A

abortion/contraception

In 1945, French women had little control over their fertility and their reproductive processes. Laws passed in the early 1920s had prohibited not only abortion, but also the dissemination of information concerning contraception and the distribution of contraceptive material. During World War II, the Vichy regime firmly established motherhood as women’s lot, equating abortion with treason against the state and guillotining an abortionist, Marie-Louise Giraud. In the decades following the war, a series of campaigns against the pronatalist climate which prevailed in France eventually afforded French women the kind of sociosexual rights in force in other European countries. Change was, however, slow in coming.

In the late twentieth century, French women have full and free access to a range of contraceptive methods, and can obtain an abortion (an IVG, or interruption volontaire de grossesse) within the first ten weeks of their pregnancy. Abortion is reimbursable by social security and, in the wake of AIDS and growing public concern about unwanted pregnancies, pro-contraceptive publicity is no longer subject to restriction. That this is the case is due to campaigning activities mounted in the postwar period by diverse groups and movements, such as the Mouvement pour le Planning Familial (the French Family Planning Association, initially formed by Evelyne Sullerot and Marie-Andrée Weill-Hallé), the Mouvement pour la Libération de l’Avortement et la Contraception or MLAC (the Association for the Liberation of Abortion and Contraception), the Groupe Information Santé (Health Information Group) and Choisir (Choice). These activities, whose aim was to generate reform of the 1920s laws, took off in the 1950s, with support from the parliamentary Left and Centre Left, from elements of the left-wing and the women’s press, and from numerous women’s associations. They derived further impetus with the emergence, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, of the Mouvement de la Libération des Femmes (the MLF, or French Feminist Movement). In 1971, for example, the MLF demonstrated in favour of the liberalization of abortion. A manifesto signed by 343 women in the public eye, and published by Le Nouvel Observateur on 5 April, declared that they had had illegal abortions and called for free access to abortion and contraception. In 1972, French feminists, including lawyer Gisèle Halimi, used the Bobigny procès—the trial of four women accused of procuring a backstreet abortion—to draw public attention to the consequences of the repressive status quo. In 1973, feminist women joined with doctors and unionists to form MLAC.

Key laws marking French women’s gradual acquisition of control over their bodies include:

the loi Neuwirth (19 December 1967), a law which was proposed by the Gaullist député Lucien Neuwirth and which set in train a liberalization of contraception completed by a further law of 4 December 1974;
the loi Veil (17 January 1975), which legalized abortion; and
the loi Roudy (31 December 1982), which legislated to authorize state reimbursement of IVG.

The existence of these laws reflects the extent to which reform of legislation about women’s sexual rights had elicited widespread popular support in France by the mid-1960s. This is not to say that such support was (or subsequently became) total. Numerous anti-abortion groups exist in France (e.g. SOS Tout-Petits and Laissez-les Vivre), and commandostyle attacks on abortion clinics (by groups such as Trève de Dieu), have proliferated in the 1990s.

ALEX HUGHES

Académie Française

The Académie Française, founded by Richelieu in 1635, is one of the five academies that make up the Institut de France which is housed in a splendid building on the Quai Conti in Paris. The Académie’s role was to promote the improvement of the French language, primarily through the establishing of standard vocabulary through a dictionary, of which eight editions have so far appeared. The forty members, known as immortels, elect replacements when a death occurs, but the election must be approved by the head of state. Any writer may apply, and the Academy has always included distinguished authors: however, the list of great writers not belonging to the Academy is lengthy. The first woman to be elected was Marguerite Yourcenar in 1980, and occasionally foreign writers of French are included. On formal occasions academicians wear an embroidered uniform with cocked hat and carry a sword. An important function of the Academy is to award eighty prestigious literary prizes as well as 200 charitable grants, funded by the numerous bequests made to the Academy over the centuries.

JO REED

Acquart, André

b. 1922, Vincennes

Artist and stage designer

One of the pioneers of stage design as an integral part of theatre productions, working most notably in the 1950s and 1960s with directors Blin, Vilar, Terzieff, Miquel and Rétoré on texts as varied as Shakespeare, Brecht and Genet, Acquart’s designs are typified by abstraction and an experimental approach.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Actes Sud

Publishing house

Incorporating the century-old publisher Papiers, this Parisian publishing house, under the direction of Claire David, is responsible for publishing a large number of contemporary theatrical texts in France, often in collaboration with theatres staging the plays. It is responsible for over thirty new titles a year, and for the ‘Répliques’ series of texts, edited for education by Michel Vinaver.

ANNIE SPARKS

Adamov, Arthur

b. 1908, Kislovodsk, Caucasia;

d. 1970, Paris

Playwright and writer

Famous for his experimental, often confrontational approach, Adamov’s absurdist dream plays such as La Parodie (Parody) and Brechtian-style, grotesque political satires such as Off Limits were staged by Planchon, Vilar and Serreau.

ANNIE SPARKS

Adjani, Isabella

b. 1955, Paris

Actor

Adjani’s career was launched in a 1975 François Truffaut film, L’Histoire d’Adèle H. During the 1980s she mixed comic roles and the enigmatic, tormented and sexually confused femme fatale, culminating in Camille Claudel (1988), produced by Adjani and directed by Bruno Nuttyens and, in 1994, Patrice Chéreau’s La Reine Margot. Often called the only French star, her mythical status has been magnified by a secretive private life, coupled with a relatively small number of films (an average of one a year since 1975). She was the 1987 president of the Commission d’Avance sur Recettes. In May 1997 she chaired the jury at the Cannes Film Festival.

PHIL POWRIE

advertising

The importance of advertising within contemporary French popular culture has grown considerably since 1945, and the forms of advertising discourse have been evolving alongside changes in technology and communication. Controversy as to its cultural and ethical value has long been a feature of ideological debate in France.

Advertising’s massive expansion since 1945 can be linked initially to the emergence of the consumer society and the economic confidence of the 1950s and 1960s and, later, to increased commercial competition alongside massive media expansion. Total advertising expenditure represents 1.25 per cent of the French gross domestic product and the sector employs on a regular basis an estimated 50,000 people. Although this is small compared with countries such as the United States, the French advertising sector has continued to grow even during periods of recession. However, the late twentieth century is seeing a period of turmoil. The long-established tradition of agencies such as Havas and Publicis has enabled the sector successfully to resist infiltration by foreign competitors, so that the largest French advertising groups—EURO-RSCG (the result of a 1991 merger between Havas-EUROCOM, and RSCG: Roux-Séguéla-Cayzac-Goudard), Publicis and BDDP: Boulet-Dru-Dupuy- Petit—still command the largest share of the national market, but their position on the international market remains modest.

Following a succession of changes in the regulation and funding of the broadcasting media, advertising (which had started to appear from 1968 on state-owned radio stations and television channels) became a major source of funding for both television and radio in the 1980s (particularly affecting the fastexpanding private stations and channels), thereby vastly extending its influence as a means of mass communication. Even in the case of state-owned television channels, advertising revenue has grown faster than licence revenue, taking the maximum advertising time per hour to twelve minutes in 1995. As a social practice, advertising has itself started to attract media attention (the M6 television channel offers a popular weekly programme Culture pub), and publicitaires (admen) have gained in social recognition via such figures as Jacques Séguéla of RSCG (who masterminded the 1988 Mitterrand presidential campaign) and Bernard Cathelat of the Centre de Communication Avancée (Centre for Advanced Communication), linked to the group Havas, who has published many books on socio-styles or styles de vie (lifestyles), outlining a sociological method for analysing consumer motivations.

Advertising is a communication process which involves a number of social actors: advertisers (manufacturing or service industries, state or other public agencies, etc.), advertising agencies which create the advertising messages, the media (the five traditionally recognized grands médias: cinema, press, radio, television and ‘outdoors’ which includes bill boards, to which one must add the new electronic technologies, particularly relevant to France since the launching of Minitel) and the consumers as target audience. The growing importance of a category of intermediate companies, the centrales d’achat, such as Carat France, who purchase the crucial advertising space and time and negotiate between advertisers, agencies and media companies, is one of the more striking organizational changes which have affected this sector in France since the 1960s. The reliance of advertising on the media to deliver commercial messages, and, conversely, the increasing financial dependence of the media on advertising revenue, raise the issue of whose voices are heard and compete for influence in society. The new practice of advertisers sponsoring programmes is likely to extend their influence. The idea of public space and public service (which has been an important concept in the cultural history of France and which is echoed in the French term for advertising, publicité) is often seen by critics as losing out to commercial forces.

Advertising as a discourse is one of the most pervasive means of mass communication and lies at the heart of popular culture; its omnipresence ensures that all members of society receive advertising messages in the course of their most mundane activities and, as such, these messages are a powerful indicator of a society’s values and practices. Whether advertising is seen as a mirror of society or as capable of shaping attitudes and inhibiting or initiating social change has always been a fiercely debated ideological question. A number of laws regulate advertising—for instance when it involves children or where it concerns particular types of products or services. Advertising of tobacco was banned in 1991 (Evin law) and alcohol advertising subjected to restrictions. The Sapin law of 1993, aimed at preventing political and economic corruption, introduced strict financial rules affecting advertising groups. The BVP (Bureau de Vérification de la Publicité) and the CSA (Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel) are the main bodies concerned with the regulation and fairness of advertising. Comparative advertising was made legal in 1992 but is strictly regulated.

In the 1950s, Roland Barthes pioneered academic interest in popular discourses by his bold semiological analyses published in Mythologies; meanwhile, the forms of advertising discourse have evolved and become increasingly sophisticated as both creators and receivers of messages have become conversant with the codes of this communication process. Since advertising messages are ephemeral and dependent on media space and time, the optimum conditions of reception necessitate a frequent renewal of forms and techniques. Initially a discourse that spoke directly to passive consumers and attempted to persuade them with arguments for the superiority of a product or a service, it has gradually resorted to more subtle forms of seduction: an attractive lifestyle or highly desirable but often unreachable qualities such as glamour, beauty or a return to an ideal state of nature are presented, by means of visual juxtaposition and semantic transfer, as irresistibly within the consumer’s grasp. A new form of seduction which seeks to entertain the receiver signals a shift in the positions of the participants in the process of mass communication: potential consumers are invited to partake in a narrative (a brief soap opera) or a humorous scenario, or to solve a puzzle, the product or service sometimes only performing an accessory function. The need to provide instant viewer’s interest, given the cost of advertising space, is thus generating new forms of exchange and interactive behaviour. The multiplicity of art forms contributing to the increasingly sophisticated production of messages (video clips, computer-produced images and graphics, special visual effects, electronically mixed jingles), while providing an experimental ground for musicians and artists, is also pointing at a redistribution of boundaries between discourses. Advertising is increasingly intertextual. It has been described as an unstable and parasitic discourse which feeds on the whole range of cultural forms of expression of a society. The culture of advertising, meanwhile, is becoming internationalized; the cost of producing advertising films for television is so high that agencies seek to produce messages which can be recognized and decoded everywhere in the world for products (such as cars or training shoes) which are equally available everywhere. The now frequent use of internationally acclaimed film stars, athletes or supermodels adds to this process of globalization. Analysing the specificity of French advertising discourse is thus becoming less relevant. Although French agencies are proud of some of their creative achievements, the sophistication of some of the British advertisements from the 1960s onwards has been rarely matched, it seems, by their French (or North American) counterparts. However, there are a number of ways in which the national environment is relevant.

Borrowings from other cultural discourses, including high culture, demonstrate the ability of French advertisements to rely readily on a shared cultural heritage transmitted through the education system. The French as a nation have always enjoyed games involving language: advertising slogans constitute an immensely rich field where language-specific creativity is deployed and where the receiver’s attention is engaged with riddles and puns or highly organized rhythms and sound patterns. It is also a good experimental ground for new modish words: advertisements promptly pick up on shared but elusive linguistic innovations, even if regulators will occasionally attempt to intervene in the process (the case of the 1994 Toubon law banning the use of foreign words in advertising is a good example).

National stereotypes frequently used to promote certain foreign products will clearly depend on a specifically French perception of, for instance, Italian, English or American behaviour patterns.

More importantly, gender stereotyping needs to be considered in the light of French cultural practices. Nudity, particularly female (and increasingly, since the 1970s, male), is used considerably more in French advertising than it is in Britain or the United States (but probably less than in some Scandinavian countries). This is often seen as reflecting French people’s less puritanical outlook and their easy relationship with the body; none the less, the casual and constant representation of people as sex objects cannot be ignored as irrelevant. More controversial is the subservient, not to say degrading, role often assigned to women in French advertising discourse. The objective situation of women in French society has changed considerably since 1945. French advertising seemed for several decades impervious to this new situation, but since the 1970s a number of changes have become visible. Society’s changed perception of gender roles and sexuality has found many echoes; particularly in the 1980s, when Yvette Roudy, the Ministre de la Condition Féminine, started a campaign protesting against the humiliating representation of women in advertising and a deliberate attempt was made to convey both men and women in a new light: images of caring or domesticated fathers, and assertive businesswomen displaying their new social confidence in traditionally male environments and occupations, began to appear. However, given the capacity for advertising discourse to function intertextually and its increasing use of humour, which is one of the hallmarks of the new styles of advertisements, many of these examples can arguably be interpreted as more of a playful acknowlegement that gender relations have become high-profile than a genuine attempt to reflect women’s changed reality and aspirations to social equality. Reversals of (or allusions to) old stereotypes, allowing the receiver to engage humorously with a scene from which he or she can feel detached, do little to change deeply ingrained perceptions. Judging by the dominant messages conveyed by advertisements in women’s magazines, there is little evidence that the late twentieth century is offering new perspectives on gender (and indeed race and class) representation. French feminist organizations seem reluctant to intervene.

Advertising as a prime vehicle of mass communication and mass culture has been at the heart of the cultural debate in France since 1945. More than in many Western countries, it has been held in utter contempt for its vulgarity or accused of being manipulative and degrading by successive generations of intellectuals scornful of mass culture generally. Its link with capitalism has been one of the reasons for its low esteem among left-wing intellectuals, but official cultural policy under the Gaullist regime also denied it any value, favouring all forms of high culture which it tried to disseminate among the masses. The first signs of a change came in the 1980s, when some high-profile intellectuals started to embrace the new Americanized way of life. The younger generations are particularly open in their enjoyment of the newly shared media and advertising culture, as is demonstrated by the success of ‘la nuit des publivores’ (an all-night event where advertisements from all over the world are shown to a jingle-chanting audience). However, advertising and its easily attainable pleasures is still regarded with deep suspicion by sections of the more educated French population.

