D

Da Silva, Éric

b. 1957, Gennevilliers

Playwright, actor and director

The director of L’Emballage Theatre in Paris, Da Silva’s career spans twenty years, including collective creations, the production of his own plays and the translations of several classics for the Théâtre de la Bastille and Théâtre de Gennevilliers. His plays include No Man’s Man and Je ne pourrais pas vivre, si je croyais que je faisais du mal (I Couldn’t Live if I Thought I Was Doing Wrong).

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Daeninckx, Didier

b. 1949, Paris

Writer

Born in the working-class district of St-Denis on the northern outskirts of Paris, Daeninckx worked as a printer and local journalist before publishing in 1984 his first successful thriller Meurtres pour mémoire (Murders for The Record). His best fiction explores, within the thriller framework, the mechanisms of collective memory and amnesia relating to inglorious episodes in recent French history such as the Algerian war or the Occupation—see La Mort n’oublie personne (Death Forgets Nobody) of 1989. More recently, his essays have traced the hidden links between extreme Right and extreme Left, promoting his view of an essentially corrupt world occasionally redeemed by individual decency.

JILL FORBES

See also: detective fiction

dance

The dance heritage of France is an extremely rich and long-standing one which dates back to the reign of Louis XIV, where the court ballet reached its height. However, the history of dance in France this century has been somewhat chequered, often leaving French dance trailing behind recent developments in Germany, Britain and (particularly) America, especially with regard to the rise of modern and contemporary dance forms. None the less, the second half of the century has seen a dramatic turn around, enabling dance to have become reputedly the second most popular activity in France after football.

To understand this rapid expansion and the multifaceted nature of the current French dance scene, it is important to address three issues: the dominant role of classical ballet up to the end of the first half of this century; the consequent difficulties encountered by modern dancers mid-century; and the various changes in circumstance that precipitated a contemporary dance boom in the following decades.

Before the 1970s, dance in France was equated with the Paris Opéra and a solid network of ballet companies attached to the regional opera houses, while outside the cities there was a strong tradition of folk dancing. After 1945, the Paris Opéra under Serge Lifar had mostly regained its reputation, while Roland Petit and the dancer Jean Babillée also contributed to the general well-being of French ballet. In addition to remounting the classics, they paid great attention to the appearance of their works, employing artists, designers and couturiers of repute to create stunning visual spectacles that were popular and accessible to new audiences and which reinvigorated classical dance with a neoclassical aesthetic which, while being highly entertaining, ultimately presented few challenges to conservative notions of good taste.

Ballet was entrenched within national culture to the point of being seen as essentially French. Therefore modern dance, which was essentially a revolt against the rules and norms of classical ballet, struggled to gain acceptance both from the establishment and from audiences. Although France had been at the forefront of the revolutionary modern art movements at the beginning of the century and (in dance) had played enthusiastic host to many of the international pioneers of modern dance, the strength of the balletic establishment made it virtually impossible, in the early decades of the postwar period, for modern dancers to challenge. The dynamic focus of the art world was no longer France, but America. Even visits to Paris by the internationally renowned American dancers Martha Graham and Jose Limon were met with unfavourable responses in the 1950s. With no official recognition from the government until 1982, contemporary dance existed on the margins, with scarcely ten companies in existence in the whole of France prior to 1970.

It is generally agreed that the cultural upheaval caused by the events of May 1968 provided a more fertile ground for contemporary dance not only to establish itself, but also to become a positively flourishing, vibrant and multifaceted art form with a distinctive character of its own on the world dance stage, as well as filling theatres regularly at home. French writers commenting on this phenomenon are fairly unanimous in attributing the rapid expansion of la danse contemporaine since 1968 to four general factors.

First, repeated visits to the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris of leading international dance figures such as Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Alwin Nikolais and, later, Pina Bausch simultaneously showed up the sorry state of French dance during the 1960s and 1970s, while also generating interest in modern dance and its ideas among audiences. By the end of the 1970s, ticket sales at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris had risen hugely.

Stylistically, the ‘abstraction’ of the Americans, evident in particular in Cunningham’s ideas about choreography, were major influences on the beginnings of a flourishing French dance scene, and still remain so today. The annual visits to France made by Pina Bausch since the late 1970s have also contributed equally strong aesthetic ideas that bring ‘neoexpressionism’ and theatricality into the choreographic arena. Whereas generally across the anglophone dance world these two aesthetic standpoints are viewed as being diametrically opposed and distinct from each other, French choreographers have been unafraid to absorb and combine aspects from both schools in original ways.

Second, it is perhaps unsurprising that French audiences of the 1970s should welcome American dancers and choreographers in the post-1968 climate, given that the events of May that year led to a new wave of enthusiasm among the French middle classes for American culture, in particular its youth-oriented and hippie movements (which arrived in France in the early 1970s as the baby boomers came of age). With these cultural changes came a new, more relaxed attitude to the body, and a disillusionment with the bastions of the cultural establishment. In the sphere of dance, this translated into a move away from ballet towards new forms of dance that were more ‘free’. Furthermore, in the climate of poststructuralist communication, the body offered a new possibility for conveying meaning. This focus on the body was also catered for in the therapeutic techniques and Oriental disciplines of various martial arts which became popular at this time. In accordance with these general shifts in public attitudes in France, the first summer dance festivals and events catered to the taste of the new large young dance audiences, rather than the bourgeois elites who had frequented the ballet.

Third, although May 1968 represents a watershed, there had already existed French modern dancers working, teaching and striving to gain a voice in French culture. In the atmosphere post-1968, the new audiences generated by international dance performances, together with positive government attitudes towards contemporary dance, opened up new possibilities for dance performances by this early generation of modern dancers. The work of pioneers such as Loudolf Child, Karin Waehner, Jean Weidt and the Dupuys, which had previously struggled to survive in a climate that was hostile, was now set in a new, non-marginal context where gaining an audience, students and recognition was not nearly as difficult as it had been. Their importance should not be overstated, however.

The recent generation of French choreographers owes far more to influences outside of French dance and its history. Jean-Claude Gallotta, a major figure in the French dance scene, comes, like many of his choreographic contemporaries, from a different branch of the arts. Therefore he draws on various artistic sources and philosophical ideas to inspire his choreography, preferring to acknowledge the influences of American techniques, such as that of Merce Cunningham, as a dance source rather than the work or teachings of any French dance pioneers.

Finally, it is undoubtedly the case that the French government can claim a large share of the credit for the French dance boom of the 1980s. Indeed, in comparison with other European countries, the French state has been generous in its funding increases and effective in implementing new cultural policies for dance. The government’s changing commitment to dance is apparent in the increasing status of dance within the Ministry of Culture over the last few decades. Dance moved from being a department within a department in 1966, through various changes until the Délégation à la Danse was created in 1987. This functions independently, although it is still grouped with the music department. These organizational changes within the Ministry of Culture have effected changes far away from the corridors of power.

The first significant developments occurred after 1968, when a decentralization policy for dance was sketched out following the pattern developed earlier for the establishment of national drama centres dispersed around the various regions of France. Although the regional dance centres in the main cater for contemporary dance, other forms—such as modern and classical ballet, and baroque dance— are also represented. The first regional dance company installed was the Ballet Théâtre Contemporain at Amiens, followed in the 1970s by five others. Such companies now number seventeen. These centres were set up in addition to the regional opera houses, as partnerships between the choreographer, the local town hall and the performance venue, as a means of spreading dance events around the whole of France.

Another early initiative by the government was the backing in 1969 of the inaugural choreographic festival at Bagnolet, which has become a major international choreographic festival attracting representatives from countries across the world. It serves as a nursery for French choreographic talent and indicates the government’s awareness and support for this type of event, of which there are now several: Avignon, Bagnolet, Montpellier, Val de Marne and the Lyon Biennale ranking as the most important. A notable feature of these festivals is the breadth of styles and dance forms which are staged. As well as Western forms of stage dance, Oriental and Asian forms such as Butoh, Barata Natyam and Kathak are represented, as well as flamenco, folk dance and various forms of street dance, especially hip-hop and break dancing. Some of these events also encompass workshops, pre- and post-performance talks and video showings that allow non-professional dancers, students and the general public to participate more fully, and further develop their interests in dance.

As a result of these circumstances, France has witnessed a remarkable expansion of dance activities over the last few decades which reached its height in the dance boom of the 1980s, and in particular when 1988 was designated as l’année de la danse. This expansion has not only been quantitative, but has qualitatively fostered the talents of a whole generation of new choreographers who have felt free to absorb inspiration from a wealth of sources, and to combine apparently antithetical dance ideas in forms that bear witness to a developing cultural diversity in France. With the changes of political climate in the last five years, there has been some shrinkage of dance activities, but as Jack Lang has said, ‘dance is an irreversible movement’ (see Adolphe 1992). It is to be hoped not only that the momentum of the 1980s can be maintained but also that, artistically, French dance will be able to regenerate itself through what could be more difficult times ahead.

FIONA WARNE

dance troupes

While the position of choreographers in France is relatively stable, the position of dancers is often much less fortunate, unless they belong to a permanent subsidized company. In terms of the overall distribution, organization and economic situation of ballet and contemporary dance companies in France, the role of the Paris Opéra (and Paris in general) as home to dance companies is still an important one, despite the decentralization programme which has continuously promoted regional dance centres alongside the established opera houses to counteract Parisian dominance.

The organization and situation of dance companies in France is quite different from the British situation, where all the major ballet and contemporary companies have identities of their own which are distinct from their commissioned choreographers. In France, a company’s identity is generally synonymous with that of their choreographer (often reflected in the company sharing the choreographer’s name), because the choreographer’s status has been somewhat privileged, and dancers are often employed on a temporary project basis. France does not have a large-scale touring contemporary dance company like Britain’s Rambert Dance Company, for example. The stars of France’s modern dance world are certainly the choreographers, not the performers.

Among French dance companies, the Paris Opéra has been the focus for theatre dance for several hundred years, and still retains its vital importance today, especially now it is the sole resident of the Palais Gamier Theatre. After a stormy period under Rudolf Nureyev in the 1980s which was not without its highlights, under the directorship of Patrick Dupond the company has found itself tackling not only twentieth-century ballets from the Diaghilev period alongside classics such as Swan Lake but also following the example of Nureyev in proving that the stars of the Opéra are equal to the challenges of modern choreography.

