F

Fabius, Laurent

b. 1946, Paris

Politician

Academically accomplished and urbane, Fabius joined the Parti Socialiste (PS) in 1974. Viewed as the ambitious ‘spiritual son’ of Mitterrand and his possible successor, he has been a député since 1978 and was Minister for the Budget in 1981–3 and Minister for Industry and Research in 1983–4. As prime minister in 1984–6, he symbolized Mitterrand’s policy U-turn towards market liberalism, although he projected a technocratic image. He was president of the National Assembly from 1988 to 1992. He gained the leadership of the PS in 1992, but was ousted in 1993 following the party’s electoral débâcle. His support for Jospin in the 1995 presidential election was somewhat lukewarm. He remains a leading Socialist.

LAURENCE BELL

See also: parties and movements

Major works

Fabius, L. (1990) C’est en allant à la mer, Paris: Éditions du Seuil (outlines his vision of modern socialism).

——(1995) Les Blessures de la vérité, Paris: Flammarion (attempts to take stock of the Socialists’ experience in government).

family

The notion of the family has two interconnected meanings. The first, more restricted meaning of ‘family’ is the individuals who come together to form a home and is akin to the concept of household. The second refers to the kinship group—that is, those who share the same blood relatives. In the postwar period in France, it is the family as described in the first of these definitions that has undergone major changes.

During the first twenty years after World War II, a certain convergence of family forms took place in France around a model of early marriage and the married couple subsequently living together with two children independently from older generations. Prior to that, on the one hand, the peasantry and petite bourgeoisie in certain regions had tended to restrict their family size to one child, while on the other hand, the large family with four or more children had been common among workingclass families in industrial regions. Furthermore, in the 1950s and 1960s, divorce rates were low, as were rates of employment for mothers of young children. Couples living together without being married were also an extraordinary and morally reprehensible phenomenon. However, the mood of the country at the end of the 1960s, and particularly after May 1968, did much to change notions of the family in France. Indeed, the ‘nuclear’ family model was portrayed as constraining, particularly for young adults and for women.

Thus, from the 1970s onwards, the ‘family’ underwent a number of far-reaching transformations. First, the nature of marriage changed. French couples began to marry later, often after a period of living together or, indeed, they started increasingly not to marry at all, opting instead for unions libres. Furthermore, marriage has become increasingly unstable, with divorce rates standing at around 1 in 3 of all marriages, depending on the region of the country. Although for a certain time it was thought that marriage remained a popular institution because of the number of remarriages after divorce, the marriage rate had gone into decline in France by the 1990s. As a result of increased divorce rates, two new forms of families thus developed: the single- parent family (la famille monoparentale) and the reconstituted family (la famille recomposée), made up of stepbrothers and sisters and/or half-brothers and -sisters. The increase in divorce and marriage instability may be bemoaned by some, but to others it is simply the logical extension of the changes in the nature of marriage in France which took place in the first half of the twentieth century. At that time, marriage became less an institution whose primary function was to perpetuate the family line and transmit property across the generations, and more an institution based entirely on the affection and love existing between two partners. It is clear that the former, traditional model of marriage is more stable than the latter ‘companionship’ family model.

Second, the nuclear family of the immediate postwar period was based on a strict division of labour between husband and wife. For many (if not all) couples, the model of ‘man the breadwinner’ and ‘woman the homemaker’ did hold true. However, from the 1970s onwards, the nature of women’s employment patterns changed. In the 1950s and 1960s, mothers in France tended to give up work on the birth of their children and only return once their children were independent—if they returned at all. From the 1970s onwards, mothers in France began to work for longer and longer proportions of their child-rearing years. Indeed, it was discovered in the 1982 census that it was more common for families with children to have two working parents than to have one. The economic dependence of a woman on a man, the remaining economic function of the nuclear family in the 1950s and 1960s, was therefore disappearing.

The increase in women’s participation in the labour market, coupled with later marriage, the prospect of marriage instability and the greater availability of birth control measures, have all contributed to a steep decline in the birth rate in France since World War II. The ‘baby boom’ after the war in France is well-known. Indeed, until the 1970s the average number of births per French woman was over two. That is, it was at a rate which would not only replace, but rejuvenate, the population. However, from the 1970s onwards, the French birth rate began to drop below the replacement rate of two children per woman. Indeed, demographic decline is a question which has traditionally preoccupied French governments and a number of incentives are provided by the state to make the lives of parents easier and thus encourage them to have larger families. However, some argue that certain of these measures—for example, the state making it easier for mothers to go out to work—encourage the limiting of family size and are thus counterproductive. None the less, it should be stressed that France remains one of the more fecund countries in the European Union.

Although the birth rate has fallen in France, the population continues to grow because of its increased longevity. This more aged population, in which one marriage partner (usually the woman) outlives the other, often lives alone. Kin groups are more dispersed than in the past, which means that elderly relatives are less likely to move in with their children when they are widowed or become infirm. This phenomenon, coupled with later marriage and higher rates of divorce, means that ‘families’ (or, perhaps more accurately, ‘households’) containing a single person are set to become the dominant family form in France, particularly in large towns and cities. However, there is also evidence to suggest that, as grown-up children find it increasingly difficult to find employment, they are staying at home for longer and longer periods with their parents.

JAN WINDEBANK

Fanon, Frantz

b. 1925, Fort-de-France, Martinique;

d. 1961, Bethesda, USA

Psychiatrist and writer

A psychiatrist and writer turned militant nationalist and socialist revolutionary, Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la terre) of 1961 earned him international attention. Converted to the cause of self-determination for Algeria through his work as director of the psychiatric hospital at Blida-Joinville between 1953 and 1956, his understanding of clinical alienation disclosed the depersonalization suffered by Algerians under French colonial rule.

In Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs), in 1952, Fanon had already criticized the human consequences of encounters with racism he had known in Martinique and France by linking the interplay of self-consciousness and recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind and the dynamics of prejudice analysed by Sartre in Anti-Semite and Jew (Réflexions sur la question juive) in order to account for the torment of black women and men subjected to racism under the culture of colonial rule. Long before he advocated militancy and revolution, Fanon denounced racism as part of a more general cultural system to be resisted and overcome.

By the time he died in 1961, Fanon had evolved from a supporter of the négritude movement linked to Aimé Césaire and the journal Présence africaine to a proponent of socialist revolution in Africa whose views on violence were in line with those taken up in the United States by individuals associated with the Black Power movement. After resigning his post at Blida-Joinville, Fanon attended the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris before moving to Tunis, where he wrote for the Algerian National Liberation Front newspaper, El Moudjahid. In 1960, he was appointed ambassador of the Provisional Algerian Government to Ghana. The same year, he contracted leukaemia and completed The Wretched of the Earth before dying outside Washington DC, where he had been sent for medical treatment.

There were, in David Caute’s apt words, three successive Fanons: the de-alienated man of Black Skins, White Masks, the Algerian citizen of A Dying Colonialism (L’An Cinq de la révolution algérienne) of 1959, and the committed socialist revolutionary of The Wretched of the Earth. Among these, the most enduring remains the final Fanon who came to see the ‘wretched of the earth’ of Third World peasantry alluded to in the opening line of the Internationale as the class of authentic revolution in Africa. Renewed interest in Fanon’s writings, in evidence since the mid-1980s has resituated them with regard to theories of the post-colonial and a revised politics of identity.

STEVEN UNGAR

Farge, Arlette

b. 1941, France

Feminist historian and journalist

Focusing in the main on the eighteenth century, Farge’s work foregrounds women’s history. Her publications include Le Miroir des femmes (Women’s Mirror), La Vie fragile: violence, pouvoir et solidarité a Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Fragile Life: Violence, Power and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris) and Dire et mal dire: l’opinion publique au XVIIIe siècle (Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France). She works at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris.

ALEX HUGHES

See also: feminist thought

fashion

France’s leading role in the international fashion industry, and the special status of fashion in French society, make this apparently epiphenomenal activity of significance in understanding French culture. Fashion also has an economic importance which belies its ephemeral nature, and as political and social correctness spreads in France the work of some designers has provoked polemical comment.

It is useful to consider what is understood by la mode in France: first, fashion is the industry and society of la haute couture; second, fashion as le prêt a porter is what is worn by people in everyday life; third, fashion is informal leisurewear, or streetwear—clothing worn as a kind of inverted badge of social distinction. Each of these reflexes of fashion has produced companion corpuses of clothing in cinema and photography especially, and also in literature. The place of fashion in French intellectual life is indicated by the way in which it has inspired literary critics and philosophers such as Roland Barthes and Gilles Lipovetsky: Barthes formulated a semiotic analysis of a corpus of articles from the women’s fashion magazines Jardin des modes and Elle, elaborated in 1967 in The Fashion System (Système de la mode), and Lipovetsky has interpreted modern democracy in the light of fashion and trends.

Arguably the first connotation of fashion in France is haute couture. Historically, European and American fashion has been dominated by French style and expertise, and an important component of the contemporary image of La Maison France (France plc) is her production of luxury clothing, perfume, accessories and toiletries. Not for nothing is the fashion, wine and spirits conglomerate owning Givenchy (Louis-Vuitton-Moët-Hennessey or LVMH) now one of France’s largest companies: fashion houses are controlled by big businesses—YSL is owned by the petrochemicals giant Elf-Sanofi. Surprisingly, given the high profile of the industry, fashion houses of couture-création (fabrication and design) number only twenty or so, of which only Azzedine Alaïa remains independent. The haute couture industry employs some 30,000, and overall (taking account of the production of prêt a porter and accessories) French fashion has an annual turnover of 20 billion francs. Contemporary French culture has been irrigated by the trickledown glitter of the fashion houses of Balenciaga (founded 1937), Balmain (1945), Cardin (1950), Chanel (1924), Dior (1947), Givenchy (1951), Lacroix (1987), Lapidus (1949), Nina Ricci (1932), Patou (1919), Yves Saint Laurent (1962)—and others—who, in providing products for the rich, have influenced fashion in society in general. In the 1980s and 1990s, newcomers such as Gaultier arguably started to blur distinctions between the fashion of la grande société (high society) and that of ordinary French citizens. Ironically, French haute couture has long been dependent on foreign designers such as Gianfranco Ferré at Dior, Karl Lagerfeld and, most recently, the Britons Galliano (Givenchy, then Dior), McQueen (Givenchy) and McCartney (Lagerfeld), and since the 1970s a Japanese influence has derived from Kenzo and Issey Miyake. French fashion is linked closely to the visual arts, continuing the cross-fertilization established by Cartier-Bresson in photography and, in cinema, by Chanel who provided costumes for Renoir’s La Règie du jeu, and Cocteau’s postwar La Belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast). In 1997, Gaultier’s futuristic frocks adorned, for example, Besson’s The Fifth Element (Le Cinquième Élément). Fashion also plays a key role in the world of French publishing, in the form of top-of-the-range women’s magazines such as Jardin des modes (circulation 12,000) and Vogue (84,000). Another crucial element of the fashion industry, often forgotten, is perfume. The perfume trade employs some 30,000 in 220 companies, the largest of which are linked to major fashion houses such as Patou, Dior and Givenchy. Despite the continuing celebrity of supermodels and designers, the haute couture industry is now, however, questioning its future, facing public scepticism about its ethics and role: Balenciaga reputedly lost faith in fashion because ‘there was no-one left to dress’, and the managing director of YSL has predicted that haute couture will disappear at the death of Yves Saint Laurent himself.

The rise of prêt à porter clothing, derived from high-society fashion, is one of the ways in which fashion has become progressively democratized in postwar France; this branch of the industry employs some 50,000 in 2,000 companies. Azzedine Alaïa, Balenciaga, Cerruti, Gaultier, Kenzo, Lagerfeld, Rykiel and Mugler all produce lines carrying their own labels (griffé) for the general public beyond the diminishing 3,000 or so clients worldwide for haute couture. This aspect of fashion has been spread by high readership women’s magazines such as Elle (circulation 340,000), and Marie-Claire (544,000), and well-known mail-order clothing companies such as Les Trois Suisses (8 million) and La Redoute (6 million) have helped ‘decentralize’ the experience of fashion from its source in the Place Vendôme in Paris, governed by the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, to the furthest reaches of provincial France (la France profonde). Since the 1980s, Les Trois Suisses has popularized styles by Rykiel, Gaultier and Alaïa and, in 1996, La Redoute celebrated its thirtieth anniversary by bringing YSL’s famous women’s dinner jacket (le smoking—itself launched in 1966) to a mass market for the first time. As well as mail order, an important role in the spread of fashion styles and a salient feature of the everyday experience of buying clothes has been the famous grands magasins (department stores). Stores like Prisunic, Printemps and Galeries Lafayette have popularized styles and designs launched by the fashion houses at accessible prices. As the antithesis of haute couture, the famous Tati shops have provided lowprice clothing for the masses (the best-known branch is in the Paris working-class/immigrant quarter of of Barbès-Rochechouart), even if in the 1990s they have offered a special range of styles designed by Azzedine Alaïa significantly entitled La rue c’est a nous (The street is ours). Another quantitatively important aspect of everyday fashion is the role played by hypermarkets, such as Leclerc and Mammouth, in providing value-for-money apparel for the man and woman in the street.

The extension of ‘Parisian’ style through prêt à porter griffé, the influence of haute couture on the clothes industry in general (la confection), and social and geographical mobility and prosperity have attenuated some disparities in clothing worn by the French. Concomitant with the modernization of French society it is now rarer to see the little old ladies, toutes de noir vêtues (all in black), who symbolized the Latin urban-rural divide, now arguably in retreat. Although regional singularities of dress have all but disappeared (save for self-conscious displays of ‘folklore’ destined for tourists), fashion and style nevertheless remain reasonable indicators in France of some aspects of social status. Typical examples of socially indicative items of clothing range from the famous bleu de travail (workmen’s overalls) to the pearl necklaces, Hermès bags, scarves, hairbands and American penny-loafers favoured by well-to-do young women from the 16e arrondissement or the Neuilly-Auteuil-Passy suburbs of Paris. The initials ‘NAP’ have indeed become an acronym describing a particular style, associated with a subclass of the category BCBG (ban chic ban genre). BCBG attire is demonstrated notably in some fields of university education, where students in law faculties, institutions of political studies and some grandes écoles use more formal dress codes to differentiate themselves from the majority of other students.

More than simply categorizing a social class and its sartorial characteristics, descriptions of dress-style, such as rocker (Johnny Hallyday), hippie and punk, refer to French incarnations of American and British musicrelated youth culture and their associated vestimentary clichés. More specifically French, however, is the baba-cool style. Originating in the questioning of authority and dominant modes of behaviour prevalent in the 1960s, baba-cool fashion is environmentally friendly, politically correct and informal, attesting to the continuing echoes of May 1968 throughout the 1970s and beyond. In the 1980s and 1990s, street style influenced by American rap and hip-hop music has been adopted by youth culture and by French bands such as Nique ta mère (NTM) and their fans. Large numbers of alienated young French people, often of immigrant origin, express their anomie in their choice of music and an aggressively informal style of dress (baseball caps, trainers, sports, blousons). The distinctions between formal and informal dress have been lessening progressively as French society has become less rigid since the 1960s. It has been claimed that one of the major effects of May 1968 was that some people stopped feeling obliged to present themselves at work in a suit and tie.

In 1947, Dior’s exuberant use of material was considered by some as immoral; more recently, Colonna’s deconstructed clothes have drawn criticism for evoking the poverty of utility clothing. More generally, fashion in France seems to be becoming increasingly politicized, both in the sense understood by YSL in 1971 with his ‘Mourning for Vietnam’ collection, but also in the way new sensibilities about inequality, race and revisionism are undermining designers’ freedom of expression by making individuals aware of the semiotics of clothing. Thus Gaultier’s use of nuns, Eskimos and Hasidic Jews as inspirations for his designs has provoked controversy; in 1994, a debate with Lagerfeld at the Sorbonne turned sour as students challenged his constant use of status logos and his influence on culture; in 1995, near the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the Comme des Garçons collection of pyjama stripes shown by shaven-headed models provoked a furore. The popularity of the French-born black Muslim model Adia in the mid-1990s constitutes an exception in the sorority of mainly white supermodels, which in turn represents an inequality in France’s multiethnic society. However, Gaultier used only black models for his 1997 show, in protest at apparent xenophobia among many French people, and within the fashion industry.

The proportion of households’ disposable income spent on clothing is in constant decline (in 1970, 9.6 per cent; 1995, 5.4 per cent), despite the increased financial autonomy of adolescents and the consequent rise in specially marketed lines of fashion clothing such as Naf-Naf (founded in 1973) and Chevignon (1979). The fashion industry in the 1990s has reflected French society’s new desire for a blend of individualism and conformism after the more radical individualism of the 1980s. The cyclical, intertextual nature of fashion (interweaving old styles with new modes) engages it in constant dialogue with the past; French fashion is in many ways the product of recurrent French preoccupations with eroticism, exoticism, spectacle, the mixing of genres and deconstruction. Arguably since Dior’s ‘New Look’ of 1947 which luxuriously ‘re-feminized’ women’s dress after the austerity of the war, much of French fashion exploits the tension between seduction and the socially correct with a postmodern playfulness perhaps best encapsulated by Dim’s slogan for colourful clothes: La vie est trop courte pour s’habiller triste (Life is too short to wear dull clothes).

Despite the industry’s problems, as with so many other aspects of French culture, fashion is seen by the French as a means of exhibiting French genius; the fact that army, traffic warden and Air France uniforms have all been redesigned by major fashion houses illustrates the emblematic importance of style. More institutionally, the ‘Colbert Committee’, set up in 1954 by the perfumer Guerlain with the aim of communicating French luxury, quality and elegance to the world, now links seventy companies drawn from the most famous establishments of the fashion, art and leisure industries. The prevalence of such cultural colbertisme (protectionism) was indicated in 1995 when President Chirac was criticized by Lacoste (the famous French designer of polo shirts) for publicly wearing a shirt made by his US competitor Ralph Lauren. Moreover, the fact that a president can appear in such attire reveals how far the formal and the informal and the public and private spheres are blurring in France.

HUGH DAUNCEY

fast food

Le fast-food is as rife in France as anywhere else in the Western world. The meal of choice for many young French is un Macdo, though indigenous chains such as Love Burger or Flunch provide competition. Latterly, bigname chefs such as Paul Bocuse or Michel Guérard have joined the trend with pre-prepared meals (frozen or vacuum-packed), whose quality is generally deemed to be excellent.

KEITH READER

See also: gastronomy

feminism (movements/groups)

In France, as elsewhere, ‘feminism’ in fact comprises a diversity of feminisms, of which most stand committed to transforming society through the eradication of sexist domination and the promotion of sexual equality.

French feminism of the ‘second wave’ (a convenient term used to describe the cluster of women’s activities from the 1960s to the present) emerged at the time of the events of May 1968, although the gradual reform of women’s status from 1944 onwards, together with increasing publications, in the 1950s and early 1960s, on the position of French women, had laid the groundwork for an independent women’s movement in the late 1960s.

During the events of May 1968, women participated widely in demonstrations, occupations and meetings. However, in this upheaval, their voices were drowned, their role downgraded to one of mere support to male comrades. From the frustration and anger, experienced by women activists at this time, emerged the realization that if women were to be seen and heard they would have to speak and act for themselves. Following May 1968, small and large women’s groups formed, mainly in universities, but also in workplaces and neighbourhoods. However, it was sensationalist actions which brought feminists to the public gaze. In August 1970, some ten women laid a wreath at the Arc de Triomphe, in Paris, in remembrance of someone more unknown than the soldier—his wife. This ‘perfidious’ action (more than any monument, the Arc de Triomphe represented a French universal male order, glorifying only the heroes of war) attracted press attention, with France-Soir’s lead story referring to the women as representatives of the Mouvement de Liberation des Femmes (MLF).

