E

economy

The French economy was radically transformed after World War II. Economic stagnation in the 1930s, caused in part by the conservative attitudes of businessmen and bankers, had resulted in France lagging behind its nearest neighbours in 1945 in terms of its degree of industrialization and modernization. A large proportion of the population still worked in agriculture (using very outdated farming methods), and small businesses, which were equally unproductive, proliferated. The traditional image of France was thus of a rural France profonde (depths of France) dominated by artisans, small shopkeepers and the peasantry. The economic history of France in the latter half of the twentieth century is thus, on the one hand, a tale of how state intervention helped to turn the economy around to make the country one of the top five industrial nations of the world, but on the other hand, the story of how the state was to become the scapegoat for the country’s economic ills as the ideology of economic liberalism took hold in France.

After World War II, France’s first priority was to develop its backward economy by modernizing agriculture in order to liberate the agricultural workforce for labour in the factories which themselves were to be made more productive and more efficient. This task was not left up to the market, however, which had come to be despised after the Great Depression. Instead, a consensus existed in the country around the idea that it was the responsibility of the state to plan economic development and to assist industrialists. It was at this time that institutions such as the Commissariat Général du Plan were set up. The 1950s and 1960s were therefore set to become the heyday of French state intervention in and protection of the economy, or dirigisme. Indeed, the years 1945 to 1974 are known as the Trente Glorieuses because economic growth rates were so spectacular during this period and social and economic change so dramatic. Equally, increases in real wages were significant and the living standard of the population rose accordingly. After the 1950s, industrialization and urbanization gathered momentum and consumption patterns altered. The consumer society was born. However, the extent to which state intervention brought about this situation is a debatable issue: some argue that similar levels of economic growth would have occurred even without so much state intervention because France’s economic success was based on technological progress and a favourable international environment in which raw materials were cheap and competition was not as yet coming from the newly industrializing countries of the Pacific Rim.

All good things come to an end, however, and this spectacular success also came to a faltering halt. The first signs that all was not well came in May 1968. The strikes and demonstrations which took place during that month, especially among the younger generation, were an expression of the fact that French social structures had not kept pace with economic change. Nevertheless, the social discontent manifested in 1968 was soon to be overshadowed by the economic troubles which were to hit the country in 1974, when the first oil crisis heralded a profound and irreversible change in the international economic climate. The immediate effect of the oil crisis was to send French energy prices soaring because of the dependence of the country on imported energy sources. However, in the longer term, the oil crisis led to an increase in the price of raw materials as developing countries and excolonies, particularly those with rich reserves of raw materials, saw that they could exert economic power over their former masters. This rise in the price of raw materials coincided with countries in new areas of the world, such as southeast Asia, beginning to industrialize and challenge countries such as France in traditional industrial sectors: heavy industry, shipbuilding and textiles, for instance.

It was in the wake of the first oil crisis that the role of the state in assisting and subsidizing the French economy began to be called into question. The 1974 oil crisis caused recession, but the high cost of energy caused inflation and hence the entirely new phenomenon of ‘stagflation’. Raymond Barre, who became prime minister in 1976, was one of the first to suggest that state intervention might actually harm the French economy. He declared that one of France’s principal economic problems was that industry had been too heavily subsidized and protected by the state and, like a spoilt child, it had become lazy and uncompetitive. Therefore, he proposed that state aid for industry should be limited to those ‘sunrise’ companies which would constitute France’s future, and ‘lame duck’ industries should go to the wall. Equally, Barre was of the opinion that lax monetary policy in the past had made French industry complacent. If costs in France rose too much and made French goods internationally uncompetitive, then the currency would be devalued in order to make them competitive again. Barre, along with Giscard d’Estaing, was one of the authors of the European Monetary System, designed to impose a degree of monetary discipline on France and force it to be cost-competitive with its nearest neighbours and rivals. Thus, it was in the late 1970s that France had its first (albeit limited) taste of economic liberalism.

However, the second oil shock hit in 1979 and the ensuing recession disrupted Barre’s plans. Unemployment rose steadily, reaching over 1.5 million by the presidential elections in 1981 which the Socialist François Mitterrand won. In office, the Socialists, aided by the Communists, set about introducing a radical Socialist alternative to Barre’s strategy, swimming against the tide of liberalism which was sweeping across America and Britain. The Socialists were elected on a programme based on la rupture avec le capitalisme; that is, a complete break with the capitalist system. To this end, they introduced a sweeping round of nationalizations of the banking sector and the largest industrial groups. The Socialists believed that Barre was wrong to let whole sections of French industry disappear and that it was necessary to make France industrially selfsufficient again. They also spent vast amounts of money on job creation. For a year, their plan worked, in the sense that French unemployment stabilized while in competitor countries the rate was increasing dramatically.

None the less, as the recession continued, the Socialists found themselves in an untenable position since the cost of their policies far outstripped the state’s ability to pay. Particularly because of constraints imposed by Europe, the Socialists were forced to abandon their original policies. Mitterrand turned his back on la rupture avec le capitalisme and instead began to work towards putting France at the centre of a more integrated European Community. Thus, by 1984 the country was back on the road towards economic liberalism and the reduction of state intervention. Between 1984 and 1986, the Socialists reduced public spending and, although not going so far as to privatize any of the nationalized industries, public sector companies were instructed to behave as if they were in the private sector. Privatizations had to wait until Jacques Chirac took over as prime minister in 1986. Influenced by the policies of Reagan in the United States and Thatcher in Britain, Chirac set about a major programme of privatizations. He proclaimed the virtues of a less interventionist but more efficiently run state, and his programme stressed the need to denationalize the banks, privatize nationalized companies, deregulate prices, create more flexibility among the workforce and limit public expenditure so as to be able to reduce taxation and provide more incentive for entrepreneurs.

By 1988, the French had experienced both a radical left-wing and a radical right-wing government within the space of seven years. Nevertheless, it appeared to the general public that neither experiment had had the desired effect—namely, to reduce unemployment and increase standards of living. In the presidential elections of that year, Mitterrand put himself forward as the candidate of compromise, promising neither to renationalize recently privatized industries, nor to pursue further privatizations. This won him the election. However, the Socialist government of 1988 to 1993 was never popular with the electorate, even though from 1989 to 1991 the French economy grew well and unemployment fell before going into the recession sparked off by the Gulf war. Ironically, this was because the Socialist government applied strict monetary policies to the country, keeping wages down and avoiding a credit boom in order check inflation. This was proof indeed that the Socialists had learned the lessons of liberalism. However, it also meant that the electorate did not benefit from the fruits of economic growth to the extent which they might have done.

It is apparent, therefore, that by the end of the century France had transformed its economy, not only in terms of modernization, but also in terms of the role that the state plays in the workings of the economy. This is no longer a question of ideology, since right-wing and left-wing parties alike propose strikingly similar policies, all of which advocate an acceptance of the rules of the capitalist market and a limitation of the powers of the state. The concern on both sides of the political divide, however, is that France might be in the grip of a process of deindustrialization and might slip eventually into the second rank of industrial nations.

JAN WINDEBANK

écriture féminine

The term écriture féminine describes a mode of writing which is deemed to overcome women’s alienation from/in the order of language, and to give voice to repressed feminine difference. The concept came to the fore in the 1970s.

Since the 1970s, a number of French feminists have denounced the gender bias they perceive to exist within language, and have argued that the patriarchal, male-centred nature of the linguistic realm militates against symbolic selfdefinition by and for women. Elements of their argumentation recall the complex psychoanalytic writings of Jacques Lacan. Lacan suggests that women, by virtue of their different, unconscious relation to the phallus, enjoy a problematic and alienated relationship with the order of language, also described more broadly as the Symbolic Order. French feminist theorists such as Luce Irigaray (a psychoanalyst, linguistician and philosopher) and Hélène Cixous (an academic and creative writer), both of whom address the issue of women’s relation to language and discourse, are certainly indebted to Lacanian theory. However, unlike Lacan, neither woman believes the exclusion of the feminine by and in the linguistic domain to be irremediable. Both have produced texts in which they indicate that there may in fact be linguistic and writing practices which allow its articulation— see Irigaray’s This Sex Which is Not One (Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un) of 1977, and Cixous’s The Newly Born Woman (La Jeune Née) from 1975. Consequently, both women have been associated with the related notions of écriture féminine and parler femme, although neither uses these terms extensively in her own theoretical writings.

Before the precise nature of ‘feminine’ linguistic practices can be explored, it is useful to establish why Irigaray and Cixous were ready to claim in the 1970s that women are excluded and banished by the patriarchal linguistic order. Irigaray’s broad-ranging discussions of linguistic issues address language in its everyday, communicative mode, as well as more particularized forms of language and discourse. One of her more accessible arguments (Irigaray 1987) is that all of those language systems which, like French, involve grammatical genderization are somehow intrinsically ‘sexist’. This is because the feminine gender is consistently associated within them with nouns connoting inferiority/‘otherness’, while nouns connoting superiority are gendered masculine. Moreover (in French, at least), seemingly ‘neutral’ expressions—il pleut, for instance—in fact privilege the masculine. In her more speculative, abstract writings, Irigaray denounces the phallic/masculine bias present specifically within the language of rational, philosophical thought (which she views as occupying a key place within Western culture). She considers this form of language to be underpinned by certain, central ‘male’ principles; principles such as linearity and non-contradiction. She suggests that these principles, because they exclude ambivalence and ensure that meaning remains single and stable, may be symbolically equated with ‘monolithic’, masculine sexuality rather than with women’s libidinal organization—which she theorizes as plural and multiple. She argues that rational, philosophical discourse relies on a goal-oriented syntactical model (subject-verb-object) which is alien to women, because ‘female sexuality is not unifiable, it cannot be subsumed under the concept of subject—which brings into question all the syntactical norms’ (Irigaray 1977b). Cixous analyses philosophical discourse and the secondary discourses it has engendered—including literary discourse—in a comparable way. She considers these signifying systems to be governed by an either/or logic and by a system of hierarchized binary oppositions (activity/passivity, black/white, nature/culture, etc.), which can be traced back always to the unequal couple man/woman and to the inequalities of the patriarchal value system. This argument is advanced in an early section of her highly influential 1975 essay, La Jeune Née.