In addition to the Paris Opéra, France was also one of the first countries to establish a strong organization throughout the country for ballet in the nine regional opera houses, or the Ballets des Maisons d’Opéra. However, the quality is variable, as full-length performance opportunities are often rare. This results in dancers lacking performance confidence and creates companies that are uneconomically run. Four of the original opera companies have been given new impetus by being redesignated as national choreographic centres. Of these, the Ballet du Rhin in Mulhouse is gaining a good reputation for staging rarely seen works of this century, while the Ballet de Nancy produces classical works on a smaller scale. The Ballet du Nord has expanded its Balanchine repertory to American work and Petit’s Ballet de Marseille creates mixed programmes.

Ballet’s Parisian orientation is also reflected across genres, with over 60 per cent of the 286 dance companies (both state-subsidized and independent), counted by the Centre National d’Action Musicale (CENAM) in its guide to dance of 1989, working in and around Paris despite the decentralization programme of the last few decades. The decentralization policy relocated some companies, and recommissioned others, to add to the nine municipal ballet companies. The first regional dance company to be installed was the Ballet Théâtre Contemporain at Amiens in 1969, followed in the 1970s by Théâtre du Silence at La Rochelle, the Ballet du Rhin, Ballets Félix Blaska in Grenoble, the Ballet de Marseille and the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine at Angers. In 1984, the decentralization policy was reinforced and there are now almost twenty national choreographic centres as well as several choreographers and their groups designated as ‘associate creators’ in various maisons de la culture.

To encourage companies to relocate, adequate rehearsing and performing facilities were provided and the policy backed financially by local, regional and national government. In exchange, the companies undertake three-year renewable contracts to make a certain number of new works and to give usually around thirty performances annually. Companies are also responsible for promoting dance across their region through workshops and teaching engagements and by performing in otherwise culturally deprived areas.

While the government funds about 120 dance companies, every year 300–350 funding requests are received. Consequently, many contemporary companies are transitory in nature due to economic difficulties. Therefore, professional dancers often do not enjoy the job security and pension rights of colleagues employed by regional centres and opera houses. Building up a national repertory in these circumstances is very difficult but, conversely, this problem also creates positive cross-fertilization of styles and ideas between companies and choreographers.

In addition to economic insecurities, the close involvement of the government in dance matters means political changes directly affect dance companies. With the National Front taking over three town halls in the south of France, Angelin Prélocaj (whose company was recently given the status of Ballet National Contemporain de Toulon and a base at Chateauvallon’s Theatre of Dance and Image) has resigned, along with the theatre’s director, in protest at the ultra-right wing’s victory in the town hall.

The most stable and well-known contemporary companies are therefore those headed by the leading choreographers, who are often based at national choreographic centres. These include Jean-Claude Gallotta’s company Le Groupe Émile Dubois, Philippe Decouflé’s Companie DCA, Daniel Larrieu’s Askrakan and the Lyon Opéra Ballet headed by Maguy Marin, with Bouvier and Obadia’s L’Esquisse quickly becoming a recognizable force on the scene. The groups of other leading choreographers, such as those of Karine Saporta, Odile Duboc, François Raffinot, Hervé Robbe and Catherine Diverrés, take the name of their choreographer.

Therefore, French dance companies depend very much upon the profile and reputation of their choreographer to gain secure funding, but, once established, enjoy fairly stable conditions and a high degree of artistic freedom.

FIONA WARNE

See also: choreographers; dance

Daney, Serge

b. 1944, Paris

d. 1992, Paris

Film critic

Daney was one of France’s most individual and influential writers on film. His work, for Cahiers du cinema and Libération, is the most substantial interrogation of the difference between watching a film on the big screen and on television or video, as suggested by the titles of his two collections of essays—The Zapper’s Salary (Le Salaire du zappeur) and Devant la récrudescence des vols de sacs à main (a reference to the notice displayed in cinemas warning against thieves). His career as film writer and tennis correspondent for Libération was curtailed by his death from AIDS.

KEITH READER

See also: cinema

Dasté, Jean

b. 1904, Paris;

d. 1994, St-Étienne

Actor and director

An ex-pupil of Copeau known for his honest, direct approach and a strong supporter of decentralized theatre, Dasté founded France’s second Centre Dramatique National in StÉtienne in 1947 and directed it until his retirement in 1970.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Debray, Régis

b. 1940, Paris

Intellectual

From his Marxist-Leninist period in the 1970s, through his work as Third World adviser to President Mitterrand in the 1980s and thence to his important work on the evolution of the media and the different kinds of ideas and discourses they enable, Debray has been one of the most prominent French thinkers of the last quarter-century. His widely divergent work centres around a series of key themes: the importance of the nation-state; that of the weapons with which it defends and the mediations through which it articulates itself; the necessarily compromised status of the intellectual; and an abiding nostalgia for the now-displaced culture du verbe. His imprisonment in Bolivia for three years (the original sentence was thirty) from 1967 focused much attention on Revolution in the Revolution? (Révolution dans la révolution?), a theoretical justification of the Castro-Guevarist strategy of guerrilla warfare. His denunciation of the power exercised by the media over French intellectual life, in Writers, Teachers, Celebrities (Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France) of 1979, served as the starting point for a sustained examination of different types of mediation and their evolution from ‘logosphere’, via ‘graphosphere’, to the contemporary ‘videosphere’ (Vie et mort de l’image of 1992, L’État séducteur of 1993). His 1990 defence of an idealized de Gaulle, Charles de Gaulle: Futurist of the Nation (A demain de Gaulle) rests on his admiration for de Gaulle as homme du verbe and on their shared belief in the centrality of the nationstate. His novel La Neige brûle (The Snow is Burning) won the Prix Femina in 1977.

KEITH READER

decolonization

Decolonization is the process whereby the European colonial powers, including France, retreated from their overseas empires in the postwar period, sometimes under peaceful circumstances but often as a result of long and bloody wars.

Although frequently compared unfavourably with Britain’s relatively orderly withdrawal from her overseas empire after World War II, French decolonization can by no means be equated simply with the successive wars in Indochina (1945–54) and Algeria (1954–62). For, while the violence in France’s two principal colonies cannot be ignored, neither should the real achievements of French decolonization in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere be overlooked. Both the relative successes and the conspicuous failures of French decolonization may be understood in terms of the specificity of the French colonial project on the one hand and the impact on the empire of World War II on the other.

It is a convenient commonplace to contrast the pragmatic mercantilism and indirect rule commonly held to have been the twin foundations of the British imperial edifice, and the assimilationist rhetoric and centralizing practice constitutive of the French colonial enterprise. Rooted in notions of civilizing mission, the much-vaunted project of creating ‘the France of a hundred million Frenchmen’ may have remained largely mythical, but nevertheless was to constitute an important psychological barrier to decolonization after 1945. Yet, paradoxically, the French colonies had never previously generated anything to compare with the popular imperial enthusiasm so familiar in the British context. Neither private capital nor willing settlers proved to be forthcoming in the volumes necessary for effective colonial consolidation. So, for instance, Algeria, France’s foremost colony, would throughout be dominated by the armed forces—for whose colonial regiments (and especially the Foreign Legion) it became a spiritual home— and settlers of Spanish, Italian, Maltese and various other non-French origin.

However, the role played by the French empire after the fall of France in June 1940 was radically to transform the perceptions of French policy-makers and the general public alike. In the wake of the armistice, and more particularly General de Gaulle’s historic appeal to the French to continue their struggle, the colonies took on a new importance. The rallying to the Free French cause of dependencies in the Indian subcontinent, the Pacific Ocean and sub-Saharan Africa provided de Gaulle with his first real political base, and constituted a potent symbol of national continuity and resistance. With the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942, France’s territories in the Maghreb became a springboard for the forthcoming attack on the southern flank of Hitler’s ‘fortress Europe’ and thus, ultimately, for the Liberation of France itself (with colonial troops, both ‘European’ and ‘native’, playing a significant part in the Free French contribution to the Allied war effort). De Gaulle’s subsequent establishment in Algiers of the French Committee of National Liberation (CFLN), which became the Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPRF), was to provide another powerful symbol of imperial continuity.

The role of the empire, real and symbolic, in the liberation of the ‘mother country’ encouraged the emergence of an unprecedented colonial consensus after the war. The necessity of maintaining France’s overseas territories in order to re-establish the nation’s ‘great power’ status became an article of faith for many veterans of the internal and external Resistance. However, what these policy-makers failed to appreciate was that the colonized peoples of the French empire had drawn directly contradictory conclusions from the wartime spectacle of French military defeat, Occupation and division. Where prewar colonial nationalists had tended to favour legal routes to reform within the French empire, their more militant postwar replacements now looked to full independence. Moreover, they were increasingly prepared to take up arms to achieve this outcome. On the French side, the fact that many soldiers were to be involved in a succession of campaigns spread over a quarter of a century and three continents led to a marginalization and, crucially, a politicization of the officer corps which would ultimately constitute a serious threat to the very existence of the Republic.

Thus, just as the other European powers— led by the British in India—began loosening their military, political and emotional bonds with their colonies, France sought to reimpose its authority on an empire permanently altered by its wartime loss of control. De Gaulle’s own thinking on the future of the empire became apparent with the conference organized for the governors of France’s tropical African colonies in Brazzaville (Congo) in January 1944. The complete absence of representatives of the African populations of these territories was indicative of the paternalist vision which inspired the conference’s real, but strictly limited rethinking of France’s colonial vocation. For what was proposed at Brazzaville was not independence, but rather a measure of administrative decentralization which might eventually lead to limited self-government within a notionally federal structure.

This top-down attempt at colonial modernization was variously prompted by the insights of reformers, the agitation of the increasingly well-organized nationalists and, especially, the avowed hostility to continued colonial rule, in the French empire as elsewhere, of the United States. The new French Union envisaged a rosy colonial future in which ‘associated states’ would freely consent to continued French control in return for political and economic concessions. However, such thinking was fatally outmoded in an age when the self-affirmation of the colonized peoples was daily becoming more apparent. Leading French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre were instrumental in drawing attention to the political implications of cultural movements such as the négritude championed by Léopold Sédar Senghor in Senegal and Aimé Césaire in Martinique, while the elected representatives of newly enfranchized colonial voters such as Félix Houphouët-Boigny in the Ivory Coast and Lamine Gueye in Senegal gave a fresh voice to colonial aspirations. Other signs of the strength of the decolonizing ‘winds of change’ blowing in this period included some particularly vicious clashes between colonizers and colonized, of which the most bloody—and most ruthlessly suppressed—occurred in the Sétif region of Algeria in May 1945 and Madagascar in 1947– 8. However, it was in Indochina that the opposition to France’s attempted reimposition of its colonial authority was to manifest itself most violently.