The title ‘MLF’ covered numerous groups acting in concert over certain issues such as the legalization of abortion. However, from the beginning, the MLF accommodated a variety of currents which were not in agreement on fundamental questions of theory (e.g. the basis of femininity; whether or not class constituted a more fundamental and important category than sex) and practice (co-operation with parties and groups of the Left; separatist action). The three principal currents within the MLF were the Féministes Révolutionnaires, the lutte des classes (class struggle) current and Psych et Po (Psychanalyse et Politique).

Féministes Révolutionnaires came to prominence within the MLF towards the end of 1970. Within it were collectives organized around publications such as Histoires d’elles or Questions féministes and also lesbian groups such as Les Gouines Rouges (Red Dykes) and Les Polymorphes Perverses. Of all MLF currents, it was most influenced by post-1950s North American feminism, believing that the total overthrow of patriarchy alone would signal an end to women’s oppression and that, in order to achieve this, women would have to act separately, without men. Some argued further that only a lesbian position would survive the persistent assault of patriarchy and capitalism. It was the Féministes Révolutionnaires who engaged in the most spectacular actions which grabbed media attention: for instance, disrupting a conference on the theme of ‘Woman’ organized by the magazine Elle in November 1970, and demonstrating against Mother’s Day in May 1972. However, the influence of Féministes Révolutionnaires was relatively short-lived, as the current struggled to survive, within the MLF, against attacks from Psych et Po and against a background of intra-current conflict between lesbian and heterosexual groups.

The ‘class struggle’ current was largely made up of women who were members of Far Left Maoist and Trotskyist groups. One of the best known of these groups to emerge in the mid-1970s was the Trotskyist collective which published Les Pétroleuses. As far as ‘class struggle’ feminists were concerned, capitalism remained the principal enemy and collaboration with left-wing groups or parties was necessary even though it was admitted that women also had to struggle against specifically male power and domination. It was the ‘class struggle’ current which provided the thrust behind the formation of feminist neighbourhood groups (groupes de quartier) and workplace groups (groupes femmes d’entreprises) which, in turn, founded and supported organizations such as the Mouvement pour la Liberation de l’Avortement et la Contraception (MLAC). From 1974, the ‘class struggle’ current attempted to redefine the MLF as an organized, hierarchically structured force capable of influencing French politics but failed against resistance from the Féministes Révolutionnaires. By 1977, many members of the ‘class struggle’ current were moving away from the MLF to form a new Marxist-feminist organization, Mouvement Autonome des Femmes.

The third main current, Psych et Po, born in 1968 from the marriage between Marxism and psychoanalysis, separated itself from feminists within the MLF, declaring that feminists were a bourgeois avant-garde which sought merely to conserve the dominant capitalist order but in an inverted form, replacing male power with female power. Psych et Po argued that the only way of revolutionizing society and ending the oppression of women was by disrupting the Symbolic Order and subverting bourgeois language through which people understood and identified with the world in which they lived. Thus, from 1972, Psych et Po began to wage an anti-feminist campaign, through its publishing empire (bookshops and periodicals) and ‘research associations’, in a bid to ‘save’ the MLF. The campaign culminated in 1979, with legal action on Psych et Po’s part, whereby the title MLF was registered as the group’s commercial trade name. From here on, the MLF became synonymous with Psych et Po and feminists were legally barred from representing it.

The conflicts within the MLF considerably weakened the movement. By 1981, when a new Socialist government established the Ministry for Women’s Rights, it was not difficult for a state-inspired reformist feminism to usurp the space once occupied by an autonomous and dynamic MLF.

KHURSHEED WADIA

feminist press

Written by women for women, newspapers, magazines, intellectual journals, pamphlets and books within the category of ‘feminist press’ were initially linked with the Women’s Liberation Movement (Mouvement de Liberation des Femmes or MLF) in the 1970s and early 1980s, and have since contributed to the creation of a feminist culture within the spheres of intellectual, social, economic and political life.

A decade of feminist struggle, from 1968, produced an explosion of feminist writing and the foundation of numerous publications with varying aims, content and style. By the end of the 1970s, it is estimated that thirty-five titles (excluding regional, neighbourhood and workplace publications) were in circulation nationally. Their emergence responded to a need and desire for theoretical debate, the exchange of practical information and analysis of issues such as sexual liberation, homosexuality, rape, prostitution, violence against women, the representation of women in writing and visual forms of communication and of equality in the workplace. These periodicals and newspapers, of both a general and more specialist orientation, nearly always represented a particular political current within the MLF.

The category of general publications included, among many: Le Torchon Brûle, an autonomous publication which aimed to reflect the views of all MLF groups; Les Pétroleuses and Les Cahiers du féminisme, published by groups within the MLF’s lutte des classes current; Histoires d’elles, Questions féministes and Les Nouvelles Féministes, set up by groups within the current Féministes Révolutionnaires; Le Quotidien des femmes and Des Femmes en mouvement, both published by the group Psych et Po (Psychanalyse et Politique). Among the specialist feminist publications were the gay and lesbian review Masques, the history review Pénélope, the cartoon magazine Ah Nana and Sorcières, published by Éditions Stock, which dealt with one specialist feminist theme per issue. As the majority of feminist newspapers and magazines relied upon unpaid editorial teams and operated on meagre budgets, their publication was irregular and sales took place at demonstrations, meetings and feminist bookshops. A few, however, such as Les Cahiers du féminisms and Questions féministes managed to attract regular subscribers while Le Quotidien des Femmes and Des Femmes en Mouvement appeared to benefit from the unlimited private funds of Psych et Po’s main helmswoman, Antoinette Fouque, although both titles eventually folded due to lack of readers.

The precarious finances of the majority of these publications meant that many only survived during a short period. While it was never the intention or hope that these publications should reach a mass readership (in their heyday an estimated 150,000 women bought at least one title), their influence has not been negligible. First, they provided the mainstream press, and especially women’s magazines such as Elle and Marie-Claire, with bold new themes and ideas and inspired the launch of F Magazine, in 1978, which was aimed at a large feminist readership. Second, their provocative tone and the challenge that they presented to trade unionists and women in the mainstream Left led publications such as Antoinette—the women’s magazine of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT)—to reconsider women’s issues in a new light. The magazine’s editors began to take an oppositional stance to the trade union’s male leaders, which finally led to the dismissal of the entire editorial team in 1983, when it refused to withdraw support for the Polish trade union, Solidarity, as instructed by the CGT’s leadership. Women in the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT) also began to be active around feminist issues, and 1977 saw the publication of Jeannette Laot’s Stratégie pour les femmes.

As far as the two main parties of the Left were concerned, a number of Communist women formed a group, in 1978, which published the feminist magazine Elles voient rouge and in the Socialist Party, the feminist publication Mignonnes allons voir sous la rose was launched after the party’s 1977 Nantes congress. Both publications were used by their editors and supporters to question sexist thinking and practices within their respective parties, eventually leading to the departure of the women concerned from both parties.

The 1970s were also marked by the establishment of about a dozen feminist publishing houses, including Psych et Po’s Des Femmes publishing venture, which gave women the opportunity to (re)discover and create their own champions in real life and fiction. Campaigning feminist writers included Annie Leclerc, Gisèle Halimi, Christine Delphy and Monique Wittig, while writers such as Marguerite Duras, Christiane Rochefort and Nathalie Sarraute contributed original styles and substance to French literature. Furthermore, this period saw the publication of the first histories of French feminism and the MLF, and introduced the public to certain hallmarks of écriture féminine such as Hélène Cixous’s The Laugh of the Medusa (Le Rire de la méduse), Julia Kristeva’s About Chinese Women (Des Chinoises) and Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman (Speculum de l’autre femme) and This Sex which Is not One (Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un).

From the mid-1980s, feminist publication has increasingly entered the mainstream as women’s studies have become a feature of the higher education curriculum, as big publishers (e.g. Seuil, Stock and Éditions Syros) have established their own ‘women’s series’ and as trade unions, professional and political organizations have gradually attached more importance to women’s sections or committees. However, the relative acceptance of feminist publications within the mainstream has not occurred without the exaction of a price, which is that the most original and uncompromising type of publications (Histoires d’elles or Pénélope) have gradually disappeared. Those which have survived (Cahiers du féminisms and Nouvelles Questions féministes) or which have been set up in recent years (Clio: histoire, femmes et société and Résonances-Femmes) have done so either because they have adopted a more ‘serious’ and less doctrinaire tone or because they have achieved and maintained academic respectability.

KHURSHEED WADIA

feminist thought

A good working definition of feminist thought has been provided by the philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff: ‘Depuis deux siècles, une féministe est une femme qui ne laisse à personne le soin de penser a sa place; de penser, tout court, et plus particulièrement de penser ce que c’est la condition féminine, ou ce qu’elle devrait être’ (‘For the last two hundred years, a feminist has been a woman who lets no one do her thinking for her: thinking full stop, but more especially, thinking about what women’s condition is, or what it ought to be’; Le Doeuff 1989).

The number of French women fitting this definition rose steadily throughout the first half of the twentieth century, as educational and career opportunities expanded. The right to vote (granted in 1944) transformed the possibilities of the feminine condition. Economic expansion in the 1960s provided the conditions to turn the possibilities into reality. More women were taking up new roles as producers as well as consumers in the market economy, just as that economy and its culture were undergoing the radical political and philosophical critique that shaped the revolutionary events of May 1968. Women, experiencing what for many was the novelty of acting for the first time as independent economic subjects, found themselves in a cultural politics where the agenda had been set by Marx, Freud and Lacan, and the dominant discourses were those of Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. The women’s groups who came together in the aftermath of the May events to form the MLF (Mouvement de Liberation des Femmes) developed within and against those radical masculine doctrines and the consciousness of the theoretical dimension of practice which is the distinctive mark of contemporary French feminism. Their activities over the subsequent years, foregrounding and challenging masculinist bias in the production of thought, and creating opportunities for women to participate fully in all areas of intellectual activity, have transformed the cultural landscape in France. In the process, they have also made a distinctive contribution to the course of feminism elsewhere in Europe and America.

For most Anglo-American feminists, who know France chiefly through the bias of humanities departments, the work of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous (often known only partially and belatedly, through translations) are synonymous with French feminist thought. The real situation is more complex. Feminist thought nowadays operates within a multitude of disciplines: philosophy, sociology, linguistics, literature, psychoanalysis, history and politics. Within France, perceptions of the importance of different individuals and groups have varied, as intellectual fashions and emphases change. Outside France, this fashion-effect has been compounded by the inevitable distortions produced by the special interests of academic and publishing networks.

Postwar feminist thought begins, famously, with Simone de Beauvoir. Trained as an academic philosopher, she devoted her first energies to developing the themes of existentialism within the terms set by Jean-Paul Sartre. Early Beauvoirian existentialist essays are Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944) and The Ethics of Ambiguity (Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté) of 1947. The ground-breaking The Second Sex (Le Deuxième Sexe), published in 1949, transformed the terms of the discussion of the woman question, with its exploration of the situation of the female subject in Western culture, and its challenging presentation of woman as the object constructed by men’s fictions and sciences and by the male-determined rituals and conventions of family and social life. Beauvoir argued for the need to remake the heterosexual couple, to produce a better life for both men and women, and for the importance of women seeking economic independence to free themselves from the chains of domesticity. In her later novels and autobiographical writings, she pursued her analysis in terms which always situated the personal in its wider political context. Her political activism in conjunction with Sartre, from the 1950s onwards, also produced political commentaries—see, for example, The Long March (La Longue Marche), published in 1957, relating her visit to Mao’s China.

Not until the mid-1960s did Beauvoir characterize herself as feminist; but her distinctive intellectual style, with its rationalist analysis, left-wing commitment, engagement with practical moral and political issues and constant return to personal experience as the ground of understanding has left a clear mark on succeeding feminist thinkers. The direct influence of The Second Sex is apparent in, for example, Benoîte Groult’s Ainsi soit-elle (1975), a polemic account of the marginalization of women in everyday life. The work of Christine Delphy ploughs a distinctive furrow within the tradition. An academic sociologist active in the feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and one of the founder members of the MLF, as well as of the campaign for the legalization of abortion, Delphy continues in the 1990s to produce theory linked closely to practical social action. She founded the radical feminist collective Questions Féministes (1977), and after the split in the collective on the issue of radical lesbianism (whose separatist doctrines she opposed, including those of her erstwhile collaborator Monique Wittig), she cofounded Nouvelles Questions Féministes, with continuing editorial support from Beauvoir. A Marxist, Delphy nevertheless conceives women’s oppression not in terms of class struggle but as primarily a struggle against patriarchy, which is conducted in the first instance within the family, where unpaid female labour is expropriated by the (male) head of household. Delphy’s doctrine of materialist feminism views gender as a social construct rather than a natural category, and she is opposed to psychoanalytical theories which look for definitions of the difference of the female subject in terms which invite biological essentialism. Her 1976 essay ‘Protofeminism and Anti-Feminism’ (‘Proto-Féminisme et antiféminisme’) was a refutation of Annie Leclerc’s much-hyped Parole de femme (1974), a lyrical celebration of the ‘natural’ difference of woman which urged women to abandon attempts to compete on masculine terrain and seek instead to valorize female discourse (giggles and gossip), the female reproductive capacity and the domain of domesticity.

Julia Kristeva, a former member of the influential Tel quel collective, whose work builds on that of Barthes, Bakhtin and Lacan, defines her intellectual project as the exploration of the positioning of the subject in language. Her work has enriched feminist thinking with the fresh dimensions it has brought to consideration of the relationship between language and meaning. In her Revolution in Poetic Language (La Revolution du langage poétique) of 1974, Kristeva drew together linguistics, philosophy and psychoanalysis for an analysis of the revolutionary subject in post-Mallarmean literature. She set out her discussion of language and meaning (and, especially, the subversion of meaning) in gender terms, presenting the production of meaning as involving the interaction of two types of signifying process. The semiotic, pre-linguistic, involves the imprinting of the child with social and familial structures mediated through the maternal body. The symbolic has to do with sign and syntax and with linguistic and social laws, and is said to be a paternal function. In its explanations of some of the difficult new concepts it was inventing, Kristeva’s early work used some very traditional metaphors based on gender (for example, the traditional association of women and nature), which her later work has reassessed. But even at that early stage, she developed the metaphors in ways that were productive for feminist political positions. See, for example, About Chinese Women (Des Chinoises), published in 1974; Polylogue, 1977). The Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection (Pouvoirs de l’horreur) of 1980 is a powerful critique of the conventional association of woman with nature and its monstrous repressions; which has produced, Kristeva argues, the Western fear of the archaic mother.

The work of Luce Irigaray is conceived in sustained opposition to the philosophical and psychoanalytic masters who organize the academy. It challenges the masculinist terms of their logic, questions their right to lay down the laws of debate, and sets up in opposition radically different feminine sets of images for thought. Speculum of the Other Woman (Speculum de l’autre femme), published in 1974, addresses itself to the question of what constitutes feminine difference, which it describes as the burning question of our age. Freud is dismissed for having assimilated the formation of the feminine subject to a system expressed in terms of the phallus, and is attacked for the contradictions and ill-disguised self-interest of his logic. Plato is swept up in the condemnation, as one of the originating masters of masculine thought. Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (Amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche) from 1980 attacks this other significant pole of contemporary Western philosophy, as yet another emblem of the sameness of masculine thought, always reducing feminine Other to its mirror. Irigaray attacks specifically Nietzsche’s celebration of the will to power, his emphasis on recurrence, the sharp binary oppositions that his thought imposes, and its aspirations to possess its object. Against these, she places the preoccupation with change, difference, inclusiveness, openness and sharing, which she claims as the property of feminine thought. Marine Lover is a major text for reading Irigaray’s famous association of the feminine with fluidity (the mobile, all-embracing, creative sea) and, again, her opposition to the rationalist tradition. This time it is Socrates who is called to the tribunal, along with his modern heir. Re-evaluation of modes of thought carries with it the re-evaluation of personal relationships. This Sex Which Is not One (Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un) of 1977 collects important essays on feminine sexuality and writing, including a reconsideration of mother/father roles. A fresh version of the bonds between mother and daughter appears in And One Does Not Move Without the Other (Et l’une ne bouge pas sans l’autre) of 1979. More empirical investigations into the different ways men and women use language figure in, for example, Sex and Gender Through Language (Sexes et genres à travers les langues) published in 1990, and/e, tu, nous (1990).

The reputation of Hélène Cixous, founder in 1977 of the influential Centre d’Études Féminines, rests principally in her creative writing, which itself constitutes an exploration into key theoretical issues concerned with the nature of the feminine subject, and the relation to writing of feminine desire and the female body (écriture féminine). Her work is closely associated with the psychoanalytic theory of the group Psych et Po. But her thinking on the relations of body, history and language, and also her distinctive style, is at least as heavily indebted to the Irish modernist James Joyce, on whom she wrote her thesis. The images and structures of her writing embody the search theorized by Kristeva and Irigaray for a mode of writing that models what is characterized as the specific nature of feminine desire—see, for example, The Laugh of the Medusa (Le Rire de la Méduse) from 1975, ‘Coming to Writing’ and Other Essays (La Venue à l’écriture) from 1977, and The Newly Born Woman (La Jeune Née) of 1975. The play Portrait de Dora (1976) turns back against Freud the content and form of the case study in which he tried to pin down the ‘hysteric’ Dora in the imprisoning categories of his psychoanalysis. More recent plays go beyond the perspective of women’s repression to explore in the wider perspective more general questions of identity and freedom in language and history.

A more traditional approach to academic philosophy appears in the work of Michèle Le Doeuff, who has highlighted the institutional barriers to women’s careers in the academic institutions. Hipparchia’s Choice (L’Étude et le rouet), from 1989, sets her own work in the tradition of Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir, and defines her own philosophical approach as contestatory, exploratory, analytical and rationalist. Like Irigaray’s, but in more conventional and accessible terms, her texts explore statements on women by male philosophers and demonstrate their theoretical weaknesses. Le Doeuff’s language is also that advocated by Catherine Clément, teacher of philosophy and former professional diplomat, who, in La Jeune Née, played devil’s advocate to Cixous, arguing that rationalist speech, being more generally comprehensible, was politically more effective than hysterical and lyrical discourse. Clément’s study of opera—Opera, or the Undoing of Women (L’Opéra ou la défaite des femmes) from 1979—offers a feminist critique of the myths of feminine hysteria carried in the libretti, and an analysis of the relation of myths and music.

The transformations in academic history effected by the Annales school helped prepare the ground for a new generation of women historians, of whom the doyenne is Michelle Perrot, general editor of the Histoire des femmes (1990–2). History blends with philosophy in the work of Élisabeth Badinter, which has brought fresh perspectives to the discussion of motherhood. More recently, Badinter used the historical perspective to contribute to the debate on the ‘crisis’ in masculine identity generated by the rise of feminism.