According to Irigaray, the ‘reinscription’ of the repressed feminine within the masculine Symbolic, linguistic order necessitates a radical linguistic project, a travail du langage. On the one hand, women must mount an assault on the representations of femininity which masculine discourse offers them. This assault must take the form of an ironic ‘rewriting’ of such representations. The parodic, ‘mimetic’ strategy she envisions will, she argues, reveal (potentially) a ‘feminine’ operation within language (Irigaray 1977a). Furthermore, women must evolve a new kind of writing practice aimed at disrupting the ‘phallicity’ of (rational) discourse. The disruption Irigaray recommends rests upon a modification of structural and stylistic discursive features. If ‘male’ language is characterized by a linear, logical syntactical organization, then, says Irigaray, a feminine linguistic mode, a langage autre, must be one whose style and structure allows fixed significations to be subverted. The language she has in mind would ‘undo the unique meaning of words, of nouns, which still regulates all discourse’ and ‘would have nothing to do with the syntax we have used for centuries’ (Irigaray 1977b). Its plurality and multivalence, since they stand in a metaphorical relation to the non-unified form of women’s genital anatomy and to the decentred, multiple nature of female pleasure, may be considered to be ‘vulvomorphic’, i.e. to bear the ‘mark’ of the female body. It is important to note that Irigaray’s vision of ‘vulvomorphic’ discourse is not based on the concept of a linguistic mode that would ‘speak’ the female body directly. Such discourse, for Irigaray, is not in any way predestined by anatomy. It constitutes, rather, ‘a symbolic interpretation of that anatomy’ (Gallop 1983).

In her explorations of language, Cixous concurs that the creation of explosive modes of discourse represents the means by which the feminine can be (re)born into/from within the phallocentric Symbolic Order. She argues in parts of La Jeune Née that the type of language she envisions—a language whose refusal to repress feminine difference marks it out as ‘bisexual’— need not necessarily be the province of women alone. Male writers such as Jean Genet, she claims, are capable of producing texts in which the feminine is decipherable. However, in other sections of her study she seems to reverse her position and to move into ‘essentialist’ mode. She implies that women are in fact far more likely to produce the kind of discourse in question. This is because, unlike men, they are psychically more open to bisexuality. She suggests, moreover—far more emphatically than Irigaray may be taken to do— that a direct link can and does exist between the female body and libido and the pluralistic écriture which she recommends (Cixous 1975). Cixous’s vision of feminine language/writing is summarized comprehensively in her essay The Laugh of the Medusa’. In spite of her claim that it is impossible to define a feminine mode of writing, because such writing eludes the discursive and conceptual limits of the patriarchal system, she outlines in this essay certain of its key characteristics. These are:

its poetic quality;
its open-ended heterogeneity;
its connection with orality and with the voice (specifically the voice of the archaic Mother); and
its function as a space of decensorization, in and via which woman can access her (forbidden) sexuality and unconscious.

In summary, both Irigaray and Cixous privilege forms of language characterized by ambiguity, polyvalence and poetic quality. Both women relate these ‘feminine’ linguistic and discursive forms, however symbolically, to the sexuality and anatomy of the female subject. This latter connection is not without its problems. As a result of it, both theorists have been accused of biologistic essentialism; that is, of endeavouring (dangerously) to ghettoize women within their bodies and within their (biological) ‘natures’. Materialist, socialist feminists—those belonging to the Questions féministes group, for example—were particularly keen in the 1970s to level accusations of this type. The discussions of language and discourse produced by Irigaray and Cixous may also be considered to be elitist and overly abstract. This is in part because they are the product of an intellectual training and context which is alien to many readers. Further, they seem in their evocations of ‘womanspeak’ to take no account of (racial, cultural, social) differences between women, and of the way in which these differences can or might affect linguistic practice. Finally, and most pertinently perhaps, Cixous’s and Irigaray’s notions of what, in formal, stylistic and syntactical terms, constitutes ‘the feminine’ may be viewed as wholly arbitrary. None the less, their writings on language have proved highly influential. These writings have been exploited not least by contemporary feminist literary critics—especially Anglo-American critics—eager to scrutinize women’s creative productions for evidence of sexual/textual ‘difference’.

French women authors who, rightly or wrongly, have been associated by critics with the practice of écriture féminine include Chantal Chawaf, Marguerite Duras, Jeanne Hyvrard, Marie Redonnet and Monique Wittig. In the writings of these authors, issues such as feminine sexuality and desire and the female body play a key role. All of them, moreover, have developed unusual, formally innovative, textual and narrative strategies. In the work of Chawaf—see, for instance, Le Soleil et la terre (Sun and Earth) from 1977— we find a sustained focus on the link between bodily experience and language, and a structuring of sentences which privileges the fluid, the convoluted and the mellifluous over the rational, the ordered, the univocal. In the writings of Marguerite Duras—notably Moderate Cantabile (1958) and 1964’s Le Ravissement de Lol V Stein (The Ravishing of Lol V Stein)— ‘blanks’, ‘silences’ and the non-dit (the unsaid) disrupt narrative coherence and flow, creating an elliptical, illogical narrating mode. Monique Wittig’s avowed textual project is to create a ‘political’, anti-patriarchal language, rather than a gender-specific ‘women’s writing’. However, her Les Guérillères (1969) and The Lesbian Body (Le Corps lesbien) from 1973 have been taken (by virtue of their accounts of new relations between women and between the sexes, and their startlingly experimental nature) to represent key examples of écriture féminine.

If French women writers of the 1970s and early 1980s engaged upon avant-garde textual practices which echoed and exemplified the notion of a poetics of the feminine, in more recent times, French écrivaines appear to be effecting a return to more conventional, realist narrative modes.

ALEX HUGHES

education ministry

The central and regional services of the education ministry form the backbone of the public education service. They devise policy, and then supervise and monitor all operations within this heavily centralized system. The ministry is also a major force within French economic life, as one out of every eighteen members of the working population is employed by it (three out of four of whom are teachers). All full-time teachers in state institutions in France are civil servants.

Established in its present headquarters in the rue de Grenelle in 1860 as the Ministère de l’Instruction Publique, the ministry has been reorganized many times since, and its precise function has been redefined. It became the Ministère de l’Éducation and acquired its proud ‘National’ epithet in 1932. The government appointed in May 1995 added responsibility for the transition from classroom to workplace, in its full title of Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale, de l’Enseignement Supérieur, de la Recherche, et de l’Insertion Professionnelle. In this case, the minister himself is flanked by three secretaries of state: one for schools, one for higher education and one for research. Rue de Grenelle (as it is generally known), assisted by its national advisory bodies, is responsible for national policy with regard to curriculum design, school organization, examinations and awards, and educational development, and also for the recruitment, appointment, promotion and remuneration of teaching and other staff in state schools and universities. In addition, a network of decentralized subsidiary departments oversees the application of national policy at local level.

In each of the twenty-eight académies (educational subdivisions) of France and her overseas départements, the minister is represented by the recteur and his staff, and by the two regional inspectorates, which together have local administrative responsibility for: supervising national examinations and awards, assessing the performance of schools and standards of teaching, monitoring the implementation of national policy, encouraging innovation, and dealing with staff counselling, promotion, development and training.

In the early 1980s, decentralization policies resulted in duties traditionally discharged by the ministry being devolved upon local government. The regions acquired responsibility for future planning, building and maintenance of the lycées (senior high schools), while the départements were given similar powers with regard to the collèges (junior high schools). In each case, however, the ministry remained responsible for the allocation of teaching posts and for staff remuneration. In addition, it continues to exercise control of higher education through the pluri-annual contracts it signs with universities, together with scrutiny of their senior staff appointments, and through the sanctioning of the diplomas awarded by the grandes écoles.

RON HALLMARK

education, primary

Schooling in France is compulsory from 6 to 16 years of age. Elementary schools teach children aged from 6 to 11. However, primary education in France cannot be discussed without consideration of the wholesale nursery provision, which, though optional, involved some 80 per cent of 2- to 5-year-olds in 1995 (35 per cent of 2-year-olds, and over 99 per cent of those 3 and over). Nursery classes are formally programmed into the planning of the initial educational process.

