G

Gainsbourg, Serge

b. 1928, Paris;

d. 1991, Paris

Singer-songwriter, real name Lucien Ginzburg

If any French singer was guaranteed to cause controversy, it would surely be Gainsbourg. Although he was mainly known for his music, his other great passion was painting, which was his father’s profession. After studying fine art in Paris and a spell as bar pianist, he sang in the Left Bank cabarets and Théâtre des Trois Baudets, achieving initial success in 1958 with Le Poinçonneur des lilas (The Ticket-Puncher on the Tube).

What is particularly fascinating is the split personality Gainsbourg developed: on the one hand, the naive, sensitive artist figure who carefully created words and music; and on the other, his alter ego, whom he named Gainsbarre, an anti-conformist provocateur. Gainsbourg cultivated an unshaven, unkempt look; he led a hedonistic, self-destructive lifestyle, drinking and smoking to excess and, as the years wore on, his nervous twitch and verbal incoherence became steadily more pronounced. A figure who sought infamy, Gainsbourg caused a storm of protest from the military with his 1979 reggae version of the French national anthem, La Marseillaise, Aux armes et cetaera (To Arms, etc.). In 1984 he burned a 500 franc note on television. Equally provocative was the duet, Lemon Incest, which he recorded in 1985 with his daughter, Charlotte.

One of Gainsbourg’s more notable obsessions was the opposite sex. From an early stage in his career, female singers such as France Gall, Juliette Gréco and Régine recorded his songs. He was often accused of manipulating, eroticizing and objectifying women in his life and work, and he became particularly fascinated with the sex-kitten image of Brigitte Bardot whom he met in 1967. Together they recorded Bonnie and Clyde and Gainsbourg paid tribute to her in Initials BB. In Je t’aime moi non plus (I Love You Me Neither), which was censored by the BBC in 1969, Gainsbourg celebrated overtly the addictive nature of sex while undermining traditional notions of romantic love. His subsequent marriage to the English actress and singer, Jane Birkin, created one of the most famous celebrity couples in France. Although he appeared at times to be savage and something of a misogynist, he was nevertheless a romantic who regarded himself as physically unattractive.

Between 1965 and 1979, a relatively unproductive time in terms of songs, Gainsbourg gave up concert tours. He did, however, direct, appear in and write music for several films, and earned his living by making television commercials.

Musically eclectic and innovative, Gainsbourg created new musical styles out of established and current trends, such as jazz (Black Trombone). He developed his literary talent through wordplay, rhyme and alliteration; for example, La Javanaise, a song using Javanese or ‘av’ slang. He had a particular penchant for franglais and contemporary fashion, as in Qui est ‘in’ qui est ‘out’ (Who is in Who is Out) and Ford Mustang.

Following his death, Gainsbourg achieved the ultimate status of popular icon: an antihero, especially for a disenchanted youth and the personification of liberty in its most excessive forms.

CHRIS TINKER

Major works

Gainsbourg, S. (1994) Dernières Nouvelles des étoiles, Paris: Plon, Presses Pocket (collected song lyrics).

Gall, France

b. 1947, Paris

Singer

Having had early success as one of the French yé-yé (1960s pop) generation, France Gall modified her image successfully in two different reincarnations: first, singing songs by Serge Gainsbourg—including Poupée de cire, poupée de son (Wax Doll, Rag Doll), which won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1965 and sold over a million copies in Japan alone; and second, singing songs by the man who became her husband, the late Michel Berger, including La Déclaration d’amour (The Declaration of Love) and Musique. France Gall is still popular today.

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

Gallimard

Publisher

Gaston Gallimard (1881–1975) co-founded the Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française with André Gide and his friends in 1911. The Éditions Gallimard publish some of the greatest works in French literature in different collections, among the most important of which are ‘Folio’ (accounting for over 30 per cent of turnover) and the renowned ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. The crime novels of the ‘Série noire’ are also very popular with the reading public.

MARTYN CORNICK

See also: detective fiction

game shows

Ratings rivalry between TF1 and France 2 has produced a variety of game shows for primetime TV. Many are American by-products, such as Wheel of Fortune (Roue de la fortune) and Une Famille en or (both TF1), and Des Chiffres et des lettres (France 2). Less slavish towards their Anglo-Saxon prototypes are Dessinez c’est gagné and Que le meilleur gagne (both France 2). Live audience participation in most game shows is reduced to applauding.