Having lost effective control of its Southeast Asian ‘protectorate’ with the Japanese invasion in July 1941, French armed forces were unable to participate in the liberation of the territory in August-September 1945. This role fell instead to the indigenous nationalist resistance, supported, very ironically in the light of later developments, by the United States. On 2 September 1945, the Viet Minh’s leader Nguyen Ai Quoc, better known as Ho Chi Minh, proclaimed the independence from France of the Republic of Vietnam; a move which, following the breakdown of negotiations between the two sides, was to lead directly to war. After an eight-year jungle conflict, the French army was catastrophically defeated at Dien Biên Phu on 7 May 1954. Although the peace agreements that sealed the French withdrawal were signed before the end of July, neither Vietnam nor France would be at peace for long: Vietnam would soon be obliged to engage the military might of the United States as the priorities of the Cold War replaced the latter’s erstwhile decolonizing zeal; France, for its part, would end one colonial war only to embark on another.

The Algerian war represents the greatest failure of French colonial policy after 1945. The effective autonomy enjoyed by the governing coalition of settlers and soldiers in Algeria meant that even the most moderate reforms belatedly proposed by Paris could without difficulty be blocked or circumvented on the ground. In the face of such intransigence, the Algerian nationalists—including many who, like future president Ahmed Ben Bella, had wartime experience in the French army—had little option but to launch an armed struggle for independence. When the war of national liberation finally began on 1 November 1954, Algeria’s special status as France’s most economically, politically, administratively and psychologically assimilated overseas territory meant that the government of Pierre Mendès France, recently elected precisely to extricate France from the débâcle in Indochina, opted without hesitation to use force in response to the nationalists’ demands. Such was the determination of François Mitterrand (Minister of the Interior at the time) to defend Algérie française that he ordered the mobilization of conscripts for military service in Algeria, something which had never been done in Indochina. Once set on this course, it proved impossible for the chronically unstable governments of the Fourth Republic to overcome the momentum generated by the war, as the Mollet administration’s involvement in the Suez fiasco of 1956 graphically demonstrated. So, whereas Morocco and Tunisia were permitted to accede to independence with relative ease in 1956, France’s principal colony was to remain gripped by a conflict which is still a source of heated debate in France and which may straightforwardly be linked to the vicious civil war being waged in Algeria today between the successors to the FLN and Islamic fundamentalists.

It was only with de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958 that a way out of the Algerian impasse became possible. The ability of de Gaulle accurately to identify the stalemate in Algeria, coupled with his determination to shift metropolitan public opinion decisively away from an imperial conception of French grandeur and towards a modern and Europecentred one, meant that he was ultimately able to prevail over the supporters of Algérie française. De Gaulle was undoubtedly helped in this task by the series of revelations which had been made concerning the abhorrent ‘pacification’ methods used by the army in Algeria—often by returning conscripts and relayed by sections of the French press, despite strict government censorship—and which led to concerted antiwar campaigning by such contrasting intellectuals as Sartre and François Mauriac.

The Évian agreements which eventually concluded the war included temporary guarantees for preferential French access to newly discovered oil and gas deposits in the Sahara desert, as well as the continued use of certain military and naval installations. They also included provisions for the future of Algeria’s European population. However, the scorchedearth policy implemented by the European terrorists of the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) rendered inevitable the exodus of a million settlers in considerable confusion and panic. Never envisaged by de Gaulle or his negotiators, this massive transfer of population was only made possible by the booming French economy. In a period of full employment, the pieds-noirs were assimilated remarkably rapidly into metropolitan French society.

If the Évian agreements proved to be a dead letter, de Gaulle’s attempts at orderly decolonization were more successful in sub-Saharan Africa, where they have resulted in the maintenance of a real economic and cultural influence, often as well as a significant military presence. While the truly federal ‘French Community’ outlined by de Gaulle never came into being, its notional existence allowed the rapid achievement of full independence by the territories involved, while continued French economic and technical assistance have provided the basis of the modern project of co-operation most often referred to nowadays as la francophonie. In a few cases, of course, the avowed French project of assimilation was actually carried through, with such fragments of the colonial empire as Martinique and Guadeloupe now firmly established as fully integrated overseas départements or territories (DOM-TOMs).

PHILIP DINE

Decroux, Étienne

b. 1898, Paris;

d. 1991, Boulogne

Actor and mime expert

An actor famous for pioneering physical theatre and mime, who worked with many famous theatre directors including Copeau and Barrault, as well as in films such as Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis. After the war, he opened his own school, and produced famous mimodrames such as Les Arbres (The Trees), L’Usine (The Factory) and Le Combat antique d’Antoine et Cléopatre (The Ancient Struggle between Antony and Cleopatra).

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

defence and security

French security policy since 1945 has paralleled France’s modernization, mirroring changes in foreign policy and moves towards European union. The nuclear deterrent and conventional capabilities created by de Gaulle and their associated security strategies have driven important developments in French society and political culture. In the post-Cold War international system, France is attempting to redefine its security stance.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, France recognized that, despite traditional enmity with Germany, the USSR was now the foe. This culture shift was not universally shared, particularly by some on the Right, but French support for NATO (1949) illustrated new realities. During incipient European integration, France’s ambiguous (and finally fatal) attitude towards the EDC (1954) showed persisting mistrust of Germany and French desire for independent control over her armed forces. Until after the Algerian war (1954–62), defence required forces capable of waging colonial wars: in Indochina (1947–54) the professional army lost at Dien Biên Phu (1954); in Algeria, the use of appelés (young conscripts) to support professional troops changed public perceptions of the conflict. After defeat in Indochina and withdrawal from Algeria, de Gaulle used the technological modernization of defence through the Force de frappe to restore army self-esteem. The technological effort devoted to France’s nuclear capability catalysed many aspects of industry and the economy, and the importance of the president as final arbiter of deployment reinforced defence as a ‘reserved domain’ of the presidency and further rigidified political authority. France has retained strong links with former colonies and has thus maintained the capability to intervene in African conflicts (such as Chad in 1984).

Deterrence has underpinned French defence policy since the 1960s, at the cost of maintaining land-, air- and sea-based missiles, conventional forces and young national servicemen, although the conventional forces have been subsidized by a highly developed arms industry. The vaunted independence of nuclear capability has enabled foreign policy, based on indépendance nationale from superpowers and on the safety of France. In the 1960s, the importance of sovereignty was illustrated by France’s withdrawal from operational participation in NATO (1966) and by the (proposed) strategy of tous azimuts (360-degree) targeting for nuclear weapons (1968), intended to show total freedom. Security has been seen as a choice between independence (an extreme being the sanctuarisation of France), and collaboration with other countries (usually within NATO). In the 1970s, Giscard d’Estaing tried to compromise with sanctuarisation élargie (enlarged strategic space), attack against which would be attack against France herself, but Gaullist doctrines continued. Under Mitterrand, stand-alone policy persisted (conceding to NATO over Pershing-II and Cruise, and with minor Franco-German military cooperation), and some priorities changed after German reunification. In the 1990s, reviews of strategy and strict control of defence spending have identified needs such as spatial reconnaissance and communications. The planned withdrawal of national service in the last few years of the millennium, giving a smaller and cheaper professional army, illustrates new financial and strategic realities, the changing place of defence in French society and a transformation of citizens’ relationship to the nation.

HUGH DAUNCEY

Deguy, Michel

b. 1930, Paris

Poet, translator, critic and theorist

Deguy is in many ways a truly experimental poet. His earliest interest was philosophy, which he taught from 1953 to 1968. He regards poetry as a mode of knowledge—for example, Actes (Deeds) of 1966—and wishes to make it reflect the ambiguity of our world; hence he can call ruins a ‘spiritual contour’ in one of his poems. The earliest collections are Fragments du cadastre (Fragments of Land Survey) in 1960, 1962’s Poèmes de la presqu’île (Poems of the Peninsula) and Biefs (Canal-Levels) of 1964, followed by the collection with the suggestive title of Ouï dire (Hear Say) in 1966. In later collections, such as Figurations (1969), he proposes a new kind of poem, the poème sourd (mute poem), gravitating between prose and verse as a means of providing a meeting ground for language and philosophy.

WALTER A.STRAUSS

See also: poetry

Deixonne law

Passed in the National Assembly in 1951, this law, named after a Député from Brittany, signalled the first postwar concession to regionalism, symbolized by language, and ensured that for the first time since the Revolution regional languages—as opposed to foreign languages like German—could be taught in the public educational system. The law allowed the teaching of only four regional languages (Basque, Breton, Catalan, Occitan) for up to three hours per week, although success in them could not count towards passing the baccalauréat. The ministerial circular applying the law’s provisions did not appear until 1969; Corsican had to wait until 1974, and other regional languages have followed slowly since.

DENNIS AGER

Delanoë, Pierre

b. 1918, Paris

Lyricist, real name Pierre Leroyer

Having been programme director of the radio station Europe 1 from 1955 to 1960, Pierre Delanoë wrote the words of songs for Gilbert Bécaud (Nathalie, L’Orange) and later for a whole host of popular singers including André Claveau, the Compagnons de la chanson, Hugues Aufray, Michel Sardou and Gérard Lenorman. He is one of the most prolific and admired French lyricists of the postwar period.

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

Deleuze, Gilles

b. 1925, Paris;

d. 1995, Paris

Intellectual and philosopher

Deleuze was, along with Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, one of the most celebrated poststructuralist thinkers in France. He gained his agrégation in philosophy in 1948, and in 1969 he was appointed professor of philosophy at Vincennes.

Deleuze began his career by writing a series of monographs on philosophers, such as Hume, Kant, Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza, along with studies of Proust and Sacher-Masoch. He traces an alternative pathway through the history of philosophy with these figures, finding something ‘untimely’ or ‘nonphilosophical’ in each of them. For example, Spinoza and Nietzsche introduce the question of the body into philosophy; Proust challenges the idea that the mind is naturally inclined towards truth, claiming that only the sign can shock thought out of its habitual stupor; and the figure of Nietzsche is pivotal in this period as a radically anti-dialectical, pluralist thinker who is suspicious of stable identities.