Schooling from 2 to 11 is organized into three successive periods (cycles), in principle by age groups. The first period consists of the nursery classes for the petits (the infants, aged 2 to 4), the moyens (intermediates, aged 4 to 5) and the grands (the seniors, aged 5 to 6). The second period encompasses the first three years of elementary school, defined as the cours préparatoire (CP), the preparatory year, for 6- to 7-year-olds, and the cours élémentaire 1ère et 2ème années (CE 1 and 2—elementary years one and two, for 7- to 8- and 8- to 9-year-olds, respectively). The last two years of elementary school, called the cours moyen, 1ère et 2ème années (CM 1 and 2—intermediate years one and two, for 9- to 10- and 10- to 11-year-olds), constitute the third period. The boundaries between periods are not, however, rigid. There is an overlap between the top class of nursery education (section grande) and the first year of the elementary school (cours préparatoire), to ensure continuity and facilitate integration; and, to take account of different rates of development and individual learning capacities, it is possible to complete each cycle in two or three years.

No set syllabus is laid down for nursery education, but its aims are said to be ‘to help the child to develop and become active; to arrive at an awareness of the outside world, and to relate to and communicate with others’. Methods are based upon play—whether organized or independent—and a gradual introduction to the three Rs. The second and third cycles are designed to ‘ensure a grasp of the skills basic to all learning (oral communication, reading and arithmetic) as well as the development of the child’s intellect, sensitivities, physical potential and and manual dexterity’. They must also introduce the child to fine arts and music.

The curriculum to be followed in pursuit of these aims is laid down centrally by the education ministry. In terms of the circular of March 1995, which defines the second period as the cycle des apprentissages fondamentaux (period for learning the basics), the following weekly hourage is prescribed: nine hours of French, 5 hours of mathematics, 4 hours devoted to ‘exploration of the world’ and civics, 6 hours of PE, sport and art, and 2 hours of directed work (conceived as an opportunity for the teacher to help pupils develop independent work habits). The ‘directed work’ is to take place in halfhour sessions at the end of each full school day. The curriculum for the third period, the cycle des approfondissements (period of more advanced learning) is similar, but adds an additional half-hour of mathematics instead of half an hour of PE, sport or art. With effect from 1995, modern foreign languages were introduced into the elementary school curriculum: one hour of French per week in CE 2 and one and a half-hours maximum in CM 1 and 2 were to be sacrificed to this end. Begun on a voluntary basis for the first year, this teaching is designed to be extended to all schools as training and resources permit.

The balance and design of the school week (26 hours, spread typically over 9 half-days) and of the school year remain a matter of debate. The subject was raised again by the report of the Fauroux Committee on education in June 1996. In 1992, when the teaching week was reduced from 27 hours, the same annual total of classroom time (972 hours) was maintained by adding extra days to the academic year. In 1995–6, three experiments with different weekly patterns of primary education were being conducted in different areas of the country.

Since the early nineteenth century, primary education has been the responsibility of the commune and its local council. In this respect, the decentralization legislation of the 1980s meant little change to the status quo. It is the duty of the local authorities at that level to provide and maintain state schools and support facilities (such as school canteens), and also to engage and pay maintenance staff, or such auxiliary classroom staff as may be required to help with the younger children (Agents Spécialisés des Écoles Maternelles or ASEM). For its part, the state, via the education ministry, appoints and pays the teaching staff. The latter are no longer trained in the Écoles Normales that were set up, on the basis of one per département, by the Guizot law (1833), and fulfilled this function until the late 1980s. As from 1990, teachers in state schools are mainly the products of the Instituts Universitaires de Formation des Maîtres. Recruitment to these is selective, and candidates must have obtained the licence or equivalent before entry. In the course of their studies there, during which they may be paid, intending teachers prepare for and sit the competitive examination for the Certificat d’Aptitude au Professorat des Écoles, as well as spending periods on observation and teaching practice in schools.

Declining numbers of pupils in elementary schools from the 1960s to the 1990s, together with population loss in country areas, have had both good effects and bad. On the one hand there has been a reduction in average class sizes in state elementary schools from 30 in 1960 to 22 in 1995; on the other, it has meant the threat of school closures, and the creation of inter-commune groups in rural areas to protect and run a local school.

To complete the picture, mention should be made of the distinctive provision made since the 1980s to cater for groups with special learning difficulties, whether the handicapped, taught in small groups in the classes de perfectionnement attached to some elementary schools, or the non-francophone children of recent immigrants, for whom were devised the beginners’ classes—classes d’initiation (CLIN)—within the context of the special centres set up to this end (Centres d’Études pour la Formation et l’Information sur la Scolarisation des Enfants de Migrants or CEFISEM).

RON HALLMARK

education, secondary: collèges, lycées, etc.

After completing primary education, pupils attend a junior high school (collège) from the age of 11 to 15 or so, and then choose to pursue further study in a senior high school (lycée), or to enter the world of work via, for instance, an apprenticeship training centre (centre de formation de l’apprentissage). For their own part, lycées are of two kinds: general and technological, which offer a three-year course leading to the general and technological baccalauréats; and professional which, in addition to preparing pupils for the professional baccalauréat, provide courses leading to a range of more practical, work-orientated qualifications.

Until 1995, the four years of junior high school study (known as classes 6, 5, 4 and 3 respectively) were divided into two periods (cycles): classes 6 and 5 formed the observation period (cycle d’observation), while classes 4 and 3 were known as the period of career and study choice (cycle d’orientation). In all four years, pupils followed a curriculum determined nationally, consisting of French, mathematics, a first modern language, history and geography, civics, life and earth sciences, technology, music, and physical education. Physical sciences and a second foreign language were added in classes 4 and 3, together with a choice of options from Latin, Greek, extra technology or extra modern language teaching.

However, the 1990s are witnessing a major reform of the collèges. A pilot scheme to this effect was launched in 1994–5 in 368 schools across the country, and all other institutions were to follow suit in 1995–6. On this basis the progressive renewal of the four-year cycle will be complete in 1998–9.

The aims are to make the curriculum more flexible and more responsive to individual needs, and to provide appropriate extra teaching support for pupils in difficulty, thereby keeping pupils in the mainstream of the system as long as possible. To this end, the two cycles are transformed into three: class 6 becomes the observation period, with special arrangements for remedial teaching for pupils in difficulty, and a focus on the consolidation of basic skills and knowledge; classes 5 and 4 are henceforth the period of more developed learning (cycle d’approfondissement), where a more flexible timetable will enable greater individual choice; and class 3 becomes the period of career and study guidance (cycle d’orientation), where resources will be put into a major counselling and information effort. The redefinition of the cycles involves a delay in the timing of crucial decisions on a pupil’s progress (proceed, repeat the year, choice of study/career path, such as via the ‘general’ stream in the lycée, or the less highly rated technological stream, or professional studies).

A diploma (the brevet des collèges) marks the successful completion of junior high school studies. It is awarded on the basis of marks gained in classes 4 and 3, together with written examinations in French, maths and history/geography.

Pupils able and willing to continue their studies in a general and technological high school (lycée général et technologique) do so with the aim of achieving the broad-based diploma awarded at the end of three years of further study, the baccalauréat. This aims to provide a good general education, as well as to enable successful candidates to embark upon higher education. An initial year (known as seconde) based upon common core subjects, to which are added options chosen by the student, is the prelude to increasing specialization over a further two years (première and terminale) in terms of one of the three general subject categories (literary studies, economics and social studies, and science) or four defined technological areas (industrial science and technology, laboratory science and technology, medical sciences, tertiary-sector science and technology). The curriculum remains broadly based throughout, however: even in terminale, a specialist in mechanical engineering (within the general area of industrial science and technology) must cope with maths, history/geography, a foreign language, philosophy, and physical education, in addition to his or her chosen specialism.

The lycée professionnel (formerly, lycée d’enseignement professionnel and, before that, collège d’enseignement technique) is open mainly to students from class 3 of the collèges who wish, or have been advised or directed, to seek practical qualifications which will give direct entry to the job market. To this end, two-year sandwich courses lead to the Certificat d’Aptitude Professionnelle (CAP) or the Brevet d’Études Professionnelles (BEP). After this point, however, it is possible to go on to attempt a baccalauréat professionnel, whose twenty-nine specialisms lead directly to the world of work; or, indeed, by taking a year’s reconversion course, to take a technological baccalauréat. It should also be pointed out that some students take advantage of their professional baccalauréat to follow courses in higher education, particularly in advanced technical departments (sections de techniciens supérieurs—see below).

Student numbers in the lycées have increased dramatically over the last forty years of the twentieth century, from 800,000 in 1960 to more than 2.3 million in 1995. This expansion looks set to continue, in view of the national objective of bringing 80 per cent of the age group to baccalauréat level by the year 2000 (in 1995, almost 63 per cent of the age group achieved the diploma). Hence efforts have been made to adapt what was originally a general, cultural diet for the elite to the needs of much wider audience. In 1969, the baccalauréat technique (renamed technologique in 1986) was created, and the baccalauréat professionnel was introduced the same year. The reform of the lycée curriculum, launched in 1992 and completed in 1995, should be viewed in the same perspective. The trend is now for lycées to become polyvalents, that is to say to to develop all three strands within the same institution, so as to facilitate interchange and mitigate the relative disfavour which which the non-generalist strands (especially the ‘professional’ strand) are viewed.

Mention should also be made of two branches of higher education to which some lycées are host: the sections de techniciens supérieurs (STS) and the classes préparatoires aux grandes écoles (CPGE). The former provide two-year courses leading to an advanced technical diploma in a range of options, sometimes linked to the needs of local industry, and designed to produce qualified supervisors and middle managers. The latter prepare candidates for the competitive examinations upon which recruitment to the elitist preserve of the grandes écoles is based.