The two exceptions to the normal kind of game show are Des Chiffres et des lettres and Que le meilleur gagne. In the former, if participants fail, members of the audience (those with the right answer) are picked out to stand up and read it out—a moment of glory. In the latter, the audience is the game, which is one of auto-elimination and self-applause (they clap as they lose). Of the 200-odd participants, only one must remain at the end, and he or she goes on to try to win the prize. The audience shouts ‘Au revoir’ as participants are skittled out by failing to answer silly multiple-choice questions. Of all the games this is the only one that in any way resists the codes of game shows. The compère, Naguy, is North African (elsewhere on these shows, white males dominate). He insults his participants—especially those who get answers wrong. But the audience hits back: they take pleasure from losing, even deliberately losing to get their moment on the box. Naguy undermines the myth of the all-knowing compère—‘it’s all written on the card’, he announces, thus also ridiculing the myth of knowledge as the key to social and economic mobility to which game shows subscribe. He is not the patriarch nor the prof his more elderly counterparts have become. He caricatures the nudge-nudge/wink-wink sexual innuendos so commonplace in the compère’s discourse by aping the ‘black man as macho/virile’ and by deliberately setting up question marks around his own sexuality as much as around that of the male participants in the game.

Dessinez c’est gagné is a reinscription of charades on to a large flip chart, upon which participants draw clues for their team to guess the unnamed word, phrase or whatever. Two teams compete, three to each side—two young contestants plus a well-known TV or media personality. They sit opposite each other on sofas and are surrounded in close proximity by the TV audience. This cosiness is deconstructed by the fact that the teams are single-sexed—male versus female, battle of the sexes—and that ageism and the teacher-pupil dynamic are well in place as the young contestants are subjected to ridicule by the middle-aged compère. There appears to be no prize, except the delight of winning, being insulted and being so close to fame. One particular broadcast, however, might not have been so pleasurable: the star in question was the actor Philippe Léotard whose drunkenness was apparent to all. Attempts to laugh off his rudeness and stifle his volubility failed completely—but the spectacle went on, live broadcasting at its best!

SUSAN HAYWARD

See also: stars; television

Garaudy, Roger

b. 1913, Marseille

Writer

A writer and philosopher who might be dubbed the ‘Vicar of Bray’ of postwar French intellectual life, Garaudy converted to Protestantism in his youth, then for twenty years was a member of the Communist Party’s central committee. He subsequently moved, by way of a humanist leftism that led to his expulsion from the party, first to radical Catholicism and finally, in 1982, to Islam. His ardent Stalinism at the height of the Cold War finds an ominous echo in his recent identification with an anti-Zionism that minimizes (if it does not deny) the Holocaust.

KEITH READER

See also: racism/anti-semitism

García, Victor

b. 1934, Tucumán, Argentina;

d. 1982, Paris

Director

After his arrival in France in 1962, García heavily influenced French theatre with his Artaudian-style productions, primarily of works by Lorca, Arrabal, Genet and Valle-Inclàn. He directed in Spain, the United Kingdom, Portugal and Brazil.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: Artaud, Antonin; theatre

gastronomy

France’s reputation as the world centre of gastronomy— loosely defined, perhaps, as the consumption not only of fine food and drink, but of discourses about it—is closely connected with both her geography and her history. At once a Mediterranean and an Atlantic, a northern and a southern country, the range of raw materials to which she has access is probably unrivalled in Europe, and it was after the French Revolution and the bourgeoisie’s triumph over the nobility that the multiple ways in which these foodstuffs could be prepared and served spread through society. It is no accident that the first restaurant in the modern sense of the term was opened in Paris in 1782 by a former cook to the count of Provence (later to become Louis XVIII).

Yet la haute cuisine as it was known and consumed immediately after the war might well appear monotonous and turgid to a contemporary public. Refrigeration was uncommon, and produce in consequence often far from fresh; it was often as much to mask the less-than-pristine state of fish or meat as to enhance their flavour that the heavy dairybased sauces characteristic of this type of cooking were used. Even in 1960 there were only seven supermarkets in the whole of France, so the range of raw materials available to the domestic cook or restaurateur was restricted. The red Guide Michelin, like France’s leading restaurants dependent on the motor car and the expanding tourist industry, shows certain of their number listing the same specialities literally year in, year out. Crayfish au gratin, duckling, truffles and foie gras as accompaniments suggest what may now seem the indigestible tone of this cuisine, in which vegetables were relegated to a strictly secondary position. Presentation was as heavy and codified as the dishes themselves; the ceremonial raising of the silver dome that covered the plat de resistance was an indispensable part of the dining ritual. The vast majority of French people, of course, had neither cultural nor financial access to this type of cooking. La cuisine bourgeoise, often perforce rooted in regional specialities, yielded such dishes as the tripes à la mode de Caen characteristic of Normandy or the quenelles (sausages of minced pike) of Lyon. Popular restaurants such as the bistrots in the Les Halles area of Paris or the bouchons of Lyon fed into the loftier gastronomic tradition—a tendency that has continued apace until the present day.