In the second period of his career, Deleuze began to develop his own philosophy of difference and multiplicity. In Difference and Repetition (Différence et répétition) he drew upon an eclectic series of philosophical, literary and scientific sources to produce non-linear studies of meaning which questioned the dominance of the category of ‘sameness’ and identity. In the 1970s Deleuze entered into a period of collaboration with the radical psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, and the writing of Anti-Oedipus (L’Anti-OEdipe), the first volume of a two-volume study of ‘capitalism and schizophrenia’, which was published in France in 1972, constituted a practical experiment with the identity of the author. As Deleuze commented in the late 1970s, ‘we do not work together, we work between the two’. L’Anti-OEdipe emerged from the questions posed by the events of May 1968 in France, and provided the authors with temporary fame. They argue that desire is prior to representation, in that it constantly escapes and ‘deterritorializes’ the Oedipal model. Deleuze and Guattari have subsequently been criticized for idealizing the anarchic, ‘desiring’ potential of the schizophrenic. The second volume of the capitalism and schizophrenia project, published in 1980, concentrated on the study of ‘rhizomatic’, acentred structures.

In the third phase of his career, throughout the 1980s and up to his suicide in 1995, Deleuze continued to collaborate occasionally with Guattari. He also turned increasingly to aesthetic questions, publishing a study of the painter Francis Bacon and a well-received twovolume study of cinema in the mid-1980s. Deleuze returns to Bergson to show how cinema at its best can correspond to a new type of thought which resists the spatializing tendency of the intellect; the ‘movement-image’ of early cinema and the ‘time-image’ of postwar cinema represent new ways of thinking aesthetically. In 1991 Deleuze published his final major work, What is Philosophy? (Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?), which was, appropriately enough, a collaboration with Guattari. Demonstrating the continuing influence of Nietzsche, they argue that the true objective of philosophy is neither communication nor reflection, but rather the creation of concepts.

JOHN MARKS

Delon, Alain

b.1935, Paris

Actor

One of the great stars, his career has been international from the start, with major roles in films by Visconti and Antonioni in the 1960s. He is best known as the archetypal hero of the police thriller, the best example being Melville’s cult Le Samourai (1967). By the 1970s, his roles were stereotyped, and it was not until the late 1970s that he found roles worthy of his considerable talents: the hero of Losey’s Monsieur Klein (1976), Baron Charlus in Schlöndorff’s Swarm in Love (1984), the hero of Blier’s Notre Histoire (1984) and Godard’s Nouvelle Vague (1990).

PHIL POWRIE

See also: cinema

Delors, Jacques

b. 1925, Paris

Politician

A Christian Socialist, Delors began his career at the Bank of France (1945–62), worked at the Planning Commissariat (1962–9) and acted as adviser on social affairs to Gaullist premier Chaban-Delmas (1969–72). He joined the Parti Socialiste in 1974. Never a member of the National Assembly, he was elected to the European parliament in 1979. As Finance Minister between 1981 and 1984 he endorsed the adoption of a policy of monetary ‘rigour’, and as president of the European Commission from 1985 to 1995 he was a tireless advocate of European integration. Mooted as a possible Socialist candidate for the 1995 presidential election (with a strong chance of winning), he finally declined to stand.

LAURENCE BELL

Major works

Delors, J. (1994) L’Unité d’un homme, Paris: Odile Jacob (a series of interviews with a journalist).

Delphy, Christine

b. 1941, France

Feminist academic

Christine Delphy has been one of the leading activists in the French women’s liberation movement and close to Simone de Beauvoir. Her work has focused on the feminist ‘discovery’ of housework as being the material basis of women’s oppression and therefore central to understanding the nature of patriarchy. Delphy is firmly social constructionist in her approach and she has sought to combat the ‘essentialist’ feminist ideas of Psych et Po, more often associated with French feminism, particularly through her editorship of the journal Questions féministes.

JAN WINDEBANK

Demarcy, Richard

b. 1942, Bosc-Roger en Roumois

Playwright, adaptor and director

Founder of the Naïf Théâtre Atelier for contemporary creation in 1972, Demarcy’s plays deal with myth, and social and historical observations, such as the Portuguese Civil War in Quatre Soldats et un accordéon (Four Soldiers and an Accordion) and social decay in La Nuit du père (Night of the father). His adaptations include Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark (Disparitions) and Pessoa’s Ode Maritime.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Major works

Demarcy, R. (1973) Éléments d’une sociologie du spectacle, Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions (Demarcy’s published thesis).

demographic developments

After Germany, France is (with Italy and the United Kingdom) one of the largest European Union (EU) member-states in terms of population size. In 1995, total population had reached over 58 million, representing an increase of some 18 million in half a century. France remains, however, much less densely populated than its north European neighbours: with an average of nearly 106 inhabitants per square kilometre, it is one of the least densely populated EU member-states. Its density is less than half that of the United Kingdom, and well under a quarter that of the Netherlands. Although, by the 1990s, over 80 per cent of French people lived in towns, and Paris continued to dwarf other major cities, France is also less urbanized than its neighbours.

Over the postwar period, procedures for recording, monitoring and evaluating population size and structure have been refined. In France, the Institut National d’Études Démographiques (INED) and the Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques (INSEE) were established in the mid-1940s to co-ordinate national data collection and report to the government on demographic matters. These organizations are responsible for conducting regular population censuses and surveys and for carrying out demographic studies. France has a long tradition of concern about population decline, and policy makers are interested in tracking and understanding growth and change in the composition of population by age, sex, marital and socio-occupational status and ethnic origin.

Many of the features characteristic of the French population in the twentieth century were already present at the turn of the century. Compared with its neighbours, France was well advanced in the demographic transition from high to low mortality and birth rates, primarily as a result of voluntary birth control and medical and social advances in the care of infants and young children. In less than a century, life expectancy at birth has increased by thirty years: at birth, men in France may expect to live almost to the age of 74, and women to 82 (the largest age difference between men and women among EU member-states). Over the same time span, infant mortality rates have fallen dramatically from above 160 to below 6.5 deaths per 1,000 live births.

The second half of the twentieth century has been marked by fluctuations in family building patterns. In the immediate postwar years, France shared with its neighbours a significant increase in birth rates, described as the ‘baby boom’. A peak was reached in 1946 for total fertility rates, with 2.98 children per woman. From the mid-1960s, the birth rate fell, and family size decreased. In the 1990s, France was still above the European average, with a fertility rate of 1.66, but below the replacement level needed to ensure continued population growth. The fall in birth rates has been attributed to a number of factors, in particular the widespread use of effective forms of contraception combined with changing aspirations. By the 1990s, fewer couples were choosing to have two children than one child, but France remained above the European average for the proportion of couples with three and four children. While most French women are producing a smaller number of children, fewer women are remaining childless: about 10 per cent of the women born in the early 1940s will have no children, compared with 20 per cent half a century earlier.

The continued growth in population size can be explained by the combined effect of the reduction in mortality rates, the increase in the number of women of child-bearing age (the baby boomers) and immigration. Between 1955 and 1971, during the years of economic expansion (les trente glorieuses), immigration was encouraged to bolster the workforce. It was fuelled by decolonization, particularly in 1962 with the repatriation from Algeria following independence. From 1974, as France entered recession in the wake of the oil crises, restrictions were introduced to curb immigration, resulting in the stabilization of the foreign population, which accounted for 6.3 per cent of total population in the mid-1990s.

The effect of declining birth rates at a time of increasing life expectancy was to stimulate population ageing. The second half of the twentieth century has seen continuing change in the age structure of the population as the baby boomers move through the generations. The proportion of young people (under 20) has fallen slightly from 29.5 per cent in 1946 to 26.8 per cent in 1993, while the population over 60 (statutory retirement age) has risen from 16.0 to 19.7 per cent, and that over the age of 75 from 3.4 to 6.3 per cent. The proportion of the population of working age (20 to 59 years), after falling between 1965 and 1975, has regained its 1950 level with 53.6 per cent. Because of the intensity of the baby boom, the full effect of population ageing will not, however, be felt in France until the year 2020, when the baby boomers have reached retirement age. Already by the mid-1990s, care for older people was recognized as a growing social problem. Because female life expectancy is greater than that of men, women are overrepresented among older people. They are also less likely to have contributed to occupational pension schemes and are, therefore, expected to place an increasingly heavy financial and physical burden on a diminishing population of working age.

LINDA HANTRAIS

Demy, Jacques

b. 1931, Pontchâteau;

d. 1990, Paris

Director

Demy was the only major postwar French director of musical films. Most famous of these is Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), with Catherine Deneuve, in which every line of ‘dialogue’, grand-opera fashion, is sung. Michel Legrand’s music was a key element in this and other Demy musicals (Les Demoiselles de Rochefort of 1967). For many, however, his finest work is to be found in the non-musical dramas Lola (1961) and La Baie des anges (1963), starring Anouk Aimée and Jeanne Moreau respectively. His love of the seaport towns of western France, such as Nantes (the setting for Lola) and Cherbourg, makes him a regionalist poet of the cinema. His wife Agnès Varda devoted a documentary farewell to him—Jacquot (also known as Jacquot de Nantes)—in 1991.

KEITH READER

See also: cinema

Deneuve, Catherine

b. 1943, Paris

Actor

She began her career as the rather insipid ‘girl next door’ in Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), but was soon to reveal greater dramatic potential as the schizophrenic blonde in peril in Roman Polanski’s meta-Hitchcockian Repulsion of the following year. It was in her work for Truffaut (La Sirène du Mississippi in 1969) and Luis Buñuel—Belle de jour of 1967 and Tristana of 1970—that her icy self-possession hinting at intense disturbance beneath the surface was most fully realized. Her 1970s career lacked consistency and featured a number of comedies that were neither commercial nor critical successes, but her dramatic potential came to the fore with the approach of middle age. Opposite Depardieu in Truffaut’s Le Dernier Métro of 1980 she showed real poise and command, as the theatre director’s wife keeping the show running and her Jewish husband safe in the cellar—a resolution of the conflicts and contradictions of Occupation, which doubtless contributed greatly to her status as national icon. The following year she gave a moving performance (for Téchiné in Hôtel des Amériques) as the woman imprisoned by her love for a man now dead. Téchiné’s Ma saison préférée of 1993 gave her one of her most demanding dramatic roles, as a surgeon whose marriage and family relationships are in crisis. The extent to which her once scandalous persona as mother of illegitimate children with Roger Vadim and Marcello Mastroianni has mellowed and become accepted is illustrated by the choice of her to succeed Brigitte Bardot as the model for ‘Marianne’, the icon of the French Republic, in 1985.