Since the 1989 Education Act, all schools are required to produce an institutional plan showing how the sum total of their activities— curricular and extracurricular—combine to make up the school’s distinctive contribution to achieving the aims and objectives laid down nationally. Such a plan, if sufficiently impressive, may ensure additional funding.

RON HALLMARK

education, the state and the church

The French constitution guarantees equal access to educational opportunity for all citizens. Public education is free and secular, and its provision is an obligation upon the state. Yet, in the 1990s, almost 1 in 5 children is taught in a private—that is to say, for the most part (92 per cent) Catholic—school. Nowadays, despite traditional antagonism between the public and private sectors, the vast majority of private institutions enjoy a contractual relationship with the state, which gives them access to state funding. Given transfers at crucial moments of failure, educational progression or choice of stream, it has been estimated that as many as 1 in 3 pupils may, during their school careers, take advantage of the ‘freedom of choice’ represented by the private sector (l’école libre).

Until the Revolution, virtually all education was under the control of the church. The abolition of this monopoly in 1789 heralded more than a century of strife, as the state strove to take control of education in the face of stern opposition from the church, which considered teaching as one of its basic missions. Successive governments laboured to build up the capital and manpower resources, building and opening schools, and setting up training colleges for lay teachers (écoles normales) where anticlericalism was rife. While the church’s authority was on the whole consolidated under the Restoration and the First and Second Empire, state control was eventually established under the Third Republic, in a series of measures associated in particular with Jules Ferry, minister from 1879 to 1883. In 1881–2, primary education was made compulsory, and free state schooling was introduced. In 1886, it was ruled that state education was to be dispensed exclusively by lay teachers, and religious education was replaced in the curriculum by ‘moral and civic education’. Hence, the framework for a basic free, secular, compulsory state system was in place well before the formal separation of church and state in 1905 and the closure of the religious schools run by teaching Orders.

Catholic education did not disappear, however: two acts of parliament, the Guizot law (1833, for primary education) and the famous Falloux law of 1850 (for secondary education), had recognized the right of any authorized person or body to open and run a school, and hence endorsed the ‘freedom’ of families to choose the form of education for their children. These provisions remain in force today. Current relationships between the state and private education are regulated by acts of the Fifth Republic (the Debré law of 1959 and the Guermeur law of 1977) which offered private institutions a choice between independence outside the state system (where their income would be derived from fees), complete integration or association by contract. The last of these has been the choice of the overwhelming majority of such institutions. Under the two forms of contract that exist, the state assumes responsibility for the payment of staff salaries and teaching materials, and the competent local authorities (under decentralization) are required to make a contribution to overheads and running costs. In return, the state retains control over staff appointments, curriculum and the creation of new establishments, as places at private schools are counted in terms of the planning of resources. Contracting institutions must guarantee equal opportunity of access for all, irrespective of race or religion.

Antagonism remains deep-seated, however, and intermittently resurfaces. In 1982–4, attempts by the Socialist government to implement President Mitterrand’s election promise to make education ‘a unified, secular public service’ saw battle again joined along traditional lines. The proponents of secularism, led by the Comité National d’Action Laïque (CNAL), restated their opposition to the perpetuation of the ‘dual’ provision fostered by the current system of contracts; the defenders of ‘freedom of choice’, with the Comité National de l’Enseignement Catholique (CNEC) to the forefront, opposed any suggestion of integration or assimilation with the state system. After mass demonstrations by both camps, the proposed legislation was withdrawn as it was proving so socially divisive.

Yet traditional Catholic religious positions are not alone in posing a challenge to secularism in today’s multicultural society. In 1989, when three girls were suspended from school in Creil for wearing the traditional Muslim headscarf (chador) during lessons—on the grounds that this represented a breach of the obligatory secular stance (laïcité), to which all state educational establishments are bound by law—there ensued counter-claims of racial and cultural discrimination. In an attempt to preserve tradition, in such a way as to rebut such claims, and also to cater for the right to freedom of conscience which the Conseil d’État, when consulted, was anxious to affirm, François Bayrou, the government minister, eventually issued a circular distinguishing between ‘discreet’ signs of religious allegiance (which are to be tolerated) and ‘ostentatious symbols’ which, amounting to proselytism, are potentially divisive and are therefore banned. Schools were instructed to incorporate a clause to this effect in their house regulations, though ultimately it was left to heads of schools to police this regulation and pronounce in individual cases.

RON HALLMARK

educational elitism: the grandes écoles

A very distinctive aspect of the French higher education system, the grandes écoles are a range of small, highly selective, mainly independent institutions which exist in parallel to the universities and form the privileged training ground of top politicians, civil servants, and chief executives in modern-day France.

It is difficult to generalize about the grandes écoles because they are both so numerous (well over 150) and so diverse in legal status, specialist fields, regimes and modes of finance. Their dominant role in the late twentieth century does not mean that they are modern foundations. Many of the most prestigious among them date from the nineteenth (or even eighteenth) century: the École des Ponts et Chaussées was founded in 1747, and others go back to the Revolution or the Empire. On the other hand, perhaps the most famous of all, the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), with its awesome reputation for turning out, not only top civil servants, but also senior diplomats, politicians and presidents of the Republic, was established as recently as 1945.

Some establishments are privately financed, others are publicly funded by Ministries of State (Defence, Agriculture, Transport, etc.), while yet others come under public commercial bodies such as the Chambers of Commerce. Some charge fees, some are free, some even confer salaried status upon their entrants, usually subject to an undertaking to enter state employment upon graduation: as fonctionnaires-stagiaires, entrants to the four Écoles Normales Supérieures receive about 8,000 francs per month. Lengths of courses vary (though three years would be the norm), as does the timing of recruitment.

However, various features are shared by most of these institutions. Although they have expanded over the last twenty years, they remain, unlike the universities, small and exclusive, with rarely many more than a thousand or so students. Given the increasing demand for such prestigious studies, and the lure of job prospects upon graduation, they can afford to be highly selective on entry. In most cases, this selection is based upon competitive examinations requiring special preparation, typically in the Classes Préparatoires aux Grandes Écoles (CPGE), which form part of the post-baccalauréat provision in the big lycées and to which entry is itself selective. The CPGE represent two years of intensive, highly competitive and stressful study of one of three main branches of learning—humanities, economics or science—without any guarantee of success. Students often have to—or choose to—repeat a year, and by no means all obtain places in the end; but the jobs to which successful candidates may aspire at the end of study in a grande école—senior, highly paid, executive posts in the civil service or the private sector—are such that increasing numbers of applicants come forward each year.

As well as being small and selective, the grandes écoles are also professionally orientated. Their statutes are often defined, not in terms of the disciplines they teach, but of the end product: the École Polytechnique, for example, is committed to ‘give its students a general and scientific education which will equip them for highly qualified positions of responsibility in the scientific, technical or economic sectors in state civil or military departments and the public services, and more generally in the activities of the Nation as a whole’. Active professionals and industrialists assist in the design of syllabuses and in their updating, and are often involved in the teaching. Practical placements form an essential part of the curriculum in many cases. The value of an individual school’s diploma, for which, in addition, each graduand is ranked in order within the year’s cohort, is assessed partly in terms of the jobs and salaries commanded by its graduates. A fierce sense of loyalty is engendered within the student bodies, which, after graduation, continue to pursue activities on behalf of the institution through networks of alumni.

Amid all the diversity indicated above, it is possible to identify certain significant groupings. The four Écoles Normales Supérieures, which admit some 3,000 students in all, train top-level researchers, teachers and more generally administrators in a range of basic disciplines (including literature and the arts, the sciences and technology). The engineering schools (École Nationale Supérieure des Mines, des Ponts et Chaussées, des Télécommunications, etc.) provide senior managers and technical experts for the public services and for industry. The title ‘engineer’ is prestigious and highly sought-after in France, and the right to confer this title is strictly regulated. L’École des Hautes Études Commerciales (HEC) and the various Écoles Supérieures de Commerce train business executives, accountants, financial consultants, etc. Finally, a clutch of establishments prepare their students specifically (though not exclusively) for careers in government administration: the ENA (referred to above) and the nine Instituts d’Études Politiques.

With their unabashed elitist approach, the upper-middle-class bias of their social composition, their tendency to teach conformist attitudes, and their capacity for internal self-perpetuation, the grandes écoles have come under increasing criticism in the 1980s and 1990s. There is no doubt about their influence in French society, however, or the stranglehold they have on senior posts in both the public and private sectors. A survey in 1993 revealed that, in the 200 leading French companies, 73 per cent of the top executives were products of the grandes écoles; almost 50 per cent of them were diplomates of either ENA or the École Polytechnique.

RON HALLMARK

electronic revolution

The electronic revolution affects many areas of French life. According to President Chirac, its most important realization, the information revolution, will be the third such major upheaval for mankind, following the agricultural and the industrial revolutions. The Minitel telephone-based information system, started early, is popular and widespread; computer-based learning has been massively supported in education; in entertainment, television, video, games and CDs have become normal features of everyday life; the information society—bringing together information, entertainment and the exchange of opinion and channelled through new information highways—is being prepared through specific government (and to a lesser extent commercial) action. Perhaps more so than in other countries, ‘language engineering’ has played a significant part: the specific problems and role of French language have been at the forefront of official concern, although French is inventing neologisms to cope.