The spread of refrigeration, improved systems of transport and the increasing importance of television all contributed to the democratization of gastronomy that has been a dominant tendency of the postwar period. Raymond Oliver, owner of the celebrated Parisian restaurant, Le Grand Véfour, gave the first live television cookery demonstrations in the 1950s, thereby becoming one of the two key French gastronomic personalities of his time. The other was Fernand Point (1897– 1955), whose Restaurant La Pyramide in Vienne (between Lyon and Grenoble) trained many of the greatest chefs of succeeding generations and whose stress on fresh products of the highest quality, always freshly prepared, combined with his innovative use of sauces to mark a welcome break from the often lacklustre cuisine of the bigger hotels.

The spread of colour photography , enlivening the cookery columns of such magazines as Elle or L’Express, also had a major influence, especially combined with the weekly column in Elle written by Dr Édouard de Pomiane, France’s best-known apostle of the healthy diet until 1964, when he died. More types of food became widely available and more care went into finding healthier ways of preparing them; Oliver and other chefs ‘returned from the [1964] Tokyo Olympics infatuated with Japanese cooking’ (Mennell 1993), and this was to exercise a major influence on what was later to become known as la nouvelle cuisine. The food critics Henri Gault and Christian Millau applied this term (whose first use dates back as far as 1740) to the cooking of such figures as Paul Bocuse and Michel Guérard, though Point has a strong claim to be its founding father. Through their annual restaurant guide and monthly magazine, Gault and Millau became the dominant figures in French gastronomy. Nouvelle cuisine reacted against heavy saucing, lengthy cooking times, excessive reliance on dairy products and the orthodoxies of Parisian and grand hotel dishes, in favour of lighter types of cooking (steaming, under the Oriental influence, was a favourite), the use of unusual herbs and fruits to impart new flavours, and an inventiveness often drawing upon regional and provincial traditions for its inspiration.

Nowadays many of the innovations of nouvelle cuisine scarcely seem novel at all. The serving of sorrel with salmon (a Troisgros discovery), the use of a plethora of wild mushrooms, the promotion of once ‘vulgar’ items such as lentils or spinach to gastronomic glory have all long since become part of the French diner’s landscape. The controversy it raised between about 1973—the date of Gault and Millau’s article ‘Vive la nouvelle cuisine française’—and 1976, when Guérard’s La Grande Cuisine minceur was published, was none the less fierce, partisans of the ancien régime such as Le Monde’s food critic La Reynière (Robert Courtine) or Jean-Robert Pitte often acrimoniously crossing swords with Gault and Millau and ‘their’ young Turks. Nouvelle cuisine’s cause was certainly not helped by the zealotry of some of its practitioners, who dished up combinations of well-nigh Surrealist absurdity (raspberry vinegar was a favourite component), in visual forms more reminiscent of abstract painting than of still life, and most notoriously all too often in minuscule portions (a cartoon in the English magazine Punch memorably distilled this last tendency in depicting a puzzled couple in a nouvelle cuisine restaurant asking the waiter: ‘Excuse me, have we eaten?’). It was not surprising that no less a figure than Bocuse was to abjure the ‘movement’, nor that its succession, enthusiastically abetted by Gault and Millau, should have been assumed by cuisine du terroir, harking back historically to the supposed heyday of France’s peasantry rather than looking exotically to the East for its inspiration. It was the turn of haricot beans, black and white pudding, humbler fish such as the grey mullet, lesser-known varieties of regional cheese all to find stardom. Heartier this type of cooking undoubtedly was, but it in no sense represented a return to the haute cuisine of yore, whose omnipresent frying and roasting were largely replaced by grilling and even more casseroling.

The last-named method of cooking, of course, takes time, which is doubtless why it has been raised from the rank of commoner to the nobility; easier by far, if one can afford it, to pay somebody else to prepare a gourmet casserole for you in a restaurant…The corollary of this, of course, has been a movement on a vast scale towards various kinds of convenience food for everyday eating. These need not necessarily be bad: the big-name chefs all endorse deep-frozen or vacuum-packed products bearing their name, the best of which are quite as delicious as anything most people could expect to prepare at home, even given unrealistic amounts of time and energy. ‘Macdonaldization’, however, is spreading apace in France as everywhere else, and for every Bocuse- or Guérard-signed vacuumpacked scallop ragoût, numerous tins of cassoulet or sauerkraut in the downmarket William Saurin range are undoubtedly sold in supermarkets. Younger people, their elders often complain, care little for food and less for its traditions, and even actively prefer a Macdo to the traditional dishes of their regions. Non-European restaurants—North African ones in particular, generally serving couscous, which occupies a similar place in France to Indian food in Britain—are often popular with younger people, especially students, and their range has been steadily on the increase. Fifteen years ago, a Thai or Indian restaurant was a rarity even in Paris; today, most provincial towns of any size have one or more of each. That, of course, is no less symptomatic than Macdonaldization of the growing internationalization of everything to do with food. Nor, for all the rarity of mad cow disease and the plethora of jokes about it to which English people living in France have been exposed, is anxiety about the quality and purity of one’s diet. Excessive use of preservatives, standardized fruit and vegetables grown for appearance not flavour, cheeses with the taste pasteurized out of them—the litany of worries is a familiar one. It is ironic, after two decades and more in which French cuisine returned to the precept of the gastronomic writer Curnonsky (1872-–1956), ‘Gastronomy is when things taste like what they are’, that the very technical developments that made such a return possible seem to be menacing its survival.