BÉATRICE DAMAMME-GILBERT

agriculture

French agriculture is by far the most important in Europe. A radical policy of modernization was implemented from the 1950s, later associated with Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The strategy has been successful, but its consequences include a series of social problems such as regional desertification, the ageing of farming communities and the disappearance of debt-ridden small farms, together with a deterioration of the rural environment. Recent reforms of the CAP and the gradual opening of agricultural markets to international competition signal the ultimate failure of the ‘modern family farm’ model which was at the root of the policy consensus since the 1950s.

French agriculture is diverse. There is little common ground between large wheat producers such as Champagne, where extensive cultivation of fields extends way over the horizon, creating one of the most deserted landscapes to be found in Europe; specialized vineyards in Burgundy; and areas in the Alp foothills or around the Massif Central, where ageing communities die out, still practising mixed production in small farms. A common feature, however, is that all of the above are beset with problems and conflicts born of a rapid and brutal modernization process which has changed the face of French agriculture beyond recognition. These often assume an importance in French political life which may seem disproportionate to the actual social weight of agriculture. But the lateness of the modernization process, the continued pace of rural exodus, and nostalgia for a fast-disappearing ‘traditional’ society, form part of the cultural background of a majority of the adult population; hence the frequent support given to farmers in their protest actions.

The cultural relevance of agriculture is still considerable. French children still learn the adage pronounced by Sully, a minister of King Henry IV, according to whom ‘Labourage et pâturage sont les deux mamelles de la France’ (‘Ploughing and grazing are breasts feeding France’). France was indeed the corn-belt of Europe in the seventeenth century. However, it fell behind in the early twentieth century, withdrawing into a protectionist stance and lacking in investments. Then the French countryside took on the forms which have been used by writers such as Giono, in Regain, or Pagnol, in his L’Eau des collines novel or in recollections such as La Gloire de mon père. Both, in different ways, set their writing in an early twentieth-century Provence left behind by a fast-changing urban France.

Prospects for French agriculture changed in the 1950s. Modernization policies were pursued by successive governments, supported by the main farmers’ union, the FNSEA. This consensual approach aimed to preserve the family farm unit by providing the means to modernize. Policies were organized around market stabilization strategies, cheap finances (through the Crédit Agricole), processing and marketing tools (especially through co-operatives which developed considerably since the 1960s), the restructuring of land property (for instance, remembrement (reassembling) seeks to create larger fields through land exchanges in order to facilitate mechanization), and hefty subsidies for drainage, hedge cutting, etc. The CAP reinforced this approach, guaranteeing and subsidizing internal prices and protecting European production against imports through a common tariff barrier. The system was soon eating most of the EU budget, creating huge stocks and benefiting mostly the larger farm businesses but also providing a fragile lifeline to the smaller family units. These policies were successful on a purely quantitative level. Undercapitalized and antiquated in the 1940s, French agriculture changed into a highly productive and technically up-to-date industry which, in the early 1990s, provided more than a quarter of EU production—this proportion rises to more than a third for wine, not surprisingly. France has also become the world’s second agricultural exporter, behind the USA.

However, this technical success has its darker side. Ultimately, the original aims of the postwar modernization programme have not been achieved—the medium-sized family farm is disappearing and the environmental, social and cultural costs of ensuring food security are considerable. In environmental terms, requirements of modern, mechanized agriculture, compounded with subsidized drainage, hedge-cutting and soil ‘improvement’, have caused a complete change of landscape and a general deterioration of biological diversity in many regions. The concepts of terroir or pays (a subregional geographical areas forming an ecological, historical, cultural and agricultural unit) have lost their relevance, despite a recent fashionable comeback. At a social level, the consequences of modernization policies have been severe. The number of farms and the size of the workforce are still falling. The population active in agriculture was reduced from 3.9 to 2.1 million people between 1962 and 1975, and continued to fall thereafter to only 1.2 million in 1993. It can be expected to fall further, since more than half of French farmers were aged 50 or more in the early 1990s, and the average farm surface area is only 28 hectares (against 65 hectares in Great Britain). Therefore, rural exodus still affects more remote regions, with local services slowly disappearing and whole areas becoming deserted.

These trends have accelerated further with changes in the CAP since the early 1980s. Despite numerous protests, from specialized fruit growers to cattle owners (particularly affected in 1996 by bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or ‘Mad Cow Disease’), the highly protective system is being dismantled. The resistance of farmers has a long history—for instance the Révolte des Vignerons (Winemakers’ Revolt) in the south of France in 1907, quelled by the army, is still in farmers’ memories, and their descendants violently clashed with police forces again in 1975–6 against the EC market regulations. Protests against imports of Spanish fruit or British lamb have been part of life for decades, as smaller farmers, often heavily in debt, find themselves unable to survive—their feeling of betrayal towards agricultural policy’s failure to maintain the family farm model of the 1950s explains brutal flare-ups which are sometimes difficult to understand from abroad.

FRANÇOIS NECTOUX

AIDS

AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) is known as Sida (Syndrome Immunodéficitaire Acquis) in French, and is the terminal outcome of infection with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)—Virus Immunodéficitaire Humain (VIH).

Since the discovery of the HIV virus by Professor Luc Montaigner in 1983, the word AIDS (Sida) has been indelibly imposed on to human consciousness, and interpersonal contact and conduct irrevocably affected. Although originally believed to target specific ‘risk groups’ such as intravenous drug users, haemophiliacs and homosexuals, AIDS is now known to be a danger to all and a particular problem when compounded by poverty, be it in the Old, New or Third World.

By the end of this century, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that there will be between 20 and 40 million victims of HIV infection worldwide, with some 90 per cent of the cases in the Third World. Of all European countries, France is the most affected by AIDS— 1995 figures give total reported cases of HIV infection as 36,982, with some 60.8 per cent of these having died; the same estimates give four new cases of infection in Paris per day.

French government reaction and campaigns could arguably be described as slow, perhaps due to the traditional Republican respect of the individual coupled with a reluctance to admit to the existence of smaller groups within the République unie et indivisible (the united and indivisible Republic). It was not until 1988, for example, that the government established the Agence Nationale de Recherches sur le Sida (ANRS) to co-ordinate research into the syndrome. Its activities include the launch of the 1991 Analyse des Comportements Sexuels en France, a telephone enquiry involving some 20,000 people aged between 18 and 69 followed up by a longer questionnaire completed by the 25 per cent or so reporting sexual conduct judged to put them at risk from the virus. Before this, in 1988, the first ever advertising campaigns for condoms were produced in France. Previous pro-natalist legislation had banned all such material.

It was left instead to interested groups in the voluntary sector to become involved earlier. 1983, for example, saw the creation of Vaincre Le Sida (VLS), the first anti-AIDS group, followed by Aides, founded in 1984 by Foucault’s partner Daniel Defert.

In 1986, AIDS in France became a notifiable disease, and 1987 saw the first sales of AZT, a drug which helps to fight some effects of HIV infection. Despite a later Anglo-French Concorde trial indicating potential mitigating effects of AZT in its treatment of symptoms, the drug continues to be used, more often as part of a ‘cocktail’ intended to prevent the HIV virus reproducing itself.

Interestingly, the whole question of AIDS as it appears in France has not been polarized by the press as it has been by British journalists, who have created ‘innocent’ (haemophiliacs, children…) and ‘guilty’ (homosexuals, drug users…) victims; it has not tended to be used as an excuse to ‘gay-bash’ or to pick on minorities owing to France’s attitudes towards the public and private life of the individual.

Perhaps the most notorious situation relating to AIDS in France is that of the affaire du sang contaminé, which arose in 1985 when it was revealed that the delay in the launch of American testing kits in France until such a time as French ones could be commercialized had resulted in the contamination of blood transfusion stocks and in the subsequent infection of haemophiliacs. One year later, in 1986, the French social security system agreed to take on 100 per cent of medical costs incurred by those suffering from AIDS. Those judged responsible for the affaire—ministers, doctors and civil servants—were severely criticized. The principal protagonists, including Dr Michel Garetta (former Director of the national Blood Transfusion Service), were sentenced to prison (sentences were confirmed in July 1993). Coincidentally, two more HIV antibody tests were withdrawn in the same year.

More general public awareness was increased on the evening of 7 March 1994. An event unique in French history saw all television channels (and some in Belgium and Luxembourg) transmitting Sidaction, a series of programmes about AIDS and those affected by it. This received widespread press coverage and arguably contributed to greater knowledge of the syndrome. The experiment was repeated on 30 November 1995—the eve of World AIDS Day (1 December). The success of the March 1996 Sidaction was almost negated by the difference of approach favoured by members of radical proponents of gay activism, ACT-UP.

AIDS has also led to the establishment of groups aimed at preventing the spread of the disease. The Syndicat National des Entreprises Gaies (SNEG) was founded in 1990 and acts as a means of making information on prevention available to its membership of some 600 who, as the organization’s name suggests, are gay-and lesbian-run companies. Their activities are not exclusively directed at this base, however—SNEG worked closely with the Ministry of Health in the elaboration of the summer 1995 AIDS awareness poster campaign.

The presence of AIDS worldwide has had an indelible effect on human behaviour and conduct. In its position as the AIDS capital of Europe, France has not always acted with sensitivity or alacrity, leaving activists and those most directly affected to act as the government’s conscience. While at the forefront of research into the discovery of AIDS, France still has further to go in dealing with the repercussions.

STEVE WHARTON

Aimée, Anouk

b. 1932, Paris

Actor

She appeared as an idealized love-object in Astruc’s Le Rideau cramoisi of 1953, but is better remembered for her roles for Fellini (La dolce vita of 1960 and 8 1/2 of 1963), Demy (Lola of 1961) and above all Claude Lelouch— Un homme et une femme of 1966, the bestknown incarnation of her as a sensuous creature of destiny. Her recent screen appearances have been few and far between, and she probably last came to the attention of a British public when she was married to Albert Finney.

KEITH READER

See also: cinema

alcohol, cigarettes, drugs

The consumption of alcohol and cigarettes has frequently played a considerable role in popular conceptions of French society— traditional representations of the French have portrayed them as addicted to gros rouge (cheap red wine) and Gauloises. The use of drugs, or toxicomanie, has become an issue in France rather later in the contemporary period than alcoolisme and tabagisme, which, (in the case of drink at least) had a long tradition as an object of concern over public health and morals. Evolving cultures of alcohol and tobacco consumption seem to have been influenced by specifically French factors such as the nationalization of the cigarette industry or the electoral importance of rural wine- and tobacco-producing areas, whereas the French experience of drugs seems less influenced by national factors.

The French remain consistently among the highest consumers of alcohol in the European Union. Postwar alcohol consumption has prolonged stereotypical images of the French as quaffers of petits blancs, gros rouge, apéro and pousse-café (liqueurs), although with some modifications. In an echo of earlier moral panics about absinthe, Pierre Mendès France initiated a campaign in 1954 against the alcohol-distilling lobbies, even drinking milk in a prime-ministerial photo call. The atavistic criticisms of PMF’s ‘unmanliness’ which ensued can be seen now to reinforce the argument that the government’s aim in controlling the production of low-grade alcohol was as much about modernizing society as it was about freeing the economy or limiting alcoholism. More recently, alcohol consumption has diversified, with opportunities for foreign travel, greater mobility and advertising. Young people have been progressively tempted by Coca-Cola, and new refreshments compete with traditional drinks, either replacing alcohol, or combining with other foreign products in exotic mixes such as Whisky-Coca. Yet wine remains a major industry, important economically for exports and socially as a provider of employment. It is important to realize that the wine industry produces different types of wine, from aristocratic elite vintages (indicators of distinction sociale) to co-opérative supermarket reds sold from plastic tanks. Wine drinking covers a multitude of social experiences, whose common denominator is found only in individuals’ ‘rights’ to alcohol abuse and in the fact that drinking American sodas contributes (for some) to turning France into ‘une société Coca-Cola’.

In Godard’s 1959 film A bout de souffle (Breathless), Jean-Paul Belmondo is hardly ever without a cigarette hanging provocatively from his lips, and the girl he pursues is American and blonde—une blonde américaine— more attractive than the other women—les brunes françaises—who no longer interest him. The story of tabagisme in France since 1945 seems determined by two dynamics: first the move from French clopes (slang: cigaretttes) of sometimes dubious quality towards imported American cigarettes of Virginian tobacco; and second, the increasingly negative image of smoking conveyed by medicine. The Société (Nationale) d’Exploitation Industrielle des Tabacs et Allumettes (SEITA) was formed in 1935 to impose government control on the tobacco industry and its tax revenues. During the 1940s and 1950s SEITA Gauloises and Gitanes held a virtual monopoly over smokers which was only relaxed by an increasing availability of American cigarettes, fuelled by the popularity of everything Hollywood and by growing affluence. Embattled by rising tobacco prices and by intense competition, and despite the marketing of blondes françaises and low-nicotine cigarettes to compete with US brands which allowed the company to maintain a profitable 45 per cent market share, SEITA was privatized in 1995. Since Marlboros are now France’s favourite cigarettes, this privatization perhaps represented the state’s final admission that France had finally ‘smoked herself American’. The separation between the state and the tobacco industry was also encouraged by perceptions of the government’s embarrassing links to an industry with perceived social costs. Effective from January 1993, the loi Evin banned tobacco advertising and smoking in public places to reduce the burden of smoking illnesses on the health system, but discouraging tobacco consumption diminished tax returns on cigarette sales, reducing the usefulness of SEITA as a national company. The loi Evin has been unsuccessful in stopping advertising and in constraining smokers to respect nonsmoking areas, mainly because the French believe that to smoke is an inalienable right.