JENNIFER BIRKETT

Fernandez, Dominique

b. 1929, Neuilly-sur-Seine

Writer, essayist and critic

The son of the literary critic and collaborator Ramon Fernandez, Fernandez is a prolific novelist, distinguished Italianist, travel writer, and literary and music critic. He began writing psychobiographies of Pavese and Eisenstein based on Freudian theories of sublimation (a method he also applied to Mozart and Michelangelo). His most interesting novels are L’Étoile rose (The Pink Star), a magisterial portrayal of postwar gay culture in France and America, published in 1978; Dans la main de l’ange (In the Hand of the Angel), winner in 1982 of the Prix Goncourt, which retraces the tragic itinerary of Pasolini; and La Gloire du paria (The Glory of the Pariah), a 1987 examination of the value of human suffering caused by AIDS. While Fernandez believes in the normality of homosexuality, he also claims that AIDS restores to gay men an outlaw status fundamental to artistic creativity. In Le Rapt de Ganymède (The Abduction of Ganymede), an excellent literary and cultural history of gay representation published in 1989, he argues that only when homosexuality is an object of contestation does it become a properly creative subject for literature. By turns baroque, sober, subtle and fastidious, Fernandez’s style is distinguished by its impressive probity.

JAMES WILLIAMS

Ferrat, Jean

b. 1930, Vaucresson

Singer-songwriter, real name Jean Tenenbaum

A leading anti-establishment figure in French chanson, particularly during the 1960s, Ferrat earned initial recognition in 1954 with the populist Ma Môme (My Girl). He expressed his Communist sympathies in En groupe, en ligue, en procession (In Groups, in League, in Procession). His father’s detention in the Nazi concentration camps inspired Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog). Ferrat’s output is often romantic, as in Je vous aime (I Love You), Potemkine, and environmentally aware; for example, in La Montagne (The Mountain). He has paid tribute to Vian, Brassens and Lorca, as well as Aragon, whose poetry he set to music.

CHRIS TINKER

See also: song/chanson

Ferré, Léo

b. 1916, Monaco;

d. 1993, Italy

Singer-songwriter

Although Ferré is widely regarded as a cornerstone of French chanson, he was anxious to portray himself as a marginalized figure, a banner for left-wing intellectuals and anarchists. Marked by an oppressive education at a Catholic boarding school in Italy, Ferré went to Paris in 1936 to study political science and law. At the end of the war he became an announcer and pianist at Radio-Monte-Carlo, and by 1949 was performing in cabarets. He had initial success with Jolie Môme (Pretty Girl), and Merde a Vauban (Down with Vauban), a poem by Pierre Seghers.

While Ferré wanted to appeal to, and be understood by, a wide audience, with references to the culture and language of the masses, as in Épique Époque (Epic Era), he also identified himself as part of a more poetic tradition, for example in Étang chimérique (Imaginary Pond). He published a largely autobiographical novel, Benoît misère, and his writing has often been compared to that of the symbolists and Surrealists. Ferré’s musical tastes are equally eclectic, ranging from the popular tango, Mister Giorgina (dedicated to his accordionist), and accordion waltz, C’est le printemps (It’s Springtime), to the more classical influences of Debussy and Ravel. Ferré’s earlier work contains relatively simple melodies and harmonies, but during the 1970s he wrote much longer, heavier and ambitious pieces, such as Il n’y a plus rien (There is Nothing Left).

From early on, Ferré was an anti-conformist who aggressively challenged authority and the system (La Mafia). His targets included the Catholic church and the Pope—for example, Monsieur Tout-Blanc (Mr Whiter-Than-White). Closely associated with the anarchist movement, he participated in the angry protests of the May 1968 movement, condemning state injustice, as in Ni Dieu ni maître (Without God or Master) and Thank You Satan. While he argued against collective action in principle, he expressed solidarity with the protesters by performing a series of low-priced concerts in 1970 at the Salle de la Mutualité in Paris.

Although Ferré could preach angrily at his audiences, he was also capable of a more serious and tender tone. An animal lover, he was deeply affected by the death of his pet chimpanzee (Pépée). Such sensitivity may also be identified in Ferré’s songs about love—both ephemeral, as in Avec le temps (As Time Passes), and enduring, for example in Ça te va (It Suits You)—although his writing was also often charged with explicit sexual imagery, like in La Lettre (The Letter). The song Amour- Anarchie (Love-Anarchy) perhaps best defines Ferré, whose criticism of society stemmed from a fundamental love for humanity. The image of himself he chose to project was of an accursed poet who embraced melancholy and solitude, wandering the streets of Paris by night (Paris-Spleen).

Among his innovations, Ferré recorded long, self-contained texts; prose poems which he declaimed rather than sang, such as Les Amants tristes (The Sad Lovers). He also set the poetry of Aragon, Baudelaire and Apollinaire to music, introducing them to a wider sudience.

Although Ferré was perhaps not as mainstream as Brel and Brassens, his music was popular with the disaffected French youth— for example, Salut Beatnik! (Hi Beatnik!)).

CHRIS TINKER

See also: song/chanson

Major works

Ferré, L. (1993) La Mauvaise Graine [The Bad Seed], Paris: Paris (collected texts, poems and songs).

Figaro, Le

Newspaper

Leading right-wing quality broadsheet, Le Figaro is a morning newspaper and France’s oldest national daily. Launched as a weekly by Hippolyte de Villemessant in 1854, it became a daily in 1866. Publication was interrupted from November 1942 to August 1944 as a result of the Occupation, but after the Liberation Le Figaro flourished, as many right-wing rivals had now disappeared.

Under Pierre Brisson’s leadership (1936– 64), the newspaper gained a reputation for editorial independence despite a succession of owners. However, Brisson’s death in 1964 provoked a series of crises culminating in the purchase of Le Figaro by Robert Hersant in 1975, and the subsequent departure of numerous journalists (including Raymond Aron, who had written for Le Figaro for many years). Staff were unhappy with the new owner’s political ambitions, editorial interference and ruthless management style.

Circulation fell, but in the early 1980s conservative dissatisfaction with the Socialist government led to a rise in Le Figaro’s fortunes. New Saturday supplements also proved successful: Le Figaro magazine created in 1978, Le Figaro Madame in 1980, and TV magazine since 1987. The aim is to appeal to the whole family by covering a wide range of interests.There are economic and literary supplements, and Figaroscope, a guide to events in the Paris area. The paper contains practical pages, offering advice on tourism, sales bargains, and classified advertisements, especially for jobs and property. Readers are predominantly from the professional middle and upper classes, with above average income. Consequently, Le Figaro is attractive to advertisers and, depending on the economic climate, advertising accounts for up to 70 per cent of its revenue. Compared to Le Monde, Le Figaro provides fuller financial and business information, much appreciated by industrialists, businessmen and investors. It has a reputation as tribune of the right-wing intelligentsia, thanks to supplement Le Figaro littéraire and regular contributions from members of the prestigious Academic Française such as Jean d’Ormesson and Alain Peyrefitte.

Politically, Le Figaro is extremely conservative, and was closely associated with the Gaullist Rassemblement pour la République, having well-known RPR politicians among its staff. However, overt bias in favour of Jacques Chirac in the 1988 presidential election, at the expense of other right-wing candidates, led to falling sales, and Le Figaro was forced to moderate its tone and move towards the Centre. This was demonstrated in the appointment of Franz-Olivier Giesbert, formerly of Le Nouvel Observateur, as editorial director, and the reduction in prominence of hard-liner Max Clos.

In 1995, although outsold by Le Parisien, Le Figaro was the leading upmarket daily, with an average circulation of 391,533 copies. However, financial problems resulting from questionable business decisions, such as the investment in new printing facilities at Roissy in 1988, prompted Hersant to fire group director Philippe Villin in 1994 and, following Hersant’s death in April 1996, questions surround Le Figaro’s future.

PAM MOORES

Fini, Léonore

b. 1918, Buenos Aires, Argentina;

d. 1996, Paris

Artist, theatre designer and illustrator

Brought up in Trieste, Fini received little formal art training. Influenced by Italian Mannerism, German Romanticism, and Surrealism, her paintings, executed in meticulous detail, suggest enigmatic dreams. Although close to the Surrealists she was not a formal member of the group. Her often hallucinatory compositions present images of mysterious rituals in theatrical spaces, female warriors (La Chambre noire), hybrid creatures half-female, half-animal (Les Mutantes), and a number of self-portraits (Le Bout du monde). Drawing from the hermetic tradition, she explored images of petrification (Mémoire géologique) and decomposition and regeneration (Sphinx Regina). She designed theatre sets and costumes, including Bérénice for Barrault and The Maids (Les Bonnes) for Genet.

ELZA ADAMOWICZ

Finkielkraut, Alain

b. 1949, Paris

Writer and essayist

Finkielkraut is a writer who, having been influenced by philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Emmanuel Levinas, has written a number of trenchant essays whose common theme is to attack the false premises on which the supposed ‘liberties’ of the modern individual have been based. After a series of works on Jewish identity and memory, he achieved notoriety principally for his attack on modernity in The Undoing of Thought (La Défaite de la pensée). Here he develops his critique of postmodern culture, reflecting a major concern of his (shared with several contemporary intellectuals) that ‘non-thought’ threatens the continuity of French cultural identity.

MARTYN CORNICK

Major works

Finkielkraut, A. (1982) L’Avenir d’une négation, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

——(1983) Le Juif imaginaire, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

——(1988) The Undoing of Thought [La Défaite de la pensée], London: Claridge.

——(1992) Comment peut-on être croate?, Paris: Gallimard.

Flammarion

Publishing house

Flammarion was founded in 1876 by the publisher Ernest Flammarion (1846–1936). Among the popular authors it launched were Daudet, Zola, Gyp and, later, Henri Troyat and Guy des Cars. It publishes novels, academic works and art books, as well as affordable and popular collections such as ‘J’ai lu’ (3,850 titles 1958–94), ‘Père Castor’ (for children) and ‘GF-Flammarion’ (600 titles of French literature).

MARTYN CORNICK

See also: publishing/l’édition

folk music

The word folklore in French, as its derivative folklorique attests, has always had a derogatory connotation. Music scholars would preferably refer to musique traditionnelle or musique ethnique. This domain extends to chansons. French folk-song’s heritage is rich and its diversity reflects France’s geographical and linguistic variety. If this heritage still nourishes the collective mentality through familial, parochial and educational channels (sea shanties, Christmas carols, drinking songs, lullabies, etc. from different regions), the creative sources of new folk-songs are more likely to be found at the periphery: Brittany, Basque and Occitan country, Alsace.

The folk music revival in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the creation, under Malraux of the maisons de la culture. After the events of May 1968, folk music’s green messages appealed to the generation of soixante-huitards (literally ‘sixty-eighters’; young people who followed for a while the ecological and libertarian ideal, away from consumer society). Their audience was also exposed to Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Leonard Cohen, as well as to the country-and-western repertoire through Hugues Aufray, who specialized in adapting them in French. Folk clubs appeared everywhere.

The folk group of the period was Malicorne, formed in 1974 by a whole group of musicians who mastered traditional instruments (spinet, dulcimer, hurdy-gurdy), while at the same time introducing modern arrangements. Their best album was Almanack, and they triumphed at the Cambridge Folk Festival in July 1975, but the group fell apart, separated in 1981 and attempted a comeback with their last album, Les Cathédrales de l’industrie (The Cathedrals of industry), in 1987. Another well-known group was La Bamboche from Berry, musically talented and full of humour and joie de vivre. Roger Siffer in Alsace rein-, vented with humour the heritage of his region.

A special case must be made for Occitan and Breton folk-singers. South of the Loire valley, folk music became the instrument or the context of a revival of Occitan cultural identity, with Marti, Patric and Joan Pau Verdier. In Brittany, Alan Stivell led the rise of Celtic folk and pop, followed by Glenmor and Gilles Servat, whose Blanche Hermine (White Ermine) became the hymn of minorities neglected by central government. The Breton folk-singers survived the doldrums of the 1980s and early 1990s, in which folk music in France seemed to have declined, drawing their strength from their traditional Celtic musical heritage mixed with modern idioms. Since 1994, there are signs of a revival in folk music in France, and again some regions with a strong singular cultural identity are providing the talents: Brittany (with Tri Yann and Dan Ar Braz), the Basque country (with Peio Serbielle), Alsace and Corsica.

GÉRARD POULET

football

Football has been an extremely popular sport in France since the late nineteenth century (Le Havre, the first club, was founded in 1872) but it was only in 1984 that the country, captained by Michel Platini, won its first major trophy when it hosted the European Nations’ Championship. France also won the Olympic title in the same year. Although it has been rocked by scandals in the 1990s (allegations of drug taking among players, of financial irregularities and bribes, and the embarrassment of seeing the country’s first European Club Champions, Olympique de Marseille, relegated after match-fixing bribes were shown to have been offered), French football none the less retains its high profile in the media and the French Football Federation boasts something in excess of 1.7 million registered players. Paris-St Germain’s victory in the 1996 European Cup Winners’ Cup and the national team’s showing in Euro 96 did much to repair the damage. The country hosted the World Cup in 1998.

IAN PICKUP

See also: sport

foreign policy

Foreign policy since 1945 has contributed much to defining public perceptions of France and Frenchness in France, as well as to creating a distinctive profile for France internationally. Postwar, French foreign policy has negotiated decolonization and post-imperial diplomacy, partnership with Germany in developing the European Union and (partly thanks to defence and security policy based on nuclear deterrence) independence vis-à-vis the Cold War superpowers. Foreign policy is still strongly marked by de Gaulle, whose vision of France in the 1960s initially moulded contemporary French international relations by suggesting that France was not herself without grandeur.

Until the 1960s, foreign policy was mainly concerned with establishing a relationship with the US, co-operating with Germany in face of the USSR and reconsidering the Empire (renamed Union française), under pressure of colonial unrest. French pride was initially hurt by Allied underevaluation of France’s part in victory, the rejection of French representation at Yalta and Potsdam, the proposal to run liberated France through an Allied military government, and by the grudging inclusion of France in the administration of Germany. Marshall aid heightened French sensitivity towards the United States, and exacerbated divisions between the Communists (ordered by Moscow to oppose it) and parties more mistrustful of the USSR. With the establishment of NATO (1949) and the ECSC (1952), the way was cleared to France’s founding role in the EEC (1957), marking an opening of the protected French economy. Simultaneously came crisis in colonial Algeria, and the return of de Gaulle. Following humiliating disengagement from Indochina (1954), de Gaulle tortuously negotiated Algerian independence (1962), after an Algerian war costly in financial, political and human terms. French culture was marked by the resettlement of approximately 1 million pieds noirs (European Algerians) and by the trauma suffered in the ‘savage war of peace’ by more than 3 million conscripts, as well as by the political divisions created by decolonization.

After losing Algeria, France developed her deterrent force and structured foreign and defence policies around indépendence nationale. Gaullism favoured a multipolar international system, a Europe of nation-states and a network of francophony; these aims were furthered through encouraging nationalism (for example, Quebec), by reluctant European integration (including veto of British entry because of feared Atlanticism), and by links with former colonies. Giscard d’Estaing pursued mondialisme (internationalism), expressed in intervention in francophone African countries, contributions to North-South debates, action in favour of disarmament while maintaining strong military capability, and rapprochement with Germany in Europe. Under Mitterrand and Chirac, France has continued support of European integration, and in the context of global interdependence and economic rigour has started to reassess its ambitions of total independence. Nevertheless, much of French diplomatic rhetoric and public opinion is still heavily coloured by France’s grandeur, and by mistrust of the perceived US military, financial and cultural hegemony, although France did participate as a minor allied partner in the Gulf War. French foreign policy is still trying to build France a home in the post-colonial, post-Cold War international system.

HUGH DAUNCEY

Forrester, Viviane

b. 1925, Paris

Literary critic, historian and writer

A creative writer and feminist literary critic whose work has focused on Anglo-Saxon women authors, especially Virginia Woolf, Forrester’s best-known work is La Violence du calme (The Violence of Calm). Published in 1980, this study offers a radical critique of history, as generative of a culture of coercion and repression.

ALEX HUGHES

Foucault, Michel

b. 1926, Poitiers;

d. 1984, Paris

Intellectual historian

Michel Foucault stands among the most important philosophers and writers in postwar France. His work explores at least six interrelated areas: art and literature as what describes a space outside of cognition and reason; madness as that which defines the way a culture and its history can be understood; the symptomatic relation of word to things in classical and modern culture; the clinical ‘gaze’ as a determiner of relations of societal and sexual difference; sexuality as the very basis for study of ideology; the history of penality as the area in which is mapped out the birth of the modern or ‘disciplinary’ state.

Foucault’s Death and the Labyrinth: The Work of Raymond Roussel (Raymond Roussel) and ‘This is Not a Pipe’ (‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’) constitute a dictionary and an exemplary indicator of his style of analysis. In the former, published in 1963, the novelist is seen as providing a language of extreme platitude which in fact makes the reader aware of an extraordinary violence that inhabits the literary cliché. Roussel makes us aware, says Foucault, of a ‘lacunary reserve’, like the unconscious, that inhabits all language, and that is paradoxically neutral or of ‘zero-degree’ inflection in modern writing. Similarly, 1968’s ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ suggests that the word-image relations in Magritte’s paintings attest to an imponderable paradox of identity and difference of language and visual form. What is indicated in an act of deixis (ceci or ‘this…’) is not, as an image, what is either stated or written in the discourse describing it. Yet, too, it is, since the trick of the painter is to present a pipe, or a lure, that inhabits the ‘pipe’ which is before our eyes. Foucault shows that whenever the memory of ideograms and pictograms is recalled, as they are with Roussel and Magritte, meaning and institutions that are built on the illusion of conventional communication begin to totter.

In The Order of Things (Les Mots et les choses), published in 1966, Foucault maps out a history of constitutive differences of the kind begun in his work on art and literature. Its sweeping vision leads the reader from the early modern realm of linguistic analogy, in which words and the objects to which they referred shared a common substance and malleability, to the regime of representation, in which words ‘stand for’ or are the procurative agents for things that are no longer there or present. This radical change, begun with the advent of seventeenth-century science (and felt in the gap between, for example, Montaigne of the 1580s and Descartes of the 1640s), inaugurates the modern world. It leads forward to the age of the psychoanalyst and the ethnologist.

Foucault designed his study to show how relations of identity are constitutive of the modern subject. In its companion volume, Madness and Civilization (Folie et déraison), which was his doctoral thesis, and was published in 1961, Foucault begins in roughly the same areas and reaches similar conclusions, except that the approach is cued to relations of difference. How madness is defined, and then how it is legislated and managed, become the counterpart to his work on sameness. Van Gogh and Artaud become in this work what the analyst and the anthropologist were in The Order of Things. They crown a work that begins with the Erasmian drive to bring madness into civilization, and illustrates how madness becomes implicated with practices of incarceration in the Classical Age, then finds itself reborn and renamed in the growth of the human sciences.

The backdrop of these two studies indicates why Foucault’s greatest work, the 1975 Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et punir), was subtitled a ‘history of modern times’. In this work, the author studies what he calls the history of the relation of the body to the soul by way of institutions designed to impose pain, suffering, retribution and amendment. The history of the prison, like that of alterity, stands at the basis of political and military institutions. Noteworthy, however, is that Foucault offers a history of the articulation of space in the prison, military barracks, hospital, asylum and secondary school. He shows that these architectures tell much through their ‘form of content’ as much as through what they elsewhere try to impose or convey in their language. This book was part of a political commitment on Foucault’s part to institutional reform and, to a more radical degree, liberation in general. His work did not ever separate its inaugural drive—its eros and its politics—from its conclusions. Surveiller et punir in fact made manifest an ethics that had been less immediately visible in the earlier writings.