KEITH READER

See also: fast food; wine

Gatti, Armand

b. 1924, Monaco

Journalist, playwright and director, real name Saveur Dante Gatti

Wartime experiences as a deportee, resistance fighter and prizewinning journalist fuelled many of Gatti’s flamboyant political plays. In 1968, he began developing theatre studios for the people of Toulouse and Montreuil, and turned to television, while continuing to develop community theatre projects.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Gaulle, Charles de

b. 1890, Lille;

d. 1970, Colombey-les-deux-Églises, Haute Marne

Politician

De Gaulle is the outstanding political figure of modern France. Born to a conservative and strongly Catholic family, he embarked on a military career in 1913 and fought in World War I. Between the two wars, he gained a reputation as an unorthodox military thinker and wrote a remarkable study of leadership, Le Fil de l’épée (The Sword’s Edge). Little known to the general public, he was plucked in May 1940 from obscurity to a junior ministerial post as Undersecretary for War in the crisis weeks that followed Germany’s invasion of France. When the new prime minister, Philippe Pétain, announced that the fighting must stop, de Gaulle flew to London and on 18 June 1940 made the celebrated broadcast inviting those of his compatriots who were able to do so to join him in a Free French movement whose purpose was to continue the struggle against the enemy. This June broadcast is the founding moment of the de Gaulle myth and the basis of his subsequent national legitimacy. At the time, however, it had little impact on a France traumatized by defeat. Even after opposition to the German occupation began to emerge, de Gaulle had great difficulty in getting his authority accepted, not only by other Resistance organizations but also by the United States government, which regarded him as the sort of military dictator against whom the war was being fought. What enabled him to assert his leadership was his single-minded determination not to be pushed aside by the Allied powers and his ability to win the support of the domestic Resistance movement by stressing his commitment to postwar political and social reconstruction. American attempts to exclude him from a role in liberated France failed, and in 1944 he became head of the provisional government of the French Republic, which contained representatives of the major political groupings, including the powerful Communist Party. His government carried out an extensive nationalization programme and organized the referendum of October 1945 on France’s constitutional future, which resulted in a massive rejection of a return to the Third Republic and the election of a Constituent Assembly.

The honeymoon between de Gaulle and the political parties did not last long. In January 1946, he stormed out of office and in June made a speech at Bayeux which set out his belief that only a strong presidency, independent of the parties, could give France the strong leadership it needed. This was a challenge to the entrenched Republican doctrine that personal power was incompatible with democracy and that the only genuine Republic was one based on the sovereignty of the National Assembly. The result was open political war between de Gaulle and the parties. In April 1947 he launched a mass political movement, the Rassemblement Pour la France (RPF), which became the spearhead of his campaign to replace the parliamentary constitution of the Fourth Republic. Initially able to capitalize on France’s domestic and international difficulties, de Gaulle failed in his ambition of forcing the Fourth Republic to abdicate. In 1954 he withdrew from public life and retreated to his austere country residence at Colombeyles-deux-Églises, where he wrote three highly regarded volumes of war memoirs. It was not the behaviour of a man with a political future.