KEITH READER

See also: cinema: stars

Denis, Claire

b. 1948, Paris

Director, screenwriter and actor

Claire Denis achieved international success in 1988 with her first film, Chocolat, a semi-autobiographical reflection on growing up in colonial Cameroon. Subsequent films further address the dispossessed black (male) subject: S’en fout la mort (1990), an obsessive study of illegal cock-fighting in Rungis, and J’ai pas sommeil (1993), based on mass murderer Thierry Paulin, a gay transvestite African Caribbean with AIDS. In two low-budget art films, US Go Home (1994) and Nénette et Boni (1997), Denis focuses engagingly on relationships between teenage brother and sister. Her style owes much to close collaboration with actors and with camerawoman Agnès Goddard.

CARRIE TARR

See also: women directors

Depardieu, Gérard

b. 1948, Châteauroux

Actor

Depardieu is the heir to Jean Gabin and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Famous for his energy, he has sometimes made as many as five films a year in his thirty-year career of some seventy-five films (to 1996). His image is complex: he stars in auteurist films, big-budget spectaculars, popular comedies. In his early career, his roles were mainly comic and proletarian, the best example being Blier’s provocative Les Valseuses (1974), a consciously misogynistic road/buddy movie, informed by the rebellious post-May 1968 spirit of the café theatre, in which Depardieu and Dewaere play delinquents or loubards. Depardieu starred in a number of Blier films subsequently: Buffet froid (1979), Trop belle pour toi (1989), Merci la vie (1991) and, especially, Tenue de soirée (1986), a remake of the ménage à trois of Les Valseuses, again with Miou-Miou, and Michel Blanc replacing Dewaere. (Depardieu, his aggressive masculinity sufficiently well-anchored, plays a gay drag queen.) Other more popular comic triumphs are the three extremely successful films with Pierre Richard, directed by Veber: La Chèvre (1981), Les Compères (1983) and Les Fugitifs (1986). He also acted in auteur cinema, with roles in several films by Duras, Resnais, Truffaut (Le Dernier Métro in 1980, for which he received a César, and La Femme d’à côté from 1981, in which he starred with Ardant), and especially Pialat (Loulou in 1980; Police in 1985; Sous le soleil de Satan in 1987). In such films he is the ‘suffering macho man’ (Vincendeau 1993:351), playing on a masculine aggressivity tempered by his often-proclaimed ‘femininity’. Predictably, his least favourite film, judging from the vituperative comments in his Lettres volées (1990), is Ferreri’s La Dernière Femme (1976), where he plays an aggressive male who refuses to understand feminism and castrates himself. He has said that his favourite film is Vigne’s Le Retour de Martin Guerre (1982), where he is Nathalie Baye’s lover in the context of rural medieval France. The return to the land or to ‘authentic’ roots forms a strong part of his star image from the 1980s, evidenced in Berri’s Jean de Florette (1986), and other heritage spectaculars (Berri’s Germinal of 1993; Angelo’s Le Colonel Cbabert of 1994). His complex star image can be seen in the combination of several films made in 1990–1: one of the bestselling French films, Rappeneau’s Cyrano de Bergerac, in which he plays the swaggering hero with a melancholic sensitive side; another literary adaptation, Berri’s Uranus, in which he is a loud-mouthed café owner with literary pretensions; an American comedy, Weir’s Green Card; and a French comedy, Lauzier’s Mon père ce héros, where he is both father and mother to his adolescent daughter, a film remade in Hollywood with him as star in 1994.

PHIL POWRIE

See also: cinema; stars

Major works

Depardieu, G. (1990) Lettres volées, Paris: Livre de Poche (a semi-autobiography in the form of letters addressed to parents, industry colleagues and others; originally published 1988).

Derrida, Jacques

b. 1930, Algiers

Philosopher

The most celebrated and influential of contemporary French philosophers. Derrida studied at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris and was a teacher there for some twenty years (1964–84) before moving to the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1984. He was the founding president of the Collège Internationale de Philosophie in 1983 and has also held a number of visiting professorships in the USA.

Like most philosophers of his generation, Derrida was thoroughly acquainted with the German phenomenological tradition (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger) which had been the principal source of inspiration for existentialism. His first published work in 1962 was an important introduction to the translation of Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry. Voice and Phenomenon (La Voix et le phénomène), also on Husserl, followed in 1967. Derrida’s reading of Husserl had little in common with orthodox existentialist interpretations, however, and was in certain respects closer to the preoccupations of structuralism. Two groundbreaking works were also published in 1967: Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie) and Writing and Difference (L’Écriture et la difference). Derrida’s thinking in these texts crystallized around the concept of writing. His argument, best exemplified in the systematic and scholarly demonstration of De la grammatologie, was that throughout the history of Western thought writing had consistently been cast in a role subordinate to that of speech. Whereas speech was associated with reason and rationality (Greek: logos), the voice being closer to the inner ‘truth’ of individual consciousness, writing was viewed as an artificial extension or supplement to the voice, an auxiliary technology employed by human reason but not essential to it. Derrida’s critique of this repression of writing or ‘logocentrism’ takes the form of close readings of thinkers representing different ‘moments’ of the logocentric tradition: Plato, Leibniz, Rousseau, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss. In each case he shows how arguments predicated on the exclusion of writing are in fact essentially dependent upon it. In addition to this, he proposes a more fundamental form of ‘writing’ that is the precondition of both speech and writing and indeed all cultural and communication systems.

Derrida’s choice of Saussure, and especially of Lévi-Strauss, as examples of logocentric philosophy clearly had a polemical side, given the intellectual predominance of structuralism in France at the time. While Derrida recognized the important theoretical contribution of structuralism, he was critical of its reductionism. More generally, he questioned the claims of structuralism and the human sciences to have transcended the problems of traditional philosophy, arguing that the very discourse of the human sciences was dependent on unexamined presuppositions inherited from that tradition. Derrida’s critique of the human sciences provided philosophy with a powerful alternative to the humanist-existentialist critique, whose success in checking the advance of structuralism had been limited; historically, it could be said to mark the beginning of poststructuralism.

It was not only the content of Derrida’s theory of writing and his critique of logocentrism that was so influential in the intellectual debates of the late 1960s, but equally his style of analysis, the critical approach he called ‘deconstruction’. Deconstruction involved a rigorous working through of the argumentative and rhetorical structures of the texts selected as examples or ‘symptoms’ of the logocentric tradition. Here, it was not so much a question of demolishing a philosophical opponent as revealing the problematic tensions and contradictions within a given text. At the same time, deconstruction involved a reflexive and critical awareness of its own discourse, and a systematic resistance to the reification and instrumentalization of its concepts. The result is that much of Derrida’s writing has a rhetorical quality that distinguishes it from more conventional philosophical discourse. This rhetorical dimension is most apparent in the more experimental texts of the 1970s, such as Dissemination (La Dissémination), Glas and The Post Card (La Carte postale). The text of Glas, for example, consists of two parallel columns; one a reading of Hegel, the other of the writer Jean Genet. While separate, the two commentaries converge and interfere in their exploration of the themes of biology, sexuality, the family and the state, the reading of Genet in particular depending on a complex system of puns and linguistic assimilations. Similarly unconventional is the quasi-autobiographical account that opens La Carte postale, offering an extremely sophisticated meditation on Freud, reproduction and communications technologies through its narrative of the author’s repeated attempts to contact his distant partner.

As these brief examples indicate, a preoccupation with language and literature is central to Derrida’s philosophy. While his deconstructive readings of philosophical texts practise the kind of close linguistic commentary normally associated with literary analysis, he frequently turns to literary texts (Genet, Baudelaire, Mallarmé) as a source of philosophical reflection. For Derrida, what is interesting about complex symbolic systems such as language and fiction is their autonomy and mutability, their non-finalization and flexibility, which allows for the perpetual creation of new possibilities. Derrida’s recourse to literature is thus an integral part of his deconstruction of Western metaphysics, which has consistently sought to regulate or repress the subversive effects of fiction and rhetoric. The importance of the literary in Derrida’s work also explains his prodigious success in the domain of literary criticism, especially in English-speaking countries. While this has produced some interesting results, it has also led to misunderstanding and misinterpretation, contributing to the sometimes hostile reception of Derrida’s work among philosophers suspicious of the ‘continental’ tradition he is seen to represent.

Some critics have pointed to the lack of ethical and political concerns in Derrida’s thought, a criticism quickly dispelled by even a casual perusal of his texts: his early engagement with the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in L’Écriture et la différence; his deconstructive reading of the psychology of nuclear politics in Psyché: inventions de l’autre (Psyche: Inventions of the Other); his analysis of Heidegger’s politics in Of Spirit (De l’esprit), and the problem of the institutionalization of knowledge in the university in Du droit à la philosophie (On the Right to Philosophy); his reflections on the significance of Marx in a ‘post-Marxist’ world (in Spectres de Marx)—all of these readings testify to the enduring significance of the political and the ethical in Derrida’s work. That work has been, and will doubtless continue to be, a subject of controversy among more orthodox philosophers. Few, however, would contest the importance of Derrida’s contribution to late twentieth-century philosophy.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

Major works

Derrida, J. (1967a) De la grammatologie, Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Translated G.C.Spivak (1976) Of Grammatology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

——(1967b) L’Écriture et la différence, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Translated A.Bass (1978) Writing and Difference, London: Routledge.

——(1972) La Dissémination, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Translated Barbara Johnson (1981) Dissemination, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

——(1974) Glas, Paris: Éditions Galilée. Translated J.P.Leavey Jr and R.Rand (1984) Glas, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

——(1979) La Carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà, Paris: Flammarion. Translated A. Bass (1987) The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

——(1987a) De l’esprit: Heidegger et la question, Paris: Éditions Galilée. Translated G. Bennington and R.Bowlby (1989) Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

——(1987b) Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, Paris: Éditions Galilée.

——(1990) Du droit à la philosophie, Paris: Éditions Galilée.

——(1993) Spectres de Marx, Paris: Éditions Galilée. Translated P.Kamuf (1994) Specters of Marx, Routledge: London.

Desarthe, Gérard

b. 1945, Paris

Actor and director

Desarthe is famous for his interpretations of major roles for famous directors, notably in Chéreau’s 1981 Peer Gynt, Jourdheuil’s 1978 Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Planchon’s 1980 Dom Juan. His directorial career began with an acclaimed production of Le Cid in 1988.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Deschamps, Jérôme

b. 1947, Neuilly-sur-Seine

Playwright, actor and director

Deschamps is the creator of popular shows noted for their visual comedy and scenic experimentation. They include Baboulifiche and Papavoine (created for Vitez) in 1974, La Famille Deschiens in 1979 and C’est magnifique with Macha Makeiff in 1994.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Désir, Harlem, and SOS Racisme

b. 1959, Paris

Anti-racism activist

Harlem Désir became a national figure in the mid-1980s as the president of SOS Racisme, an anti-racist organization founded in 1984. Through inarches, demonstrations, concerts and, especially, a badge containing the words Touche pas à mon pote (Hands off my pal), it raised awareness of racism and inequality. Criticized in the late 1980s for being a media creation and too closely attached to the Socialist Party, it subsequently concentrated less on high-profile events and more on local action. At the same time, it shifted its focus from le droit à la difference (the right to difference) to claims for equality through integration. On standing down as president of SOS Racisme, Désir eventually became a secrétaire national of the Socialist Party.