Foucault’s last works take up many of the same themes encountered in the studies of the years 1962–76. In the four-volume collection of Sayings and Writings (Dits et écrits) published in 1994, the reader encounters Foucault in his most resonant voice. In so far as he had defined his work not only as writing but also as an ongoing political and social practice, the interview, the short news item, the occasional article, the book review and other ephemera become crucial elements in his labours. Dits et écrits transforms what readers have felt Foucault’s work to have been by showing us the conditions—the spaces and places, the resistances and the stakes—in which his work, be it on sexuality, incarceration, the invention of the self, or the author as a mode of classification, was elaborated. Few historians of the same stripe have ever wedded such inclusive sense of labour and praxis to their lives. Foucault stands as one of the greatest exponents and barometers of radical shifts in approaches to understanding and rethinking the history of Western culture. This work goes much further than the three volumes of The History of Sexuality (Histoire de la sexualité), which were published between 1976 and 1984 and which, conceivably by virtue of Foucault’s own homosexuality, are his best-known books.

TOM CONLEY

Fourastié, Jean

b. 1907, St-Benin-d’Azy, Nièvre;

d. 1990

Economist

Fourastié’s socioeconomic analysis of the modernization of France after 1945 revealed the scale of change that occurred during the Fourth Republic and early years of the Fifth. The title of his 1976 book, Les Trente glorieuses, became shorthand for the years that had transformed France from an archaic, rural, agricultural society into a modern, technological, industrial nation. In 1945 Fourastié had joined the new Commissariat Général au Plan, facilitating the modernization he later described as an ‘invisible revolution’, and much of his academic work looked at the sociological implications of economic growth, examining inequalities, for instance, in Le Jardin du voisin (The Neighbour’s Garden) published in 1980. Fourastié devoted considerable time to teaching, notably at the Conservatoire national des Arts et Métiers and at Sciences Po (the Paris political science institute), and wrote for Le Figaro. In 1968, he was elected to the Academic des Sciences Morales et Politiques.

HUGH DAUNCEY

See also: economy

France 2

Television channel

This national television company came into existence in 1975 as a result of the breakup of the state broadcasting organization, l’Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (ORTF). Funded by a mix of licence-fee and advertising revenue, the channel remained part of the public sector throughout the various broadcasting reforms of the 1980s. Its programme output remains subject to detailed public service-type regulations and is monitored by a state-appointed regulatory authority, the Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel (Higher Audiovisual Council). Originally called Antenne 2, the company was renamed France 2 in 1992.

RAYMOND KUHN

See also: television

France 3

Television channel

Known as France Régions 3 (FR3) until 1992, this television company came into existence in 1975 as a result of the breakup of the state broadcasting organization, l’Office de Radio-diffusion-Télévision Française (ORTF). It was originally intended to be a channel for both the regions and French cinema. Funded mainly from licence-fee revenue plus some advertising, the channel remained part of the public sector throughout the various broadcasting reforms of the 1980s. Its programme output remains subject to detailed public-service regulations and is monitored by a state-appointed regulatory authority, the Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel (Higher Audiovisual Council).

RAYMOND KUHN

See also: television

France Culture

Radio station

This is one of the state-owned Radio France’s six national stations available on FM stereo in all parts of France (for frequency details, see Télérama’s Guide de la radio or regional newspapers). Since 1963 (when it was created), France Culture has been fulfilling its ambitious mission, which is to disseminate culture (especially art, literature, science, history, philosophy, theatre and politics), develop creative projects in the field of radio and to reflect key movements in the world of ideas. This nonstop service (programmes are repeats between 1 a.m. and 7 a.m.) offers news, documentaries, debates, drama and music (classical as well as jazz).

ALAN PEDLEY

See also: radio (state-owned)

France Musique

Radio station

France Musique is one of the state-owned Radio France’s six national stations broadcast on FM stereo throughout France (for frequency details, see Télérama’s Guide de la radio or regional press). Created in 1963, this quality music station broadcasts a large number of live regional, national and international concerts and recitals. Music from all periods and cultural origins is often supported by introductions, explanations and discussions, which gives the station both an educational and a pluralistic flavour. Some recently created rivals in the private sector (e.g. Radio Classique) have affected listening figures.

ALAN PEDLEY

France-Dimanche

Newspaper

A sensational Sunday publication of long standing. Created at the end of World War II, it was apparently intended to cheer up the population. Dramatic headlines and extensive use of colour photographs entice the reader to share in the secrets of well-known personalities, their health, financial problems and love life. Appealing to the emotions, France-Dimanche provides escapist entertainment for a popular audience. It is produced by a limited number of journalists using various pseudonyms; news content and intellectual input are minimal. Typical readers are elderly, or women between 35 and 50 years of age. In the mid-1990s, circulation was stable at around 650,000 copies per week.

PAM MOORES

See also: national press in France

France-Inter

Radio station

Radio France’s general-interest station, broadcast twenty-four hours a day, on long wave (162 kHz, 1852m), medium wave and FM (see local press or Télérama’s Guide de la radio for frequency details). Created in 1947 as Paris- Inter, it was renamed in 1964. Catering for all tastes and most ages, this family station, while still commanding more than an 11 per cent share of the national audience, has been steadily losing listeners to the more specialized private and local stations bursting on the scene with the audiovisual deregulation of the 1980s. Current affairs, drama, interviews, phone-ins and music of all kinds feature prominently.

ALAN PEDLEY

France-Soir

Newspaper

The only mass-circulation national daily in postwar France, France-Soir regularly sold over a million copies in the 1950s. Created by Pierre Lazareff in 1944, it continued the traditions of prewar Paris-Soir, and sensationalism, human interest stories and extensive use of photography brought success in the popular market. The events of May 1968, together with Lazareff’s death in 1972, marked a turning point: circulation declined steadily thereafter. Robert Hersant bought the paper in 1976, as a second Gaullist title to complement the more upmarket Le Figaro. Despite a succession of new initiatives, however, losses continue to accumulate.

PAM MOORES

François, Claude

b. 1939, Ismaïlia, Egypt; d. 1978, Paris

Lyricist and singer

Claude François established himself as one of the major figures of the French yé-yé (1960s pop) generation with hit songs such as Si j’avais un marteau (If I Had a Hammer). ‘Clo-Clo’, as he was known, appealed to adolescent audiences, often singing imported French versions of American hits. The incarnation of the glitzy showman on stage, Claude François will be best remembered in the Anglo-Saxon world as the co-author (with Thibault; music by Revaux) of Comme d’habitude, which in translation became the Sinatra classic My Way.

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

François, Guy-Claude

b. 1940, Berck

Stage designer

A designer at the Théâtre du Soleil since the 1960s, he worked on countless famous productions, including L’Age d’or in 1975 and Mephisto in 1978. He has also worked in cinema with James Ivory and Bertrand Tavernier, and acts as adviser to architects of public buildings, such as the Pompidou Centre.

ANNIE SPARKS

francophone cinema: Belgium

If the size of France has played a large part in the country’s success in the cinema, it has also influenced the cinema of other francophone countries. Thus the linguistic border which Belgium shares with France has enabled its francophone community to produce largerscale co-productions that are guaranteed a respectable market share. This involvement of France is significant, since Belgium’s three official languages (French, Dutch and German) fragment what is already a very small market. These linguistic divisions make it necessary to divide ‘Belgian’ cinema into francophone/Belgian and Dutch/Belgian, and only a handful of directors (such as Delvaux and Henri Storck) have worked in both languages.

The above scenario would seem to suggest that France ‘facilitates’ the cinema of francophone Belgium. However, the relationship between the two countries has ranged from one of colonization (some of the first films to be made in Belgium were those by Alfred Machin, a Frenchman specifically sent by Pathé to produce films for the Belgian audience) to cultural ‘exchange’ (mainly through personnel abandoning the first country to work in the second—for example, Jacques Feyder, Raoul J.Lévy and Charles Spaak).

While its relationship with France has provided both advantages and disadvantages, Belgium’s position within Europe has had a similar impact on its cinema. On the one hand, any sense of a ‘Belgian specificity’ is obscured by the country’s role as centre of the new Europe. On the other hand, perhaps also because of its geographical position, Belgium has a long history as an enthusiastic host and sponsor of world cinema, with its Cinémathèque, its festivals and film schools all ensuring its place on world cinema’s map.

Though Belgium is evidently a country which is far from hostile to cinema, its own national product has been hard to export, with the few actual successes coming from films which use the European auteur or art-cinema models (such as Jaco Van Dormael’s Toto le héros in 1993). Meanwhile, much critical success has been gained through small-scale experimental work. There is a strong documentary tradition in Dutch/Belgian cinema (illustrated in the work of Henri Storck, Robbe de Hert or Frans Buyens) and this feeds into a wider preoccupation in both linguistic groups with ‘reality’. Thus the quotidien is observed in microscopic detail by Boris Lehman and Manu Bonmariage, or analysed for its intersection with the fictional by Chantal Akerman (specifically Jeanne Dielman 23 quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles of 1975) or André Delvaux.

Apart from their use of ‘European’ genres (art and auteur cinema), and perhaps because of the lack of good scriptwriting, many Belgian directors have turned to their pictorial heritage for inspiration. The influence of painting can be seen in the preoccupation of many directors with Belgian landscape (Jean-Jacques Andrien, Boris Lehman), the success of animation from the 1940s onwards (Belgium being the home of Tintin, Astérix and the Smurfs) and, finally, what could be seen as a truly Belgian genre—the film sur l’art. The latter can be described as a film which takes an artist or work of art as its subject.

CATHERINE FOWLER

francophone cinema: North Africa

National cinemas in the countries of the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia) were only able to develop after independence from French colonial rule (Tunisia and Morocco in 1956, Algeria in 1962), and their relationship with France and the French cinema industry continues to be problematic. Irrespective of differences in political systems and conditions of production, which range from state control in Algeria to private funding in Morocco, with Tunisia occupying an intermediary position, opportunities for film-making in North Africa are limited. North African films are in competition for audiences with Egyptian cinema on the one hand and Hollywood on the other. As a result, many North African film-makers have turned to France (and Europe) for training, funding, technical support and aid for distribution and exhibition. Ironically, therefore, given that metropolitan French audiences generally show little interest in Arabic culture, as many as one in two North African film-makers live and work in ‘exile’ in France or Belgium (particularly since the increase in fundamentalist terrorism in Algeria), and a large proportion of francophone North African films are (co-)produced in France and address a European art-house and festival audience rather than an indigenous popular audience in the Maghreb.

The first Carthage Pan-African Film Festival was held in 1966, and the first features by North African film-makers were heroic narratives of revolt informed by the national liberation struggle against French colonialism and foreign exploitation, the volume of which eventually gave rise to the term ‘couscous Western’. A major figure to emerge from this period was Algerian film-maker Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina, who won the best first film award at Cannes with Le Vent des Aurès (1967) and the 1975 Palme d’Or for Chronique des années de braise (1974), a moving drama about the war of independence. Like other films of the 1970s, Abdellatif Ben Ammar’s Sejnane began to address more contemporary social issues: the power of the state and the new ruling classes; the condition of the peasants; urban misery; and the condition of women (a topic also addressed in films like Assia Djebar’s 1978 Nouba). Merzak Allouache’s ground-breaking Omar Gatlato (1976) replaced the conventional hero with the figure of an ordinary Algerian youth, and the success of its down-to-earth realism allowed Algerian cinema to develop in less conformist ways.

A key theme of films of the 1970s was emigration and the problems faced by immigrant workers in France, represented in what critics have referred to as a ‘miserabilist’ style. Ali Ghalem’s two films, Mektoub? (1969) and L’ Autre France (1976), portray a young Algerian desperately seeking work and the exploitation of Algerian workers. Other examples include Nacer Ktari’s Les Ambassadeurs (1977), an exploration of the effects of French racism on the community of North Africans living in the Goutte d’Or district of Paris, Ali Akika and Anne-Marie Autissier’s Voyage en capital (1977), a comparison between the lives of a (male) working-class immigrant and a (female) middle-class student born in France, and Ahmed Rachedi’s Ali au pays des mirages (1979), a study of the aspirations and nightmares of an immigrant crane-operator. Since the advent of beur cinema in the 1980s, there have been few films by North Africans about immigration in France apart from Okacha Touita’s intense realist dramas, including Les Sacrifiés, (1982), a dramatization of the fate of a young immigrant driven mad by the struggle between the FLN and the MNA which tore apart the Algerian community in Paris during the Algerian war. Allouache captures the tone of beur cinema in Un amour a Paris (1988), centring on the doomed love affair between a Jewish Algerian girl and a beur who fancies himself as the first beur cosmonaut, and returns to analysing contemporary beur and banlieue (suburb) culture in Salut cousin! (1996).

The film-maker of the 1980s who most successfully uses humour to problematize and critique Algerian mores and cultural identity is Mahmoud Zemmouri, now resident in France. His first black comedy, Prends dix mille balles et casse-toi (1980), explores the cultural conflicts produced when an immigrant family accepts the French government’s offer of funding to return ‘home’ and discovers that their sons cannot adapt to Algerian village life. Les Folles Années du twist (1983) refuses the heroic narrative of the national liberation struggle, focusing instead on the pragmatic survival tactics of two lovable rogues, while De Hollywood a Tamanrasset (1990) dramatizes the intrigues of an Algerian community who model their behaviour on their favourite American film and TV stars.

However, in the 1980s North African filmmakers generally turned away from explicitly political topics, disillusioned by the intransigence of the nationalist movements and influenced by both economic factors and Western ideological values. Some sought commercial success by using international stars and settings, like Moroccan film-maker Souhel Ben Barka’s Blood Honeymoon (1979), starring Irène Pappas and Laurent Terzieff, and Amok (1984), a film about apartheid starring Miriam Makeba. Others sought international recognition through a personal cinema linked to the quest for identity and/or through selfconsciously auteurist topics and techniques. Nouri Bouzid’s L’Homme de cendres (1987) and Lakdhar-Hamina’s La Dernière Image (1986) are specifically rooted in their director’s childhood experiences, while Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud’s Traversées (1982) and Nacer Khemir’s Les Baliseurs du désert (1986) evoke a universal sense of alienation and mystery.

In the 1990s, a number of film-makers introduced debates about Islam, and about sexuality and the body, into North African cinema. Allouache’s Bab El Oued City (1993) and Malik Lakhdar-Hamina’s Automne—octobre a Alger (1991) offer critiques of the current crisis in Algeria, while in Tunisia Nouri Bouzid’s Bezness (1992) addresses the pernicious effects of sex tourism, and Moufida Tlatli’s Les Silences du palais (1994) and Ferid Boughedir’s 1990 Boy of the Terraces (Halfaouine)—both scripted by Bouzid—explore various interdicts on the body. Halfouine, which recounts the coming of age of a 12-yearold boy amid very intimate domestic scenes, has been the biggest box office hit in Tunisia since the invention of motion pictures.

CARRIE TARR

francophone cinema: Switzerland

This small industry is largely known outside Switzerland by the names of two directors. Claude Goretta’s 1976 adaptation of Pascal Lainé’s popular novel The Lacemaker (La Dentellière) helped to make a major star of Isabelle Huppert, and his biopic of Rousseau, Les Chemins de l’exil (1977), paid oblique tribute to the greatest of Swiss-born actors by casting Michel Simon’s son François in the main role. Alain Tanner has specialized in dulcet post-May 1968 satires such as La Salamandre of 1971, starring Bulle Ogier, and 1973’s Le Retour d’Afrique, which parodies the enthusiastic Third Worldism characteristic of its time.

KEITH READER

francophone performing arts: Belgium

The first major literary figures of Belgian origin were closely related to the theatre (Maeterlinck was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1911 and his Pelléas et Mélisande was immortalized by Claude Debussy). Yet, despite its famous origin, twentieth-century Belgian theatre of French expression has not emerged as a major genre. Belgium has produced major playwrights but no identifiable school of drama. The relative non-identity of a Belgian drama of French expression can be accounted for in a number of diverse ways. Major figures avoid categories and cannot easily be inscribed in the context of international movements. Enjoying a complex relationship with their country of origin, its languages and its tumultuous history (including the Question Royale and the ‘linguistic wars’ which split the nation in two), Belgian theatre remains individualistic and is often centred around the problems of language, memory and history.

Avant-garde theatre has not thrived in Belgium, and Belgian drama of French expression as a whole has had to compete with two popular genres: plays written in dialect reflecting local interests, and popular productions of French (Georges Feydeau’s) vaudevilles or Belgian comedies such as Le Manage de Melle Beulemans (Miss Beulemans’ Wedding), performed for the first time in 1910. Not surprisingly, playwrights had to look elsewhere for an audience. After World War II, despite the state funding of Belgian theatres, many playwrights of Belgian origin looked to Paris for an audience: Parisian blockbusters of Belgian manufacture include Suzanne Lilar’s Le Burlador, Jean Mogin’s 1950 play A chacun selon sa faim (According to One’s Hunger), and Michel de Ghelderode’s La Ballade du grand macabre (The Macabre Ballad) of 1953.

The 1960s saw productions from two major playwrights: Paul Willems and Jean Sigrid. In Il pleut dans ma maison (It Is Raining in My House), first performed in 1962, Willems reveals a lyrical theatre where the barriers between life and death, between reality and dream, are shown to be porous. His 1967 production, La Ville à voile (The Sailing City), is also obsessed with the past, but here a much less optimistic view is expressed: language fails to conjure up a past and a history, and the main character’s dream ‘sailing city’ (i.e. Antwerp) will never emerge from its ashes. Sigrid’s plays, 1959’s Les Cavaliers (The Horseriders), Mort d’une souris (Death of a Mouse) in 1968, and L’Espadon (The Swordfish) from 1976, focus on a search for identity, and his 1977 production L’Auto-Stoppeur (The Hitchhiker) experiments with a dysfunctional chronology.

On the international scene, the most famous and original Belgian playwright is René Kalisky. The author of plays first performed in the 1970s and 1980s, he translated into an experimental form traumatic events of the twentieth century (Stalinism, Nazism, Fascism). His most acclaimed productions include Jim le téméraire (Jim the Reckless), Le Pique-Nique de Claretta (Claretta’s Picnic), Dave au bord de mer (Dave at the Seaside), La Passion selon Pier Paolo Pasolini (Passion According to Pier Paolo Pasolini) and Falsch. Kalisky’s theatrical aim is to destabilize conventional ways of representing and reading a dramatic plot, as well as to undermine traditional notions of identity by multiplying the possibilities of the text (which he calls le surtexte, ‘the supertext’) and the performance (which becomes le surjeu, superacting; see his Du surtexte au surjeu).

JEAN MAINIL

francophone performing arts: Indian Ocean

The islands of the Indian Ocean—Madagascar, Mauritius, Reunion and the Seychelles—are home to populations of very varied ethnic origins, and their differing cultural traditions are reflected in the diversity and richness of the performing arts in the area. Common to all the islands is a tradition of storytelling, with recitation of folk-tales transmitted orally and, more recently, collected and transcribed in local languages and in French. These, along with riddles and proverbial forms such as the sirindanes of Mauritius, often form the basis of public celebrations of folklore in all the islands.

Popular music and dance traditions are more differentiated: Mauritius and Reunion share the sega, a Creole song form accompanied by a rolling rhythm—usually in 6/8 tempo—provided by percussion instruments and associated with a sensual form of dancing. This was repressed as subversive and licentious in the years of slavery, but it is now the dominant local folk music of both islands, and is often used for tourist promotional purposes. Since the mid-1970s in Reunion, there has been a revival of a related form, the maloya, closer to its African and Malagasy origins, which in its pure form uses a chantresponse pattern and purely percussion accompaniment. A contemporary, very successful example is the troupe of Gramoune Lélé, a sprightly 65-year-old former sugar refinery worker who has toured the ‘world music’ festivals of France and Europe. The style has been taken up by Creole poets such as Danyel Waro, as a vehicle for social and political protest, and further refined by local groups such as Ziskakan, militantly autonomist in inspiration, who have added sophisticated electroacoustic instrumentation and subtle Creole lyrics by literary figures such as Axel Gauvin and Carpanin Marimoutou. A younger generation, exemplified by the group Baster, has incorporated Western influences such as reggae to produce a pop music with a distinctive rhythmic style.