It is more difficult to identify a spécificité française in the use and regulation of drugs. Concerning la toxicomanie and the use of stupéfiants (narcotics), French society and government entertain complicated opinions about tolerance and non-permissivité which, as with the smoking of cigarettes, centre around notions of individual rights. Drug taking first became widespread arguably only in the liberalization of society which followed May 1968. Figures show that numbers of drug addicts remained relatively stable during 1946–66, rising rapidly with the use of cannabis, morphine and heroin in the late 1960s and 1970s. In 1989, cannabis was taken by 64 per cent of users, heroin by 33 per cent and cocaine by 2 per cent, although since the late 1980s, when ecstasy and crack became available, their popularity has increased rapidly. Drug taking appears to be a mainly youthful and male phenomenon, since only one in ten users is female and more than 80 per cent are aged between 16 and 30. In the public mind, drug taking is generally held to be a problem affecting urban youth, as illustrated by Tavernier’s 1991 film L627, which dramatizes the work of a narcotics police team in Paris. In this perspective, although in reality more widespread, drug taking is perceived to be yet another problem of la banlieue and of underprivileged youth culture born from exclusion. Government policy towards drugs has been confused and somewhat ineffective, much work being done by private rather than state organizations, and with the rise of AIDS there has been amalgamation of the problems of HIV sufferers and drug addiction, distorting public perceptions.

A final irony of France’s experience of alcohol, cigarettes and drugs is that the French are renowned for their costly overconsumption of medicines, particularly tranquillizers of all kinds. While still accepting the traditional drugs of alcohol and nicotine, French society seems yet to come to terms with newer habits of illicit drugs and of prescription pill-popping.

HUGH DAUNCEY

Algerian war

Immediately preceded by France’s catastrophic defeat in the Indochina conflict (1945–54), the Algerian war (1954–62) was the climax of the traumatic French experience of decolonization. France’s oldest and most important colony, Algeria was home to a million settlers (known as the pieds-noirs), together with some 9 million ‘Muslims’ of Arabo-Berber origin. This large European presence underlay the determination of successive governments to resist Algerian nationalism with massive military force, a strategy further rationalized in terms of the territory’s unique legal status as three, theoretically fully integrated départements of the Republic. Measures taken included the building of electrified fortifications along Algeria’s frontiers with Morocco and Tunisia, the forcible relocation of large sections of the indigenous population, and the mobilization of nearly 3 million metropolitan conscripts over the course of the eight-year campaign against the revolutionary Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). The principal victims of what became a brutal guerrilla war were Algerian civilians (up to a million of whom may have died), with the FLN at least as willing as the French army to use coercion whenever persuasion failed. With neither obvious fronts nor set-piece battles, the war reached a crux with the so-called Battle of Algiers of 1956–7, in which paratroopers made systematic use of torture and summary execution to crush the FLN’s bombing networks. Although such tactics enabled the French to achieve military dominance, they also encouraged support for the nationalist cause both within Algeria and abroad. The army’s response was a campaign of political ‘activism’ which culminated, in May 1958, in the collapse of the ineffectual Fourth Republic and the return to power of the country’s wartime ‘saviour’, General Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle, backed by the armed forces in the belief that he would safeguard Algérie française (French Algeria), quickly realized that the war was politically unwinnable and set about ridding the country of what had become a threat to the Republic and a barrier to postwar reconstruction. Skilfully exploiting his personal prestige, the semipresidential constitution of the new Fifth Republic, and his incomparable mastery of the mass media, de Gaulle was able finally to break the settler and military stranglehold on Algerian policy. His declaration of the Algerians’ right to self-determination on 16 September 1959 was a watershed, prompting armed challenges to his authority by the forces of colonial reaction. Having faced down the piedsnoirs during the so-called ‘Week of the Barricades’ in January 1960, he would overcome an attempted army putsch in April 1961. Subsequent negotiations with the FLN led to a ceasefire on 19 March 1962, with Algerian independence being declared a few months later.

PHILIP DINE

Althusser, Louis

b. 1918, Birmandreïs, Algeria;

d. 1990, La Verrière, Yvelines

Marxist philosopher

A Catholic militant in his youth, Althusser received his political education as a prisoner of war and in 1948 joined the French Communist Party (PCF). As a philosopher at the École Normale Supérieure, he influenced a generation of young people, who responded with enthusiasm to his attempt to revitalize the stultified Marxist theory of the 1950s. Applying his theory of symptomatic reading to the classic texts of Marxism, analysing gaps and silences, unanswered questions, as well as answers to unasked questions, he attempted to construct the conceptual system Marx himself had not been able to complete.

Rejecting the interpretation of Marxism as an ethical humanism, which dominated European Communist parties after the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Althusser denied any continuity with Hegelian philosophy, stressing Marxism’s revolutionary originality. In For Marx (Pour Marx) and Reading Capital (Lire le Capital), he applied principles learned from the Bachelardian school of historical epistemology to demonstrate that Marxism was a new development, inaugurating the science of history, through an epistemological break with previous ideological, non-scientific thinking. As a science, it was subject only to scientific criteria of validity, not to political pressures. Knowledge production was a process confined solely to the domain of thought, which he defined as theoretical practice. This position owed much to Spinoza’s notion that truth contained its own norms of validity, but ran counter to orthodox communism’s reflection theory of knowledge, which Althusser rejected as empiricist.

Only scientific knowledge had the status of knowledge; all else was dismissed as ideology, though in his key 1970 essay, ‘Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses’ (‘Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État’), Althusser admitted that ideology was more than mere lack of knowledge or error. Not only was ideology a social practice, the mode in which individuals operated within the Ideological State Apparatuses, it was also the vehicle whereby individuals were constituted into subjects, as ‘supports’ for the reproduction of class relations of production. The theory of the constitution of the subject owed much to Jacques Lacan.

Influenced also by structuralism, the Althusserian social formation was constituted by combinations of elements, apart from human beings, who did not create these structures nor determine their meaning, but had their own meaning determined by them; history was not made by men, but was a ‘process without subject or end(s)’. His theory of overdetermination, rejecting vulgar economic determinism, acknowledged the complexity of real social processes, although it failed to explain the transition from one mode of production to another.

Despite the influence of militant French Maoism, Althusser remained in the PCF. Modifying his position on the autonomy of theory, he adopted a view of philosophy as ‘class struggle in theory’ from the late 1960s. Politics played a more important role in his theoretical analyses, though his own political involvement receded, until, following the Left’s failure in the 1978 elections, he openly criticised the PCF in What Must Change in the Party (Ce qui ne peut plus durer dans le parti communiste). Dogged by depressive illness, Althusser played no further part in public life after killing his wife in 1980. By then, he had already renounced most of his theoretical principles, though not his faith in the communist movement.

MARGARET MAJUMDAR

Amont, Marcel

b. 1929, Bordeaux

Singer, real name Jean-Pierre Miramon

Having studied at the Conservatoire, Marcel Amont performed in light operas and musical comedies before turning to cabaret in the 1950s. His very successful career as a solo singer includes appearances at Bobino and the Olympia, tours throughout France and abroad and work on television and in films. Hit songs include the humorous Un Mexicain (A Mexican) and Ping-Pong.

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

anglomanie/franglais

Anglomania began in the eighteenth century with an enthusiasm for all things English, particularly literature and institutions. This resulted in a massive importation of anglicisms into the vocabulary of French. The trend culminated in R.Étiemble’s satirical denunciation of this development in Parlez-vous franglais? (1964). He feared that French was evolving into a bastardized Atlantic pidgin and pressed for official action. The French government has attempted to stem this inflow, but with little measurable success.

JO REED

Annales

A journal (full title Annales d’histoire: économies, sociétés, civilisations) founded by the historians Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch in 1929, but particularly influential in the postwar period. Influenced by the sociology of Émile Durkheim, and in its turn influential on the work of such as Foucault, Annales and the school of historiography that bears its name concentrate on ‘the study of socio-economic structures and collective phenomena, not on that of events’ (Quid?). Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is the best known of figures recently associated with the journal.

KEITH READER

Anouilh, Jean

b. 1910, Bordeaux;

d. 1987, Lausanne

Playwright

Anouilh’s works have been among those most performed in the postwar period, and continue to form a popular part of the contemporary repertoire in private and public theatre alike. Many have been played in long runs by famous directors, including most notably Barsacq and Barrault in the 1940s and 1950s, and today form part of the Comédie-Française’s modern repertoire. His plays are noted for their variety in style and subject matter, from comedy-inspired language to history and tradition in Medea (Médée) and Antigone. Many of his highly successful works are also noted for their existentialist, philosophical tone and were written at the same time as the works of Sartre and Camus, the former of whom included Anouilh’s plays in his consideration of playwrights as ‘forgers of myths’ in a 1946 lecture (Bradby 1991), Anouilh’s plays are existentialist inasmuch as they exploit the notion of role-playing, with characters representing their role, hence their actions and choices, in terms of inevitability. Antigone, first performed in 1944, The Lark (L’Alouette), and his 1959 Becket are good examples of this. However, Anouilh cannot be considered a political playwright per se, even though plays such as Antigone were particularly successful with wartime Parisian audiences who were quick to relate the psychological struggle in the play to their own personal struggle and choices under occupation. Influenced as a young writer by the work of Pirandello, Anouilh was interested in playing with illusion and reality, hence the use of masks and ‘types’ as the characters in his work. The latter gave him ample scope for subject matter, ranging from ancient classics to the modern day, since the ideas, situations and attitudes they embodied were timeless and applicable to the human condition no matter what the historical or social setting. Many of his works deal with moral choices and the limitations imposed upon his characters which influence their behaviour. This ‘psychological’ aspect of his plays, combined with the light, well-crafted tone of his dialogue, has made them great successes with postwar audiences.

ANNIE SPARKS

anthropology and ethnology

As an academic discipline anthropology was established relatively late in France. Despite a distinguished tradition of ‘armchair’ anthropology (Durkheim, Mauss, Lévy-Bruhl), specialized fieldwork was not undertaken until the 1930s, symbolically inaugurated with the famous Dakar-Djibouti expedition in 1931– 3. This first generation of fieldworkers was instrumental in the notable expansion of French anthropology in the postwar years.

The development of anthropology in postwar France cannot be properly understood without reference to the sociology of Durkheim and Mauss earlier in the century. In his later work Émile Durkheim (d. 1917) made extensive use of ethnographic data in his attempt to formulate a universal theory of social cohesion, and ethnological interests featured strongly in the research team that formed around his journal, L’Année sociologique. It was, however, Durkheim’s nephew and close collaborator, Marcel Mauss (d. 1950), often called the ‘father’ of French ethnology, who came to specialize in the discipline and who made a crucial contribution to its academic provision in the university. The phenomenally erudite Mauss was an inspirational teacher to many of the first generation of professional ethnologists; he was also author of the remarkable The Gift (Essai sur le don), one of the most influential texts in twentieth-century anthropology. The main thesis of the essay is that exchange in non-Western cultures does not have the utilitarian and individualist functions it possesses in industrial capitalist societies. The exchange of gifts in traditional societies is a collective phenomenon, and must be viewed as a ‘total social fact’ to the extent that it involves not only economic, but also moral, religious, legal and cultural-aesthetic considerations. As such, gift exchange is an important agent of social cohesion, ensuring the integration of different social groups and the resolution of potential conflict between them.

The influence of Mauss’s theory of the gift extends well beyond the academic disciplines of sociology and anthropology, and is discernible in much contemporary French thought. In anthropology, the most important mediator of Mauss and the Durkheimian school in the postwar period is Claude Lévi-Strauss. While the fieldwork initiated in the 1930s was providing French ethnology with a growing empirical base, the discipline suffered from a distinct lack of theorization. Lévi-Strauss’s originality was to combine the insights of Mauss’s theory of exchange with binary models borrowed from structural linguistics, as demonstrated in his first major work, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté), published in 1949. His work on kinship structures not only brought a new level of theoretical sophistication to French ethnology, but also suggested a wider programme of research for the discipline. Since Durkheim and Mauss, ethnological studies had focused primarily on aspects of religion and ritual, notable examples including Alfred Métraux’s studies of voodoo practices in Haiti or Marcel Griaule’s work on Dogon cosmology. Lévi-Strauss’s venture into the highly technical domain of kinship relations moved the focus from religion to social organization, traditionally the preserve of British anthropology. Significantly, when after 1950 he himself began to specialize in the anthropology of religions, Lévi-Strauss concentrated on myth rather than ritual, on non-Western thought rather than non-Western religion.

Lévi-Strauss’s attempt to construct a rigorous theoretical framework for French anthropology needs to be viewed in the context of a general realignment of the sciences humaines (human sciences) in postwar France. Lévi-Strauss contributed actively to this realignment in that he presented ethnology as no longer the adjunct of sociology, as it had been for Durkheim and even for Mauss, but as a discipline in its own right, with its own distinct objects, methods and goals. More than this, he expanded the conventional definition of the discipline by substituting the term ‘anthropologie’ for the more common ‘ethnologie’, distinguishing between three stages or moments of anthropological inquiry: ethnography, the preliminary collection of data in the field; ethnology, the synthesis of data provided by ethnography; and anthropology, the comparative analysis of ethnological material, leading to a general theory of human society. Lévi-Strauss’s redefinition of the scope of anthropology meant that it was not restricted to the so-called ‘primitive’ societies which had traditionally been the object of ethnology. It also meant that the previous subordination of ethnology to sociology was reversed, sociology becoming in effect a subsidiary component of anthropology.

The implications of Lévi-Strauss’s ambitious programme for anthropology were obviously more general than its historically ambivalent relationship with sociology. This programme placed anthropology at the very centre of the human sciences, also challenging more firmly established disciplines such as history and philosophy. The new historian Fernand Braudel’s famous article ‘La longue durée’, published in 1958, was allegedly written in response to Lévi- Strauss’s Structural Anthropology (Anthropologie structural), the seminal collection of essays on the scope and methods of the new anthropology. For his part, the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault anticipated the dissolution and absorption of philosophy into other disciplines, presenting his ‘archaeology’ of the human sciences as an attempt to view our own cultural history with the sense of defamiliarization and distantiation achieved in Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology.