Yet such a future was to be his. In 1958, faced with the collapse of the authority of the civil government in Algeria and the menace of civil war in France, the bulk of the party leaders turned to him as the one man who could somehow ‘win’ the war against the Algerian nationalist movement without turning France into a military dictatorship. De Gaulle made his return to power conditional on the right to draw up a constitution which would enable government (by which he meant himself) to govern, and in 1959 became the first president of the Fifth Republic. Between 1958 and 1962 he used referenda to win mass approval for a series of constitutional changes designed first to strengthen the power of the presidency and second to put an end to the ruinous war in Algeria. The decisive year was 1962. Algeria became independent and de Gaulle held, and won, a referendum providing for the direct election of the president. By doing so, he ensured a shift in the balance of political power away from the National Assembly towards the Executive, and in particular the presidency; he also laid the bases for a new party system. With Algeria and a troublesome legislature out of the way, de Gaulle was now able to realize his core ambition of restoring France’s status as a major, and independent, player in the international system. To realize the grandeur inherent in his ‘certain idea of France’, he challenged the right of other powers, be they the Commission of the European Community or the president of the United States, to interfere in French policy. He developed France’s independent nuclear deterrent, thwarted Britain’s ambitions to join the European Economic Community, withdrew French troops from the integrated command structure of NATO, and launched an attack on the financial pre-eminence of the American dollar. At the same time, he sought to persuade Third World and European countries that France could be an effective champion of their independence against the might of the superpowers and was a strong critic of American involvement in Vietnam. For a man who personified the military virtues of hierarchy and order, de Gaulle showed a singular lack of respect for the conventions of the postwar international order.

De Gaulle’s domestic agenda was designed to promote economic modernization and political order. His enthusiasm for state-led technology and industrial modernization was matched by his disdain for what he regarded as the selfish demands of interest groups and the whingeing pieties of opposition liberals. The image he conveyed of caring much more about France than about the French contributed to the unexpectedly good showing of the opposition candidates (notably François Mitterrand) in the 1965 presidential elections and to widespread criticisms of his ‘solitary exercise of power’. Nothing, however, prepared him—or his political opponents—for the explosion of civil protest which rocked France in May 1968 and cast an ironic light on his claims to have given France unprecedented political stability. In the short run, de Gaulle was able to ride out the storm, thanks in part to a last, great radio broadcast in which, as in June 1940, he declared his refusal to submit to the pressure of events. But the electoral landslide his supporters won in the June elections was a victory much more for law and order than for de Gaulle’s heroic vision of France. Less than a year later, he resigned office after the defeat of a referendum on regional reform.

During his lifetime, de Gaulle attracted great devotion from those who regarded him as the two-time (1940 and 1958) saviour of France and as a political genius; he also aroused deep hostility among those, like the followers of Pétain, the French settlers in Algeria, and also the defenders of traditional Republicanism, who paid the price of his success. At the end of the century, there is near consensus in France that he was the country’s greatest twentieth-century leader.

PETER MORRIS

Major works

Gaulle, C. de (1956–9) Mémoires de guerre, Paris: Plon (de Gaulle’s own record of his wartime career).

——(1970–1) Mémoires d’espoir, Paris: Plon (de Gaulle records his postwar career).

——(1975) Articles et écrits, Paris: Plon (a useful anthology).

Gaultier, Jean-Paul

b. 1952, Arcueil

Fashion designer

Known for the irreverence and humour of his designs, Gaultier’s forte is the glamorization of street style at couture level. He established his house in 1977 and his first menswear line in 1984. His eclectic references range from punk to Victorian underwear, and his corset designs for Madonna’s ‘Blonde Ambition’ tour received global attention. Gaultier’s technical virtuosity, gleaned from his training at traditional French couture houses, allows him to play with conventional ideas of gender and manipulate body forms through careful tailoring. He has hit the headlines frequently with his skirts and corsets for men, and also for his costumes for Besson’s Le Cinquième Élément (1997).

NICOLA WHITE

See also: fashion

gay activism

Although the 1980s and 1990s have seen the rise of gay activism and increasing coverage in mainstream media, gay activists have long been in existence. Vichy-inspired laws for the protection of minors, preventing same-sex relationships with men under 21 years of age, remained on the statute book until 1981 when, in the wake of Mitterrand’s election, they were repealed and the age of consent equalized at 15. Any apparent reluctance to change the law between 1945 and 1981 may be seen to be linked to the inherent conservatism of the MRP and Gaullist regimes that followed the war.

The radicalization of ‘homosexuals’ around the events of May 1968 led to the establishment of the Comité d’Action Pédérastique Révolutionnaire (CAPR)—a short-lived organization, since the (bourgeois) concept of homosexuality could arguably have no place within a revolutionary context. Some three years later, in March 1971, the Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire (FHAR), in favour of direct action for the achievement of gay liberation, came into being after the disruption of a radio programme on homosexuality. In line with the general decline in radical politics post-May 1968, FHAR ceased to exist in mid-1973.

1974 saw the birth of the Groupe de Liberation Homosexuelle (GLH), formed by exmilitants from FHAR. Divisions among its members between reformists and revolutionaries led in 1987 to the establishment of two separate groups—the GLH—Groupe de Base (GLH-GB) comprising reformists, and the GLH—Politique et Quotidien (GLH-PQ), the revolutionaries. The lack of cohesion resulting from such a split led to the creation of a Centre d’Information et de Documentation sur l’Homosexualité (CIDH), providing information as its name suggests. Although the GLHGB ceased to exist in 1976, the GLH-PQ persisted, forcing the PCF to adopt an anti-discrimination policy in July 1977. Two gay candidates stood in the 1978 parliamentary elections, but their presence could be seen as the last throes of the group.