Madagascar has followed a similar pattern in developing the resources of its folk music to produce a popular style internationally acceptable in ‘world music’ circles. Rossy and his group have had an international recording career since the mid-1980s sponsored by the British singer-songwriter Peter Gabriel; and, more recently, Justin Vali, specialist of the distinctively Malagasy bamboo harp, has toured in Europe, as have the group Salala, inheritors of a Protestant tradition of a cappella close harmony singing.

The development of dance in the islands is similarly diverse. Apart from the troupes of sega dancers from Mauritius and Reunion, both islands have well-established schools of Indian dance, and Reunion also has some locally subsidized amateur companies of modern dance and ballet. Madagascar has had its own national folk troupe, Imadefolk, directed from 1975 onwards by Odeamson as a touring theatre group and continued by his daughters as the Landyrolafotsy troupe. Popular drama in Malagasy languages, often sung, has always attracted a wide audience, as in the hira gasy form. In recent years, the novelist Michèle Rakotoson has succeeded in staging as-yet-unpublished French-language plays in Antananarivo, such as Sambancy, which was a prizewinner in the Radio France Internationale play competition in 1980; and a new generation of women playwrights is returning to French after the period of ‘Malgachization’, such as Charlotte Rafenomanjato, Suzanne Ravoaja and Josette Rakotondradany.

Mauritius and Reunion have had thriving theatres at least since the early years of the nineteenth century, and the theatre in the Mauritian capital Port-Louis has recently been restored with the help of grants from francophone sources. Popular drama has none the less relied principally on Creole in recent times, the language accessible to the broadest spectrum of its audience. The most successful Mauritian dramatist, Dev Virahsawmy, published a series of plays in the 1980s, some of them in trilingual versions, using Mauritian Creole, Reunionnais Creole and French. In Reunion, the Théâtre Vollard, under the direction of Emmanuel Genvrin, has been the most prominent theatre group, with a series of original historical dramas combining Creole and French, such as Étuves (Steamrooms) in 1988, recreating the Revolutionary period in Reunion, and Creole adaptations of Jarry’s King Ubu (Ubu roi) in 1979 and Ubu colonial (1994). The troupe has regularly visited the Théâtre International de Langue Française in Paris and the Festival des Francophonies in Limoges. Other Réunionnais theatre groups, such as the Théâtre Talipot of St-Pierre, directed by Philippe Pelen, are attempting a dramatic synthesis of the diverse cultural traditions of the Indian Ocean area in ambitious multimedia productions such as Mâ in 1995.

Cinema, not surprisingly the Cinderella of the performing arts in such an isolated part of the francophone world, has maintained a presence in Reunion: a thriving animation school at the Village-Titan in the Port area and a tradition of local cineclubs, the Fédération Abel Gance. This serves to promote the embryonic regional film production, such as the work of the pioneering Malagasy film-maker Ignace Solo Randrasana, and his first feature film Ilo tsy very, a Malagasy-Algerian co-production, about the bloody anti-colonial insurrection of 1947. The local television stations, the state-controlled RFO and the private companies Canal Réunion, TV4 and TV Sud, also produce local documentaries, for instance, on the multicultural music festival Kabaréunion in 1995.

In general, the multicultural, multilingual variety of contemporary performing arts in the Indian Ocean islands can be seen as a vibrant example of post-colonial and postmodern creativity which, while enjoying the benefits of francophone support networks, is developing a hybrid culture which is capable of transcending the limits of French as a world language.

PETER HAWKINS

francophone performing arts: North Africa

Dramatic performance in the three countries of the Maghreb (Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco) is marked by its multiple cultural inheritance: an Arabic, Berber and Islamic tradition, to which has been added the culture and language of France, the colonial power from which independence was only relatively recently won (by Tunisia and Morocco in 1956, and by Algeria in 1962). The situation generated by this multiple inheritance for individuals and for creative art is modelled in Assia Djebar’s 1985 novel Love, Fantasia (L’Amour, la fantasia), in terms which foreground issues relating to public and private performative expression. The Algerian-born cultural subject inherits indigenous performance traditions related to the body, and primarily spectacular: the parades, feasts and festivals of tribal tradition, equestrian displays for men (the fantasia), and, for women, the dance. Oral performance is similarly gender-divided: ululation for women and, for men, the chanting of the Koran and all forms of discursive speech. In Djebar’s text, the acquisition of French produces a transformation of subject position which in its turn transforms cultural performance. French introduces both female and male speakers into the equalizing discourse of bourgeois subjectivity, into a post-Revolutionary history both democratic and secular, which redraws familiar boundaries of action and speech. Djebar herself has largely confined her explorations to the novel; in Maghrebin culture, religious and social obstacles to female expression have been especially potent in the domain of theatre. (In the 1950s, when the middle-class public first came to the theatre, special performances were held for women.) Male Maghrebin writers, however, have found in the multiple resources of the postwar francophone stage, with its alliance of spectacle and word, the ideal vehicle to project the tensions and transformations attendant on the birth of their nations.

European theatre has been a cultural presence in the Maghreb from the beginning of the twentieth century: French touring groups were playing in Algeria as early as 1830. In the 1920s and 1930s, Egyptian theatre troupes introduced the French classical repertoire, especially the comedies of Molière. These led to adaptations, and thereafter some original creations in literary Arabic and in the spoken dialects. But the effective genesis of Maghrebin drama was in the 1950s and 1960s, when the energies of political liberation met up with the subversions of an avant-garde politically engaged European theatre. Writers, actors and directors who have been key figures in the new movement worked in Paris with Vitez, Chéreau and Serreau.

Since independence, negotiation with the bilingual performance tradition has seen two distinct phases. In the 1960s, building a national drama, both in French and in literary Arabic, was a key part of establishing national cultural identities. The International Theatre Directory (1973) testifies to some success in developing the institutional infrastructure for theatre in the Western mode. In Algeria, where theatre became a nationalized monopoly in 1963, the Théâtre National Algérien ran five theatres (in Algiers, Oran, Constantine, Sidibel-Abbès and Annaba). Five other theatres were managed and subsidized by the municipal authorities, and the Petit Théâtre in Algiers was given over to the youth of the FLN. Morocco boasted two theatres, in Casablanca (founded 1922) and Rabat. Tunisia had one professional theatre, the Théâtre Municipal de Tunis, built in 1903, occupied by the Troupe Municipal de Tunis, which was founded in 1953. In the 1950s, both Tunis and Morocco created drama centres. The Directory of Theatre, Dance and Folklore Festivals (1979) registers a complementary interest in developing the festival. This was particularly evident in Tunis, after the decentralization of drama in the mid-1960s, and was encouraged by the Tunisian National Tourist Office. Nineteen annual festivals, throughout the regions, offer a mixed diet of folklore, theatre, dance and equestrian shows. The International Festival of Carthage, held in the Roman amphitheatre, was founded in 1964 to introduce the Tunisian public to ‘the styles of classic expression in the West’, but soon made equal space for national productions. In the second stage, the emphasis has been chiefly on the national, focusing on plays in modern literary Arabic, Arabic dialects and Berber.

Francophone drama has developed differentially in the three countries of the Maghreb. Morocco has a strong tradition of popular and ritual drama, but literary drama is overshadowed by the novel. In the 1950s, a few dramatists had work performed in the country (Abdelkader Ben Hachmy, Ahmed Belhachmi). Most recently, however, francophone dramatists have found their audiences and publishers in France. Abdelkébir Khatibi’s The Veiled Prophet (Le Prophète voilé) was performed in 1979. Tahar Ben Jelloun’s La Fiancée de l’eau (Water Bride), staged in April 1984 at the Théâtre Populaire de Lorraine, evokes the tensions of the village communities left behind by the migrant workers.

In Tunisia, Arab tradition is more important than francophone influence in all areas of literature, despite the country’s relative openness to Western culture. The popular plays of Habib Boularès were usually written and staged in Arabic, but Le Temps d’El Boraq (The Time of Dreams), staged in Tunis in November 1969, was published in French and Arabic versions in 1979. The members of a Tunisian family in a fishing village, shaken by contemporary social conflicts, articulate their very different aspirations and interests (the educated children, with their urban ambitions and socialist values; the parents, with their reluctance to abandon their patriarchal Islamic conservatism, the basis of a hard-won and precarious sense of security). An uneasy compromise is reached, at the expense of the women. Realistic, often comic language alternates with lyrical dream-voice episodes, with voices and persons speaking in isolation or caught back into communion, forced to exchange discourses by the pressure of history, figured in the simple plot. The linguistic anarchy models the ferment produced by the introduction of Western subject positions, represented as critical and revolutionary, into traditional hierarchies. Fawzi Mellah’s Néron ou les oiseaux de passage (Nero or Birds of Passage) from 1975, and Le Palais du non-retour (The Palace of No Return) of 1975, use violent satirical melodrama to denounce a decolonization process which has left Western capitalism more firmly entrenched in the Third World. The Western audience written into the text is harangued from the stage for its collusion in genocide. Mohammed Moncef Métoui’s Messieurs…je vous accuse (Gentlemen… You Stand Accused), an attack on the effects of absolute power, European influence and francophonie in Tunisia, was published in France (in French) in 1982.

Most francophone dramatic activity has come from Algeria—the work of writers who operate either in Algeria when conditions permit, or otherwise in France and the rest of Europe, playing both to immigrant communities and to avant-garde European audiences. There is keen ideological debate whether the activity of Maghrebin writers who made France their primary base (Camus, for example) can be included in the history of Maghrebin culture. In any event, the most significant dramatic activity begins in the period 1955–70, stimulated by the call of the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) on 20 August 1956, for plays, poems and prose in support of the armed struggle. Mustapha Kateb became director of the Troupe du FLN in 1958, and during the Algerian war toured the world with his militant productions. Director of the Théâtre National Algérien (at independence) and joint organizer of the Institut National d’Art Dramatique (INAD) from 1964 to 1973, he withdrew in 1972 in opposition to the decentralization of the theatre, and then returned as head of the national theatre at the end of the 1980s. INAD reopened in 1986. Dramatists in the 1950s and 1960s concentrated on topics related to the war: from Henri Kréa (pseudonym of Cachin), who published Le Séisme (Earthquake) in 1958 and Théâtre algérien (Algerian Theatre) in 1962, to Kadour M’Hamsadji’s 1959 La Dévoilée (Woman Without a Veil), Mouloud Mammeri’s Le Foehn ou la preuve par neuf (The Foehn), staged in 1967, and Assia Djebar and Walid Garn’s Rouge l’aube (Red the Dawn), performed in Arabic and then published in French in 1969.

The most important work has been that of Kateb Yacine, initially in collaboration with the director Jean-Marie Serreau, who helped introduce Brecht to Parisian theatre in the 1950s. Banned in the 1950s for their criticism of French colonial policies, Kateb’s first plays turned to Greek theatre (Aeschylus) as much as to Brecht for inspiration and techniques to harness the national imagination to political issues. The trilogy published as Le Cercle des représailles (1959) is an exercise in militant mythologizing: Le Cadavre encerclé (Corpse Surrounded), first performed in Carthage and Brussels in 1958 and in Paris in 1959; and the fairy-tale/farce La Poudre d’intelligence (Cleverness Dust) and Les Ancêtres redoublent de férocité (Savage Ancestors), both staged in Paris in 1967. In the trilogy, Kateb uses sound and lighting to spectacular effect, marries a lyrical and symbol-laden rhetoric to realist dialogue, and disrupts narrative time with dream discontinuities and flashback, in order to rouse the emotions of the audience. At the same time, he gives a central place to a chorus and its leader to comment on and analyse the action. In these plays, humanity is always collectivized and the group is the real focus of performance. The individual ‘heroes’ (male and female) who carry the action forward are stereotyped in the Brechtian fashion and their activity is always referred to the interests of the group—a familiar feature, after Kateb, of Maghrebin drama. Kateb returned to Algeria in 1972 to experiment with political theatre in popular Arabic, under governmental auspices. Mohammed, prends ta valise (Mohammed, Pick Up Your Suitcase), first played in Algerian Arabic (Birkadem 1971), toured in France February to June 1972, in migrant workers’ hostels and maisons de la culture. L’Homme aux sandales de caoutchouc (The Man in Rubber Sandals), which sets choruses of French workers, Chinese, and Black American revolutionaries around an epic history of anti-colonial struggle in Vietnam, was performed first in Algiers and then at the Théâtre du Cothurne in Lyon, in 1971. The mayor of Lyon cut the theatre’s subsidy. La Voix des femmes (Women’s Voice)—staged in 1972 in spoken Arabic, which uses female voices to celebrate an amalgam of ancestral and socialist values, was staged in French in Tlemcen, also in 1972. From 1977, Kateb’s iconoclasm encountered renewed hostility from the Algerian political and religious authorities. Le Bourgeois sans culotte, ou le spectre du Parc Monceau (The Middle-Class Revolutionary, or the Ghost of the Parc Monceau) is a satire written in French for the Bicentenary and performed at the Avignon Festival of 1989, juxtaposing the politics of 1789 with the colonial experience of Indochina and New World.

Since the early 1970s, Algerian drama has moved away from the themes of war and independence into social satire, gender issues and international liberation. With few exceptions, plays performed in Algeria have been in Algerian Arabic; francophone writers find their audiences in France. Noureddine Aba, whose plays have been presented on ORTF as well as in the live theatre, handles psychological and epic modes with equal skill. L’Annonce faite à Marco, ou a l’aube et sans couronne (The Annunciation to Marco, or Uncrowned at Dawn) (1983), set in a village cafe in Algeria in the summer of 1957 and mixing colloquial French with snatches of Arabic, shows how divided interests and loyalties fuel both sides of the conflict. Tell el Zaatar s’est tu a la tombée du soir (Silence at Nightfall in Tell el Zaatar), from 1981, is a spectacular dramatization of the history of the Palestinian tragedy, charting the displacement of the inhabitants of Palestine by the Balfour declaration, their exploitation by the United States, Britain and the oil sheikhs, and the continuing resistance by individuals, guerrilla groups and terrorists, backed finally by international popular uprisings. A cast of dozens of episodic characters fills a sequence of tableaux casting backwards and forwards in time, using film and sound recordings, the full gamut of lighting and explosive sound effects, music and dance. The action is held together by a love story, which recounts the persistence of personal and national loyalties down the generations, and by a framing technique drawn, with a novel twist, from the most traditional mode of Arab performance art. A tale-teller from Algeria himself turns into a frame for another narrator, a woman, who tells the full story—in this fight for liberation, the women take up the word, as they took up the guns. There is the same recognition of women’s changed role, established through the war of independence, in Mohammed Dib’s black comedy, performed at the Avignon Festival in 1977, Mille houras pour une gueuse (Cheers for the Skirt). The female voice comes to the foreground, urging on the despairing revolutionaries, marching alongside them and, in a striking reversal of the traditional nurturing maternal role, abandoning individuals to die, when necessary, for the sake of the Revolutionary cause. New ground has now been broken by the first woman dramatist, Fatima Gallaire, whose work explores the efforts of post-Revolutionary women to free themselves from the hierarchies of the patriarchal family, mediated by a colluding matriarchy—for example, Princesses, ou ah! vous êtes venus…là où il y a quelques tombes (Princesses, or You’ve Come Among the Tombs), staged in New York in 1988 and Paris in 1991, and Les Co-Épouses (Joint Wives) performed in Paris in 1991).

JENNIFER BIRKETT

francophone performing arts: Switzerland

The performing arts in French-speaking Switzerland began to come into their own in the mid-nineteenth century. The Romands were noted for attempts, in the lineage of Rousseau, to popularize a theatre in which song and dance were an integral part. In the first part of the twentieth century, many theatrical companies were created in keeping with this spirit; René Morax’s Théâtre du Jorat (1908), for instance, was founded in a barn. Plays shown in such spaces incorporated music, like Le Roi David (1921), with a score by Honegger, and exploited popular themes, like Tell (1914), with music by Gustave Doret. Contemporary traditional theatre has benefited from the international renown of German-speaking Swiss authors such as Dürrenmatt and Frisch, especially through the increase in funding available.

After World War II, new companies were founded to complement existing municipal theatres. Most notable examples are: La Compagnie des Faux-Nez (Lausanne, 1948) under Charles Apothéloz; the Théâtre de Carouge (1957), which merged in 1972 with the Théâtre de l’Atelier (Geneva, mid-1960s); the Théâtre de Poche (Geneva, late 1940s), which became the Nouveau Théâtre de Poche; and the Théâtre Populaire Romand or TPR (Neuchâtel in 1959, and now based in La Chaux-de-Fonds). French-Swiss theatre is often experimental or, at least, untraditional by Parisian standards. Themes tend to be surreal or farcical—for example, Henri Dubluë’s 1962 Le Procès de la Truie (The Trial of the Sow), Louis Gaulis’s Capitaine Karagheuz (1960)—or are centred on issues of Swiss identity. Contemporary theatre has developed these characteristics in plays by, and adaptations of, contemporary writers in other genres (Anne Cuneo, Éric Schaer, Amélie Plume, Michel Viala).

Substantial patronage from the Swiss Art Council (ProHelvetia) led to the creation in 1991 (in conjunction with the Swiss Society of Authors, or SSA) of the Parloir Romand, an organization encompassing five companies (Arsenic, Osses, TPR, St-Gervais and Yverdon). New plays can be showcased through the Parloir, thereby gaining a degree of international recognition (see, for instance, the work of Claude Delarue and Jean-Daniel Coudray). In the 1990s the SSA has also supported the showing of new plays at the Théâtre du Grütli in Geneva. The merging of different art forms within Swiss theatre helps transcend language and socioeconomic barriers, and is in keeping with the Swiss spirit of popular art. Mime, self-evidently not restricted to one linguistic area, is very popular: the famed school founded by the mime Dimitri is in Italian-speaking Ticino, and the international fame of the Mummenschanz transcends more than mere language barriers. Physical performance is traditional, as illustrated by the work of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, the creator of danse rythmique (now part of the romand primary school curriculum). Poetry, literature, music (from the traditional Ranz des vaches to the modernism of Honegger and Frank Martin), dance, film, mime, puppetry (Théâtre des Marionnettes de Genève) and circus (Knie) all feed into the diversity of the Swiss performing arts, and the collaboration of Ramuz and Stravinsky in 1918 on the Histoire du Soldat (The Soldier’s Tale) is an illustrious early example. Today dance and theatre are closely linked, with the Béjart school (Rudra-Atelier) in Lausanne teaching not only dance and kendo, but also percussion, singing, theatre and music, so as to produce performers whose understanding of dance as a language is not restricted to choreographic annotations. The Arsenic Theatre’s director, Jacques Gardel, collaborated with Linga to produce Alma Mahler, benefiting from the open attitude of companies created by ex-Béjart dancers (Linga, Buissonière, Nomades).