Despite the undisputed influence of Lévi-Strauss, it would be wrong to attribute these interdisciplinary effects of anthropology solely to his individual initiative. The special status of ethnology in the years following the war can be explained by a number of factors specific to that context. The devastation caused by the war was psychological as well as physical: for the second time in the century Europe had unleashed destructive forces which had enveloped the world, and the wave of decolonization which followed the war was both a reminder of European responsibility and a symptom of the decline of the former colonial powers. These events caused many to question the pre-eminence of European culture and consciousness and also to criticize its ethnocentrism. In this context it was therefore logical that ethnology, as a privileged mediator of non-Western cultures, should become the special focus of such questioning and criticism. Indeed, in the 1950s ethnology came to be regarded as a ‘new humanism’, with a wider vision of humanity than the traditional philosophical version of humanism, whose conception of the individual subject was culture-specific and thus far from achieving the universality it claimed. The resultant sense of the diversity of human existence was also accompanied by an acute awareness of the increasing homogenization of the post-colonial world, subject as it was to the continuing influence of Western civilization. Again, ethnology became the repository of alternative values, values different to those of an increasingly consumerist and materialistic society. This mood and these ideas were eloquently expressed in Lévi-Strauss’s autobiographical account Tristes tropiques, published in 1955 in Jean Malaurie’s aptly named Terre humaine series. The book struck a chord not only among the French intelligentsia but also with a wider literate public, thus confirming ethnology’s position as the human science most attuned to the complexities and ambiguities of the modern world.

Lévi-Strauss’s successful promotion of anthropology has sometimes tended to overshadow the achievements of his other French colleagues, whose contribution to the discipline has often been no less distinguished (Bastide, Balandier, Dumont, Griaule, Leiris, Métraux). Nevertheless, it was Lévi-Strauss who was the most influential in bringing an anthropological perspective to the wider intellectual debates which have traditionally been so important in France, and it was his formulation of a structural anthropology which inspired the movement known as structuralism. At the same time, his version of anthropology did not go unchallenged. One notable criticism within the discipline came from ethnologists such as the Africanist Georges Balandier, who argued that while Lévi-Strauss’s structural analysis might be appropriate to the small-scale communities he had studied in the rainforests of Brazil— societies with relatively little contact with the outside world—it was entirely inappropriate to the analysis of, for example, the substantially larger and rapidly changing societies of the African continent. The implication of this criticism was that anthropology should resist the temptation to idealize the exotic culture as an isolate untouched by history and instead attempt to understand the difficult process of the adaptation of traditional cultures to the modern world.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

Apostrophes

Television programme

A book programme, produced and presented by Bernard Pivot, on Antenne 2 (now France 2) on Friday evening, from January 1975 to June 1990 (724 programmes in all). This award-winning chat show, attracting audiences ranging from two to six million viewers, was credited with a highly significant and controversial influence on intellectual life (which was much criticized by Régis Debray). An appearance on Apostrophes could make or break a new book: the impact on sales was immediately visible in bookshops on Saturday morning. Pivot’s appeal lay in his fair-minded independence, pitching discussion at a level accessible to a mass audience.

PAM MOORES

architecture, urban planning and housing after 1945

French architecture was traditionally inspired by a very strong classical tradition sustained by the state-backed École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, After about 1900, an alternative, modern architecture sprang up, partly on the basis of new, industrial techniques led by reinforced concrete. After 1914, classical styles largely disappeared, but they were replaced by eclectic treatments rather than by distinctively modern design, despite the efforts of leading modern architects such as Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier. Slow French economic growth in the 1930s contributed to this lack of clear progress. Even after 1945, reference to the past was implicit in many new buildings and planned layouts. The result was often inspired by order and symmetry, and sensitive, human treatment sometimes suffered.

Under the Vichy regime (1940–4), architecture looked back to traditional French society. After the Liberation, only the devastated areas saw much new construction, and a great deal of this echoed or recreated earlier building, using what were known as ‘regionalist’ styles. Perret’s rebuilt Le Havre (1945–63), with its geometrical plan, big axial avenues and modular concrete buildings, was the country’s biggest and best example of modern planning and architecture until the 1960s. Its monochrome concrete surfaces, horizontal emphases and repetition were tolerable in Perret’s impressive plan, but their dull and inferior application to anonymous housing estates across France were no substitute for a mature competence in modern architecture. Public buildings drew heavily on concrete-related materials and styles, and on metal components like those developed by Jean Prouvé. Overall, concrete elevations and their related glazing often recalled 1930s design until the late 1950s. The main novelty was an enhanced gigantism, behind which lay the inspiration of reinforced concrete.

The biggest area of divergence from this conformity was church architecture. Following a long tradition, church architects sought originality and strong statements after 1945. Especially influential was Auguste Perret’s concrete, towered church of St-Joseph, Le Havre, built between 1949 and 1956. Powerful, ribbed vaults and soaring, angular towers gave many churches a timeless quality which looked awkward or quaint alongside the new housing blocks. Many of the churches now completed had been started in the 1930s and design adjustments were often made, especially to the interiors. Churches had little influence on the rest of contemporary architecture, therefore, and became even more detached as time passed. Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame-du-Haut, at Ronchamp (1951–5), and the convent of La Tourette (1957–60), were isolated masterworks by an architect who built little secular work after the early 1950s.

An architecture of mass housing did not develop extensively until the 1950s, when the country made strenuous efforts to make up its serious housing backlog, signalled by the shacks and shanty towns around the big cities, and the crowded inner slums. Public housing was the main solution. Le Corbusier’s expensive, experimental housing blocks (unités d’habitation) failed to multiply, but French architects and engineers perfected industrial methods of construction. The main guidance here was provided by the Ministry of Reconstruction and Urbanism, which had been given the task of producing mass housing after the war. The traditional concrete specialist, Marcel Lods (1891–1978), was widely followed, even though his work was redolent of the 1930s. The result was a diffusion of mass designs which (ironically) represented a triumph for Le Corbusier’s post-1930 Radiant City urban concepts, without the accompanying detail and quality. French pre-eminence in reinforced concrete since before the war, combined with a lack of expertise in modern architecture after it, produced standardized treatments which were often tedious. The resulting simple, symmetrical blocks offered little scope to the architect and the layouts were generally repetitive, with geometrical effects spreading over wide areas, together with minimal landscaping and few public buildings. Most of the flats were in slabs but there were also many towers, demonstrating French prowess in reinforced concrete but revealing a lack of social planning. Individual towers were sometimes used to liven up slab estates, but this scarcely qualified as creative architecture. In the 1950s and 1960s much of the new suburban housing was in the form of grands ensembles (large multi-storey housing estates) such as the notorious Sarcelles, north of Paris. Developed with repetitive towers and slabs, they were laid out on geometrical lines. Housing up to 40,000 people, they created a new urban environment which soon disturbed the French public. Ironically, much of the inspiration for this mass architecture came from the eighteenth century, whose symmetry and rationalism were applied to popular housing by French architects in the absence of a training in modern design.

Similar designs were built in the French colonies of North Africa. A high-rise tradition was lacking here, but the French architects applied the same techniques as in France, except that Arab forms and detailing were often included. Climatic factors were fully considered and the blocks were grouped together to create shade. Public buildings often acknowledged local forms, with arcades, white surfaces and, often, arched openings and loggias. Apartments built for rich Europeans were visibly open to air and light and they had a luxurious appearance, like the Liberté block of luxury flats in Casablanca (1961). Most of the architects, though trained in France, specialized in colonial work and continued into the 1960s after independence.

By the 1960s, prefabrication was highly developed and architectural repetition became even more pronounced. Curved and asymmetrical layouts became more common in the 1960s, but the volume of the structures tended to increase at the same time. Industrialized concrete techniques were now being applied to the building of blocks of flats on a scale unrivalled in Europe. New public buildings were now almost without exception in a modern style. In Paris, the UNESCO building (1958), the exhibition hall at the Défense (1958), and the ORTF headquarters (1963) featured simple, efficient modernism and geometrical forms in gigantic structures. These projects emphasized the growing international role of Paris, but they soon influenced public buildings elsewhere in France. Urban renewal often emphasized space, geometry and height, with the gigantic Part-Dieu scheme in Lyon crowned in 1974 by the awesome, cylindrical Tour du Crédit Lyonnais. This phase of gigantism on geometrical lines still tended to reveal some of the deficiencies of French architects in modern design and in the later 1960s architectural education was reformed to make its products more adaptable. From 1969, President Georges Pompidou encouraged modern architecture through his influence on big competitions such as that for the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The president especially favoured tall towers, and by the 1970s a number of these broke the traditional flat skyline in Paris and the big provincial cities like Lyon. Meanwhile, Le Corbusier at last achieved national recognition as the guiding spirit of French architecture in the 1960s. André Wogensky’s Hauts-de-Seine prefecture at Nanterre (1967) epitomized his new influence.

French economic difficulties after 1973 created a complex context for new architecture. Modernism, its reputation tarnished by much of the cheap housing of the 1960s, and the tall Paris office towers like the Tour Montparnasse (1973), was partly replaced by cheapened versions of traditional and vernacular styles. The conservation of historic districts under the Malraux act of 1962 created a new interest in the old. Popular preference for small, individual houses was reflected on the outskirts of growing towns and in the new towns (villes nouvelles) planned around Paris. The École des Beaux-Arts was reformed in 1968 in the wake of the Paris student demonstrations. Its new structure of eight largely independent teaching units in Paris, with a number of provincial centres, encouraged variety and independence in the early 1970s. However, modernism, which had only just made its mark, did not completely disappear, and pure postmodernism on American lines did not develop in France. As in the last century, national traditions provided the main lines of continuity. Even the cheapest buildings, such as blocks of flats and offices, moved away from brutal repetition to smoother, asymmetrical, varied treatments incorporating water and greenery. Colour was given a bigger role than before 1970, though grey and white monochrome lived on, with primary colours used in panels or blazes. The ubiquitous grey marble floor slab set the tone for many a new public building, not least in Carlos Ott’s new Paris opera house (1984). Preformed concrete components, often emphasized by the expansion gaps between them, remained common.

Overall, French architecture absorbed the new respect for the past which grew up in France, as elsewhere in Europe. The Pompidou Centre at Paris—designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers after a big international competition, and completed in 1977—was blatantly modern but its failure to create a school in France reflected the big shift in opinion. The ‘new modern architecture’ which grew up from around 1975 was based on ideas of tradition and an organic relationship between site and adjoining buildings. A human scale was sought, and new buildings were often attached directly to existing frontages. Steel, often combined with glass in atria and canopies, was used more often and more visibly, and reinforced concrete was used in a more restrained fashion. High-quality bricks were often used to stress artisanal traditions, as in Paul Chemetov’s huge brick apartment house at the Porte de Pantin (1981). Elsewhere, brick panels were often set in concrete frames, emphasizing a human scale. The Catalan architect, Ricardo Bofill, who built widely in Paris in the 1970s for public clients, exaggerated this historicism while seeking a rich social life, via an architectural theatricality. His Espaces d’Abraxas (1978–83), a concrete neoclassical estate at Noisy-le-Grand, won worldwide acclaim for its expressionist romanticism, and influenced many French housing architects, though mainly in the direction of visual effects. The greatest scope was in the new towns, where French architects had much freedom. Best described as ‘neo-modern’, the new approach both modernized and humanized France’s multi-storey cities, being applicable to both old and new districts. In effect, it allowed history to reinforce the French urban habitat. However, many French architects continued to work in close association with the state, as they had since the war, and the observer could detect a degree of repetition in schemes across the country.

Outside the city centres, in the new towns, and in the small towns of traditional France, a shift occurred from the early 1970s towards the individual house and away from the block of flats. American influence helped to ensure that, even when built by large developers, these received varied treatment. The decline of public sector building between the 1970s and the 1990s produced growing numbers of these individual houses, with the architects of both developers and private clients recreating traditional forms, often reminiscent of rural life.

Commercial buildings, which multiplied from the later 1950s, conformed to the tradition of continuous frontages and constant heights, together with, in many cases, traditional materials. Residential buildings made some use of traditional materials and forms, with mansard roofs returning to favour. The persistence of nineteenth-century building regulations contributed to this result and encouraged conservatism among architectects. President Mitterrand’s Parisian Grands Projets in the 1980s and the early 1990s combined modern architecture with respect for the historic Parisian environment. The eight major projects announced in 1982 were gradually complemented by other schemes. The styles varied, but the neo-modern was the dominant theme. Their scale varied from I.M.Pei’s deferential pyramid at the Louvre (1988) to J.O. von Spreckelsen’s great arch at the Défense (1989), whose grandeur was much valued.

French architecture since 1945 has witnessed the persistence of a national, historic tradition, tempered by an imported modernism. From the 1970s, a return to tradition took place, while the best features of modern architecture were retained or adapted. The resulting continuity allowed French architecture to retain the best of the past while encouraging good design. The design emphasis switched from individual buildings to ensembles, and by the 1980s a new urban aesthetic had emerged, based on intimate space with a hint of an older tradition in which people were the masters of their cities, rather than the victims of brutal modernity.

ANTHONY SUTCLIFFE

architecture under Mitterrand

For François Mitterrand, ‘le premier des arts’ was architecture; indeed, his personal fascination for this subject is clearly discernible in his writing. This private ‘passion’ was to have a very striking influence on his presidency, most obviously in the form of what were known as the Grands Travaux or Grands Projets Culturels, a programme of architectural projects in Paris which constitute one of the most visible and durable aspects of his legacy.

Mitterrand’s Grands Travaux consisted of a programme of about a dozen major architectural projects in Paris, three of which had in fact been initiated under Giscard d’Estaing: the Institute of the Arab World, the Science Museum at La Villette and the Musée d’Orsay. The first of these, inaugurated in 1987, is a cultural centre whose stated objective was to foster the understanding in France of the culture of the Arab world, defined in its broadest sense, since more than twenty Arab countries participated in this joint venture, in partnership with the French state. The Musée d’Orsay, also inaugurated in 1987, is a museum of art from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, created by converting the old Orsay station which had been abandoned after the war. The third project instigated by Giscard and then completed under Mitterrand is the Cité des Sciences at La Villette, inaugurated in 1986, just days before the legislative elections that led to the first period of political ‘cohabitation’ in France. This was also an architectural conversion, involving in this case the central building of the new abattoir commissioned under de Gaulle but then not completed due to changing market conditions. It is surrounded by a new ‘urban’ park, designed by the Franco-Swiss architect, Bernard Tschumi; commissioned under Mitterrand, it is classified separately as another of his Grands Travaux, though the President is said to have had very little involvement in its conception or execution, and indeed, is rumoured to have disliked it intensely. A third project on the same site is the Cité de la Musique, designed by French architect Christian de Portzamparc, in two separate units, one housing the new Conservatoire and rehearsal studios, and the other containing a museum of music, a concert hall and amphitheatre, a multimedia library and exhibition area. This was not inaugurated until January 1995, having been given the lowest priority of all the projects, paradoxically, because of the crossparty support for it.