MAX SlLVERMAN

Major works

Désir, H. (1987) SOS désirs, Paris: CalmannLévy (account of the early history of SOS Racisme).

detective fiction

Detective fiction—le roman policier or polar—is a product of modernity. This is reflected in the comparatively recent development of the genre, in the mass readership it has attracted, in its tendency to appear in series and in its rich relationship with cinema, comic strips and television. Murder as a means to an end offers an inexhaustible instrument with which to explore social and moral contradictions between myth and reality with regard to the sanctity of the individual, rights of property and the mechanics of social privilege. Its ancestry in France can be traced to Balzac, Sue and Hugo, but the founder of the genre is Edgar Allan Poe. In the Anglo-Saxon world Conan Doyle’s Holmes brought the genre into the twentieth century, as, in France, did the adventures of Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin. The interwar years saw the flowering of the problem novel (roman à clé)—whose most famous exponent is Agatha Christie—where the narrative takes the form of an intellectual puzzle set within a defined social and physical space. In France, it was promoted primarily by Hachette in the pioneering series Le Masque. The adventures of Simenon’s world-famous hero Maigret lasted from 1931 to 1972 and were innovatory in that the hero was a senior police officer whose enquiries added both a psychological depth and a social breadth to the traditional detective novel. The post-World War II period is dominated by the roman noir, a coming-together of the detective story and aspects of the western. Here, the mystery tends to evolve during the course of the narrative and the hero is more active, providing greater possibilities to exploit the urban landscape’s social detail, and shifting the emphasis more to an exposure and a neutralization of evil. In 1945 La Série noire, led by Marcel Duhamel, introduced Hammett, Chandler and others, but Léo Malet’s private eye Nestor Burma contributed an aesthetic dimension to the style of his American colleagues. The last subgenre to evolve was the suspense novel, which focuses on the state of mind of the victim or the criminal. The novels of the team of Boileau and Nercejac proved particularly successful in adaptation for the cinema. Doggedly ignored by ‘serious’ critics until the 1970s, the genre has since attracted the attention of major literary figures. It has its own centre in Paris, there are popular fan clubs and journals, as well as dictionaries of characters and terms. New writers, like Daeninckx, Pennac, and the innovative series Le Poulpe, are developing the genre to explore the experiences of alienation, oppression and social contradictions.

GEORGE PAIZIS

Deutsch, Michel

b. 1948, Strasbourg

Playwright, poet and essayist

Classed as a member of the Théâtre du Quotidien in the 1970s, Deutsch is a member of Vincent’s dramaturgy collective at the Théâtre National de Strasbourg, and a writer of poetry and criticism for the review Aléa. His philosophical, social documentary-style plays include Convoi (Convoy), the three-part Féroé, la nuit, (Féroé, at Night) and La Négresse bonheur (Negress Happiness).

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Major works

Deutsch, M. (1990) Inventaire après liquidation, Paris: L’Arche (texts and interviews).

Devers, Claire

b. 1955, Paris

Director

With only three films to her name, none the less she is indisputably an important filmmaker. Devers broke into film-making in 1986 through her highly controversial, award-winning film Black and White (Noir et blanc), about a male sadomasochistic relationship. Made in black and white, it was her graduating film from the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC). Her films interweave the sociopolitical with the sexual, and the dangerous narratives of her films expose spectator expectation and address female fantasy. Essays on voyeurism and the technology of surveillance, her films offer an uncompromising female eye on male sexuality and the tensions inherent in a homosocial hegemony— giving a new dimension to the generic concept of film noir, which is so traditionally a male director’s province (see 1992’s Max et Jérémie).

SUSAN HAYWARD

See also: cinema; women directors

Dewaere, Patrick

b. 1947, St-Brieuc;

d. 1982, Paris

Actor

A product, like his screen partners Depardieu and Miou-Miou, of the café theatre. His role in Blier’s Les Valseuses of 1974 gave him a voyou image he took a long time to shake off. His best work, apart from the Blier films, was for Alain Corneau (Série noire of 1979) and Téchiné (Hôtel des Amériques of 1981). He took his own life, reputedly because of an unhappy relationship with Miou-Miou, in 1982.

KEITH READER

See also: cinema

Dib, Mohammed

b. 1920, Tlemcen, Algeria

Writer and poet

At various times a school teacher, interpreter and rug designer, Dib published a trilogy in the 1950s: La Grande Maison (The Great Mansion), L’Incendie (The Fire) and Le Métier à tisser (The Weaving Loom). In this trilogy Dib denounced the humiliations of life under colonial rule from a communist perspective. He has lived in France since his expulsion from Algeria in 1959. In Who Remembers the Sea (Qui se souvient de la mer), published in 1962, Dib’s style became more oriented towards an oneiric discourse. La Danse du roi (The King’s Dance) and Habel, published in 1968 and 1977 respectively, depict the Algerian war of liberation from a Surrealist angle. Dib’s collections of poems deal with the themes of exile, erotic sexuality and the psychological journey within the self.

LAÏLA IBNLFASSI

Diên Biên Phu

The battle of Diên Biên Phu in early 1954 effectively marked the end of French colonial interests in Indochina. After regaining nominal jurisdiction over its prewar possessions in southeast Asia following the Allied defeat of Japan in 1945, France was immediately faced with the prospect of being unable to implement it. The Vietnamese nationalists under Ho Chi Minh had gained control of northern Indochina and, after attempts at a negotiated settlement had failed, over seven years of war ensued which were draining both financially and psychologically for the French forces and government, in spite of military assistance from the United States. On 13 March 1954, Viet Minh forces began a siege of French military positions in the valley of Diên Biên Phu in northwestern Vietnam, bombarding the French from the mountains around the valley. The French finally surrendered on 7 May 1954, just as talks on the future of Indochina were about to begin in Geneva, leaving the French government in a desperately weak position at the negotiations which resulted in the north-south partitioning of Vietnam.

COLVILLE WEMYSS

Dior, Christian

b. 1905, Granville;

d. 1957, Montecatini, Italy

Fashion designer

Born into a wealthy Norman family, Dior wanted to study architecture, opened an art gallery, and mingled with avant-garde artists such as Picasso and Matisse. After the 1929 economic crash ruined his family, he learned to sketch, and in 1938 he designed Robert Pinguet’s collection. With the help of investor Marcel Boussac, Dior opened his own fashion house in 1947. His ‘Corolle’ silhouette revolutionized the fashion industry. In 1954, he created his ‘II’ line with loose tunics. After his death, the Dior company added a ready-towear Miss Dior boutique (1967) and a men’s line (1970).

JOËLLE VITIELLO

See also: fashion

director’s theatre

This term is used to describe director-dominated theatre, a phenomenon particularly prominent in France in the postwar period. During the twentieth century, the role of the director in French theatre has achieved extremely high status. Although during the last century and even at the beginning of this one, the theatre director, or in those days the ‘producer’, was considered to be little more than an orchestrator of actors and scenes, the situation today is very different, with directors wielding considerable creative input as well as financial power, especially in the public theatre. The role of director today has been influenced by several traditions. Prewar theatre in France saw the rise of Copeau and the Cartel directors (including Dullin, Jouvet, Pitoëff and Dasté), who believed in the importance of the director as an interpreter of the author’s text, helping the actors to develop their role as part of the production. Copeau and others wielded additional influence thanks to the theatre schools they ran. The second influence to affect the role of the director in France is that of the more avant-garde, revolutionary approach which began with Artaud and his Theatre of Cruelty. In his wake, theatre came to rely less on text and more on a complex web of sign systems based on the visual and the active as much as the aural. French theatre and its directors began to experiment with non-textbased theatre, and the boundaries to which theatre could be pushed. As a result, text was no longer the only source of theatrical creation: the directors became central to the coordination of experimentation with stage, movement and visual imagery, and added their own artistic input. The arrival of Brecht on the French theatre scene after the war was also an important influence. Planchon was especially noted for his interest in experimenting with Brechtian theatre.

While directors such as Brook and Barrault could be said to be influenced by both the Copeauesque and Artaudian traditions, Planchon and Vilar, two of the best-known postwar directors, are certainly more influenced by Copeau and the Cartel, as well as by Brecht. Meanwhile, Ariane Mnouchkine at the Théâtre du Soleil and Patrice Chéreau could be said to fall more into the Brechtian and Artaudian schools of direction. Thus it is difficult to describe today’s directors as descendants of any single tradition: it would be more accurate to say that postwar directors have drawn on all of them in varying proportions, while experimenting with the boundaries of theatre and imposing their own creative style. While directors continue to be extremely influential in French theatre, it is difficult to class them into any kind of school or movement: each has his/her own strong, and individual, voice.

Director’s theatre in France reached its peak in the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1950s, the great decentralization movement had meant that Centres Dramatiques Nationaux had begun to be established around the country. Each was run by a director, usually the theatre’s artistic director, who became administratively responsible too, thus wielding considerable power over how money was spent and on which productions. By the 1960s and 1970s, directors had gained such power that they were in almost total charge of most of France’s theatres. Artistically, they were in a position to choose how to spend subsidies: often this meant working on texts upon which they could impose their own creative stamp and tread new ground, which frequently led to non-theatrical texts being used. Vitez, for example, is famed for his adaptations of non-dramatic texts such as Aragon’s Les Cloches de Bâle (staged as Catherine). It was not uncommon, for example, for directors to cut, alter or reorganize the author’s text to suit their own creative purpose, or to choose a repertoire which deliberately reflected their own creative interests. Even in the 1990s, the tradition persists that one refers to ‘Planchon’s’ rather than to ‘Molière’s’ Tartuffe, crediting directors with the major creative input in much the same way as they are treated in the cinema.