The most spectacular and popular merging of performance arts occurs every twenty-five years for the Fête des Vignerons in Vevey. The last festival of this kind was in 1977 and was written by Henri Dubluë, with a musical score from Jean Balissat and costumes by Jean Monod. The 1977 Fête was directed by Charles Apothéloz, a doyen of mainstream art theatre who also successfully directed other popular celebrations: La Pierre et l’esprit (1975) (The Stone and the Spirit), La Fête du blé et du pain (1978) (The Feast of Corn and Bread) and Terre nouvelle (1979) (New Land). No performance in Switzerland can equal the scale of the Fête des Vignerons, originally a parade that became partly a stationary show in the nineteenth century. It has grown in size over the years to become, in 1977, a two-week-long spectacle (coinciding with National Day) comprising more than 4,000 performers in an open-air arena (seating 15,800) overlooking Lake Léman. The performers were non-professional (a choice made by Apothéloz, after the snub received by organizers of the previous Fête, in 1955, when the Corps de Ballet of the Paris Opéra refused to participate in the parade), and comprised more than 1,000 children. The representation of the four seasons featured modern and popular dance, poetry, music (from orchestra to Alpenhorn), and traditional, patriotic romand songs (including the Ranz des vaches) sung tearfully by the whole audience. Such spectacles are the apotheosis of the performing arts in Switzerland.

VÉRÈNE GRIESHABER

francophone popular music: DOM-TOMs

Martinique and Guadeloupe, the two Caribbean DOMs (départements d’outre-mer, or ‘overseas departments’), share the same cultural identity. Although French is the official language, Creole is the vehicle for artistic expression. In musical terms their culture is rooted in West Indian, therefore West African heritage.

In the 1960s and 1970s public entertainment generally took place in the paillottes, straw huts often located on the seaside. Local groups or individual artists would come and play traditional West Indian rhythms, live of course. In the 1980s a new musical form creatively fusing old idioms and contemporary forms of swing, rock and funk emerged: the zouk. The seminal exponent group Kassav’ exported it to France, to Africa and to the world, and with this new form came coincidentally the decline of the paillottes, and the appearance of nightclubs with heavy acoustic equipment and play-back facilities (to the point where live music entertainment had more or less disappeared). In the early 1990s, Kali and his group in Martinique were the exception that confirmed the play-back rule. But, apart from the fact that market forces imposed exile to mainland France on the ambitious local zouk or jazz-biguine groups, things were changing. Besides the official temples (Maison des Arts et de la Culture, in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, and Le Carbet in Fort-de France, Martinique), bars and clubs open their doors to their local zouk artists. In Guadeloupe, where it all began, you can hear Patrick St Eloi and Jean Michel Rotin, as well as the most established stars like Zouk Machine, Energy and Tanya St Val. In Martinique, one finds Kwak and Taxi-Kreole (exponents of pure zouk), Max Ramsay and the group Malavoi, which explore the biguine and sounds of the 1950s reborn. After years of neglect, some traditional forms of music and events on these islands are back in force; for example, the gwo-ka as well as the lewoz, where workers on the sugar plantations would sing of their troubled existence and commemorate their African roots. These vie neg styles (Creole for ‘old Negroes’) bear witness to the vitality of traditional music and are an antidote to the invasion of ragamuffin music imported by exiles from France or Jamaica.

Further south along the Atlantic coast, French Guiana is a singular country which, from an old penal colony, became a high-technology capital without much transition; a disparate group of immigrants from Brazil, Surinam, Haiti, Europe came to the new Eldorado. Each community endeavours to keep its own cultural identity. There is an extraordinary musical patchwork—American tradition, Creole koesco and biguine, jazz sessions and Brazilian-style carnival—and the organic link between these traditions is reggae. Compared to the French West Indies, there is no singular or original feature such as the zouk, but French and/or Creole are used by a myriad of artists, who explore a variety of genres from progressive music (Azica), reggae (Marcel Blood, Wailing Roots, Nikko), traditional Guianese (Ayne Gabrielle), latinojazz (Jorland), latino-african (Gilda Rey), to chanson (Edward Blasse) and bossa nova (José Ultet).

In the Indian Ocean, the island of Reunion— a French territory since 1638, which became a DOM in 1946—offers an even wider form of métissage of cultures. As it developed over two centuries, immigrants came: slaves from Africa, colons from Europe, traders from China, India, Madagascar and the Middle East. The specificity of Reunion is born out of this clash of cultures. Compared to his/her West Indian cousin, the Réunionnais is more inhibited; he/ she has so many cultures to contend with, but the common language apart from the official French is the popular Creole (which is used almost exclusively for the lyrics of any musical expression). Reunion music is born of tradition akin to the other Indian Ocean islands (Mauritius, Seychelles), a mixture of binary and ternary rhythms. The two seminal styles of music on the island are maloya (synthesis of traditional music from Madagascar and East Africa) and sega (black African dance and music mixed with white European rhythms and instruments). Up to the 1980s, sega was officially encouraged, while maloya became the protest voice of political opposition and, until 1981, was censored. During the Mitterrand era, maloya became the focus of the young generation, and local groups like the Camaleons, TI Fock and Ziskakan, as well as the more established figures (Danyel Waro and Gramoun Lélé, Jacques Farreyrol and Bernadette Ladauge), have syncretized the ancient art of maloya and modern electric support to create an authentic Reunion sound. This musical explosion in terms of production is a sign of extraordinary vitality and diversity.

New Caledonia has seen the rise of Kanak cultural identity and has received the financial support of both the DAC (official French cultural office) and the ADCK (local structure). Too often ignored by the Caldoches (Europeans who represent one-third of the whole population), the musical heritage of this island is now systematically explored and mixed with modern-day techniques. The concept of kaneka (rhythms of the Kanaks) appeared in 1986 as a variation of a Pacific reggae with traditional percussion instruments. Almost all local artists sing in French and in one of the twenty-eight different Kanak languages: Lifou, Drehu, Laai… This mode of pop music is only beginning to flourish.

French Polynesia has 200,000 inhabitants disseminated across 130 small islands over 4 million square kilometres, with Tahiti at the centre of cultural and musical enterprise. The mixture of races and cultures over the centuries is even more inextricable and reflected in the languages used by the most successful artists established in Tahiti: French, Spanish, Tahitian, Rarotongian, Creole and…English. The richness of traditional music and instruments (ukelele, Tahitian guitar) is enthusiastically mixed with French variété, Californian pop, rock and jazz, and (inevitably) reggae, to form a powerful eclectic sound where ancestral Taupiti celebrations are perpetuated.

GÉRARD POULET

francophone popular music: Europe

Belgium and Switzerland are the main sources of popular music in francophone Europe, in terms of both production and distribution.

Politically and culturally, Belgium’s two main communities—Flemish and French-speaking—live in dynamic tension rather than in harmony. The French-speaking community mainly inhabits Brussels and southern Belgium (Wallonie). In popular music terms, Jacques Brel has put Belgium on the map since 1959. His monumental presence overshadowed a rich pattern of young talent, some of it ephemeral, such as Philippe Anciaux, Paul Louka in Charleroi, Hustin, Watrin and Piérot. Others mentioned below have lasted longer and still participate in the present scene. The survival of la chanson as one of the most popular and authentic expressions of French-speaking Belgian identity encounters many obstacles: the geographical context is too restricted, there are few venues which offer regular slots to pop, variété or rock artists, the record/CD market is small, media support weak, and foreign impact important. Even the home audience often expressed attachment to pop artists only after success in France. In general terms, production and distribution of cultural products is concentrated in the hands of non-Frenchspeaking multinationals, and the danger of uniformity of music culture across the planet is all too real: francophone pop music represents under 3 per cent of the world recording market. Nevertheless, there is a framework to support artists of the Communauté Française de Belgique (CFB) from Wallonie and Brussels. Funding exists to support participation in main festivals in what is usually known as the espace francophone: in France, the Printemps de Bourges, the Francofolies de La Rochelle and the Chaînon-Manquant in Tours; elsewhere, the Festival International d’Été de Québec, the Francofolies de Montréal and the Coup de Coeur Francophone, all in Montreal; in Switzerland, the Paléo Festival de Noyon. Such participation is vital because of the decline of local events since the heyday of the 1960s and 1970s.

While Brel was enjoying success in France, in Brussels some assertive voices were heard, such as Freddy Zegers, Jules Beaucarne and Salvatore Adamo. At the same time, rock and roll surged through both linguistic communities—three francophone groups were The Cousins, Wallace Collection and, in the 1970s, Machiavel—together with a general trend towards social and regional protest songs. Representative voices of that period are André Bialek and Claude Semal, who gave perhaps a more accurate image of contemporary Belgian identity than Brel himself in Plat Pays (1960). More socially aware were Christiane Stefanski, Guy Harmel and Ann Gaytan, among others. Young talent of the 1970s has since established itself in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Philippe Lafontaine, Maurane and Pascal Charpentier. Of these, Maurane had success in France, Quebec and Switzerland. Her songs, full of humour, tenderness and energy, are appreciated there as much as at the Cirque Royal in Liège. She heads a new generation of artists, including Pierre Rapsat, Stella, Odieu, Marka and the Frères Mansion who, year after year, attempt to renew style and repertoire. In the 1990s, the extraordinary voices of Zap Mama and Khadja Nin, from Zaire and Burundi, impose their private worlds and rhythm on the old colonial metropolis, on Montreal and in the USA.

The Festival International de la Chanson Française in Spa was a fertile forum for new talent between 1963 and 1984. Since then, hopefuls must attend festivals in France, Quebec or Switzerland or start at the Botanique in Brussels in the shadow of established artists, as in the festival of September 1993 (‘Le Botanique fait la rentrée chanson’). On the airwaves, the Anglo-American steamroller prevails: there is no prescribed quota for French songs as in France and Quebec, even though, for a while, Pierre Collard-Bovy had a radio show dedicated to Belgian artists. Popular venues in Brussels are: the Os à Moelle, the Samaritaine and the Soupape and, in Liège, Les Forges, Georges Fassotte or Six Corale, where the new generation can be heard— Audrey Englebert, Etienne Dontaine, Légétime Démence, Pascal Vyvère and Vaya Con Dios.

The French-speaking community in Switzerland has a long singing tradition and its essential voice is undoubtedly Michel Bülher. In the mould of Brel and Brassens, he is the rebellious troubadour who questions our times and echoes the uneasy hopes of the Suisse romande youth. His 1993 album, L’Autre Chemin (The Other Path), shows consistency in his message over twenty years, even if some lyrics are in the more trendy idiom of rap suisse. A sign of the times is that Évasion, the company which had produced Swiss-French singers since the 1950s, went bankrupt in 1995. In an eclectic musical environment, where jazz is particularly fertile, a few artists are perpetuating francophone song: for example, Sens Unik (a group of young rappers), Carlos and his band, Valérie Lou and Sakharyn. They remain a minority with little airtime on local French-speaking radio. However, two annual events are used as a forum for artists from the francophone world in a variety of musical styles: one is exclusively francophone (the Francomanias in Bulle, since 1990) and the other the Paléo-Festival at Noyon, which gives a substantial slot for French performers and repertoire. Switzerland is a microcosm of European cultural diversity. There is evidence of this cross-fertilization in the work of Stephan Eicher, a German-speaking Swiss gypsy now highly successful on the international scene singing in French, English and German.

GÉRALD POULET

See also: music festivals

francophone popular music: North Africa

The Maghreb (Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria) is a land of ancient civilizations where successive contributions from Mediterranean neighbours have produced a burgeoning and conflictual context, favourable to a rich and varied musical texture. Three main languages commonly used are Arabic, Berber and French. The French colonial presence varied in length in its three countries: 44 years in Morocco, 75 years in Tunisia and 132 years in Algeria. Since then, throughout North Africa (though less markedly in Algeria), francophone musical expression has mainly been imported and native talents have remained loyal to their ancestral roots and traditional languages:Arabic and Berber.

In Morocco the African-Andalusian musical tradition is the dominating influence. Evidence of this can be found in the numerous Écoles de Musique (Oujda, Meknes) or Instituts de Musique (Fez, Tétouan, Tangier), which specialized in that type of music, originally from Granada and Córdoba. The language of instruction might sometimes be French, as in the Institut National de Musique et de Danse in Rabat, but the musical idiom is not.

Apart from this central tradition, represented in the 1990s by Bajedoub Mohamed, there are many other influences that never really converge in the creation of an authentic Moroccan sound: Berber, Jewish, Middle Eastern, Bambara and International variété. Nevertheless, in the 1970s Nass El Ghowan and Jil Jilala were instrumental in attempting a characteristic Moroccan style. A younger generation (the Bouchnak brothers, for example) emulated their Algerian neighbours in promoting their own version of raï, and today the leading artist is Cheb Mimoun El Oudji from Oujda. The Berber tradition is centred in Agadir with Ahihi Moulay Ahmed and Izenzaren.

Any Moroccan talent that wishes to use French as a vehicle of expression tends to end up in France. The best example of this kind is Sapho. Born in Marrakesh in the Jewish community, she came to France in 1968 and brought with her the memories of the rich sounds of her childhood. If at first she rejected her background to embrace the values and culture of the Western world, using rock and jazz to express her torn experience and her sense of revolt, in 1987 she added rhythms which are close to those of the gnawas, ‘musician-therapists’ who entrance the crowds in Casablanca and Marrakesh using traditional drums, Bambara-style. Idolized in Japan, she has invented a kind of ethno-rock, merging her disparate roots—Jewish and Maghrebin culture and French language.

Tunisia is also a land of extraordinary musical vitality rooted in long tradition and influenced by a Turkish presence established for 100 years as well as Andalusian nouba. In the 1960s, apart from the academic malouf, more popular styles were developed like the recitative fondo. The 1970s saw the beginning of a rich period in the singing tradition, illustrated by Lofti Bouchenak (who gave concerts in France) and Ahmed Hamza. Ridha Hjouini from Tunis is the only artist of the 1980s and 1990s who performs in French as well as in Arabic and is the prolific writer of more than 3,000 songs. The new trends are the bisquit (from the French biscuit) meaning ‘commercial’ and the mezwed (whose name is derived from the Breton bagpipe). Popular Tunisian tunes rarely cross the Mediterranean.

After 1962, Algeria experienced an ebullient period, when a strictly state-controlled cultural policy of Arabization, and of instruction in Andalusian traditional musical style (perceived as ‘politically correct’), did not prevent some artists from exposing their modern-day Algerian- style pop music, mainly in Algiers and Oran. The new styles emerged from the poorer suburbs. Around Oran there was a modern version of raï, created in the 1920s and from the Algiers casbah, the chaâbi, a sort of Algerian traditional blues, which pervaded this young country whose population more than doubled in twenty years. The central planning of cultural policy became more marked in 1965, with the arrival of Boumedienne as president, but, nevertheless, the international pop and rock movement did permeate somehow, and the introduction of the acoustic guitar allowed a new breed of artists (Aït-Menguellet, and Idir with his famous hit, A vava Inouva) to express outside official channels the troubled existence and aspirations of Algerian youth. Fifteen years later, at the end of the 1970s, a new breed nourished on traditional raï but exposed to rock, pop and reggae came on the scene from the same suburbs of Oran. This was a social phenomenon first, then a musical movement which grew clandestinely to express in its vitality the spirit of a whole generation, at once joyfully exuberant and freely melancholic. They called themselves chebs (meaning ‘young’), they crossed the sea, and took Paris and France by storm in 1986, adding an extraordinary dimension to the French musical landscape.

GÉRARD POULET

francophone radio: DOM-TOMs

Radio audiences in the départements d’outremer (DOM) and the territoires d’outremer (TOM), France’s overseas departments and territories, depend mainly on programmes broadcast by Radio France Outre-Mer (RFO, whose headquarters are at 5 avenue du Recteur Poincaré, 75016 Paris), which employs a full-time staff of over 1,000. This subsidiary of Radio France, whose official title is the Société Nationale de Radio et de Télévision Française d’Outre-Mer, was created in 1982. Short-wave radio broadcasts to former French colonies began as early as 1931, on the occasion of the opening of the Colonial Exhibition in Paris. In 1955, DOM-TOM radio services were taken over by a new organization, SORAFORM (Société de Radiodiffusion de la France d’Outre-Mer), which became OCORA (Office de Coopération Radiophonique) in 1964. From 1975 to 1982, the service was controlled by FR3, the television channel.

There are nine RFO stations, each available on FM networks: Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane, Réunion, St Pierre-et-Miquelon, Polynésie (Tahiti), Nouvelle-Calédonie, Wallis-et-Futuna and Mayotte. Since 1991 RFO programmes have been broadcast via the Télécom 2B satellite. Programmes are planned centrally (but 75 per cent are produced locally) and concentrate on reflecting local culture, traditions and social and economic affairs. Programmes retransmitted from Radio France stations are provided free to RFO. Advertising on RFO stations has been authorized since 1984—in 1993, 14.5 per cent of RFO’s total revenue came from advertising—but the major part of its income (over 70 per cent) was provided by the redevance (radio and television licence-fee payments). The state occasionally contributes subsidies.

In most overseas departments and territories, France-Inter programmes are also available on FM. There is also a popular private périphérique radio station, Radio Antilles, which is available to most French Caribbean listeners (Guadeloupe and Martinique), and transmits from the nearby British island of Montserrat.

Overseas francophone listeners can also tune into France’s world service news broadcasts on short wave, many of which are in French. This service, which has an estimated regular audience of 30 million, is provided by RFI (Radio France Internationale), another subsidiary of Radio France. France’s world service dates back to 1935: RFI was created in 1975 and became an autonomous organization in 1983.

ALAN PEDLEY

francophone radio: Europe

According to the most recent estimates, over 61 million Europeans use French as their first language. Many more can understand it and speak it as a second language. Radio, which is unaffected by national frontiers, makes a significant contribution to the maintenance of francophonie, which extends in Europe beyond French borders into Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg.

France’s 23 national radio stations (including networks), 39 state-owned local radio stations and estimated 1,600 private local radio stations provide the bulk of francophone radio in Europe. Some of these stations, the socalled radios périphériques, do not even transmit from within French borders: RTL (formerly known as Radio Luxembourg), the most popular station in France since 1982 (with 17.6 per cent of the national audience), has its long and short-wave transmitters in the Duchy. Europe I, the other main private périphérique station (attracting 10 per cent of French radio listeners), transmits from the Sarre in Germany. Both these long-wave stations are listened to by many Belgians, Swiss and Luxembourgers. In the southern half of France, two other private périphérique stations broadcast non-specialized programmes similar to those of RTL and Europe 1: RMC (Radio Monte-Carlo), claiming over 4 per cent of the national audience, and Sud Radio, which transmits from the Principality of Andorra.

The French state broadcasting company, Radio France, also runs a non-specialized national station, France-Inter (commanding 11.2 per cent of the national audience), both on FM and long wave, so capturing many listeners in Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg and even Britain. Radio France also runs five other national stations of a more specialized nature: France Info, France Culture, France Musique, Radio Bleue and FIP. Radio France’s local stations cover all corners of the country, from Lille (Fréquence Nord) to Bayonne (Pays Basque), from Quimper (Bretagne Quest) to Bastia (Corse Frequenza Mora).

In addition to the périphérique stations there are a number of private national networks which are more specialized: NRJ, Fun, Nostalgie, Europe 2, Skyrock, Chérie FM, RFM, M40, Metropolys-Maxximum, Super-Loustic, Montmartre, Notre-Dame, Fourvière, TSF, RTL 2 and Radio Classique. These stations are tending to progress in terms of audience at the expense of the non-specialist stations.

Outside France, the largest number of French speakers is to be found in Belgium (about 4.5 million). Before World War II, radio broadcasting was in the hands of a private company, INR (Institut National Belge de Radiodiffusion)—founded in 1930, it ran two stations, one broadcasting in Flemish and the other in French. In 1945, the INR was granted a monopoly of broadcasting and became a state-owned concern. Following a period of growing tension between the two main cultural and linguistic groups in Belgium, a law created two distinctive autonomous organizations in 1960: RTBF (Radio-Télévision Belge de la Communauté Française) for Walloon/French speakers and BRT for Flemish speakers.