The music complex at La Villette was originally also to have incorporated another project, for a new ‘popular’ opera house, but in fact a more central site on the Place de la Bastille was then chosen, essentially for symbolic reasons. The Opéra-Bastille, designed by the Canadian-Uruguayan architect Carlos Ott, was inaugurated for the Bicentenary celebrations in 1989, but did not open to the public until the following year. There was intense opposition to this project on aesthetic, financial and technical grounds, and Mitterrand, who did not like the design, nearly abandoned it on several occasions. It has remained the subject of much controversy surrounding its cost, its technical qualities and its programming policy, and it is undoubtedly one of the least well received of the Grands Travaux.

Conversely, the project which is now considered as being the most successful is the one with which Mitterrand was most closely involved personally: the Grand Louvre. Mitterrand confessed to having long been ‘obsessed’ with the idea of modernizing the Louvre, where the lack of space and funds prevented the proper functioning of the museum; he was determined to force the departure of the Ministry of Finance from the Richelieu wing of the building, in what he saw as a symbolic battle between money and culture. His appointment, without competition, of the Chinese-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei to take on the project, was much attacked for its allegedly personalized and ‘arbitrary’ nature, though public criticism was in fact fuelled less by this apparent autocracy than by Pei’s ‘revolutionary’ design for a glass pyramid in the Cour Napoléon to mark the new central entrance. The ‘battle of the pyramid’, which was launched by France-Soir in January 1984, did not die down until over a year later when a lifesize model, erected on the proposed site, persuaded opponents that it would not be the ‘aberration’ that many had predicted. Indeed, the pyramid has since become probably the most admired architectural project of the Mitterrand presidency, and has attracted record numbers of visitors.

An offshoot of the Grand Louvre was the construction of another new building to house the displaced Ministry of Finance. In order to minimize potential technical problems that might indirectly cause delays to the Grand Louvre project, thereby jeopardizing its completion, Mitterrand allowed Jacques Chirac as mayor of Paris to exert a major influence over the choice of site at Bercy, which suited his plan to redevelop the eastern half of the city according to his ‘Plan de l’est parisien’. Given the intended function of the building, the architectural competition was open to French architects only, and it was won by Paul Chemetov and Borja Huidobro, whose design was much criticized for what was often described as its neo-Stalinist style, which Mitterrand himself described as being that of a motorway toll. The Ministry finally moved into its new location in 1989, after a bitter struggle involving Chirac’s Finance Minister from 1986–1988, Édouard Balladur, who was reluctant to move; this enabled the Richelieu wing of the Louvre to be inaugurated by 1993, year of the bicentenary of the Convention’s decision to turn the royal palace into a national museum.

The other architectural project in which Mitterrand took a particular personal interest was the Arche de La Défense; all the previous presidents of the Fifth Republic had discussed plans to build a major monument on this site, but it was Mitterrand who made this a reality. An international competition was won by Danish architect Johan Otto von Spreckelsen whose design for a huge white marble arch (or cube as it was first called) met with almost unanimous acclaim from specialists and nonspecialists alike. Built on top of four main pillars sunk underground, it had to be slightly turned at an angle from the ‘triumphal route’ leading down to the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs Élysées, because of existing underground service networks. It was initially designed to house a vast communications centre, abandoned by the Chirac government in 1986, when private investment had to be sought to ensure the future of the building, which is now essentially occupied as office space. It was inaugurated during the Bicentenary celebrations in 1989, and the roof of the arch was used for the G7 meeting that took place on this occasion. Since then, the roof has housed the Fondation des Droits de l’Homme, officially inaugurated on 26 August, anniversary of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Mitterrand’s re-election to the presidency in 1988 gave him the confidence to launch another major architectural project, this time for a vast new modern library. A limited competition was held, which was won by French architect Dominique Perrault, whose design consisted of four L-shaped glass towers facing inwards towards each other, symbolizing open books, round a sunken garden. The site was once again chosen partly out of deference to Chirac, since the Ville de Paris offered to give the site free of charge, because it wanted to use the new library as the central focus of a whole new redevelopment in this area, known as the Seine Rive-Gauche. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France was officially inaugurated by Mitterrand in 1994, but not opened to the public (and then only partially) until December 1996, at which point Chirac decided to extend the library’s full name by adding that of François Mitterrand. Two other less important projects were also planned for the second presidency: the renovation of the Galerie de l’Évolution in the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle, which was completed in 1994, and the International Conference Centre to be built on a site on the Quai Branly, near the Eiffel Tower. This project was the only one to fall foul of conflicts with the Ville de Paris, and had to be abandoned in 1993.

Besides these major projects in Paris, many others were also carried out in the provinces, but they were not really part of the presidential programme; they were partly funded by the Ministry of Culture in partnership with local authorities which, usually under the auspices of ambitious mayors, emulated the central model of cultural gestures, by initiating the construction of major cultural projects that would not only satisfy the increasing demand from the electorate for cultural facilities in their areas, but also act as vehicles for urban development. These projects outside Paris were instigated by the state largely to offset criticisms by decentralizers of excessive resources being concentrated into the capital, and they enabled the defenders of the Grands Travaux to argue that the central ‘example’ was the most effective model for irrigating the country with cultural initiatives.

The significance of the Grands Travaux has been extensively discussed in the press and, to a lesser degree, in academic research. The widely accepted presentation is that of Mitterrand as the president-pharaon (pharaoh-president), building monuments to his own glory, in a revival of the old French monarchical tradition of building in the capital, in order to establish and enhance the personal image of the head of state. That the president chose to leave his most personal and controversial mark on the Louvre, the symbolic heart of French national culture, simply reinforced this view of Mitterrand as a ‘megalomaniac’ with an overriding ambition to be remembered in history through the construction of these prestigious monuments. Moreover, the fact that he was able to carry out such a massive programme of architectural projects, on a scale unprecedented since the days of Haussmann, was made possible, according to this interpretation, by the almost unlimited powers supposedly available to the president of the Fifth Republic, who is frequently portrayed as ‘an elected monarch’, able to dictate policy without having to contend with any significant constraints.

However, this construal of the Grands Travaux makes assumptions about the president’s motives and the extent of his powers, both of which can be contested. First, with regard to his ambitions, the quest for personal glory is in no way an accurate reflection of the mood that initially inspired them: Mitterrand’s greatest concern in initiating the Grands Travaux was to leave a cultural stamp on his presidency, and the architectural projects were intended as prestigious ‘cultural gestures’, designed to drive a much broader cultural policy, pursued in parallel under the authority of Jack Lang as Minister of Culture. Indeed, all the architectural projects (except for the new Ministry of Finance, which was simply an offshoot of the Grand Louvre) had a cultural function of some sort, which was in each case conceived as a response to a widely perceived and often long-standing demand from the public and from professionals in the field. It was also Mitterrand’s ambition to use these cultural projects to bring about an architectural revival in the capital, enabling new talents to come forward and express themselves in a burst of artistic creativity. Indeed, Mitterrand had often deplored the quality of publicly funded architecture in France, and he hoped that the Grands Travaux would play an exemplary role in setting new architectural standards and expectations. This would also have the effect of focusing international architectural attention on Paris, thereby restoring the city’s supposedly declining status as a cultural Mecca. But there was a further dimension to the architectural revival about which Mitterrand spoke often before his election, and this was the role it would play in humanizing ‘the city’ and making it more ‘civilized’, a notion which he claimed was central to his idea of socialism. His architectural projects would therefore also, in theory at least, be informed by a wider concern with urban design and planning that was, and continues to be, a major preoccupation of architects and planners alike with regard to the city of Paris and its future development. However, this ‘urban’ dimension was in the event very considerably eclipsed by the cultural demands, and the president was much criticized for emphasizing the monumental and neglecting the concerns of the suburbs, for example with regard to the choice of sites. It is also true that there was undoubtedly, over the years, a certain shift in his ambitions with regard to the Grands Travaux: the library project was conceived and executed in a context of supreme political self-confidence at the beginning of his second period of office, which for many marked the beginning of a decline into the excesses and abuses of power that branded him a nepotist, a liar and a despot.

Second, the extent to which the very complex decision-making processes involving the Grands Travaux were associated personally with the president himself has been greatly exaggerated. Similarly, the often crucial role and influence of political advisers, technicians and other professionals has been almost totally ignored in the attempt to portray Mitterrand as having behaved in the manner of an absolute monarch. Recent research, however, has shown that the president would not have been able to undertake or complete the Grands Travaux had he not been actively supported and advised in this venture by certain informally constituted groups, who were not simply behaving as courtiers, but who saw in Mitterrand’s programme the opportunity to realize their own independently elaborated projects. For the ‘cultural community’, as represented, essentially, in the person of Jack Lang, this meant providing the capital with better cultural facilities. For local planners (mainly those working from the local authority agency, the Atelier Parisien d’Urbanisme or APUR), it meant a chance to redevelop certain parts of the city according to their own existing plans that would otherwise have remained on the drawing board. For many involved in local cultural politics, behind the rhetoric of political opposition, the presidential projects represented a unique opportunity to provide the local electorate with facilities that would be paid for by the state rather than out of local taxes. Indeed, it could even be argued that the case of the Grands Travaux, rather than representing the presidential expression of pure sovereign power, showed, on the contrary, how these groups were able to use the president’s own ambitions to pursue their own agendas. More accurately, given the heterogeneous nature of the different projects in the programme, the Grands Travaux should be seen as an example of an osmosis between the presidential ambitions and their harnessing by the actors in the relevant policy area to suit their own specific demands.

Thus, the widely accepted view of the Grands Travaux as the expression of Mitterrand’s monarchical ambitions and powers can be reassessed as a gross misrepresentation, and yet it is a view which will almost certainly continue to hold sway, not only due to the limited dissemination of academic research, but also because of the ease with which this view lends itself to caricatural representation in the media, and the appeal of this sort of image to the public in general. Besides, it is a view which has clearly served the political interests of Mitterrand’s critics both on the Right and the Left, and it is for this reason that the Grands Travaux will continue to be a controversial aspect of his legacy.

SUSAN COLLARD

Ardant, Fanny

b. 1949, Saumur

Actor

Her career took off as the heroine of Truffaut’s La Femme d’à côté (1981), in which she starred with Depardieu. Truffaut’s Vivement dimanche! (1983) was a showcase for Ardant. She also appeared in three 1980s films by Resnais (La Vie est un roman, L’Amour à mort, Mélo). She once more starred alongside Depardieu in Yves Angelo’s Le Colonel Chabert, a 1994 literary heritage film echoing her role in Schlöndorff’s 1984 Proust adaptation, Swann in Love. Both films exemplify her languorously romantic acting style.

PHIL POWRIE

See also: cinema; stars

armed forces

From 1945 through to the present day, the French armed forces have undergone repeated and significant changes at a conceptual level and in terms of the tasks which they have been asked to perform. French forces have been involved in a variety of conflicts in many different theatres, most notably the counter-guerrilla wars in Indochina (1945–54) and Algeria (1954–62), but also in the abortive Suez expedition of 1956, in rapid interventions designed to maintain stability in former French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, in humanitarian interventions in Bosnia and Rwanda, and as part of the international coalition of forces in the Gulf War.

France has been a permanent, if somewhat maverick, member of the Western Alliance— withdrawing from NATO’s integrated command structure in 1966 while continuing to cooperate at a lower level. France, along with Britain and the United States, is one of only three NATO countries to possess an independent nuclear deterrent, the main impetus behind its acquisition being the (then) President de Gaulle’s determination to assert, if only on a symbolic level, French strategic independence, to wean the army from its colonial preoccupations, seen as outdated, and to transform it into a modern fighting force with a more European focus.

French military forces had enjoyed a long tradition of apolitical neutrality; the Army was known as la grande muette (the great silent one) on the grounds that it did not interfere in political affairs. This tradition was shattered during the Algerian war at the time of the Generals’ Putsch of 1961, when some of the most decorated and trusted men in France’s armed forces openly rebelled against the regime, angered at what they saw as de Gaulle’s desire to ‘abandon’ Algeria. The failure of the putsch was in no small part due to the reluctance of the reservists and those carrying out their compulsory period of military service in Algeria to join the revolt. From 1997 onwards, however, compulsory national service was phased out, reflecting, in part, the lowering of tension brought by the end of the Cold War. This also suggests a change of attitudes. Service in the armed forces has usually been seen as a way of ensuring that the army did not become too detached from the nation whose values it was supposed to defend, and as a moral contract between the citizen and the nation—a duty incumbent upon the citizen who, in return, received the rights and protection which citizenship conferred.

CRAIG BLUNT

Aron, Jean-Paul

b. 1925, Strasbourg;

d. 1988, Paris

Philosopher and historical anthropologist

Aron worked across various disciplines, including philosophy, history, sociology and epistemology. His principal works are: Essais d’epistémologie biologique, Anthropologie du consent français (which he co-authored), The Art of Eating in France (Le Mangeur du XIXe siècle), La Bourgeoisie, le sexe et l’honneur, and (with Roger Kempf) Le Pénis et la démoralisation de l’Occident, a stunning exposé of the bourgeois discourse of morality in post-revolutionary France (1820–50). In Les Modernes (The Moderns), a series of witty and highly scathing attacks on the major intellectual figures of postwar France (Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Barthes, etc.), he decried the power and influence of the French media and teaching institutions. Aron (who was based at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris) achieved national fame in 1987 when, in a highly publicized interview for the Nouvel Observateur entitled ‘Mon Sida’ (My AIDS), he became the first celebrity in France to declare publicly that he was HIV positive. This act was in direct response to Michel Foucault’s ‘shameful’ decision not to reveal he had AIDS. Aron wrote several novels and a collection of plays, producing for television histories of medicine and inventions. He was Raymond Aron’s nephew.