The French Teletel network, Minitel, was formed in 1980 as a response to Prestel, but followed an original approach widening provision from business to the general public. France Télécom provided minicomputers free to telephone subscribers, and incidentally gave massive support to the French computer industry. Individuals and commercial enterprises were encouraged to set up their own servers, and are paid for whatever service they make available with money collected on their behalf through phone bills. The approach had enormous success, with 6.5 million interactive terminals by 1995, and 25,000 on-line services ranging from newspapers to bulletin boards, from sober bank transactions and the booking of tickets for trains or concerts to messageries roses, enabling usually erotic pictures and messages to be anonymously accessed and exchanged—with no public outcry. Giving access to everybody and familiarizing users with computer screens, Minitel popularized the electronic revolution and brought home how useful and indeed interesting and entertaining technology could be. Even by 1985, some 42 per cent of Minitel time was devoted to games and messages, while during 1994 the French made 1,913 million calls, used the system for 110 million hours and spent 6.6 billion francs. However, the system has remained almost exclusively French, and hopes of France leading the world were not realized.

Computer-based learning has been massively supported in education: computers have been given to schools, and widespread training offered to teachers. As in most countries, however, the incredible speed of change has reduced the value of early large-scale initiatives, and computers have not yet become either required or integral parts of the learning process. In entertainment, television, video and games have become normal features of everyday life. Cable and satellite television have provoked the creation of new French TV channels, although much that is on offer is in English. CD-Roms, both for educational and entertainment purposes, and both audio and audiovisual, have followed earlier forms of electronic diffusion. Laser shows have transformed Paris for official celebrations as well as for concerts. Arcade games and consoles are enormously popular with the young, and sales of multimedia PCs are booming.

Government and other public authorities, rather than private industry, have led the way, developing information highways—cable, satellite transmission and the Internet. The French public has become used to many outward signs of electronic technology—constantly changing municipal notice-boards in every town’s pedestrian area, driverless trains on light passenger railways, destination boards on buses. Behind these outward signs, industrial and particularly transport technology is heavily dependent on computerization and such international developments as the Global Positioning System. But the French tradition of high protectionist barriers and centralized methods of control has offended European competition laws, and more significantly may find it difficult to withstand the anarchic explosion of the Internet or the commercial pressures from non-French manufacturers.

Perhaps more so than in other countries, ‘language engineering’ has been a significant element in the electronic revolution. The stakes are high: President Chirac is on record in December 1995 as saying, ‘if, in the new media, our language, our programmes, our inventions are not significantly present our future generations will be both economically and culturally marginalized’. Language engineering is the concern of the language industries, concerned with the creation and manipulation of (monolingual and multilingual) text, documents of any size from memos to encyclopedias, mixtures of text and images. These industries have many profitable outlets: simple word processing, office management, automatic translation, full-text information held in data banks, and a whole range of software for finding it. Most of these applications, and particularly the databases, use American English, and indeed the enormous economic and commercial power of American industry and media across the world impose the use of this lingua franca; consequently much effort in France has been deployed on language planning. As far as possible, government organizations like the Délégation Générale à la Langue Française must discover French terms to replace American ones and enforce their use; American must be translated to French in every aspect of communication media; and as far as possible French software and hardware should be supported. There have been some successes: the ubiquitous suffix -ique (informatique, bureautique, robotique) is fruitful in neologisms; words like logiciel (software), convivial (user-friendly), baladeur (walkman) have become common usage. But the inventiveness of people has another outlet: writing on screens, as in Minitel, has created a whole new shorthand and spelling, with k replacing qu, c replacing c’est, and words telescoped: oqp stands for occupé (busy).

DENNIS AGER

Elkabbach, Jean-Pierre

b. 1937, Oran, Algeria

Broadcaster

He is an eminence grise of French television, where he became director of news at Antenne 2 in 1977. It was during an interview with him in the run-up to the 1978 legislative elections that Georges Marchais lost his cool and endeared himself to much of the audience by instructing him to ‘Shut up, Elkabbach!’ (‘Taisezvous, Elkabbach!’—later to be the title of Elkabbach’s autobiography). Eased out under the Socialists, he has since 1992 been director of the channels France 2 and France 3.

KEITH READER

See also: television

Elle

Women’s magazine

Elle has been one of the most innovative of French women’s weekly magazines since 1945. It was founded in 1945, by the Défense de la France group, upon the initiative of its first editor, Hélène Gordon-Lazareff, who had returned from the USA to an effervescent France which was keen to consume, communicate and be entertained. Gordon-Lazareff saw it as her mission to establish an haul de gamme (luxury) women’s magazine to respond to these three desires. Hence, from the start, Elle represented an original women’s magazine in terms of the luxury quality of paper, use of quadrochromatic colour, state-of-the-art printing techniques, the use of well-known photographers to produce sophisticated images and the frank, humorous tone with which all subjects deemed female were discussed. In the 1950s, Elle saw itself as the ‘bible’ for women who aspired to be in the forefront of social, cultural and political change: the typical Elle reader was young, middle-class and Parisbased. By 1960, Elle’s annual circulation figure stood at over 650,000.

As a self-proclaimed progressive magazine, after May 1968 Elle adopted the less radical, feminist ideas surrounding women’s sexuality and personal liberation and began campaigning in favour of an extension of women’s rights: for abortion/contraception; for extended maternity rights and facilities for public child care; for the employment rights of part-time workers, etc. Not only did Elle’s campaigning take place within its pages but also through organized events of which the show-piece was the États Généraux de la Femme, held at Versailles in November 1970. This congress brought together politicians, academics, trade unionists, doctors, civil servants and employers to discuss a number of themes chosen as a result of a nationwide survey, organized by the magazine, to establish women’s foremost concerns. The aim of the congress was to present those in power with a detailed picture of the aspirations of French women. Undoubtedly, though, it constituted an effective means of marketing the magazine beyond its established Parisian readership and the magazine achieved high sales between 1970 and 1974.

By 1975, gloomy economic forecasts and competition from the specialist periodical press and other media led to plummeting sales and hence the adoption of another marketing formula—that of the unisex magazine, which included news stories, political and economic analyses, serious cultural features and reviews. This approach failed, however, and the magazine’s takeover by the Filipacchi group marked a return, at the beginning of the 1980s, to the tried and tested formula of femininity. In the 1980s and 1990s, Elle survived in a fiercely competitive market, not due to success in France but because of its foreign editions which now number twenty-five. It no longer bears the hallmark of originality and innovation it once did.

KHURSHEED WADIA

Éluard, Paul

b. 1895, St-Denis, Paris;

d. 1952, Charenton-le-Pont

Poet, real name Eugène Grindel

He has the distinction of being the foremost poet of the Surrealist movement and the most celebrated of the Resistance poets. In keeping with the objectives of Surrealism, his poetry abounds in images, and yet the effect of the poetry is virtually ‘classical’ because of Éluard’s gift for elegant control and sensuousness. Almost all of the poetry celebrates the fascination of Woman and the erotic power she exercises over men. One often has the impression that Éluard is continuing the grand tradition of troubadour poetry. In the years of the Resistance, the subject matter of the poems widens to include the themes of fraternity and liberty. The enormous quantity of poetry written over a period of thirty-five years is collected in the Pléiade edition of his Poésies complètes (1968). Éluard was a close friend of Picasso and knew most of the Cubist and Surrealist painters well; they often illustrated his works.

WALTER A.STRAUSS

See also: poetry

employment

In the postwar period, France has undergone a major transformation both in the composition of its workforce and in the nature of the employment which the economy offers the population. From an economy in which the majority of workers were men, working fulltime in stable jobs, often in industry or agriculture, France has moved to a position in which women are as likely as men to be employed in the labour market, the service sector provides two-thirds of all jobs and the notion of a stable job for life is becoming a thing of the past.

In the first years after World War II, a significant proportion of the French working population were still engaged in agriculture. Indeed, France remained a much more agricultural country than its main economic competitors. However, the rapid industrialization which the country experienced in the 1950s drew large numbers of individuals away from their farming activities and into the towns and factories. This pool of indigenous, cheap unskilled labour was a major boost to French industrial output and prosperity in this period. That said, indigenous labour was not sufficient to respond to the massive labour requirements of the country at that time and the French economy relied heavily on migrant workers. Alongside this industrialization of the French economy, an equally important change was taking place which itself demanded new workers. This was the tertiarization of the economy, meaning the rapid expansion of service-sector jobs in shops, offices, schools, hospitals and the like. Many of the new jobs created in the service sector in the 1960s and 1970s were taken by women. Therefore, during the years of expansion, new categories of workers, in particular women and migrants, were called upon to make up the shortfall of indigenous male workers for the expanding French economy. However, when the world recession hit France in 1974 and unemployment began its inexorable rise, these new categories of workers did not simply return whence they had come, be that another country or the ‘kitchen sink’. The active population of France had undergone a radical and irreversible transformation.