These two state-owned companies could not originally carry advertising. During the 1970s they were increasingly challenged by private pirate radio stations and RTL. This led the Belgian government to legalize private radio at the local level. In 1987, BRT and RTBF were allowed to take advertising. BRT runs four FM stations; RTBF runs three FM stations and one station on medium wave. Despite the spread of television into virtually every Belgian home in the 1980s, radio listening has increased (the average of 2.5 hours a day in 1980 became 3.5 hours in 1990), even more than TV viewing (2 hours in 1980, 2.25 hours in 1990).

In Switzerland, where there are nearly 1.25 million French speakers, broadcasting has been in the hands of the SRG (Schweizerische Rundfunk Gesellschaft) since 1931, when it was created by the Swiss Confederation as a private company enjoying a monopoly of broadcasting, controlled by the state. It is subdivided into three regional/linguistic organizations: the RDRS (for German speakers), the SSR (Société Suisse de Rediffusion et Télévision) and RDSI (for Italian speakers). French-language radio programmes are provided by Radio Suisse Romande (RSR), which is based at Lausanne (40 avenue du Temple, Case Postale 78, 1010 Lausanne). RSR runs three stations: RSR-La Première, RSR-Espace 2 and RSR-Couleur 3. It is financed partly by revenue produced by the licence fee and partly by income from advertising. The latter is strictly controlled: commercial breaks must not exceed 8 per cent of any single day’s broadcasting. The SSR monopoly was broken for the first time in 1979 by Radio 24, and further concessions have been granted to a number of local private radio stations since that time.

While managing reasonably well to hold its own in the face of the ever-increasing popularity of television, radio listening in francophone Switzerland compares unfavourably with the other two major linguistic areas of the country. While Italian speakers average 156 minutes of listening per day, and German speakers average 198, French speakers only manage 133.

ALAN PEDLEY

francophone television: DOM-TOMs

Francophone television in the French overseas departments and territories (DOM-TOMs) comes from three main sources: the public sector company Société National de Radio et de Télévision Française d’Outre-Mer (RFO), which operates two channels; local private television companies; and pay-TV on the Canal Plus format.

In terms of audience share, the most important broadcaster by far is RFO. This company was originally established by the 1982 broadcasting statute (the loi Fillioud) as a subsidiary of the state broadcasting companies, Radio France and FR3, but was transformed into a separate self-standing programme company by the 1986 audiovisual statute (the loi Léotard). RFO is funded primarily from licence-fee income, supplemented by state grants and advertising revenue. It has three zones of transmission. The Atlantic zone comprises Martinique, French Guiana, Guadeloupe and St-Pierre-et-Miquelon; the Indian Ocean zone consists of Reunion and Mayotte; and the Pacific zone includes New Caledonia, Polynesia, and Wallis and Futuna. Its first channel, RFO 1, broadcasts programmes from the schedules of TF1, France Télévision and ARTE as well as some locally produced output, especially news. The second channel, RFO 2, transmits the programme schedule of France 2. In the early 1990s, thanks to developments in satellite technology, the programme schedules of both channels were lengthened and reception improved. RFO’s audience share is upwards of 70 per cent across the DOM-TOMs.

Having lost its long-standing monopoly, however, RFO is facing increasing competition for viewers with the establishment of new sources of television programming. In the early 1990s, several local private television companies were licensed by the national regulatory authority, the Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel (Higher Audiovisual Council). The most popular private television channels in the DOM-TOMs include: Antenne Réunion, whose main shareholder is the Bourbon sugar company; Archipel 4 in Guadeloupe; Télévision Caraïbe Internationale and Antilles Télévision in Martinique; and Antenne Créole Guyane. In addition, encrypted pay-TV channels, in which Havas DOM is a major shareholder, have very quickly established themselves in the market. These include: Canal Réunion, Canal Antilles in Guadeloupe and Martinique, Canal Guyane, Canal Calédonie and Canal Polynésie. Finally, there are assorted pirate television stations, including Canal 10 and TV-Éclair in Guadeloupe and TV Freedom in Reunion, broadcasting illegally to small but often very faithful audiences.

There is little doubt that the pay-TV stations will attract enough subscribers to be a viable commercial enterprise. In contrast, the advertising-funded private channels face an uncertain financial future as satellite and digital technology opens up the DOM-TOMs to the output of foreign broadcasters. More worryingly for French policy-makers, if in the future local viewers turn away in large numbers from the output of RFO, then the high cost of maintaining a separate public sector company for small overseas audiences is bound to feature on the media policy agenda in metropolitan France. In this case, the French state will have to decide the extent to which it is prepared to underwrite a publicly funded broadcasting service in the DOM-TOMs to help maintain its cultural and political presence there.

RAYMOND KUHN

francophone television: Europe

Television is a vital medium for the dissemination of the French language and francophone culture to European audiences who are resident outside of metropolitan France. Its programme output can help maintain a sense of a francophone community which often looks towards the ‘mother country’ as a source of cultural values and artefacts. However, the French-speaking audience outside of France is not extensive, and the francophone audiovisual product has to compete with a wide range of non-francophone programming in the fast-expanding multichannel environment of late twentieth-century Europe.

Francophone television in Europe can be divided up into four distinct categories. First, there is the output of French television channels such as TF1 and France Télévision, which can be received by audiences in other European countries via the new distribution systems of cable and satellite or in some cases by traditional terrestrial transmission. Second, in countries such as Belgium and Switzerland, which have their own indigenous Frenchspeaking audiences, French-language channels form part of the national broadcasting system. Third, with national boundaries becoming more permeable as a result of the development of new communication technologies, transnational and pan-European French-language channels such as ARTE and TV5 have entered the market. Finally, pay-TV channels (in which Canal Plus has a stake) are attracting subscribers in various European countries. In this last case, what is being exported is more a French model of television based on the Canal Plus experience rather than French-language product.

In Belgium, the public service broadcaster for French-speaking Wallonia is the RTBF, which is funded from a mix of licence income and advertising revenue and operates two French-language channels. Its official monopoly status was abolished in 1987 and it now faces stiff competition from the commercial channel, RTL-TVi. The latter is owned by the Compagnie Luxembourgeoise de Télédiffusion (CLT), which is the main broadcaster in Luxembourg. The CLT is in part owned by the French company Havas and has an ownership stake in the French television company M6. Since over 90 per cent of Belgian households are hooked up to cable systems, francophone Belgians can also receive French-language programming from the metropolitan French television channels as well as from ARTE and TV5. TF1, for example, has a large share of the Belgian francophone audience, making it a major competitor with RTBF and RTL-TVi. The pay-TV channel Canal Plus Belgique was started in 1989, and is owned by a consortium comprising RTBF, Canal Plus France and assorted Belgian companies.

In Switzerland, the Société Suisse de Radiodiffusion (SSR) produces programming for each linguistic region, with its studios in Geneva catering for the French-speaking Swiss population. The SSR had a public service monopoly until 1983. However, because of the widespread availability of cable television, francophone Swiss viewers also have access to foreign channels, including those from metropolitan France. Well over half of the viewing time in the French-speaking cantons is devoted to non-Swiss channels. In 1990, for example, the metropolitan French channels—France 1, Antenne 2, France 3, La Cinq and M6—took over half of the French-speaking audience share, with TF1 alone taking 24 per cent.

The development of cable and satellite technology in the 1980s, and the arrival of digital television in the 1990s, have opened up new opportunities for pan-European francophone output by facilitating a huge expansion in the number of channels and breaking down national boundaries in transmission and reception. In 1996 Canal Plus entered into an agreement with BSkyB (United Kingdom) and Bertelsmann (Germany) to form a European consortium to promote the expansion of Europe-wide digital television. With its technological expertise and production experience, Canal Plus is set to be a major player in the media market of the twenty-first century and, as a result, French television will be at the heart of the European audiovisual revolution. However, the problems for francophone television in Europe remain formidable. On the supply side, the French programme production industry is not geared up to providing huge amounts of original francophone product. In contrast, the United Kingdom has a well-developed audiovisual media sector whose programme output is popular with audiences across continental Europe. Moreover, there are very limited non-European sources of francophone production. Programme imports to Europe from abroad tend to be in English (from the United States) or Spanish/Portuguese (from Latin America). On the demand side, the European francophone community resident outside of metropolitan France is small and concentrated in areas close to French territory.

The French state has sought to promote francophone television in Europe and assist the production base of its audiovisual industries through a combination of financial aid and protectionist measures such as programme quotas. However, France’s major partners in the European Union have not been sympathetic to its advocacy of regulation and financial support to offset the allegedly undesirable cultural consequences of free trade in audiovisual goods and services. In any case regulation can be only part of the equation. If francophone television is to be successful in securing audiences in the future, this will require not just a larger Frenchspeaking market in Europe but also programmes whose content, form and style make them competitive with non-francophone and particularly anglophone production.

RAYMOND KUHN

francophone writing (fiction, poetry): Belgium

Belgian writing is here defined as the collection of texts (novels, short stories and poetry) produced by authors of Belgian origin, and has been better known through famous figures than through an easily identifiable label (such as ‘Belgian literature’). While few would dare propose a definition of what exactly constitutes ‘Belgian literature of French expression’, Belgian authors have in fact contributed to the history of French literature: for example, Maurice Maeterlinck (recipient of the Nobel prize for literature in 1911), Émile Verhaeren, Henri Michaux, Georges Simenon, Dominique Rolin, Françoise Mallet-Joris, Pierre Mertens, and the inevitable Tintin, whose adventures scarcely need to be presented. For ideological and political reasons, for want of institutional or academic support (except a Royal Academy of French Language and Literature, avoided by new talents as a stifling institution), and because Belgian publishers were never able to compete with their established and prestigious French neighbours, many Belgian authors have chosen to live in France or to give up their Belgian nationality altogether (Michaux became French in 1955). When they choose to remain in Belgium, Belgian novelists set their novels either in France or behind closed doors with no reference to location. Throughout the history of Belgian literature, the trend of exile to Paris has been so consistent that there is indeed some truth in the adage that ‘One French author out of two is Belgian.’ Since the 1980s, however, the situation has changed. Thanks to the combined efforts of Belgian publishers (Labor), and to a proactive Ministry of Culture and Social Affairs represented by Marc Quaghebeur (who is not only a diplomat but also an author and critic), Belgian authors have become visible on the international scene as specifically Belgian, though it is no longer felt that such an identity requires a fixed definition outlining exactly what is Belgian and what is not.

The post-1950 literary production remains polymorphous. While many authors of the first half of the century have set their own work within a movement or have been ‘labelled’ according to French literary taxonomy (naturalism for Camille Lemonnier, symbolism for Georges Rodenbach, and Surrealism for Paul Nougé and Christian Dotremont), contemporary Belgian authors remain idiosyncratic. The 1980s saw a tremendous development as far as Belgian writers were concerned, both with new voices and with writers who had published before and who came back with much-acclaimed novels.

In a deceptively classical style, Jacqueline Harpman explored the abysses of history and memory from La Mémoire trouble (Blurred Memory) in 1987, and 1990’s La Fille démantelée (The Dismantled Daughter), to Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes (I Who Have Not Known Men) from 1995, a claustrophobic novel set in a wasteland which explores life without memory, and her 1992 collection of short stories, La Lucarne (Skylight), in which she rewrote old myths, from the Virgin Mary and Antigone to Joan of Arc.

One of the most prolific and acclaimed Belgian authors, Dominique Rolin, who was awarded the 1952 Femina prize for Le Souffle (Breeze), explores love, family and their tragedies—from Les Marais (Swamps) of 1942, Moi qui ne suis qu’amour (I Who Am Nothing But Love) of 1948, 1960’s Le Lit (The Bed) and Le For intérieur (Heart of Hearts) of 1962, novels influenced by the nouveau roman, to 1992’s Deux Femmes un soir (Two Women One Night), the subtle story of a mother-daughter relationship in which their points of view alternate.

In a much-debated novel (taken to court for its allegedly irreverent comments on Belgian monarchs Leopold III and Baudouin), Pierre Mertens—the author of what had been considered the ‘first modern Belgian novel’, 1974’s Les Bons Offices (The Good Services), and recipient of the 1987 Médicis prize for his Shadowlight (Les Éblouissements)—deals with a popular Belgian theme, the interior exile of the tourist, entwined with childhood memories, in Une Paix royale (A Royal Peace).

In his 1995 novel, La Place du mort (The Passenger Seat), Jean-Luc Outers also deals with memory, but integrates it with a theme central to the Belgian novel of French expression— language itself. In the same year, Louise Lambrichs, whose Journal d’Hannah (Hannah’s Diary) was elected best novel for 1993 by the French literary journal Lire, analyses the dangers of history and memory in Le Jeu du roman (The Game of the Novel).

On the more experimental side, Eugène Savitzkaya manipulates the French language to translate the tragedy of the human condition and memory in a world inhabited by decadence, decay and putrefaction—see Mongolie plaine sale (Mongolia, dirty plain) from 1976, La Disparition de maman (The Vanishing of Mother) of 1982, Marin mon coeur (Marin, My Beloved) from 1992, and En Vie (Alive) published in 1995. Jean-Philippe Toussaint explores the narrative possibilities of the fragment in La Salle de bain (The Bathroom) and Monsieur: A Novel (Monsieur), published in 1995 and 1996. The most famous writers of the new generation include Pascal de Duve, who explored the tragic ironies of modern life in his 1990 novel (Izo), and the playful and tragic possibilities of the French language in his 1993 travel narrative Cargo Vie (Cargo Life), before his death from AIDS at the age of 29. Amélie Nothomb has become the enfant terrible of Belgian literature, a cultural phenomenon, not only with her novels but also with her interviews, in which she has created herself into a myth (coming from a famous family of Belgian diplomats and ministers, she declares that she was an alcoholic between the ages of 3 and 14 and that only anorexia saved her from alcoholism). After her first novel, Hygiène de l’assassin (Hygiene of the Murderer), a thriller published in 1992 whose action is the very act of writing, she published Le Sabotage amoureux (Amorous Suicide), Les Combustibles (Combustibles), and Les Catilinaires (Hate Speeches), which was hailed by the popular French literary journal Lire as the best novel for 1995. Amélie Nothomb’s novels, usually based on the dialogue form, are caustic and captivating domestic tragedies.

JEAN MAINIL

francophone writing (fiction, poetry): DOM-TOMs

In the Caribbean, the borders of nation-states are incompatible with linguistic and literary frontiers. By concentrating on the (strictly speaking) French territories of Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana that officially acquired the status of overseas departments (départements d’outre-mer) in 1946, it is possible to delineate a thriving literary corpus. But no common denominator is easily pinpointed, because Caribbean literatures always question the categories of literary genres, of national or even post-colonial literatures, and invite us to adopt a comparativist approach.

The French language is not a unifying element: Haitian literature of French expression is internationally acclaimed, while not all texts emanating from the French islands are in French: many poems, novels or folk-tales are written in Creole by Hector Poullet and Raphaël Confiant or collected by Ina Césaire. Recent novels have explored the potential of Creolized French: for example Patrick Chamoiseau’s (1988) attempt at becoming a marqueur de parole in Solibo Magnificent (Solibo magnifique) and Daniel Maximin’s 1995 prose poem about a hurricane, Une Île et une nuit (One Island and One Night).

Caribbean writings from départements d’outre-mer are closely related to texts written in other Caribbean islands (in Creole, French, English, Spanish or Dutch), but also to the Creole (though non-Caribbean) literatures of the Indian Ocean (Mauritius and Reunion). Moreover, many authors live and write far from their native islands. Gisèle Pineau, who wrote La Grande Dérive des esprits (The Great Drift of the Spirits) and L’Espérance-Macadam (Macadam-Hope), was born in Paris; Maryse Condé has lived in Africa—see Segu (Ségou), and Heremakhonon (1976)—in France and in the United States. Always, Caribbean writings redefine fiction and poetry because they bring together literature and politics, history and myths, storytelling and the written word.

Politics and history, turbulent sites of contested cultural reappropriation, constantly mingle with fictional accounts. Many recent novels write a Caribbean history of (de)colonization. Writers denounce the silences of official history—see Dany Bebel-Gisler’s 1985 biography of an unknown Guadeloupean woman, Leonora: The Buried Story of Guadeloupe (Léonore: l’histoire enfouie de la Guadeloupe) or shatter persistent myths: rereading the tragic turning point of 1802 when slavery was re-established by Napoleon after having been abolished in 1794, André Schwarz-Bart’s 1972 work La Mulâtresse solitude, and Maximin’s Lone Sun (L’Isolé Soleil) and Soufrières, ridicule the theory that Caribbean people cannot appreciate their freedom because they never had to fight for it. Novels also provide a Caribbean vision of recent events: Raphaël Confiant’s 1988 text, Le Nègre et l’amiral (The Negro and the Admiral) adds a lively Caribbean rendition of Vichy-led Martinique to the few and often sketchy accounts left by famous literary figures after their short and unhappy stay in the island on their way to the United States (see, for example, Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques).

Caribbean culture and the way in which it is mediated through written and oral productions is often a controversial site of struggle against neocolonial reflexes, as shown in Bebel-Gisler’s Le Défi culturel guadeloupéen: devenir ce que nous sommes (The Guadeloupean Cultural Challenge: Becoming Who We Are), published in 1989. Caribbean writing has a long tradition of opposing the racist stereotypes that have survived the heyday of colonial assimilationist policy.

Recent fiction has celebrated heroic nègres marrons (maroons), trying to erase the popular image of runaway slaves as mythical villains invoked to scare children (see Édouard Glissant’s Malemort). In recent fiction and poetry, cultural marronnage (marooning) is a conscious tactic of reappropriation, and novelists choose to tap both African storytelling traditions and the Western canon—see Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Between Worlds (Ti-Jean l’horizon) or The Bridge of Beyond (Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle), and Condé’s rewriting of Wuthering Heights, La Migration des coeurs (Migrating Hearts).

What Frantz Fanon called lactification in his 1952 publication, Black Skin White Masks (the tragically alienated desire to mix black blood with the milk of white sexual partners in order to ‘save’ the race), is still recognizable in derogatory Creole phrases referring to the texture of black people’s skin or hair—see Julie Lirus’s Identité antillaise (Caribbean Identity)—and denounced in Michèle Lacrosil’s or Jacqueline Manicom’s stories. Most novels published in the 1980s and 1990s, however, welcome racial and cultural hybridity. While they hardly present diversity as a cultural or economic panacea, they move far beyond the tenets of negritude, that focused on black identity and race, neglecting people of mixed-blood, Indian and Chinese origins (see Aurore by the writer and Communist leader of Indian origin, Ernest Moutoussamy). The universe described in Joseph Zobel’s 1955 Black Shack Alley is still present in collective memories but the grandmother’s struggle to help her grandson infiltrate the white educational system is far from recent novelists’ preoccupations: Chamoiseau’s 1992 Goncourt prizewinning Texaco retraces the history of quite contemporary urban developments.

In 1989, when three Martinican thinkers published a lyrical manifesto to celebrate créolité as a specific West Indian cultural identity, they did not hesitate to claim that West Indian literature does not exist yet In Praise of Creoleness (Éloge de la créolité). Readers may have wondered if such a self-disparaging statement was the result of lasting forms of cultural alienation that Chamoiseau, Bernabé and Confiant’s literary predecessors had already virulently condemned: Aimé Césaire’s 1939 Return to My Native Land (Cahier d’un retour au pays natal) predates World War II. But the provocative suggestion may also be an invitation to revise our conception of ‘literature’ in the West Indies. Glissant proposes ‘relation’ as a keyword in his Caribbean Discourse (Le Discours antillais) of 1981, and in his 1990 text, Poétique de la Relation (Poetics of Relation). Playing on the French word ‘relation’ (meaning ‘relationship’, but also what is ‘related’ and what is ‘relayed’), he presents us with cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural models. Similarly, In Praise of Creoleness invites us to concentrate on the beautifully entangled web of relationships created by our search for a specific French West Indian literature; This web or mosaic finds both thematic and structural representation in novels such as Maryse Condé’s Crossing the Mangrove (Traversée de la mangrove) from 1989, an intriguingly polyphonic text where the voices of first-person male and female narrators of different races and social origins alternate from chapter to chapter. The juxtaposition of separate Caribbean identities does not add up to a coherent whole, but to a complex and sometimes fragmented mosaic, a symbol of the islands’ multiracial and multicultural society.