JAMES WILLIAMS

See also: gay writing; television

Aron, Raymond

b. 1905, Paris;

d. 1983, Paris

Intellectual and journalist

Aron was one of the most prominent of France’s postwar intellectuals. Educated at the École Normale Supérieure, where he was close to Sartre, he also studied in Germany, and it was his first-hand observation of the Nazi seizure of power which led to his enduring fascination with the nature of historical explanation, the claims of political ideology and the menace of totalitarianism. After the war, which he spent in London with the Free French, he sought to combine academic scholarship with political (though not, apart from a brief period in the late 1940s, party) engagement. Although he wrote widely in the fields of sociology and international relations, it was as a dedicated opponent of the philosophical claims of Marxism, and the political record of communism, that he made his name. His attack on the Marxist sympathies of the French intelligentsia in The Opium of the Intellectuals (L’Opium des intellectuels) (1955)—much admired in America and England—led most French pro-gressives, including Sartre, to view him as nothing more than a crude Cold War conservative. In fact he was an independent-minded liberal, who supported Algerian independence and criticized aspects of de Gaulle’s nationalist foreign policy. His unorthodoxy, and his isolation, were further demonstrated by his response to the 1968 Events, which he mocked in The Undiscoverable Revolution (La Revolution introuvable) as a psychodrama with no historical meaning. In 1978, as the intellectual credibility of communism finally crumbled in France, the cause of liberal democracy suddenly became fashionable— and so did its chief spokesman. Aron wrote a well-regarded autobiography and acquired the status of national guru which had earlier belonged to his student friend, and subsequent adversary, Sartre.

PETER MORRIS

Arp, Jean

b. 1887, Strasbourg;

d. 1966, Basle

Artist

Arp was a modernist pioneer sculptor, and a founder member of the 1916 Zurich Dada group. Expressionism provoked his interest in abstract form with only oblique reference to the real world. He abandoned traditional skills in favour of the idea of artist as artificer. In his works, for example, Portrait of Tristran Tzara (1916), form, following the elements of cubism, becomes determined by the laws of chance and force (air currents, gravity) rather than the artist’s choice. After 1930, his contemplative three-dimensional sculptures, for example, Human Concretion in Oval Bowl (1935), began to reflect the face of nature and growing forms.

VALERIE SWALES

Arrabal, Fernando

b. 1932, Melilla, Spanish Morocco

Playwright and director

Arrabal is best known as the writer of ritualistic, turbulent plays noted for their disregard for convention, influenced by grim personal experience of war and family tragedy, e.g. Le Cimetière des voitures and Picnic on a Battlefield (Pique-Nique en campagne).

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

art brut

The company of art brut was formed in 1948 to manage Jean Dubuffet’s immense collection of ‘raw art’ (l’art brut) at the Galerie Drouin. Other founder members were André Breton and Michel Tapié. The group’s major exhibition, ‘L’Art Brut Préféré aux Arts Culturels’, was held in November 1948. Following Surrealism and also the tradition of the irrational of Alfred Jarry, Dubuffet sought inspiration in the art of children and the mentally unstable, and in accidental marks and graffiti on walls and pavements. Encrusted, muddy pigment, trowelled, scrawled and scratched into parodies of the heroic metaphors of the romantic tradition, contribute to postwar realism’s commentaries on the brutalism of contemporary society and the careerist intellectual; for example, The Cow with the Subtle Nose (1954).

VALERIE SWALES

See also: painting

art criticism

Art criticism in France since 1945 has shown two distinct trends, embodied first in the writings of the ‘professional’ art critics, and second in the writings of intellectuals whose discussion of the visual arts is simply part of their wider body of work.

‘Professional’ art criticism in the years immediately following World War II was largely influenced by a resurfacing of the prewar abstraction/representation debate in the visual arts, which meant that critics took sides, were combative, and rhetorical in approach and became promoters of the art they had engaged with. Michel Tapié and Julien Alvard, for example, were both militant apologists for abstract art, the French counterparts of Clement Greenberg in the United States, creating trends as much as discussing them. With his 1951 exhibition, ‘Les Signifiants de l’informel’, Tapié defined, launched and thereafter promoted the art informel movement. The critic Pierre Restany, initially at least, also argued for abstract art, allying himself with the Lyrical Abstraction movement created in 1947 and promoting the work of this group of painters. The absence of a well-argued, intellectually committed philosophical foundation for the opinions of these critiques de métier was illustrated when Restany, in 1960, without apparent hesitation, changed sides in the abstraction/figuration debate. Defining a number of disparate artists (Yves Klein, Hains, Arman, Tinguely et al.) as Nouveaux Réalistes and promoting their work himself, Restany now declared himself an opponent of abstract art. A familiarity with the opportunities of the art market appears to have been a determining factor in the positions taken up by critics such as Restany, who, like Tapié, was creating a product and selling it. Restany has been regarded as the most representative French exponent of the type of criticism dominating the period 1950–70, of which Greenberg as the promoter of Abstract Expressionism in America is probably the best-known practitioner.

A parallel trend in French art criticism since the war stems from the tendency of intellectuals in France to turn their attention to the visual arts as part of their principal project. While the most influential art criticism of this type, grounded in structuralism and poststructuralism has come to the fore since the 1960s, the model of the philosopher engaging with the fine arts was defined by Jean-Paul Sartre in the immediate postwar years. His admiration for Giacometti, as well as his attacks on Surrealism, stemmed from his existentialist position, and found expression in his 1948 essay on Giacometti for the catalogue of the sculptor’s first postwar exhibition as well as in his critical endorsements of the work of Jean Dubuffet, Wols, Calder and Masson. In the same period, Merleau-Ponty gave a phenomenological account of the work of artists such as Cézanne.

From the late 1950s on, important critical writing on art became increasingly grounded in theory. An offshoot of Saussure’s structural linguistics—which saw the basic unit of any language, including the visual, as sign—this approach to the image enabled French academics to move between different disciplines— sociology, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis and the visual arts—and to free themselves from the traditional stylistic boundaries of academic discourse. Thus Michel Foucault analyses Velasquez’s Las Meniñas, Jacques Lacan discusses Holbein’s The French Ambassadors, Roland Barthes writes essays on Dutch painting and Cy Twombly, and Jean-François Lyotard produces articles on Duchamp, Barnett Newman and Daniel Buren. The 1980s saw a two-volume study of Francis Bacon by Deleuze and a book on the graphic art of Antonin Artaud by Derrida. Derrida’s poststructuralism also informs his collection of essays, Truth in Painting (La Vérité en peinture) of 1978. Analyses of the visual arts can also be seen in the work of Baudrillard and Julia Kristeva. This approach, based on a response to the visual image in terms of signs, where the emphasis is on the reading of the art work itself rather than the documentation surrounding it, is perhaps the most distinctive feature of contemporary art criticism in France.

CAROL WILCOX

See also: structuralism

art galleries/museums

The idea of offering public access to hitherto private collections was to have social implications unimaginable in 1793 when the Louvre was transformed from a royal palace into the first national museum in Europe. It was not until the late nineteenth century and the rise of the historical sciences, notably art history, that the public art gallery/museum became a recognized social institution, albeit one that excluded any innovatory art that might challenge the French establishment. The official policy in France remained unchanged until just before World War II, although of course many small privately owned art galleries in Paris regularly exhibited and promoted avant-garde art during this period. The closed-door policy of the public art galleries was reflected in the closed spaces of their architecture and in the sober atmosphere they generated. Apollinaire, in fact, wanted to burn down the Louvre and Proust saw it as an elitist microcosm isolated from the world.

A change in French policy after the war was illustrated in 1947 by the opening of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, then housed in the Palais de Tokyo, with its collection of twentieth-century avant-garde art. Despite this change in attitude, the concept of the museum’s function, as essentially a preserver of the artistic legacy of the past, and the elitist image that went with it, remained unquestioned until the 1960s, when the prevailing ethos forced the institution to open up to a wider public and a wider range of activities.

The Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum and the Berne Kunsthalle, which Christo ‘wrapped’ in 1968 encouraged by its director; were pioneering forces shaping the new museology which aimed at desanctifying and democratizing the public’s experience of art.

The same ideas informed the policies of the curator of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Pontus Hulten, who was able to implement them on a grand scale when the Musée National d’Art Moderne (MNAM) was rehoused in Beaubourg in 1977.

Beaubourg, or the Centre Georges Pompidou, to give it its official name, was the architectural incarnation par excellence of this new spirit. President Georges Pompidou, a keen collector of modern art, had decided in 1969, in line with the prevailing ideology, to create a multipurpose cultural centre, and Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano were the architects chosen to bring his project to fruition. Their late-modernist structure incited controversy as well as admiration. Its design encouraged public participation in cultural activities, while its flexibility invited collaboration between the museum and the artists themselves. This resulted, for example, in the adaptation of exhibition spaces to contemporary artistic practice such as installation art. At the same time it promoted itself as multifunctional, a place of entertainment, incorporating restaurants and bars, children’s play areas/workshops as well as a place for research and study with its cinema, library, bookshops, music, lectures and debates. These activities are currently organized by its four main departments. Beaubourg represented a turning point in museum design and thereby, in a sense, succeeded in reasserting the artistic vitality Paris had lost when New York usurped its place as art capital of the world. In terms of numbers of visitors, it was an immediate success.

A similar conception of the museum’s function seems to have informed President Mitterrand’s appointment of I.M.Pei as the architect of the new ‘open’ entrance space for the Louvre and its undergound network of service areas, made available when the Ministère des Finances moved out of part of the building. It was completed in 1988 in time for the Bicentenary celebrations of the Revolution that had given birth to the museum. The choice of a glass pyramid to cover the new entrance was practical as well as symbolic, in that it allowed light to penetrate by day, adding to the openness of the new user-friendly area in which the visitor is informed by wall-mounted texts and video monitors of the options available in the museum. In conception, it recalls the vast groundfloor information area at Beaubourg, while the physical transparency of both buildings mirrors the transparency and honesty of their intentions. The same cannot be said for the Musée d’Orsay, at least in the view of those who support the ‘Beaubourg’ ideology.

Pompidou’s immediate presidential successor, Giscard d’Estaing, took the decision in 1977 to have the old Gare d’Orsay turned into a museum for nineteenth-century art. The success of Beaubourg may explain the timing of this decision, as a conversion plan had been mooted some four years earlier. It fell to Mitterrand, elected president in 1981, to see this project through to its conclusion (and thereby to claim it as one of his Grands Projets, along with the Pyramide du Louvre). Appropriately, art of the period 1848 to 1914 (from the beginning of the Second Empire to the outbreak of World War I) was to be displayed in this turn-of-the-century building. To defenders of the ‘Beaubourg’ idea, however, Gae Aulenti’s conversion of the interior into the traditional palace of separate spaces, divided off by grandiose structures which eclipsed Victor Laloux’s original architecture, was a retrograde step. She admits, moreover, that the decorative features, pastiches of Egyptian and neoclassical motifs, were not intended as references to nineteenth-century cultural traditions. This may be condemned as artistic dishonesty or accepted as postmodernism. The curators have also been accused of promulgating a neoconservative interpretation of nineteenth-century art, with the work of avant-garde artists once rejected by the official salons virtually hidden on the top floor, while the so-called pompier (more ‘popular’, not to say vulgar) paintings are among the first art works seen by the public as it enters on ground floor level.

This restatement of the museum as a ‘palace of rooms’ is also evident in the 1985 conversion of the Hotel Salé in the Marais quarter of Paris into the Musée Picasso. Because the conversion specified a minimum number of changes to the original hotel particulier built for a rich merchant in 1656, its obviously bourgeois layout defines a space that clearly contradicts the spirit of the avant-garde that Picasso’s work consistently embodied.

While the thinking behind the Musée Picasso and Orsay conversions appears to reinstate a retrograde museum culture, this is only partially counterbalanced by the alternative conception of the museum represented by the Pompidou Centre. Research has shown that the typical Beaubourg visitor is still a member of the educated middle class and that the working classes are poorly represented. Cultural barriers are clearly more complex in origin and much harder to break down than the architects of the Beaubourg idea originally thought.

CAROL WILCOX

art informel

Mathieu is historically significant for his role in delineating art practices along the Paris-New York axis in the 1940s and 1950s. Two pairs of terms were used to name this difference: American artists were referred to as expressionistes abstraits, while Mathieu and his colleagues styled themselves expressionistes lyriques. The subdivision of action painting, usually used to refer to Pollock’s work, was paralleled in France by the term ‘informel’. The difference was insistently revealed by a show at Nina Dausset’s gallery in 1951 entitled Véhémences confrontées, at which Bryen, Capogrossi, De Kooning, Hartung, Mathieu, Pollock, Riopelle, Russel and Wols were represented. The reliance upon Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the body as inseparable from the self (a refusal of the mind/body problem present in philosophy since Plato), and the addition of suggestive ideogrammatic symbols related to the Surrealist notion of ‘automatic drawing’, distinguish the French work from similar experiments in the US. Other artists whose work may be styled ‘Informel’ include Degottex, Hantaï, and Soulages.

SIMEON HUNTER

See also: painting

Artaud, Antonin

b. 1896, Marseille;

d. 1948, Ivry-sur-Seine

Actor, director and writer

Antonin Artaud’s writing has had a significant influence on postwar French culture. He is best known for his Theatre of Cruelty, a notion developed in his collection of essays The Theatre and its Double (Le Théâtre et son double). The scope of his writing extended from Surrealist poetry in the early 1920s to the film script for the first Surrealist film, The Shell and the Clergyman (La Coquille et le clergyman), directed by Germaine Dulac and released in 1927. He wrote and directed one full-length play, The Cenci (Les Cenci) in 1935, based on P.B.Shelley’s play of the same name, and he also turned to politics in his Revolutionary Messages (Messages révolutionnaires) of 1936, writing of the hopelessness of French youth and their opposition to bourgeois capitalism. His prose writing is peopled with marginal characters, such as Heliogabalus, the effeminate 14-year-old boy emperor of Rome who was assassinated and cast into the River Tiber, and Van Gogh, whom Artaud defended against criticisms of madness. Towards the end of his life, he wrote three radio plays, the last of which was entitled To Have Done with the Judgement of God (Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu). His language became increasingly impassioned and aggressive, often breaking with referentiality, and he frequently accompanied his performances with shouts and screams.