The 1970s also saw the emergence of the collective creation movement, in which the playwright was rendered entirely redundant, as theatre companies began devising their own creations from research and improvisation. In this case, the director theoretically held no more power than any other member of the company; in practice, it would be fair to say, directors such as Mnouchkine still had considerable input into productions. The 1980s, however, saw the return to text as a source of theatre, with directors such as Planchon, Vitez, Mnouchkine and Chéreau continuing to dominate the theatrical scene until the end of the decade (and beyond in the case of Mnouchkine and Chéreau). Directors continue to wield considerable power financially in public theatre and creatively, although the re-emerging importance of text-led theatre has led to renewed recognition of partnership with authors (for example, Mnouchkine and Cixous, Chéreau and Koltès, or Minyana and Cantarella). While the director today continues to occupy an important position in the theatre world, the relationship between director and author is shifting back towards a creative partnership, in which the text retains its own voice.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatres, national

dirigisme

The concept of dirigisme denotes the type of state intervention in economic life which developed in France in the postwar period and which dominated French economic thinking until the 1980s. Dirigiste policies have been carried out by Left and Right alike. This is because dirigisme does not necessarily imply a critique of the capitalist system or a socioeconomic ideology which rejects the market. Rather, dirigiste policies are based on the notion that the state is in a better position than market forces to secure the long-term health of the French capitalist economy, particularly in terms of investment.

JAN WINDEBANK

documentaries

The documentary tradition in France has had a chequered career. The first documentaries date back to 1895 and the Lumière brothers’ travelogues and scenes from daily life. During the silent period, many film-makers came into feature films via the training ground of documentaries; however, the soaring cost of production during the 1930s, with the advent of sound technology and the impact of the Depression, brought this training process to a virtual halt until the late 1940s. Arguably the heydays of the French documentary are the 1950s and 1960s, even though important contributions to its development were still being made during the 1970s and 1980s. The 1970s in particular must be singled out because the documentary shifted from occupying a putatively objective position to adopting an investigative and often strongly politicized one. Presently the impact of the French documentary tradition is most strongly felt, on an international level, in African nations and, on a more parochial level, in regional film collectives established post-1980 in a governmental effort at decentralization.

In terms of the documentary’s history in the sound era, the revival of the genre after its slump in the 1930s was due to the effects of the Occupation (1940–4). Audiences, disgruntled at the abolition of the double-feature programme, obliged the (then) organizing body for the film industry, the Comité d’Organisation des Industries Cinématographiques (COIC), to find a way of providing value for money. COIC identified the documentary as one inexpensive source of entertainment and directed state funding to finance documentaries and shorts that were ostensibly non-propagandistic. This investment provided a system of apprenticeship for the next generation of film-makers (e.g. Jacques Cousteau, Jacques Becker, Jean Rouch). It also instigated a training tradition that culminated (in the late 1950s) on the one hand in the feature cinema known as the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), and on the other in the documentary cinema known first as cinéma direct and later as cinéma vérité. Both types of cinema were famous for their location shooting, hand-held camera work, grainy, realist filming, and—where the documentary is concerned—on-site sound recording.

Cinéma vérité was the first identifiable documentary movement in French cinema and one that sought to obtain the closest possible relationship to objective realism. It was, then, the first movement to address questions of representation even though, earlier, individual filmmakers had also investigated the role and ideological function of documentary and its relationship to history (e.g. the fairly isolated examples of Vigo and Renoir in the 1930s, Resnais in the 1940s and early 1950s). Cinéma vérité was strongly influenced by the visual codes of live TV and the principles of ethnography (thanks mostly to Rouch’s work), and it is this movement that has been quite widespread in its influence on African documentary traditions.

Post-May 1968, the radicalizing effect on the documentary of the various debates on the Left around the politics of representation (whose history, what is truth, who is the speaking voice, and so on) and also the effects of the democratization of the camera (low-cost video and lightweight cameras) meant that different voices were being heard and different issues put up on screen: women’s voices, those of blacks and beurs, questions of reproductive rights, racism and integration. Contemporary history was no longer the safe mythology of heroes. Now, the complexities of the Occupation and its effects on the French population were given a full airing: for example, Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity (Le Chagrin et la pitié) of 1971. This documentary tradition is the one that has fed into the regional documentary cinema of France.

SUSAN HAYWARD

Doillon, Jacques

b. 1944, Paris

Director

A film-maker distinctive in his rigorous use of close-ups and framing, often suggesting intense social and emotional isolation. Like André Téchiné he may be looked upon as ‘a poet of the alternative family’ (to quote Jill Forbes)—a judgement borne out by La Pirate of 1984, an agonized bisexual love triangle, and La Vie de famille of the following year, recounting the fraught journey to Spain of a man and his daughter, in which understanding comes about only when the two address each other through video recordings.

KEITH READER

See also: Birkin, Jane; cinema

Doisneau, Robert

b. 1912, Gentilly;

d. 1994, Paris

Photographer

Most famous for Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville (The Kiss) which came to symbolize the eternal romantic allure of Paris, Doisneau was one of the great photographers of Paris’s changing urban landscape, his true passion and genius being for the recording of everyday life in the suburbs (banlieue). Working in the tradition of Baudelaire’s ‘Artist of modern life’, he charted the progressive destruction by government planning policies of the soul of the southern Paris suburbs.

MICHAEL WORTON

See also: photography

Dort, Bernard

b. 1929, Metz;

d. 1994, Paris

Theatre critic

Best known for his part in France’s discovery of Brecht, as well as for his editorial work on the well-known theatre journals, Théâtre populaire and Travail théâtral, Dort is the author of Lecture de Brecht (Reading Brecht), published in 1972.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Douai, Jacques

b. 1920, Douai

Singer, real name Gaston Tranchant

Often perceived as the standard-bearer of traditional and contemporary French folk-songs, Jacques Douai projects an image in the troubadour tradition, promoting in particular the poetic dimension of popular song. Along with his wife, Thérèse Palau (the leader of a dance group known as La Frairie), he toured France, Canada and America in order to reach an increasingly wide public, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s.

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

Doubrovsky, Serge

b. 1928, Paris

Intellectual, literary critic and writer

The author of studies on Corneille, Proust, literary theory and autobiography, Doubrovsky is himself a prolific autobiographer. He prefers, however, to label his self-narratives— which include Fils (Son/Strands), Un Amour de soi (Self-Love) and Le Livre brisé (The Broken Book)—autofictions. This is because his stated intention is to produce texts which, although they relate authentic episodes from their author’s life, display literary qualities and formal/stylistic characteristics owing more to the novel genre than that of autobiography ‘proper’. In 1989, Doubrovsky won the Prix Médicis for Le Livre brisé.

ALEX HUGHES

Doutreligne, Louise

b. 1948, Roubaix

Playwright

The writer of prizewinning texts for theatre, radio and film during the 1980s and 1990s, Doutreligne’s theatre works include Femme à la porte cochère (Woman at the Carriage Entrance) and Les Jardins de France (France’s Gardens).

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Du Bouchet, André

b. 1924

Poet, translator and critic

He spent his early years in the United States (Amherst College, Harvard University). In France he worked on the review L’Éphémère and translated Shakespeare, Hölderlin, G.M. Hopkins, Pasternak and Paul Celan. There are also essays on painting and poetry and a study of the work of Giacometti. The poetry is sparse and tightly constructed, avoiding abstractions and making considerable use of typographical spacing, mindful of the blank areas of the page, the ultimate model being Mallarmé’s A Throw of the Dice (Un Coup de des). It is as if Du Bouchet were making a clean slate of things. The major collections are Dans la chaleur vacante (In the Vacant Heat) from 1961, Ou le soleil (Or the Sun) in 1968, Laisses (Leashes) and L’Incohérence from 1975 and 1979, Rapides (1980) and Axiales (1992).

WALTER A.STRAUSS

See also: poetry

Dubillard, Roland

b. 1923, Paris

Actor and playwright

A 1950s radio actor, author of radio plays, and adaptor of numerous anglophone works, his theatre plays include Où boivent les vaches (Where the Cows Drink), adapted from an earlier radio piece, Naïves Hirondelles (Naive Swallows) and La Maison d’os (House of Bones).

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Dubuffet, Jean

b. 1901, Le Havre;

d. 1985, Paris

Artist

Jean-Philippe-Arthur Dubuffet was a full-time painter from 1942, and in 1949 he published the essay ‘Art Brut Preferred to the Civilized Arts’. He acquired a collection of art brut of children, the insane or the untrained and naive, unadulterated by culture, and founded the Compagnie de l’Art Brut (1948–51) with André Breton. Highly influenced by the Surrealists, he attempted to capture the essence of freedom of expression, but was accused of imitating outsider’s art. Crude, scatological images, roughly worked and scratched in thick paint, of the female body, cows, the surface of the earth (for example, Blood and Fire, Body of Women from 1950), were seen as powerful figurative images of matter, texture and colour. From 1967 he worked in polystyrene, as in Cabinet lologique.

VALERIE SWALES

See also: painting; sculpture

Duchamp, Marcel

b. 1887, Blainville;

d.1968, Neuilly-sur-Seine

Artist

The brother of the painter Jacques Villon and the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and a member of the Parisian avant-garde and the Surrealist movement, Duchamp was also a champion chess player and was ranked sixth in the 1925 French chess championships. His iconoclastic work rejected painting and he worked with found objects (objets trouvés) and visual puns to redefine artistic modes of production. In 1916 he first produced his ‘Readymades’, such as the urinal Fountain (Fontaine), and from 1915 to 1923 worked on one of his most famous compositions, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même), also known as the Large Glass. He often worked in America, especially during World War II, and took American nationality in 1955. He is considered to have influenced conceptual art, especially in the United States.

DEBRA KELLY

See also: painting; sculpture

Dufy, Raoul

b. 1877, Le Havre:

d. 1953, Forcalquier, Basses Alpes

Artist

Dufy is principally known for his decorative style, often portraying the leisured life of the French upper classes at the races, regattas and on the French Riviera. He was influenced by Matisse and the Fauves, which led to his use of simplified forms and bright palette. He also designed ceramics, textiles (including dresses with Paul Poiret), tapestries and illustrated books. Dufy created a large decorative composition, the Electricity Fairy (La Fée électricitée), for the 1937 International Exhibition.

DEBRA KELLY

See also: painting

Dumazedier, Joffre

b. 1915

Sociologist

An intellectual and advocate of democratic popular culture. He helped to found the organization Peuple et Culture (People and Culture) at the Liberation. His best-known book, Towards a Society of Leisure? (Vers une civilisation du loisir?) of 1962, earnestly promotes the value of popular culture in the development of the person, while attacking commercial culture for its escapism. For Dumazedier, ‘leisure…should be the occasion when high social and personal ideals are pursued and reinforced’ (Rigby 1991).