MIREILLE ROSELLO

francophone writing (fiction, poetry): Indian Ocean

The principal islands—Madagascar, Mauritius, Reunion and the Seychelles—all have a literary output in French, but its status differs as a result of their varied populations and contrasting colonial history. In all these areas, French as a literary language is rivalled by local languages such as Creole in Reunion, Mauritius and the Seychelles, English and Indian languages in Mauritius, and Malagasy languages in Madagascar. There is nevertheless a well-established tradition of writing in French, going back to the late eighteenth century in the case of Reunion and the early nineteenth century in Mauritius.

The postwar years have seen contrasting developments of these latter two traditions. Mauritian poetry has achieved French and international consecration through the figures of Malcolm de Chazal (1902–81), a visionary and aphoristic poet much admired by André Breton and Jean Paulhan; and Edouard Maunick (b. 1931), a poet of exile and multicultural island identity and a figurehead of francophone literary circles in Paris. By contrast, the contemporary poets of Reunion have been more concerned to establish and explore their Creole identity, often by writing in Creole or incorporating Creolisms into their use of French. The pioneer of the movement of créolie was Jean Albany (1917–84), with his collection Zamal of 1951—the title is the Creole word for ‘marijuana’, symbolizing the poet’s heady memories of his childhood on the island. Others of a more conventional inspiration celebrate Reunionnais decor and culture, such as the archbishop Gilbert Aubry (b. 1942), in Rivages d’Alizés (Trade-Wind Shores) of 1971, and Hymne à la Créolie (Hymn to Creolia) of 1978; or the long-exiled Jean-Henri Azéma (b. 1913) in Olographe (Testament) of 1978. A more militant poetry grew up in the 1970s, aware of the heritage of slavery and contemporary social inequalities, with the monumental epic poem Vali pour une reine morte (Lament for a Late Queen) of 1973 by Boris Gamaleya (b. 1930); and the populist and autonomist poetry of Alain Lorraine (b. 1946) in Tienbo le rein (Let’s Stay as One) of 1975. More recent militant poets, such as Carpanin Marimoutou (b. 1956), have moved from French to Creole, often publishing bilingual editions of their poetry, such as Romans pou la mèr et la tèr (Romance for the Sea and the Land) of 1995.

In Madagascar, with the colonial imposition of education in French, a generation of poets grew up who attempted to transpose into French the forms and qualities of the indigenous Malagasy poetic tradition. Three of these, Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo (1903–37), Jacques Rabémananjara (b. 1913) and Flavien Ranaïvo (b. 1914), were made famous by their inclusion in L.S.Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (Anthology of the New Negro and Malagasy poetry) in 1948. The pioneering Rabéarivelo committed suicide in 1937, but the militant nationalist Rabémananjara was to dominate the Malagasy literary scene during the postwar years. Imprisoned after the uprising of 1947, Rabémananjara became a spokesman for the aspirations of his country to independence and worked closely with Alioune Diop on the revue Présence africaine. His prison poetry Antsa (Testament) of 1948, Rites millénaires (Millennial Rites) of 1955 and Lamba in 1956 are among his most poignant celebrations of the mystery and beauty of the decor and customs of his country. After independence in 1958, Rabémananjara became an influential politician and government minister, but was forced into exile by the coup d’état of 1972 which soon brought to power the Marxist regime of Ratsiraka. The more discreet figure of Ranaivo published L’Ombre et le vent (Shadow and Wind) in 1947, Mes chansons de toujours (The songs I always sing) in 1955, and Le Retour au bercail (Return to the Fold) in 1962, before he too was forced to settle in France. The period of the People’s Republic was not favourable to writing in French and very few new poets in French have come to prominence in the intervening years.

In both Mauritius and Reunion the first attempts at novel writing date back to a nineteenth century more preoccupied with poets and poetry, and it is often the case that novelists are also famous as poets. In the postwar years, the brothers Loys (1915–69) and André Masson (b. 1921) impose a Mauritian presence in metropolitan French literature with an impressively prolific production of novels. Loys Masson left his native island in 1939, never to return, but some of his best-known novels, L’Étoile et la Clef (The Star and the Key) of 1945 and Le Notaire des Noirs (Lawyer to the blacks) of 1961, evoke episodes of Mauritian society, and the mythical presence of the island and the sea are recurrent motifs in his fictions. His brother André remained in Mauritius but none the less managed to publish several novels in the 1960s in Paris—Un temps pour mourir (A Time to Die) in 1962, 1963’s Le Chemin de pierre ponce (The Pumice-Stone Path) and Le Temps juste (A Just Time) from 1966—which evoke metaphysical doubts through the depiction of Mauritian social problems such as racial prejudice. The most notable defenders of the Mauritian novel in recent years have often been exiles: Jean Fanchette (b. 1932) with Alpha du Centaure (The Alpha of the Centaur) in 1975; Marie-Thérèse Humbert (b. 1940) with her autobiographical novel A l’autre bout de moi (At the Other End of Myself) in 1979; and the French novelist Jean-Marie Le Clézio who rediscovered his Mauritian identity with Le Chercheur d’or (The Gold-Hunter) in 1985. The island has at the same time experienced a revival of literature in Creole, be it novels such as René Asgarally’s Quand montagne prend difé… (When the Mountain Catches Fire…) of 1977 or the poems of the dramatist Dev Virahsawmy.

The mid-1970s in Reunion saw a renaissance of socially committed novels, often written in Creole or a Creolized French, whose subject matter was the lives of the poorest members of Réunionnais society: the most notable of these are Les Muselés (The Silenced) of 1977 by Anne Cheynet (b. 1938), Daniel Honoré’s Louis Redona of 1980, written in Creole, and Quartier trois-lettres (Three-Letter District) of 1980 by Axel Gauvin (b. 1944). Gauvin has continued to publish (in Paris) novels with similar themes of social exclusion and characteristics of formal experiment, which he has subsequently republished in Reunion in Creole: Faims d’enfance (Childhood Hungers) of 1987 and L’Aimé (The Loved One) from 1990. The implied questioning of Réunionnais identity has been pursued through historical novels about the island’s often sombre past by Jean-François Samlong (b. 1949), such as Terre arrachée (Torn Earth) of 1982 and Madame Desbassayns of 1985, and by the metropolitan Daniel Vaxelaire, in Chasseur de Noirs (Slave Hunter) of 1982 and L’Affranchi (The Freedman) of 1984. The last twenty years have seen a period of considerable richness in Reunionnais writing in both French and Creole, and this looks likely to continue.

The novel in French has not really established itself as a genre for indigenous writers in Madagascar; an exception to this general rule is the recent output of short stories and novels by Michèle Rakotoson (b. 1948), such as Dadabe of 1984 and Le Bain des reliques (The Bathing of the Relics) of 1988, which evoke from a woman’s point of view the social problems of a people emerging from a long period of repression. In general the short story has shown more vitality as a genre, being easier to publish in local newspapers and magazines and able to attract the attention of a wider public through the competitions organized by Radio-France Internationale.

The smaller islands in the region—the Seychelles, the Comores, Mayotte—have shown the first signs of autonomous literary activity during the last twenty years, with their first novels and poetry written in French. In general, however, it is the sustained vitality of the literary output of Reunion and Mauritius which remains the principal contribution of the area to francophone culture, which can arbitrarily be measured by the recognition by Parisian publishing houses of figures such as Malcolm de Chazal, Loys Masson, Marie-Thérèse Humbert, Axel Gauvin or Jean-François Samlong.

PETER HAWKINS

francophone writing (fiction, poetry): North Africa

All three Maghrebin countries (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) experienced French colonial rule. Morocco and Tunisia gained their independence in 1956, Algeria in 1962. Because of the French policy of assimilation and the length of time (132 years) it was in contact with the French language, Algeria has produced more francophone writers than Morocco or Tunisia. At first, Maghrebin people refused to acknowledge as legitimate the use of French as it was an imposed language, but later accepted its usage, often appropriating it for their own ends. Thus French became the language of anti-colonial struggle, particularly through writing.

The first short story to appear in French in 1891 was La Vengeance du cheikh (The Vengeance of the Sheikh) by the Algerian M’hammed Ben Rahhal. However, this early francophone writing was discarded by generations of Maghrebins as assimilationist and over-friendly towards France

It was not until the 1950s that the Maghreb witnessed the birth of a literature written in French that was acknowledged by many as being of quality. The representative writers of this period are Albert Memmi, Driss Chraïbi, Kateb Yacine and Mohammed Dib, among others. The dynamic and powerful style of these writers earned them the title of forefathers of what is today known as ‘francophone Maghrebin literature’.

The early 1950s writers, such as the Algerian Mouloud Feraoun who published Le Fils du pauvre (The Pauper’s Son) in 1950, and the Moroccan Ahmed Sefrioui with his 1954 novel La Boîte à merveilles (The Box of Wonders), were labelled by their peers as ethnographic writers because they provided the reader with a colourful and exotic picture of everyday life in the French colonies. Such writing was essentially directed to a French audience. It was regarded by Maghrebin critics as being politically disengaged, considering that the 1950s were, above all, a period of political unrest throughout the Maghreb. However, in the case of Feraoun, the critics failed to recognize that through the autobiographical narration and the humanist style of The Pauper’s Son the writer does not simply portray the poverty-stricken Berber region of Kabylia, but shows implicitly that such poverty was a direct consequence of French colonization.

The 1950s was also marked by the revolutionary style of writing of the Tunisian Albert Memmi, the Moroccan Driss Chraïbi and the Algerian Kateb Yacine. They respectively published what were to become canonical texts in francophone Maghrebian literature: La Statue de sel (The Statue of Salt) in 1953, The Simple Past (Le Passé simple) in 1954 and Nedjma in 1956. While Yacine wrote about the metaphorical repeated rape of Algeria, Memmi and Chraïbi respectively attacked the traditional Jewish and Muslim societies from which they feel alienated and which they describe in angry and violent tones.

Of the three writers, it is Chraïbi who drew more attention, both for the quality of his novel and for the aftermath of its publication. His direct attack on Islamic law, which in Chraïbi’s view subjugates the individual, gained him the applause of those in France who were for the continuation of colonial rule over a nation who they believed needed to be civilized, and attracted the anger of Moroccans who, during the publication of The Simple Past, were struggling for independence and saw the novel as propaganda against their fight.

While the 1950s novels were highly autobiographical, the 1960s saw a more politicized kind of writing, especially in Algeria. With the Algerian war of independence, Algerian writers took up arms, and this period saw prolific literary production with revolutionary tones and themes. Thus, Mouloud Mammeri’s 1965 novel L’Opium et le bâton (The Opium and the Baton) set in a small Kabyle village, became a classical text dealing with the Algerian Revolution and the role of the National Liberation Front (FLN) and the resistance fighters. But, before that, Les Enfants d’un nouveau monde (Children of a New World) was published by a woman writer, Assia Djebar. In her 1962 novel, Djebar celebrates the role of women in the war of independence.

From the mid-1960s, a new generation of writers emerged, including Rachid Boudjedra and Mohammed Dib in Algeria, and Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine in Morocco. They were concerned less with the war than with the situation of the Maghrebin countries in the aftermath of independence. They focused on their own societies, which they criticized for inhibiting freedom of expression and for abusing human rights. Likewise, under the banner of free speech, the Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi founded the literary review Souffles (Breaths) in 1966. He was later jailed as a political prisoner but was released in 1988 after Amnesty International intervened on his behalf.

The publications of the 1970s marked a complete break from the previous styles of francophone Maghrebin literature. The writing of this period subverted the French language and gave it new dimensions with highly philosophical tones. Illustrative writers of this period are Abdelkebir Khatibi with his 1971 novel, La Mémoire tatouée (The Tattooed Memory), and Abdelwahab Meddeb’s 1979 work, Talismano. Language, identity, history and sexuality were the key themes of writing of this period. The production of poetry gained ground on the novel in the 1970s. Thus, in addition to novelists who are also poets, such as Mohammed Dib and Tahar Ben Jelloun, new names became prominent, such as Abdellatif Laâbi (who continued to write from his prison cell), Mohammed Loakira and Mostafa Nissaboury.

Maghrebin women started publishing in French as early as 1947. Religious, social and state censorship often constrain women’s writing, which results in some women giving up writing altogether or publishing under pseudonyms, such as Aïcha Lemsine. While, generally, women writers share the same sociopolitical concerns, Assia Djebar stands as the only woman writer whose work experiments with the multiplicity of women’s voices in literature and whose use of French is a subversion of what she calls her ‘stepmother tongue’.

Despite the controversies surrounding the use of French, women writers continue to use it as a medium to make their voice heard. In fact, in spite of the policy of Arabization in the Maghreb since the 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s produced more names from both sexes on the francophone literary scene. Representative of these periods are women writers such as Béji Hélè, Nina Bouraoui, and male writers such as Rachid Mimouni, and Edmond Amrane El Maleh. On the other hand, of the old generation, Kateb Yacine ceased to write in French as a result of his opposition to the institutionalization of francophonie. However, ironically, in 1986 he was awarded the prestigious Prix National des Lettres for his rich contribution to francophone writing.

Though the 1990s represent political and religious threats to Maghrebin writers—especially intense in Algeria—the majority continue to publish. Unlike their predecessors, most of whom lived in France, they have opted to remain in their own countries. This is a brave and risky choice: many writers, like Tahar Djaout in 1993, have been murdered by Islamist opposition groups in Algeria (anyone perceived to be an ‘intellectual’ is a target). The very real risk of violent death is a high price to pay to keep alive a literature that some critics previously regarded as being of little real value.

LAÏLA IBNLFASSI

francophone writing (fiction, poetry): Switzerland

Switzerland and its literature are often viewed as constituting an island in the middle of Europe—an appropriate image, as long as one bears in mind that the closed world of an island is also the symbol of travel, refuge and escapism. Historically speaking the Swiss have always tried to ‘escape’ their boundaries (in 58 BC Julius Caesar sought to halt their general exodus). The fragmentation of Switzerland, with its late absorption of some of the French-speaking cantons, means that Swiss identity is often constructed in contradistinction to other nationalities.

Historically, perhaps inevitably, French-Swiss literature is strongly linked with France. Indeed the romand intelligentsia traditionally went to Paris to study or work. Within Switzerland, France is often accused of claiming as her own the greatest Swiss-French writers, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mme de Staël, the linguist Saussure, Blaise Cendrars, Robert Pinget, Albert Cohen and Pierre Klossowski. In the same way, most Swiss visual artists are perceived to become ‘un-Swissed’ once famous (for example, Füseli, Balthus, Le Corbusier, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, Jean-Luc Godard), leaving ‘local’ and ‘minor’ artists to remain Swiss.

Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz (1878–1947), whose innovative characteristic is the placing of the reader within the novel by a poetic use of the pronouns ‘we’ (nous, on) and ‘you’ (vous), instigated the rebirth of local literature, his rhythmic, poetical style influencing many later writers beyond the borders of Switzerland. However, his nationality and his affirmation thereof have undoubtedly served to diminish his international standing as a great writer.

The movement of emigration and immigration that constituted Switzerland has generated two specific types of literary Swissness: that adopted by the refugee and immigrant (such as Cohen, Anne Cuneo, Klossowski, Benjamin Wilkominski), and that of the ‘fifth Switzerland’, comprising the Swiss abroad (like Blaise Cendrars, Edmond Fleg, Clarissa Francillon, Philippe Jaccottet, Pinget, Monique Saint-Hélier), who produced a substantial body of travel and exile literature, as well as some internationally recognized ‘French’ literature. The insular Swiss have not, as generally believed, generated solely dull and austere work. Playfulness and observation of the outside world are strong preoccupations, as if singularity could be better expressed by toying with otherness (see, for example the work of Amélie Plume). Peasant and workers’ roots have also inspired an important strain of Marxist literature (for example, Yves Velan, and Jacques Chessex, who received the Goncourt prize for L’Ogre in 1973).

This singularity has led to Swiss-French writers wishing to be seen as individuals rather than as a group, and certain ambiguities towards the notion of nationality can be discerned in their work. Distinctions between writers are today felt to be thematic rather than nationalistic, their Swiss roots often only being identifiable by the fact that they are published by Swiss presses (see, for example Charles-Albert Cingria, Anne Cuneo, Amélie Plume, Gustave Roud, Yvette Z’Graggen). Indeed, except for a substantial corpus of internationally recognized Swiss-French academics and intellectuals (Albert Béguin, Léon Bopp, Marc Eigeldinger, Jean Piaget, Marcel Raymond, Denis de Rougemont, Jean Rousset, Jean Starobinski, Jean Ziegler), the international reputation of Swiss-French writing today rests on the unjustly small number taken up by publishers in France (Chessex, Cohen, Jaccottet, Pinget, Velan).

VÉRÈNE GRIESHABER

Frères Jacques, Les

Singers

A legendary quartet of male singers, formed in 1944, whose stage costumes (including leotards, white gloves, top hats and handlebar moustaches) became their distinctive trademark. They perfected their stage performances in variety theatres rather than music halls, combining gesture, mime, movement and lighting in songs which became sketches or playlets. Les Frères Jacques gave their farewell performance at the Champs-Élysées in 1980.

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

Fresson, Bernard

b. 1931, Reims

Actor

A film, television and theatre actor since the 1960s. Fresson has worked with directors, including Jean Vilar at the Théâtre National de Paris, Planchon, Maréchal and Barsacq, in productions including Planchon’s Troilus and Cressida, Fagadau’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Maréchal’s mise en scène of de Filippos’s Filumena Marturana.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Funès, Louis de

b. 1914, Courbevoie;

d. 1983, Nantes

Actor

France’s most popular film star of the 1960s. The generally downmarket nature of his films, such as the Gendarmes series directed by Jean Girault between 1964 and 1982, made great play with a grimacing, irascible body language originally developed in the music hall. The other director for whom he excelled, in a double act with Bourvil, was Gérard Oury (in 1966’s La Grande Vadrouille). He had begun his career working with more ‘respectable’ film-makers such as Sacha Guitry and Autant-Lara (La Traversée de Paris, also with Bourvil, in 1956). His attitude towards authority—hectoring in exercising it, submissive when it was exercised over him—perhaps most fully accounts for his extraordinary popularity with mainstream French audiences.

KEITH READER

See also: cinema

Furet, François

b. 1927, Paris;

d. 1997, Paris

Historian

The best-known recent historian of the French Revolution. Furet’s works—above all 1978’s Interpreting the French Revolution (Penser la Révolution française) and, with Mona Ozouf, Dictionnaire critique de la Revolution française (1988)—were instrumental in articulating a post-Marxist view in which 1789 was seen as foreshadowing the Russian Revolution of 1917 only in its bloody excesses. For Furet, the positive aspects of the French Revolution found their apotheosis in electoral social democracy— a view given credence by the second Mitterrand term and the geopolitical collapse of Communism. A PCF member in his youth, Furet acted as adviser to education minister Edgar Faure in the restructuring of French universities after May 1968, and was president successively of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and of the Institut Raymond Aron.

KEITH READER