As a result of Artaud’s unstable mental condition, his writings were not taken seriously until The Theatre and its Double was translated posthumously into English in 1958, and became widely read by writers and practitioners. There are evident parallels between Artaud’s theatre of cruelty and the New Theatre of postwar France. Both movements aimed to exploit the full range of expressive means in the theatre, rather than to focus predominantly on the spoken word, and both tried to tear the audience away from all recognized social conventions. However, if something of Artaud’s aesthetics can be felt through Genet’s sense of religious ritual, Beckett’s density of language and Ionesco’s rupture of discourse and referentiality, renewed interest in Artaud can be seen as largely retrospective, a way of explaining the cruelty and violence which was already seeping into the theatre. Nevertheless, actors such as Jean-Louis Barrault acknowledged Artaud’s influence on aspects of actor training, such as double breathing, which provided a continued impetus to the postwar theatre.

Despite Artaud’s highly developed theatrical aesthetics, he wrote few major works of his own. It has been suggested that Artaud’s detailed prescriptions for a modernist theatre are unattainable and inaccessible. Michel Foucault, in Madness and Civilization (Folie de déraison), has expressed the view that Artaud is an artist without works, which is a sign of madness itself. Meanwhile, Derrida, in Writing and Difference (L’Écriture et la difference) sees Artaud’s failure as the logical outcome of any rebellion against the Western metaphysical tradition. In attempting to bypass the legacy of God the Father, Artaud created a scene of non-representation, a nontheological space which arose from the act of parricide conducted against the tyranny of the Father’s Word.

GERARD PAUL SHARPLING

See also: theatre

ARTE (Association Relative aux Télévisions Européennes)

Television channel

ARTE is a public sector Franco-German cultural television channel created by agreement in 1990 between President Mitterrand and Chancellor Kohl, which began transmissions in 1992.

On the French side, the origins of ARTE lay in the creation in 1986 of la Sept (Société d’Édition de Programmes de Télévision, renamed Société Européenne de Programmes de Télévision in 1989), whose mission was to develop cultural and educational television programming for pan-European transmission on the French direct broadcasting satellite Télédiffusion 1. While the satellite was not a commercial success, the French state still retained its commitment to the concept of a European cultural channel and sought a partner for the new venture. The Franco-German agreement on the creation of ARTE represented another instance of cooperation between the two states at the heart of the European Union. In the audiovisual field it followed on from the bilateral technological collaboration on satellite broadcasting during the late 1970s and 1980s.

The headquarters of ARTE are symbolically located near the Franco-German border in Strasbourg. The ownership of the channel is equally shared between La Sept/ARTE (France) and ARTE Deutschland TV (Germany). La Sept/ARTE is jointly owned by the French state and three public sector broadcasting companies, of which the television company France 3 is the biggest single shareholder. France’s stake in ARTE is funded from a combination of licence revenue and direct state subsidy.

Following the collapse of the commercial channel La Cinq in 1992, the French government allocated the fifth terrestrial network to ARTE. Programme transmission began on French and German cable networks in the same year. Since late 1994, ARTE has shared the fifth network with the educational channel La Cinquième, with the former transmitting in the evening from 7 p.m. until 3 a.m. ARTE’s programme output consists of high culture, including documentaries, magazine programmes, music and feature films. Despite its free availability on a terrestrial network, its audience share in France is minuscule.

Two main criticisms have been directed against ARTE: first, the undesirability of the ‘ghettoization’ of cultural output on a specialist channel; and second, the high cost per viewer to the public purse of such elitist programming. Defenders of ARTE emphasize the originality of the channel. It is the first transnational television channel in Europe resulting from cooperation between two countries; there is an acceptance of the principle of bilingual programming; and ARTE’s production and programming are innovative, with the channel providing free to the viewer a range of contemporary cultural and intellectual output not generally available on other channels. The next stage in ARTE’s development—and a test of the commitment of both governments to the project—is to transform itself into a truly pan-European cultural service capable of attracting a significant audience share in a competitive, multi-channel, digital environment.

RAYMOND KUHN

See also: television

arts funding (including regional)

Financial support for the arts in France comes from four sources: the Ministry of Culture, other ministries, local government and private sponsorship.

The culture ministry contributed 19.8 per cent of overall public spending on the arts in 1993. Its remit is wide-ranging: theatre and shows, music and dance, cinema, books and reading, visual arts, archives, heritage and museums. Until 1981, its spending rarely exceeded 0.5 per cent of state spending. But in the late 1960s, a target figure of 1 per cent was adopted by the arts world, which Mitterrand promised to reach. Accordingly, the ministry’s budget was doubled in 1981, passing from 0.47 to 0.75 per cent (5.99 billion francs) and continued to rise in the ensuing years, though 1 per cent was only ever reached fleetingly. Furthermore, the costly presidential building projects absorbed much of the increase and, alongside existing institutions like the Pompidou Centre, continue to do so because of their high operating costs. The ministry’s budget for 1995 fell from 0.93 to 0.91 per cent; but in his 1995 presidential campaign Chirac restored the 1 per cent target and the following September Léotard, his Culture Minister, proposed a budget for 1996 of 15.54 billion francs to meet it.

Various other ministries, including Education and Foreign Affairs, fund the arts, accounting for 27.4 per cent of public spending in 1993. But the biggest spender is local government, whose arts provision has risen steadily since the 1960s, due to the commitment of particular authorities, the introduction of contractual agreements with central government, and decentralization measures. In 1993, local arts spending made up 50.3 per cent of public expenditure and is expected to rise to around two-thirds by the year 2000. Although regions and departments have begun to play a bigger part (2.0 and 7.4 per cent respectively in 1993), the lion’s share comes from communes (40.9 per cent in 1993).

While public funding totalled 73.3 billion francs in 1993, business sponsorship has traditionally contributed little. The setting up of ADMICAL (Association for the Development of Industrial and Commercial Patronage) in 1979 and the subsequent introduction of tax and other incentives partly remedied this, though income from private business remains relatively small (1– 1.6 billion francs in 1992). Various types of approved private foundations, including the state-initiated Fondation de France, also provide funds. Plans for a new, autonomous Heritage Foundation were announced by the government in 1993.

DAVID LOOSELEY

athletics

France, in the person of Pierre de Coubertin (1863–1937), did much to resurrect the Olympic Games (Athens 1896), but a national body devoted exclusively to athletics—the Fédération Française d’Athlétisme—was created only in 1920 (its predecessor, dating from 1887, having embraced other sports as well). Paris hosted the Olympic Games in 1924. France’s success in athletics was rather limited before the Atlanta games of 1996 (which saw a marked improvement), but a small number of outstanding world record-holders and Olympic champions have emerged from the 1960s onwards, including Guy Drut (110 m hurdles), Michel Jazy (middle distances), Pierre Quinon and Thierry Vigneron (both pole vault), Colette Besson and Marie-Jo Pérec (both 400 m).

IAN PICKUP

See also: sport and education

Atlan, Jean-Michel

b. 1913, Constantine, Algeria;

d. 1960, Paris

Artist and poet

Atlan, a philosophy teacher, received no formal art training. Arrested for Resistance activities in 1942, he escaped deportation by simulating insanity. He was interned in St Anne mental hospital, where he produced Le Sang profond (Blood’s Depths), a collection of illustrated poems. After the war he joined the Surréalisme Révolutionnaire group and contributed to the avant-garde reviews Réaltiés nouvelles and Cobra. His early figurative paintings combine landscapes and animal images (Paysage) and Old Testament subjects (Le Lion de Judah, Salomé), which testify to his Jewish roots. He developed violent abstract forms, combining the magical and the erotic (Miroirs de l’Asie), and explored the relations between writing and painting.

ELZA ADAMOWICZ

Atlan, Liliane

b. 1932, Montpellier

Playwright and poet

A Jewish writer whose work deals with the history and suffering of her people and the atrocity of war, often employing fantasy rather than grim realism to tell the tale. Her major works include Monsieur Fugue, first staged in 1967 at the Comédie de St-Étienne.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Attali, Jacques

b. 1943, Algiers, Algeria

Writer, economist and political adviser

An economist and polymath intellectual, a graduate from the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), and the author of numerous socioeconomic and historical essays, Attali was Special Adviser to President Mitterrand from 1981 to 1989, and helped shape the foreign and European policies of the president. In 1990 he became Director of the newly formed European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, providing financial support to Eastern Europe. He resigned in 1993 amidst allegations of overspending and lax management. His long memoirs, Verbatim, were criticized for plagiarism and for not always being trustworthy.

FRANÇOIS NECTOUX

Attoun, Lucien

birthdate not known

Broadcaster, actor and director

As well as for his acting and directing roles, Attoun is known for founding the Théâtre Ouvert company in Paris, with his wife Micheline, in 1971, in order to promote contemporary playwrights through readings, performance and publication. The company, permanently based since 1981 at the Jardin d’Hiver, Paris, was made the first Centre Dramatique National devoted to new writing in 1987.

ANNIE SPARKS

Audiberti, Jacques

b. 1899, Antibes;

d. 1965, Paris

Playwright and writer

A playwright of carnavalesque, wordy plays, many dealing with concepts of good and evil, which were mainstays of 1950s and 1960s Parisian arts theatre, e.g. Le Mal Court (Evil Runs About) and Le Cavalier seul (The Lone Cavalier).

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Aufray, Hugues

b. 1932, Neuilly-sur-Seine

Singer-songwriter, real name Jean Auffray

Aufray appeared in nightclubs on the Left Bank in Paris before forming a skiffle group in the 1960s under the influence of Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and, above all, Bob Dylan, some of whose early songs he sang in imaginative French translations by Pierre Delanoë. Important on the French musical scene for his importation of American folk music and as an exponent of protest songs, he has enjoyed something of a revival in the 1990s.

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

Auriol, Vincent

b. 1884, Revel;

d. 1966, Paris

Politician

Vincent Auriol was a leading member of the French Socialist Party (SFIO) in the interwar period and held the Finance ministry in Léon Blum’s 1936 Popular Front government. His resolute opposition to the Vichy regime ensured his prominence in the postwar period. As president of the Constituent Assembly he played a central role in the complicated drafting of the constitution of the Fourth Republic. His status as Father of the Constitution led the National Assembly to elect him, by a large majority, president of the new Republic, an office which held few real powers but had a potential for influence which Auriol was fully to exploit in the turbulent politics of the late 1940s. The Republic was attacked on its Left by the powerful Communist Party and on its Right by de Gaulle’s anti-system Rassemblement pour la France. Auriol used such authority as his office possessed, and also his insider’s familiarity with the tortuous procedures of French parliamentary politics, to shore up the authority of the fragile governmental coalitions which struggled to cope with problems at home and abroad. His posthumously published diaries show the extent of his interventionism. He left office in 1954, but returned to prominence in 1958 as one of the Socialist leaders who backed the return to power of de Gaulle. He soon turned against the latter’s style of leadership, and in 1962 campaigned strongly against the proposal for a directly elected presidency on the grounds that it was incompatible with Republican democracy. The electorate did not agree with him.

PETER MORRIS

See also: parties and movements

Aurore, L’

Newspaper

An important popular daily in the 1950s. Created in 1942, this right-wing newspaper reached its peak circulation of over 400,000 copies in the mid-1950s. In 1951, cotton giant Marcel Boussac bought a 74 per cent shareholding in the paper. L’Aurore’s popularity declined through the 1960s and 1970s, and financial problems forced Boussac to sell, in 1978, to Marcel Fournier (of retailer Carrefour). He passed L’Aurore on to press baron Robert Hersant, who allowed it to decline, gradually merging it with Le Figaro. Although L’Aurore as such disappeared in 1984, an edition of Le Figaro continues to carry its name.

PAM MOORES

See also: national press in France

Autant-Lara, Claude

b. 1901, Luzarches

Director

The archetypal Fourth Republic film director, Autant-Lara’s denunciations of bourgeois hypocrisy often, as in Douce of 1943, show a savage awareness of class differences. His penchant for literary adaptations and co-operation with screenwriters Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, as on Le Diable au corps of 1946 or Le Blé en herbe of 1954, earned him the scorn of the Cahiers du cinéma critics, above all Truffaut. Yet La Traversée de Paris (1956) was one of the first determinedly non-heroic treatments of the Occupation, and his move across the political spectrum, from Communist Party member after the war to National Front MEP in the 1980s, was clearly the result of cynical opportunism as much as of any major ideological change.

KEITH READER

Auteuil, Daniel

b. 1950, Algiers, Algeria

Actor

His career began in 1977 with comic roles. He became well-known for his role as Ugolin in Berri’s 1986 diptych Jean de Florette/ Manon des sources, for which he received a César and a BAFTA award. Apart from the nineteenth-century criminal in Girod’s Lacenaire (1990) and Henry of Navarre in Chéreau’s La Reine Margot (1994), his roles in the 1990s were mainly of middle-class males in emotional trouble, exemplified in 1992 in Sautet’s A Heart in Winter (Un Coeur en hiver), where he played opposite Emmanuelle Béart, his real-life partner during the 1980s after he had been her screen suitor in Manon des sources.

PHIL POWRIE

See also: cinema

autobiography

A widespread interest in autobiography (a person’s account of his or her life which usually emphasizes the origins and development of personal identity) has been a notable feature of French culture since World War II and particularly since the 1970s.

The increasing prominence of autobiography in France is a multifaceted cultural phenomenon. At one level it represents belated recognition for a neglected body of major texts, including Rousseau’s Confessions and Stendhal’s Life of Henry Brulard (Vie de Henry Brulard), which had been relegated to the periphery of the literary field. New critical methods spawned by structuralism generated an interest in the workings of narrative, and questioned the established parameters of literary genres. Autobiography, with its combination of fact and fable, found its place in an expanded canon, and drew serious critical attention to other forms such as memoirs, essays, biographies and diaries. However, this new-found fascination with the first person singular placed a premium on the investigation of subjective reality and its complex determinants, rather than on personal effusions. As such, the rising tide of interest in the autobiographical reflects the wider impact of the human sciences—psychoanalysis, linguistics, semiotics, structural anthropology, sociology, feminist theory—in French culture generally. It is no coincidence that a crucial figure in twentieth-century French autobiography, Michel Leiris, was a poet adept at dissecting words, a trained ethnographer, and a lifelong devotee of psychoanalysis. The rise of autobiography reflects new ways of locating the sources of identity—in gender, ideological representations, history, ethnicity, the body, as well as in the dynamics of personal relations. It goes hand in hand with the questioning of old categorizations and divisions of experience into individual and collective, public and private, personal and historical. If it represents an emphasis on the experiential, the prestige of autobiography reflects new ways of placing le vécu (lived experience) at the heart of human understanding and cultural endeavour.