KEITH READER

Dupin, Jacques

b. 1927, Privas, Ardèche

Poet and critic

Jacques Dupin is associated with the review L’Éphémère (like Du Bouchet). He has been in close and regular contact with painters and painting and has written books on Miró and Giacometti. He moves along poetic paths similar to Yves Bonnefoy: unaffected by Surrealism and classically oriented, with strong affinities to Mallarmé, tending also toward hermeticism in his poetry. There is also a notable impact of Char’s poetry on Dupin. His collections are Gravir (Climbing) from 1963 and L’Embrasure (1969)—the poems are highly concentrated and concise, frequently difficult to access, yet characterized by great verbal richness and strong energy, often in the form of anguish. He occupies an important place among the poets who came into prominence after World War II and who represent, by and large, a return to a new dispensation in the history of French classicism.

WALTER A.STRAUSS

See also: poetry

Duras, Marguerite

b. 1914, Giadinh, Indochina;

d. 1996, Paris

Writer, essayist, playwright and director, real name Marguerite Donnadieu

A prodigious writer and film-maker whose career spanned over fifty years, Duras was one of the most important, fascinating and influential cultural figures in postwar France. Her unique literary style and constant experimentation with form resulted in a complex oeuvre of remarkable diversity. Alert to the unconscious workings of language and committed to the absolutes of love and passion, Duras took her readers and viewers to the boundaries of the unthinkable and unsayable. Although she encountered much hostility throughout her career, particularly from the Right, her brutal honesty, force of personality and radical vision helped to redefine the very nature of the female artist and intellectual in France.

Duras’s childhood in French Indochina left her with an ineradicable sense of injustice: her father died when she was 4 years old and her mother—who always favoured her elder brother—was sold unworkable land by corrupt French officials. Ironically, Duras’s first text, L’Empire français (The French Empire), a collaboration with Philippe Roques published under her maiden name and the fruit of two years spent at the Colonial Office in Paris from 1937 to 1939, extols the virtues of French colonial expansion. Her first, fairly conventional novels appeared during the war, but she temporarily abandoned writing to become a Communist activist. Upon leaving the Communist Party acrimoniously in 1950, she published The Sea-Wall (Un barrage contre le Pacifique), a harsh, neo-realist tale of growing up in Indochina, clearly autobiographical in inspiration. With the minimalist style and blank, seemingly non-expressive prose of The Square (Le Square) and Moderate cantabile, Duras became associated with the nouveau roman, although her themes of female alienation, selfdestructive, violent desire and potential madness already set her firmly apart. She achieved international fame in 1959 with her screenplay for Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, mon amour, with its famous refrain, ‘You are killing me, you are doing me good’, and produced in the mid-1960s her major long novels, The Ravishing of Lol V.Stein (Le Ravissement de Lol V Stein) and The Vice-Consul (Le Vice-Consul). The first, featuring an unreliable male narrator who finds himself ‘ravished’ and progressively ‘unmanned’ by the eponymous heroine, is written in a fragmentary, abstract and non-linear style, and it inspired Jacques Lacan to write a famous ‘homage’ (his only article on a contemporary writer), in which he celebrated Duras as a writer of ‘clinically perfect madness’. This provoked, in turn, a stream of psychoanalytic readings of Duras’s work, notably Marcelle Marini’s attempt to chart the territories of silence and unexplained narrative lacunae (or ‘blanks’) that ‘resonate with’ and ‘speak’ the feminine (e.g. the mute beggar woman in Le Vice-Consul). Throughout this period, Duras also established herself as ‘a major dramatist, producing adaptations both of her own novels, such as Whole Days in the Trees (Des journées entières dans les arbres) and L’Amante anglaise, and of classic works, such as Strindberg’s The Dance of Death. The culmination of her work in theatre was Savannah Bay, a play written in 1982 for Madeleine Renaud about the apocalyptic impact of sexual passion and the vital necessity of bearing witness.

Duras was briefly a member of the revolutionary action committee of students and writers set up at the Sorbonne during the events of May 1968. Yet, after reaching with L’Amour a kind of limit point, she began to devote her energies almost exclusively to film-making. Nathalie Granger (1972), based around a young girl’s refusal to speak, exemplified the attraction Duras’s marginal status had for established stars (here Jeanne Moreau), and it encouraged a temporary and highly ambivalent association with feminism evident in her published interviews in 1974 with Xavière Gauthier, Woman to Woman (Les Parleuses). La Femme du Gange and India Song (1974/ 1975) rework elements from Duras’s 1960s novels to create a dense network of intertextual echoes commonly referred to as the ‘India Cycle’. Both films are composed of slow, long takes which are often repeated and have no direct relation with the intricately layered, plurivocal soundtrack. The actors such as Delphine Seyrig are asked simply to ‘figure’— rather than act—their rôles. Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert, which uses the same soundtrack as India Song but this time over frozen images of an abandoned château, revealed that Duras’s underlying ambition was not merely to reappropriate her literary work—which, she claimed, had been betrayed in commercial adaptations—but also to destroy the very foundations of cinema. Le Camion (1979), centred around a dialogue with Gérard Depardieu about a film that ‘could have been made’ of a female hitch-hiker, marked the first occasion that Duras entered her own work as Duras. Not only did it refuse any essentialist notion of a female writing of the body, but it also established a new, defiantly heterosexual and ultimately sadomasochistic, aesthetic, or malkeur merveilleux (magical misery). The four-part series of shorts comprising Césarée, Les Mains négatives, and two versions of Aurélia Steiner (about the Holocaust), where Duras recites haunting poetic texts over stark, quasi-documentary images of Paris and the Seine estuary, represents the pinnacle of her work in film. In Green Eyes (Les Yeux verts), where she theorizes her cinematic practice, Duras fully recognizes the seductive power of her voice—low and gravelly— when delivered over a limited range of neutral ‘master-images’. The logical conclusion to her experiments in minimalism was the short L’Homme atlantique, the second half of which presents a black screen and her own voice interrogating an unnamed male ‘you’.

In 1980, Duras returned to fiction proper with The Seated Man in the Passage (L’Homme assis dans le couloir), a slim volume which elaborates in graphic detail the violent erotic subtext of Le Vice-Consul and heralds the arrival in her literary work of an explicit first-person narratoi-voyeuse. L’Été 80 (Summer 1980) was Duras’s first experiment in écriture courante (literally ‘running writing’), her answer to écriture féminine and an apparent transcription of anything personal, social or political that ‘passes’ during the scene of writing. Contingent and potentially all-inclusive, écriture courante was taken by many as proof of Duras’s stated ethical commitment to alterity. L’Été 80 also introduced Yann Andréa, a gay man half her age with whom she formed a lasting relationship and who featured in her films and novels, often as Yann or ‘YA, homosexual’ (most obviously in Yann Andréa Steiner). A new set of thematics had begun to emerge: homosexual/heterosexual relations, explicit incestuous desire (explored at length in Agatha), selfhood, collaboration and ageing. The sparse The Malady of Death (La Maladie de la mort), which stages an aggressive encounter between a female narrator and another anonymous male ‘you’ (by implication, also the reader), offered a brilliant deconstruction of sexual difference, fantasy and transferential desire. The Lover (L’Amant), an autobiographical novel of consummate skill and linguistic mastery structured around the photographic image of a young girl’s crossing of the Mekong river, won the Prix Goncourt in 1984 and achieved record-breaking sales, aided by a stunning personal performance on Apostrophes. From being an obscure, ‘difficult’ author for a chosen few, Duras soon became France’s most widely translated living writer. There followed a series of ‘prose poems’ of almost uniform length; each, however, stunningly different, as if she was deliberately outplaying her new readers’ expectations. While The War: A Memoir (La Douleur), based on her wartime experiences in Paris, caused much controversy, particularly in its depiction of the torture of a French collaborator, it nevertheless consolidated her public links with François Mitterrand, with whom she had served in the Resistance. Blue Eyes, Black Hair (Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs) was a brave study of an impossible love between a gay man and a straight woman, which avoided the new conventions of Duras’s self-ironizing textuality by lacking, for instance, a first-person female narrator or scene of self-naming. Emily L., a ‘pure’ novel and a tour de force examination of human fears and emotions, developed further Duras’s erotic, intertextual relations with what she termed her ‘Great Men’ (e.g. Proust, Henry James, Robert Musil).

During the mid- to late 1980s, Duras, now a virtual icon of the Mitterrand Left, worked intensively in the media, particularly journalism (her ‘Outside’), and she pronounced publicly on subjects ranging from politics and drugs to football. Her reputation began to suffer through overexposure, however, and she was widely attacked for her article in Libération entitled ‘Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V.’, where she heroized Christine Villemin as the entirely justifiable murderer of her son although the case was still sub judice. In 1988 Duras suffered a nearly fatal coma and underwent a tracheotomy, yet she still continued to write, publishing Summer Rain (La Pluie d’été) and The North China Lover (L’Amant de la Chine du nord), her narrative reworking of a filmscript of L’Amant originally intended for Jean-Jacques Annaud. Her final text, C’est tout (That’s All), was almost ignored when it appeared, yet its physical staging of her own death distinguishes it as one of Duras’s most searing and uncompromising works.

JAMES WILLIAMS

Durif, Eugène

b. 1950, Lyon

Poet and playwright

Durif is the author of arts and literary reviews, adaptations, poems and plays. His Conversation sur la montagne (Conversation on the Mountainside) and Le Petit Bois (The Little Wood), put on at the Théâtre National Populaire in 1991, both feature the long monologues that characterize his work. His works are regularly performed by the Théâtre Ouvert.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Duteil, Yves

b. 1949, Paris

Singer-songwriter

A popular singer-songwriter, who had his first hit in 1974 with le Petit Pont de bois (The Little Wooden Bridge), followed by others such as Tarentelle (Tarantella), Prendre un enfant par la main (To Take a Child by the Hand) and La Langue de chez nous (The Language of Our Country), which won the poetry prize of the Academic Française. An interesting lyricist whose songs sometimes verge on the oversentimental.

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

Duvert, Tony

b. 1945, Villeneuve-le-Roi

Writer

Duvert has been described as perverse and as a writer of evil. While his largely autobiographical work centres on the questions of juvenile sexuality and sexual transgression, notably paedophilia, he presents his marginal world as a world of innocence. However, this moral category is a provocatively ambiguous one in his work: in his 1976 Journal d’un innocent (Diary of an Innocent), the ‘innocent’ with whom he has sex is a mentally retarded adolescent. In his essays, he repeatedly inveighs against ‘heterocracy’, which he defines as a social system in which heterosexuality is posited—and imposed—as a universal.

MICHAEL WORTON