The only problem concerning employment in the 1950s and 1960s had been labour shortage. All this changed dramatically after 1974, when unemployment became an integral, if unwelcome part of French life. From an average of 200,000–300,000 during the years of economic growth, by 1976 the number of unemployed had reached the 1 million mark, by 1981 it had reached 1.5 million, until by the 1990s the figure was stuck at over 3 million. During the first years of recession after 1974, it was thought by the government that a return to growth would immediately reduce the unemployment figures to acceptable levels. However, as the 1970s and 1980s wore on, it became clear that two factors inhibited significant reductions in unemployment, even when economic growth returned. The first was the phenomenon of ‘jobless growth’. If the rate of economic growth is strong, but nevertheless remains below the level of productivity increases in the economy, significant numbers of jobs will not be created and therefore such growth will be ‘jobless’. Second, even if economic growth does create jobs, these do not necessarily keep pace with the increase in the number of those seeking jobs.

Indeed, there is a certain amount of debate concerning the solutions to the unemployment question in France. Right-wing politicians and commentators often argue that French labour costs are too high and that these costs result from the minimum wage (SMIC) and the cost to employers of social security contributions. This acts as a disincentive for companies to take on workers. Most politicians, however, pin their hopes for a reduction in unemployment on France becoming more successful and competitive in the world. In the meantime, successive governments have set up schemes to encourage employers to hire the unemployed, particularly young people, by relieving them of the social security contributions which they pay on behalf of their employees. Although unemployment in and of itself is a serious social problem, the unevenness of its distribution throughout the French population worsens matters. Geographically speaking, traditional industrial regions such as the north and the east of the country are most badly affected. In social terms, women, immigrants, the unskilled, the young and the over-50s are all disproportionately affected by unemployment.

For those who manage to remain in a job, the experience of work has changed dramatically since the 1970s. Whereas in the years of expansion jobs were permanent, and often for life, the economic crisis led to the development of ‘flexibility’ in the labour market with a wide range of differing conditions for labour being on offer. Although a core of employees with secure long-term jobs stills exists in France, an increasing proportion of the population find themselves working on short-term contracts and/or as part-time employees. For some, such jobs are merely a temporary expedient, but for others, their entire work life consists in going from one insecure job, or ‘petit boulot’, to another. Furthermore, the average person’s working life is becoming shorter as young people stay on in education for longer periods of time and individuals continue to retire earlier. This generational concentration in the distribution of work, however, coupled with an increasingly aged population, means that an ever-dwindling active population is keeping a growing army of the inactive, whether young or old.

JAN WINDEBANK

Équipe, L’

L’Équipe, France’s best-known and oldest sports newspaper (it celebrated its fiftieth birthday in February 1996), is published daily except Sunday and has a weekly magazine which is also devoted exclusively to sport. With a readership often in excess of half a million, L’Équipe, which uses the most advanced technology available, is noted for the range of sports that it covers and for its esoteric style, often relying heavily on specialized vocabulary, literary allusions, pun and wordplay.

IAN PICKUP

Ernaux, Annie

b. 1940, Lillebonne

Writer

Ernaux’s literary corpus, initiated by the 1974 novel Cleaned Out (Les Armoires vides), focuses particularly on the theme of social class. The only daughter of working-class parents, a number of the autobiographical fictions she published in the 1980s—Positions (La Place), Une Femme (A Woman) and La Femme gelée (The Frozen Woman)—address the gulf between the ‘classe dominée’ into which Ernaux was born and the ‘classe dominante’ to which university education permitted her to accede, and the consequences of the kind of social metamorphosis Ernaux herself underwent. While she is by no means a militant feminist, gender-role formation and (female) sexuality also feature as key themes in Ernaux’s writing, dominating Ce qu’ils disent ou rien (What They Say or Nothing), published in 1977, and 1991’s more recent Passion simple (Simple Passion). One of France’s leading contemporary women writers, Ernaux’s latest work includes Journal du dehors (A Diary of the Outside) and La Honte (Shame).

ALEX HUGHES

erotic writing

In the decades following the war, authors of erotica had to contend with a prolongation of the moral order imposed by Vichy, and with a climate of repression which made publication problematic. From the mid-1970s onward, the situation became less restrictive, and in the late twentieth century French erotic literature appears to be flourishing. Any review of postwar erotico-literary production in France needs to focus upon those texts which, if they occasionally or even regularly employ the motifs of commercial pornography, nevertheless transcend the limitations of a crudely pornographic model (see Frappier-Mazur 1988). Additionally, such a review must take account, not only of the sociohistorical landmarks punctuating the evolution of the erotico-literary genre and the publishers associated with that genre, but also of the diverse ‘categories’ of erotica it has engendered.

In the introduction to her very useful anthology, Écrire d’amour, Claudine Brécourt- Villars isolates laws passed in 1930, 1939, 1949, 1958 and 1967 as generative of the controls to which the publication of erotica was subjected in France for the first thirty years of the postwar period (Brécourt-Villars 1985). She cites also, as significant moments in the evolution of the erotico-literary field, 1964 (a year which witnessed a ‘new erotic offensive’) and 1970 (the year in which an ‘unprecedented wave of erotica’ burst upon the literary scene). Her essay makes the further point that if literary erotica managed to survive in postwar France, this was because it was defended by the country’s intelligentsia. This fact is evidenced by the enthusiasm for the works of Sade displayed in the writings of authors such as Beauvoir, Georges Bataille, Blanchot and Lacan. Indicative also of intellectual support for erotico-literary freedom is the way in which public and literary figures voiced their opposition, in 1945 and 1973, to the prosecutions of the Denoël publishing house (Henry Miller’s French publishers) and of Régine Deforges, whose maison d’édition L’Or du Temps specialized in erotica.

Deforges is not the only specialist publisher whose name springs to mind in the context of literary erotica. Éditeurs in this field include Éric Losfeld, a Surrealist who published erotic works clandestinely (‘sous le manteau’) and officially; Claude Tchou, whose Cercle du Livre Précieux series included erotic ‘classics’ and new texts; and Jean-Jacques Pauvert, whose efforts to bring out new editions of the works of Sade encountered legal obstacles in the 1950s. Yet other publishers specializing in the erotico-literary domain are Christian Bourgois, La Jeune Parque, Spengler, and Zulma. As Brécourt-Villars indicates, after 1964 mainstream maisons d’édition such as Gallimard also began to publish erotic fiction (Brécourt-Villars 1985).

For review purposes, we can divide postwar erotic writing into two key subsections— male-and female-authored erotic discourse— and subdivide these bodies of writing into a further series of categories. According to Anne- Marie Dardigna’s study Les Châteaux d’Éros, a good many postwar, male-authored, heterosexually oriented erotic texts—the creations of writers such as Leiris, Klossowski and Mandiargues—associate the erotic with the mystical and the metaphysical, and/or privilege quasi-religious motifs such as transgression and profanation (Dardigna 1980). The fusion of the erotic and the metaphysical/spiritual is likewise a central theme in Bataille’s influential 1957 essay Eroticism (L’Erotisme), as it is in his own prewar erotic tales. The first modern writers to connect sexual liberation to an affirmation du Mal, suggests Dardigna, were the Surrealists. While most of the eroticoliterary works emerging from the Surrealist movement predated 1945, postwar texts associated with it include André Pieyre de Mandiargues’s tales of sadism Le Musée Noir (The Black Museum), published in 1946 and Leiris’s Aurora, which appeared in the same year. In these works, and in later erotic texts such as Klossowski’s Roberte ce soir (Roberte This Evening) and Robbe-Grillet’s La Maison de rendez-vous, the female body (argues Dardigna) regularly becomes the key locus of ritualized profanation and obliteration. Clearly, the same is not true of texts in which male homosexuality is the focus. In the immediate postwar period, the gay writers whose work focused most explicitly on masculine homoeroticism were Genet and Jouhandeau: neither offers wholly empowering visions of gay male love/sexuality. Genet’s accounts of homoerotic transgression were long viewed as radical texts, but in recent times critics have addressed the way in which their images of homosexual abjection mesh with heterosexual prejudice (see Rifkin 1995; Robinson 1995). In and after the late 1960s, texts by authors such as Renaud Camus, Yves Navarre, Tony Duvert and Hervé Guibert offered constructions of gay sexuality which departed from the model contained in the writings of Genet.

Within the generic field of postwar women’s erotic discourse, various subcategories exist. On the one hand, there are those texts which reveal scant evidence of a ‘politicization’ of women’s erotic experience. Such works generally refrain from questioning gender norms/relations, and tend to employ the motifs of male-authored erotica/pornography (see Hughes and Ince 1995). This body of writing is exemplified by Pauline Réage’s Story of O (a pseudonymous work which appeared in 1954 and whose female authorship remains in doubt) and the Emmanuelle series, launched in 1960. On the other hand, the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s witnessed the publication of a series of more complex female-authored erotico-literary productions. These works place women’s eroticism against the backdrop of social and gender relations (see Frappier-Mazur 1988), and/or attest to a feminist awareness initiated by the publication of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and reinforced by post-May 1968, neo-feminist reconsiderations of questions of sexuality, language and representation. Often exercises in textual innovation, they interrogate, implicitly or explicitly, sexual power relations, erotic norms and the modalities of their representation. Among this group of texts may be included the accounts of lesbian love offered by Violette Leduc and by the more radical Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig; Duras’s The Seated Man in the Passage (L’Homme assis dans le couloir); as well as Christiane Rochefort’s Warrior’s Rest (Le Repos du guerrier) and the highly ironic, male-narrated Quand tu vas chez les femmes (Excursions into Womankind). Other contemporary women authors associated with the erotico-literary domain are: Vanessa Duriès, whose allegedly autobiographical account of S/ M love, The Ties That Bind (Le Lien), was published shortly before her death in 1993; Alina Reyes, best known, perhaps, for the erotic novels The Butcher (Le Boucher) and Behind Closed Doors (Derrière la porte); and Benoîte Groult.