The rise of autobiography may seem paradoxical given the structuralist proclamation of the death of the author and the demise of the sovereign self, key themes in contemporary French culture. But in fact, the general model of the subject, as opposed to the self, which emerged in such quarters as linguistic theory centring on enunciation, Lacanian psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the illusory nature of the ego, or Cixous’s account of gendered subjectivity and language, paved the way for an increasingly self-aware and sophisticated mode of autobiographical writing attuned to the dispersion of a multiply constituted subjectivity. The inherently hybrid character of autobiography, at the crossroads of the referential and the fictional, and capable of finding expression in a wide range of media, visual (film, photograph, video) as well as verbal, becomes a distinct advantage. In the 1990s it has given autobiography a central position in a number of important cultural currents. These include the focus on the récit de vie (life history) which has led to new experiments in oral testimony, biography and travel writing, and the focus on the ordinary and the everyday, associated with such theoreticians as Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau. In these contexts autobiography, while by no means supporting die-hard individualism, does have a positive role in renegotiating the place of the subjective in wider social and intellectual formations.

Although it had been published just before the war, Michel Leiris’s Manhood (L’Age d’homme) only made its real impact when reissued in 1946 with an essay which has come to be seen as a manifesto for a new kind of literary enterprise. ‘The Autobiographer as Torero’ (‘De la littérature considered comme une tauromachie’) underlined the work’s radical structural and thematic innovations. The first modern autobiographer to break with chronology, Leiris had structured his self-investigation around certain obsessional motifs organized in associative patterns. Crucially, Leiris underlined the risk-taking candour of the confessional autobiographer, willing to ‘tell all’, and thus to expose himself to vilification, as the matador exposes himself to the bull’s horns. The element of risk gave autobiography the edge over other forms of literary expression which seemed merely footling in the face of the horrors of war. In its authenticity, autobiographical writing could constitute a form of that engagement which Jean-Paul Sartre was calling for on the part of intellectuals.

In fact, Leiris’s autobiographical project, to be pursued for the rest of his life, notably in the four-volume cycle (1948–76) The Rules of the game (La Règle du jeu), partly inspired Sartre’s own passionate interest in human lives, which first found full expression in his biography of Charles Baudelaire, also published in 1946 and in fact dedicated to Leiris. Sartre’s next biographical subject was the homosexual writer Jean Genet. This was partly on the strength of Genet’s 1948 The Thief’s Journal (Journal du voleur), a major autobiographical work which, as in Leiris’s case, combined a high degree of awareness of the pitfalls and challenges of autobiography with a radical approach to narrative and time. Sartre himself embarked on an autobiography in the early 1950s, but by the time it was published to great acclaim in 1964 as Words (Les Mots), two other important autobiographies had been published by members of his circle, Simone de Beauvoir’s 1958 Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée) and André Gorz’s 1958 The Traitor (Le Traître). These were to be followed by Violette Leduc’s La Bâtarde, an important autobiography by a writer close to Beauvoir. While all these autobiographies have common features which can be associated with existentialism (for example, a concern with betrayal and bad faith), Sartre’s Words is in a class of its own. Witty and fast-moving, it injects a strong dose of parody into the autobiographical proceedings, while in fact, as critical analysis has shown, disguising a complex structure of argument behind a loosely chronological surface.

A decade later, three works published in 1975 can be seen as the next milestone in the evolution of autobiography in France. First, a brilliant critical work by Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (The Autobiographical Contract), placed autobiography at the top of the literary critical agenda. Well-versed in contemporary literary theory, Lejeune combined a concern for rigorous formal criteria with an approach favouring close textual reading. In a series of subsequent works Lejeune refined and broadened his critical approach, serving as an indispensable interpreter of the manifold developments which have occurred in French autobiography in the last twentyfive years or so.

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes) and Georges Perec’s W or the Childhood Memory (W ou le souvenir d’enfance), both from 1975, broke new ground. Barthes’s text, featuring alphabetically ordered fragments, and a narrative voice oscillating between first and third person pronouns, adapted concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis and used autobiography to explore a new vision of the human subject. In Perec’s case, chapters from an autobiographical narrative sifting through a meagre stock of childhood memories alternate with chapters from a fictional story written when Perec was an adolescent. Progressively it emerges that both narratives point to a horror neither can name: the annihilation of the author’s mother in Auschwitz. Posthumous texts published since Perec’s early death in 1982 reveal the extent of his interest in developing new kinds of autobiographical project geared to exploring the borders of individual and collective experience.

The upsurge of interest in autobiography in the late 1970s had a direct impact on the nouveau roman group of novelists. Although, in the heyday of the structuralist assault on humanism, the new novelists had appeared to banish subjectivity, the ‘retour du sujet’ (return of the subject) spearheaded by Barthes’s later work prompted Alain Robbe-Grillet to write Le Miroir qui revient (The Return of the Mirror) and two subsequent volumes where autobiography and fantasy fuse in a manner particularly characteristic of what was to become known as autofiction (see below). Nathalie Sarraute’s outstanding 1983 Childhood (Enfance) used the established stylistic and thematic range developed in her fiction to probe childhood memories. With The Lover (L’Amant), published in 1984, Marguerite Duras used memories of an illicit affair as the sounding-board for a haunting exercise in memory and fantasy which clarified the autobiographical basis of her fictional work. Similarly, Claude Simon’s 1989 L’Acacia (The Acacia) consolidated a distinct autobiographical turn in his work.

The 1980s saw the emergence of several writers whose work bears the strong impact of the revival of autobiography. To some degree they can be seen as exponents of autofiction, a label coined by Serge Doubrovsky for novels where the narrator-protagonist bears the author’s real name. Works of autofiction, including those of Robbe-Grillet mentioned above, and Doubrovsky’s Un Amour de soi (Self-Love), often involve the reader in games with truth and fiction, blurring the border between autobiographical revelation and fictional creation. But for younger writers like Annie Ernaux, Hervé Guibert and Patrick Modiano, the ludic dimension of autofiction serves more authentically autobiographical ends. For Guibert, in To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (A l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie) the fusion of the diary mode (which also undergoes a revival at this time), autobiographical narrative and novelistic effects creates a medium in which he can explore the experience of being HIV positive. Ernaux has moved from autobiographical novels to works where biography—that of her father in Positions (La Place), that of her mother in Une Femme (A Woman)—provide the framework for autobiographical self-scrutiny. In her 1993 Journal du dehors (A Diary of the Outside), autobiographical writing becomes the medium for an exploration of ‘le quotidien’ (the everyday), the zone of immediate daily experience where the balance between freedom and constraint in the rhythm of individual existence can be gauged.

This turn towards everydayness, to the texture of individual lives, present or past, can be linked to another of the alliances autobiography has forged. Historians of private life, sociologists of collective memory, ethnographers who investigate their own society rather than exotic ones, have opened up new ways of exploiting the archive of everyday existence that individuals and institutions assemble in the shape of documents, photographs and artefacts bearing the trace of human identity. The autobiographical works of Marguerite Yourcenar, consisting of explorations in her family history, reflect what the historian Arlette Farge calls ‘le goût de l’archive’ (the taste of the archive) as do such mixed-media autobiographical ventures, involving texts and photographs, as Anne Duperey’s Le Voile noir (The Black Veil) and Anne-Marie Garat’s Photos de famille (Family Photos). Another symptomatic sign of the key role of autobiography in contemporary French culture is the prominence of new forms of biographical essay where biography becomes a form of indirect autobiography, as in Pierre Michon’s influential Vies minuscules (Minuscule Lives) or the volumes in the series ‘L’Un et l’autre’ (‘The One and the Other’) edited by the psychoanalyst J.-B.Pontalis. The flourishing Association pour le Patrimoine Autobiographique, founded in 1992 to encourage the creation and dissemination of life-archives, and the collective creation and discussion of autobiographical works, is further testimony to the fact that the rise of autobiography reflects a widespread fascination with life histories and individual testimony which is a phenomenon affecting a broad cross-section of French society.

MICHAEL SHERINGHAM

avance sur recettes

Instituted in 1960 by the state in the face of the film industry’s financial crisis caused by declining audiences, this form of selective financing benefits 20 per cent of the films made and represents 5 per cent of investment in production. It targets films of quality (experimental, auteur, heritage films) and is attributed to a producer or film-maker upon the successful acceptance of his or her script by a government-appointed commission. Not a subsidy, this advance is to be repaid. However, of the films benefiting from this system since 1960, less than 10 per cent have paid off the loan in full, and only 50 per cent in part.

SUSAN HAWARD

Avignon and summer arts festivals

Cultural life in the field of the performing arts (including theatre and dance) is particularly vibrant in the summer months, thanks to the establishment over the last fifty years of a series of festivals, of which Avignon is certainly by far the biggest and most famous.

The Avignon festival was founded in 1947 by Jean Vilar with the intention of making theatre available to a public wider than the traditional Parisian audience. At a time when the general trend in French politics and culture was towards decentralization, the festival became a popular centre with audiences from all over France, especially the south. Jean Vilar’s productions in the Cour d’Honneur of the Palais des Papes (Papal Palace), and those which followed him there, have included some memorable stagings, which have become theatrical reference points. These include Vilar’s Richard II in 1947, and his Prince of Hamburg starring Gérard Philipe and Jeanne Moreau in 1951; Bob Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach in 1976; Peter Brook’s Mahabharata in 1985, Vitez’s The Satin Slipper (Le Soulier de satin) in 1988, and Chéreau’s Hamlet in 1989. Famous dancers and choreographers have also staged productions in the Cour d’Honneur, which has become the most prominent performance space used at the official Avignon festival. By 1996, the official festival had grown to take in twenty-nine venues, with thirty theatre productions—plus lectures, musical theatre, some thirty concerts and five exhibitions— attracting an audience of between 120,000 and 130,000 over the three weeks of the festival.

Avignon is funded by state, town and ticket sales: in 1996, the total budget amounted to 45 million francs, of which 24.5 million came from subsidy (12.5 million from the state and 12 million from the region). A total of 86.6 million is spent during the Avignon festival, 44.2 million of which is spent on events connected with the festival, and 42.4 million within the town by festival-goers.

The equivalent of the Avignon ‘fringe’ festival— the ‘Off, as it is known—has been running alongside the official festival for some thirty years. In 1982, Alain Léotard founded the association Avignon Public Off, to co-ordinate and provide a structure for the numerous young troupes wanting to take part in the Avignon season, issuing a programme of all events happening outside the official festival. Today, it encompasses productions in ninetyfive performance spaces, with 482 productions from eighteen countries, taking place from 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. all over town. The ‘Off’ includes a wide range of arts, ranging from circus performance to cabaret, as well as numerous theatre creations, with a particular emphasis on contemporary writers. Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, home to the state-funded writer’s centre La Chartreuse, also launched its own festival in 1996 to run at the same time as the Avignon festival, with over thirty events.

As well as being motivated by the desire to diffuse culture more widely, towns around France have also realized, as these figures illustrate, that for the municipality a festival is likely to be beneficial both for reputation and for business. ‘Festivalomania’ has resulted in a plethora of festivals appearing and disappearing, celebrating music, dance, theatre and other art forms all over France. All are fighting for the subsidy without which it is very difficult to make a festival financially viable. Avignon, too, has to struggle to make its money stretch: although artistically the aim is to present as wide a range of productions as possible, the number of events has in fact decreased from the levels of 1995 (forty-three spectacles) to around 30–35 each year. Festival director Bertrand Faivre d’Arcier recently criticized those municipalities which, he says, are inspired to run a festival for touristic rather than for artistic reasons. Whether this is true or not, it is certainly undeniable that ‘festivalomania’ exists in France, with over 600 performing arts festivals recognized by the Ministry of Culture. Although Avignon is by far the biggest cultural festival, others are also worthy of note. Pau, for example, was founded by Roger Hanin in 1966 to help promote the work of young troupes, also the philosophy of the Alès festival of ‘Jeune Théâtre’, which specializes in new talent, in the past providing a forum for now famous names such as Jérôme Deschamps or the Royal de Luxe theatre company. The annual Cannes film festival is celebrated for its Palme d’Or awards. Aixen-Provence hosts a renowned festival of lyric music, particularly Mozart, which attracts an international audience. The city of Paris also hosts a summer arts festival, the Quartiers d’Été, funded by the city and state and directed by Patrice Martinet. Other notable theatre festivals during May and June are Théâtre en Mai, held in Dijon since 1991; Les Turbulences at La Maillon in Strasbourg; the St Herblain festival near Nantes, the Lille-based circus Festival du Prato and the Printemps des Comédiens in Montpellier. Paris is also home to the autumn arts festival, the Festival d’Automne, which traditionally attracts big-name productions from practitioners such as Peter Brook, Bob Wilson and other famous directors, as well as a range of dance, musical and cinematic events. Major film festivals take place in Cannes, La Rochelle, Deauville (devoted to American cinema) and Créteil, near Paris (devoted to the work of women film-makers).

ANNIE SPARKS

Azama, Michel

b. 1947, Catalonia

Playwright

A master in modern arts and former professional actor, Azama has written numerous plays, including Vie et mort de Pier Paolo Pasolini (Life and Death of Pier Paolo Pasolini), Croisades (Crusades) and Aztèques (Aztecs). From 1989 to 1992 he was resident writer at the Centre Dramatique National in Dijon. Since 1993, he has been literary adviser to the Centre National des Écritures Contemporaines at La Chartreuse, Villeneuveles-Avignon. He edits its theatre journal for authors, Les Cahiers du Prospéro.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Aznavour, Charles

b. 1924, Paris

Singer-songwriter, real name Varenagh Aznavourian

Immediately after the war, Aznavour wrote only the words of songs in collaboration with Pierre Roche, but later wrote both words and music of songs performed by Édith Piaf, Eddie Constantine and Juliette Gréco. Eventually succeeding as a solo artist from the mid-1950s, he enjoyed much success in the United States and the United Kingdom. Hit songs include For Mamma (La Mamma), which was written with R.Gall, and Comme ils disent (As They Say).

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson