released and her confiscated watch was returned to her by a helpful German. “A complete German absurdity,” she writes. Miss Giroud shared the shame of those French who believed the government should have fought on in 1940, but she had been sure that the Germans would be defeated. “I never for a minute doubted the moralsuperiority of England, and for me that explained how it was able to hold out.”

She had little education to speak of. She left school at 14 and worked first in a shop, then as a typist, after her father, a journalist, died and her mother had no money. Or, it could be said, she gradually acquired a broad education through reading. Two of her heroines were Marie Curie, a pioneer in the study of radioactivity, and Alma Mahler, who gained rather more notorious fame as a result of her love affairs. Miss Giroud was to write biographies of both women. She preferred to say little about her own love life. She was married briefly and had two children, a son who died in a skiing accident, and a daughter who survives her. She said, “The men who helped me, and they are legion, were my friends, not my lovers.”

She was writing a regular column, for a news magazine, up to a few days before her death. A recent article was about the conflict in Israel. She chides both sides, but characteristically avoids a rush to judgment. She once said, “Off the rack solutions, like bargain basement dresses, never fit anyone.”