ALEX HUGHES

Etcherelli, Claire

b. 1934, Bordeaux

Writer

Etcherelli’s best-known novel, Élise or the Real Life (Élise ou la vraie vie) was published in 1967 and won the Prix Femina. In realist mode, it tells of the relationship between its heroine and an Algerian, Arezki, which forms in the factory where both characters work and develops against the backdrop of the Algerian war. Key themes/experiences charted in the text are class identity/oppression, sexism, racism and the growth of political awareness. In the 1970s, Etcherelli published two other novels— A propos de Clémence (About Clémence) and Un Arbre voyageur (The Travelling Tree)—which focus on postwar French society, and also edited a volume of anti-racist poems.

ALEX HUGHES

Europe 1

Radio station

Created in 1955, this general-interest station (long wave and FM) was one of the big three radios périphériques, tolerated by the French state, but transmitting from the Sarre, just outside the national borders. Its innovative style (news flashes, variety shows and game programmes involving listeners) has influenced all other stations over the years. Although its audience share is waning, it still attracts at least 10 per cent of France’s listeners. In 1986 it set up a subsidiary popular music station, Europe 2 (FM), which attracts over 5 per cent of the national audience. Its studios are at 26 bis, rue François ler, 75008 Paris.

ALAN PEDLEY

European economic integration

France is at the core of the European economic integration project. This process finds its origins in a political strategy aimed at avoiding conflicts in Europe, and it has gained impetus from the 1986 Single European Act and the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. The liberal ideology and economic strategies which have underpinned recent developments in the European Union are seen as having heavy social costs, however, and enthusiasm for integration has cooled significantly.

The European economic integration project has always been overtly political—the French ‘fathers’ of Europe, such as Monnet and Schuman, who initiated the first steps through the European Coal and Steel Community treaty in 1951, sought to avoid the economic isolation of defeated Germany and a repeat of the errors of the Versailles Treaty after World War I. The signing of the Rome Treaty was followed by the coming to power of de Gaulle in 1958, and the French attitude to European integration became quite complex, with France staunchly promoting national independence within a ‘Europe of States’, but continuing to advocate economic integration for the benefit of French economic interests. Traditions of protectionism started to be dismantled with the abolition of internal EC duties in 1968, but the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) ran into difficulties with de Gaulle’s refusal to agree to agricultural policies not acceptable to French farmers. During the 1970s, European economic integration made relatively little progress except via the emergence of new tools of political co-operation, such as the European Council and the creation in 1979 of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. With de Gaulle out of power, France also accepted the UK’s membership. Public opinion was then highly favourable to European economic integration. During the 1980s, France again found itself at the forefront of European economic integration efforts. After a brief period of coolness, President Mitterrand firmly backed European integration as the only way to achieve an autonomous economic space, accepting the Single European Act in 1986 (which forced sea changes in French trade and administrative practices) and supporting the Maastricht Treaty in 1992.

Europe has benefited the French economy, helping to switch and develop export markets in industrial sectors and services and helping to develop French agriculture into the most powerful agriculture in Europe. Since the mid- 1980s the pursuit of European integration has encouraged governments to apply a liberal economic strategy combining anti-inflation policy, rigorous budgetary strategy, high interest rates and accelerated deregulation. The relentless pursuit of this strategy, dubbed La Pensée unique, is widely held responsible for France’s social ills, especially its very high unemployment and the weakening of social cohesion (the fracture sociale), as well as for putting a question mark over the future of French ‘Public Services’ and its welfare system. Despite this deep unease and outright rejection by a significant part of the population, governments have persevered in their policies, so that France can be alongside Germany in the first wave of countries to adopt the single European currency, the Euro, in 1999.

FRANÇOIS NECTOUX

See also: Delors, Jacques

European Union

France played a founding role in early European integration and has since aimed to lead the development of European union, usually in partnership with Germany, and arguably to her own advantage. Despite general political support for integration, French European policy has occasionally provoked some domestic division between partisans of supranational integration and supporters of a more Gaullist ‘Europe of Nations’.

As a signatory of the Treaty of Rome (1957), France had already participated in the Council of Europe (1949) and the ECSC (1950). Although lack of French support sabotaged a proposed European Defence Community (1954), France fostered rapprochement with Germany to prevent future conflict, and the Common Market was easily ratified by parliament, only the Communists voting against en bloc. Under the presidency of de Gaulle (1958–69), France adopted a critical attitude towards European integration, basing her policy on the primacy of national sovereignty. The French Plan Fouchet (1962) argued for a ‘Europe of States’ driven by high politics rather than by economic and technical convergence and with a ‘European’ rather than ‘Atlanticist’ character. The failure of this vision, French withdrawal from NATO (1966) and de Gaulle’s vetoes of British entry (1963, 1967) slowed integration, but reinforced France’s dominance (with Germany) at the heart of policy.

In the 1970s and 1980s, after Pompidou’s ‘Oui’ to the UK (1973), partnerships between Giscard d’Estaing and Schmidt (who reputedly conversed in English on European matters) and Mitterrand and Kohl furthered the growth of the Community. During 1985–93, the presidency of the Commission was assumed by Jacques Delors (previously French Finance and Economics minister and, subsequently, a potential presidential candidate), further heightening French public awareness of Europe. In 1992 debate over Maastricht reopened domestic political divisions between integrationists, and those fearing loss of sovereignty (notably the Socialist Jean-Pierre Chevènement and the neo-Gaullists Philippe Séguin and Charles Pasqua of the RPR). The Treaty was accepted by parliament, supported by the Left and the Centre-Right UDF, but with divided neo-Gaullists mainly abstaining. This split in the Centre-Right coalition was echoed in the referendum, which accepted Maastricht by only 1 per cent.

France has benefited from her status as a founding member of the European Union and has used her central role to derive advantage from European policies: French agriculture, iron and steel, aerospace and the regions have profited in particular. France has also been conscious of the symbolic and practical benefits to be gained from aspects of European union, such as the siting of parliament in Strasbourg, the predominance of French administrative procedures in the European Commission and the major role of the French language in much European bureaucracy. Under the Chirac presidency, latent Euroscepticism has been encouraged by difficulties in shadowing the German economy and by disquiet over aspects of GATT, ERM and Bosnia, although governments have seemed committed to traditional French support for Europe.

HUGH DAUNCEY

Eurovision Song Contest

The much-maligned Eurovision Song Contest, which in its early days provided some of the first live, trans-Europe television links, has seen a number of French successes, including those of André Claveau, with Delanoë and Giraud’s 1958 Dors mon amour (Sleep My Love), and Isabelle Aubret, first with Vic and Valade’s Un premier amour (A First Love) in 1962, and then with La Source (The Spring) in 1968, by Djian, Bonnet and Faure. Another notable French success was that of France Gall with Serge Gainsbourg’s Poupée de cire, poupée de son (Wax Doll, Rag Doll) in 1965.

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

Eustache, Jean

b. 1938, Pessac;

d. 1981, Paris

Director

Eustache’s suicide deprived France of one of its major film-makers. The documentary style of his approach, as with Le Cochon of 1970, reaches its apotheosis in The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la putain) of 1973. More than three and a half hours of triangular emotional and sexual agonizing, in the literal sense of that word, in the flats and bars of St-Germain-des-Prés give Bernadette Lafont and above all Jean-Pierre Léaud perhaps their greatest roles. The film is an endlessly suggestive epitaph for the ‘generation of May 1968.’

KEITH READER

See also: cinema

Événement du jeudi, L’

Magazine

A weekly news magazine, created by Jean- François Kahn in 1984. Left of centre and iconoclastic, it was the most personalized of news magazines, reflecting its founder’s originality and candour. Investigative journalism, in-depth dossiers, broad cultural coverage, cartoons and sensational headlines (verging on bad taste) brought success. Initially, editorial freedom was secured by limiting dependence on advertising, setting a high cover price, and involving readers and journalists as shareholders. Financial problems arose in the early 1990s, and in 1995 the arrival of new director and majority shareholder Thierry Verret saved the paper from bankruptcy, and radical changes were introduced. Circulation in 1995 fell to below 170,000 copies per week.

PAM MOORES

existentialism

‘Existentialism’ is the name given to the philosophical, literary and artistic movement centred in postwar Paris. Early signs of the flowering of existentialism that swept French literature, philosophy and art in the wake of the 1940–4 German Occupation first appeared a decade earlier, in French translations of, and commentaries on, writings by the philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Between 1945 and 1949, a range of writers, artists and philosophers, energized by metaphysical questions of identity and the meaning of life, drew on the euphoria of the Liberation and the despair following revelations of the Nazi genocide perpetrated on European Jews and other minorities in order to produce work that can be classed as existentialist. Over the same period, what began as a topic of specialized concern among philosophers evolved into a wider cultural sensibility and fashion.

As if overnight, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus were cast as proponents of a new intellectual movement and as role models of an existentialist chic characterized by a taste for black turtle neck jerseys and smoky subterranean jazz clubs such as Le Tabou in St-Germain des Prés. Debates over Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (L’Être et le néant) and Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe) carried over from the lecture hall to the café where the writer/jazz trumpeter Boris Vian and the cabaret singer/actor Juliette Gréco ruled.

In its narrowest sense, existentialism is a philosophical system whose focuses include human freedom—defined as our capacity to reinvent our own meaning, constantly, via future-oriented projects—and the anguish that accompanies our awareness of it. Broader expressions of postwar existentialism drew not only on key concepts such as being-for-itself, bad faith (that is, the refusal of freedom) and the absurd supplied by the philosophical writings of Sartre and Camus, but also on a mix of literary and philosophical texts concerned with subjective experience from Descartes and Dostoevsky to Kafka and Malraux. A related tradition drew on the writings of Racine, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in order to raise similar questions with regard to the silence, absence and death of God. Where Sartre was steadfastly atheistic, other philosophers such as Gabriel Marcel and Emmanuel Mounier asserted a Christian existentialism.

Literary expressions of postwar existentialism ranged well beyond the meditations on the human condition contained in Sartre’s ‘Roads to Freedom’ trilogy and Camus’s The Plague (La Peste). Samuel Beckett’s early fiction in French—Molloy, Malone Dies (Malone meurt) and The Unnameable (L’Innommable)—as well as his theatre, as in Waiting for Godot (En attendant Godot), and that of Eugène Ionesco, such as The Bald Primadonna (La Cantatrice charuve) and The Chairs (Les Chaises), often pushed this meditation to the point of laughter, especially when the vision that grounded this laughter was one of meaninglessness. Among the poets of the period associated to a greater or lesser degree with an existentialist sensibility, Francis Ponge’s 1942 The Nature of Things (Le Parti pris des choses) drew on Husserl’s notion of a return to things in themselves, while René Char evolved from a figure of wartime resistance into a devoted reader of Heidegger. In the tradition of experimentation linked to Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud and Henri Michaux used word and image to explore the fluid boundaries of identity, space and place through automatism, travel and drugs.

Artists and sculptors likewise contributed to the new postwar existentialist sensibility. Where Jean Fautrier completed ‘Hostages’, a series of bas-relief portraits that evoked the sombre violence of the Occupation, Jean Dubuffet used thick oil paste to depict human figures that emerged directly from the elements of their physical environment. The striking results mixed an imagery of caricature with a sophisticated use of tone and texture with ties to primitivism, art brut and outsider art. The elongated human figures on heavy pedestals sculpted by Alberto Giacometti came closest to conveying the pained sense of existentialist subjectivity set into the ground of being. A similar heaviness was enhanced by anonymity in sculptures by Germaine Richier, whose faceless figures seemed paralysed in mid-gesture by an oppressive space that closed in on them.

Among writers, thinkers and artists associated with existentialism, differences of philosophical and literary origin were soon exacerbated by political and ideological divergences. Sartre, in particular, found himself increasingly isolated, as his defence of Soviet Communism under Joseph Stalin set him at odds first with Camus and later with long-time philosophical colleagues Raymond Aron and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Between 1945 and 1960, the Sartrean programme of committed writing (literature engagée), set forth in his monthly review Les Temps modernes, established itself as a model of social and political activism whose contributors and fellow travellers addressed issues of gender, as in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (Le Deuxième Sexe), sexuality (the plays and novels of Jean Genet) and race, as in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la terre).

The same activist concerns among proponents of littérature engagée led them over a longer duration to denounce France’s colonial occupation of territories in Indochina, sub-Saharan Africa and—above all—North Africa. Alongside Sartre’s personal role during the 1954–62 period of debate over Algerian self-determination, the propensity to take a public stand extended among sartriens and sartriennes from the 1956 Hungarian revolt and Castro’s takeover of Cuba to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Russia’s 1968 suppression of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, and mid-1970s feminist movement in France. In retrospect, the equation of personal identity and commitment in a public sphere remains a strong legacy of early postwar existentialism among left-wing intellectuals such as Marguerite Duras, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, as well as the new philosophers (nouveaux philosophes) Bernard-Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

STEVEN UNGAR

existentialist theatre

The existentialist theatre, led by the philosophy’s main exponents, Sartre and Camus, involved a series of plays in the 1950s and 1960s which sought to deal with issues arising from major existentialist themes. The Absurd, the need to resist or revolt against it, and the isolation, guilt and need for political responsibility engendered by it, are all preoccupations of Sartre’s and Camus’s theatre works, and also those of Jean Anouilh, who shares some of the themes, if not all of the political opinions, of Sartrean theatre. In terms of theme, the Theatre of the Absurd which followed existentialist theatre in the 1950s and 1960s dealt with similar material; Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (En attendant Godot), for example, is a prime example of the Absurd which features in existentialist philosophy. However, it is in the absurdist form it epitomizes that it exemplifies the radical difference in approach between the Absurdists and their existential predecessors. Whereas the Theatre of the Absurd employed absurdity not only in subject matter but also in structure and form, many existentialist plays rely on a formal, classical structure and dialectic. Hence, while many of Sartre’s plays, such as In Camera (Huis Clos) and Dirty Hands (Les Mains Sales), discuss the issue of choice in defining oneself, the need for recognition and the need to revolt against absurdity, these ideas are formulated in a classical, structured way more reminiscent of Greek tragedy than of a new genre. This is due, partly, to a conscious effort to attempt to establish a new form of tragedy for the modern day, combining the ancient ritual of classical drama (inspiration also for prewar predecessors such as Giraudoux) with a new form of tragedy, based on the necessity of choice discussed from an existentialist viewpoint. Both Sartre and Camus sought to show the tragedy inherent in Absurdity and the necessary tragedy of choice in the life of mankind. However, whereas Sartre believed in the individual’s responsibility to resist Absurdity for himself or herself, Camus believed that mankind should rebel collectively, and that an individual response was inadequate (an idea expressed in Caligula).

Existentialist theatre has always been popular with educated Parisian middle-class audiences, especially at the time the plays were written, many before subsidized state theatre arrived in France, when authors were obliged to rely on the goodwill of one of the private theatres. Perhaps because they used finely crafted language and situations to expound their philosophies and theories, Sartre’s and Camus’s works, even if they presented sometimes less than rounded characters and dramatic techniques, were as successful when first performed as they are today. Certainly during the Occupation and the years which followed, their individualist spirit and strength of purpose and ideals appealed to Parisian audiences. With the advent of state funding, they also saw themselves established as regular members of the subsidized theatre’s popular repertoire, and continue to be performed frequently to this day.

ANNIE SPARKS

Express, L’

Magazine

France’s first weekly news magazine, L’Express was created by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber and Françoise Giroud in 1953, initially as a supplement to Les Échos (owned by the former’s father). Inspired by Pierre Mendès France , L’Express was a politically outspoken, left-wing title, campaigning for peace and decolonization during the wars in Algeria and Indochina. Influential and avant-garde, it was often at the centre of controversy. When Sartre wrote in its columns about Henri Alleg’s account of torture in Algeria at the hands of French paratroopers, the authorities seized the whole issue of the magazine. Famous writers such as Albert Camus and François Mauriac were associated with L’Express, and it served as a training ground for many leading journalists of the late twentieth century: Pierre Viansson-Ponté, Jean Daniel, Claude Imbert, Michèle Cotta…

In 1964 Servan-Schreiber, a great admirer of all things American, decided to transform L’Express, adopting the smaller news magazine format, and a more commercial approach, while toning down political content. Unhappy with the changes, Jean Daniel resigned, and was soon leading rival title, Le Nouvel Observateur. The new L’Express was such a success that it multiplied its sales four-fold in a decade (from 153,000 copies per week in 1965 to 605,000 in 1974); readers were attracted by the clear synthesis of the week’s events. In 1970, Servan-Schreiber began actively to pursue a political career. Fearing for the paper’s independence, Claude Imbert and a number of colleagues (including Georges Suffert, Olivier Chevrillon and Jacques Duquesne) resigned, and were soon launching another rival, Le Point. In 1977 Servan-Schreiber sold L’Express to international financier Sir Jimmy Goldsmith, and with Raymond Aron as political director, it moved markedly to the right. Differences of opinion with Goldsmith over presentation of the leading presidential contenders in 1981 led to the departure of Olivier Todd, Jean-François Revel and Albert du Roy. In 1987 Goldsmith sold to the Compagnie Générale d’Électricité; job losses and a succession of presidents and directors followed. It is a testimony to the resilience and intrinsic merits of the magazine that, despite a turbulent history of internal conflict and changing leadership, it has sustained its popularity.

From the highly original, left-wing title of the 1950s, L’Express has changed to become a conformist, more institutionalized publication in the 1990s, with its reputation for innovation shifting from the political to the commercial sphere. Successful marketing strategies have led to an exceptionally high number of readers taking out subscriptions, often in response to offers of free gifts or discounts (although critics argue that this undermines its image). Readers are predominantly male citydwellers, in middle or senior management positions, and with above average disposable income (an attraction for advertisers). Since 1992, L’Express has collaborated with Le Point, for commercial, technical and administrative purposes, although both titles retain editorial independence and a distinct identity. Circulation of over 560,000 copies per week in 1995, considerably higher than for rival news magazines, confirms its continuing success.

PAM MOORES