Survivors from the Marseille GLH-PQ group created the Comité d’Urgence Antirépression Homosexuelle (CUARH) in 1979, a federation of Parisian and regional groups with different religious and political backgrounds. From 1980 to the elections of 1981, CUARH provided a mobilizing force for many gays, organizing a demonstration of some 10,000 participants in April 1981 and launching its own newspaper Homophonies.

In the non-political sphere, Catholics had founded David et Jonathan in 1972, with Protestants led by Pastor Joseph Doucé (himself murdered in 1990) founding the Centre du Christ Libérateur in 1976.

Although Mitterrand repealed repressive legislation in 1981 and freed civil servants from the ‘good morality’ clause which had blocked promotions within the civil service, repression remained elsewhere, for example with elements within the police (and the Senate) resisting the abolition of police squads established to monitor homosexuals. Raids on gay bars continued, though with lessening frequency. Politically, the group Gais pour les Libertés was launched in 1985, enjoying wider political support than the PS’s own Homosexualité et Socialisme. Groups on the Right began to find a gay voice around this period, with the establishment in 1984 of the Mouvement des Gays Libéraux (MGL), and even that of an extreme Right group called Gaie France in 1987.

It was around this time that France also began to see cases of what is certainly the most powerful mobilizing activist force around questions of homosexuality, HIV and AIDS (though AIDS is not, of course, an exclusively homosexual problem). The activities of ACTUP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) provide a focus for the frustration felt by many suffering from the syndrome, seeking as they do to bring the plight of PWAs (people with AIDS) to public attention through rapid action tactics, ‘zapping’ meetings, boycotting/ blockading laboratories, pharmaceutical companies and so on. The reasoning behind their actions is simple: silence equals death, action equals life. Their action is intended to provoke reaction.

ACT-UP’s origins in France may be traced to 1987, when Didier Lestrade—until recently the group’s chair, and now editor of the gay monthly Têtu—became aware of the concept on a trip to New York. Struck by the simple achievements of direct action, he spent as much time as possible between 1987 and 1989 finding out more about it. At the 1989 Gay Pride march in Paris, fifteen French ‘militants’ in T-shirts brought over from New York handed out simple photocopied sheets of paper that had been typed in the offices of Gai Pied, asking for supporters. On 26 July 1989, the required paperwork founding the organization was lodged with the authorities, and ACT-UP in France was in official existence.

From practically its first action on 2 October 1989 (demonstrating in front of the National Assembly), through protests in front of Notre-Dame against the Catholic church’s ban on contraception, pickets of the Ministry of Health and of laboratories known to be conducting multiple (instead of individual) HIV tests, ACT-UP has ensured that problems around AIDS are not left quietly to go away. Although initially quite small, the group has grown: with 200 militants in Paris alone, ACTUP is now larger than the New York group, which has itself split because of internal problems.

At the same time as AIDS has served to crys-tallize activity and activism, the gay community as a whole has become more visible in France, with the 1995 Paris Gay Pride gaining wide coverage in the mainstream press. This visibility, partly arrived at through greater confidence in openness around one’s sexuality, is in no small way a tribute to the changes in tolerance and acceptability that have been achieved through the actions of activists since 1945. There is still a long way to go—for example, the recognition of gay partnerships— but progress is slow but sure.

STEVE WHARTON

gay cinema

In the 1980s and 1990s, representations of central lesbian, gay and bisexual characters have become more common in mainstream French cinema. Examples include: the La Cage aux Folles series (I and II directed by Édouard Molinaro in 1978 and 1980; III by Georges Lautner in 1985); Chacun cherche son chat, directed by Cédric Klapisch in 1996; Deux lions au soleil, directed by Claude Faraldo in 1980; Josiane Balasko’s 1995 French Twist (Gazon maudit); Tenue de soirée by Bertrand Blier (1986); and Yannick Bellon’s La Triche from 1984. The context of changing sexual discourses, and the complexities of their reception by gay audiences, mean that they are relevant to any discussion of ‘gay cinema’. In addition, classical French cinema has had its gay directors, most notably Marcel Carné. However, a different perspective arises if we understand the term to mean ‘films made by lesbians and gay men with lesbian and gay subject-matter’ (see Dyer 1990). The history of these films—distinct in France from developments in Anglo-Saxon countries—begins with Cocteau and Genet, continues in marginal, politicized film-making from 1968 to about 1981, and produces recognized auteurs in the form of Chéreau, Collard, Téchiné and Vecchiali.

Male homosexuality, first criminalized by the Vichy regime, remained oppressed in the postwar period, and its first cinematic expressions are firmly located in high literary culture. Aestheticism, narcissism, the links between same-sex desire, poetry and death are all on display in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1949), a transposition of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth (starring Cocteau’s lover Jean Marais) to postwar Paris and the existentialist heyday. Another reworking of myth, his Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la bête) of 1946, can also be read homoerotically, especially as the three protagonists of the final transfiguration are all played by Marais. The elusive symbolism and anti-realism of these films distinguish them in part from the most famous of Genet’s sorties into cinema, Un chant d’amour of 1950, which is silent, lasts twenty minutes, and was not given a commercial release. Scenes in a prison, where a guard spies on men masturbating in their cells or communicating with each other through the walls, alternate with shots of a garland of flowers being swung from a cell window, and of the men in the film making love. However, Cocteau’s influence is not far away: aestheticism in Genet is combined with the homoerotic and a poetry of the sordid, marginal and ‘lower depths’ to produce one of cinema’s most profound meditations on the links society constructs between homosexuality and criminality, power and homophobia.

The oppressive postwar climate for homosexuals began to weaken only in the aftermath of May 1968, which also created more spaces for independent and avant-garde film. The 1970s were the heyday of affirmation films from the gay movement. The GLH-PQ (Groupe de Libération Homosexuelle—Politique et Quotidien) organized film festivals in 1977 and 1978 in Paris which embraced pornography but also showcased short films such as Hommes entre eux, directed by Norbert Terry, and La Banque du sperme, by Pierre Chabal and Philippe Genet, which cheerfully played with both porn and political or philosophical preoccupations. Perhaps the most consistent film-maker of this type was Lionel Soukaz, who made two films in collaboration with Guy Hocquenghem, Race d’ep! (backslang for ‘pederast’) in 1979, a documentary on ‘gay history’ rounded off by a cruising dialogue in the Tuileries, and Toni in 1980, as well as Boy Friend 1 and Boy Friend 2 (1977), Le Sexe des anges in 1978 and Ixe (1980).

The Socialist government’s reforms and the consumerist appropriation of much gay culture in the 1980s meant that, with the diminution of gay militancy, it became less clear what a ‘gay cinema’ might be. The more positive images to be found in mainstream film were neither a way of placing gay desire dynamically in the forefront of a postmodernist cinema, as with Almodovar’s activities in post-Franco Spain, nor were they to be challenged by a ‘New Queer Cinema’ in the Anglo-Saxon sense, which would provocatively revel in the abject. The lack of a tradition of identity politics in Republican France meant that directors, audiences and critics, whether straight or gay, often tended to down-play the specificity of gay representation in favour of an individualist, integrative or universalist outlook. Thus Patrice Chéreau’s L’Homme blessé of 1983, with a script co-written by Hervé Guibert, both owes much to Genet in its iconography and decor (the toilets of the Gare du Nord, for example), and at the same time situates itself in a French tradition of portraying the crystallization and consequences of l’amour fou, in this case the awakening gay passion of a teenager played by Jean-Hugues Anglade. This approach is also to be found in French ‘AIDS films’, such as Paul Vecchiali’s Encore from 1988 and Cyril Collard’s Savage Nights (Les Nuits fauves) of 1992, with their ‘bisexual’ protagonists, lack of reference to any kind of gay or activist community, and positioning of the illness within existentialist and Romantic narratives of self-discovery. (This is the approach favoured by the ‘straight’ AIDS film that is Xavier Beauvois’s N’oublie pas que tu vas mourir of 1996.) At their best, however, these French constructions of homosexuality produce the films of André Téchiné, whose consistent output since the 1970s depicts in ‘relaxed’ and empathetic fashion the complex social and historical interactions that go to make up his straight and gay characters, whether the postal worker in 1981’s Hôtel des Amériques, the young hustler in J’embrasse pas (1991) or the adolescent in the 1963 setting of Les Roseaux sauvages (1994).

The emphasis on auteurism in critical discourse, and the continued sexism of the French film industry, have militated against the emergence of a distinctive lesbian cinema in France. Chantal Akerman is Belgian. Women directors have tended not to identify as a group or (with the exception of Varda) as feminist. Mention should be made of Diane Kurys’s Coup de foudre from 1983, a commercial mainstream film portraying the relationship between two women, played by Miou-Miou and Isabelle Huppert, in 1950s France, but here, typically, any sexual relations between them are merely hinted at and never named.

BILL MARSHALL

gay press

The launch of the newsletter Futur in October 1952 marked perhaps the beginnings of what we now understand as the gay press in twentieth-century France. Drawing on the works of ‘homosexual’ writers such as Gide (thereby, arguably, acknowledging that literature has long been a privileged means of expressing ‘homosexual’ desire), Futur also aimed to be a newsletter on ‘information and sexual freedom’ in the wake of the Kinsey Report. Legal battles over the banning of its advertisements, and restrictions on sales to over-18s, were to force its closure in November 1955.

January 1955 saw the launch of Arcadie, seeking to enlighten the French with rational scientific arguments concerning homosexuality. From an initial 1,500 subscribers, figures rose to some 10,000 in 1960. It was to be from these ranks that most of new gay organizations emerged in the 1970s and 1980s.

Launched in April 1983, Gai Pied, which ceased publication in 1991, offered a weekly overview of the main political, cultural and social events on the gay scène in France and the world. In recognition of the growing power of the so-called ‘pink franc’, it also carried advertising from the gay commercial scène. Government activity in the early 1990s, which was aimed at reducing the number of messageries roses (‘lewd’ chatlines and small ads), impacted on the publisher’s income base to the extent that the magazine ceased publication, to be replaced by the intermittent La Lettre de Gai Pied, available on subscription. The company responsible for Gai Pied’s publication, Les Éditions du Triangle Rose, continues its publishing activities in other areas, for example with the bilingual Guide gai covering the scene in France, Belgium and Switzerland, and Minitel services.

Illico, published monthly in A5 format, offers a good overview of events, with editorial comment and articles on burning issues of the day. Broadsheet format Exit (le journal), published monthly since 1993, carries national and international news and current affairs items.

A more recent arrival has been Têtu, the first colour monthly for lesbians and gays, launched in Easter 1995. Edited by Didier Lestrade of ACT-UP, it aims to inform and entertain, calling for greater involvement in activities by members of the lesbian and gay community. Indeed, it was launched with a challenge to gays and lesbians to demonstrate their sexuality concretely by buying the magazine and helping to ensure its survival. Despite an apparently rocky start, sales have grown slowly.

Since the 1950s, then, the gay press has moved from initial tentative moves to explore discussion of homosexuality to a more upfront, open interaction, with events nationally and internationally. The growth in the visibility of the ‘pink franc’ has aided this phenomenon, which is far from over.

STEVE WHARTON

gay writing

Although less established as a genre than in the Anglo-American world, gay writing—understood here as literature written by or about male homosexuals—is increasingly recognized in France. This is due to a number of factors: literary giants of the earlier part of the twentieth century like Proust, Gide and Genet can, notwithstanding their own different positions and allegiances, be identified as key contributors to a specifically gay tradition, alongside a constellation of other, almost equally eminent—and prolific—writers with at least intermittently specific ‘gay themes’: Marcel Jouhandeau, Henri de Montherlant, Jean Cocteau, Julien Green, Michel Tournier, Roger Peyrefitte. A second factor is the substantial oeuvre of more recently established writers, who use particular forms of writing, such as variants on the first-person narrative, journal or diary, and particular themes, such as eroticism, violence and AIDS, to explore and question different forms of identity and sexuality. Particularly notable here are Renaud Camus, Conrad Detrez, Dominique Fernandez, Hervé Guibert, Guy Hocquenghem, Hugo Marsan and Yves Navarre. Third, against this background of real or fictionalized biographies, and of the increasing ‘intertextual’ cross-fertilization of literary and non-literary genres, the work of eminent critics such as Roland Barthes and social analysts such as Michel Foucault is being similarly mined for its implications for gay identity and culture. As a wide-ranging account of the different discourses surrounding the evolving notion of homosexuality, from classical to contemporary, Foucault’s (1976–84) three-volume History of Sexuality (Histoire de la sexualité) is, moreover, a landmark for gay studies. Fourth, by emphasizing the gender-relatedness of thinking and production across the humanities, the social sciences and the sciences, feminist, lesbian and queer theorists from both sides of the Atlantic have helped give gender-related writing—écriture gaie, by analogy with écriture féminine—and particular forms of gendered intertextuality (such as fiction and medicine in ‘the AIDS novel’) a clearer space and a stronger platform. Finally, there is no doubt that the strength of gay writing in France goes with the heightened gay visibility, energy and creativity in many parts of the globe, from San Francisco to Sydney.

Despite—or perhaps because of—this relative visibility, at least in the cities, the issue of growing up/‘coming out’ as gay is an important theme. Although evocations of adolescent or post-adolescent sexuality may be accompanied by a 1960s sense of liberated eroticism as in Roger Peyrefitte’s 1979 Roy (admittedly set in California), such newly discovered sexuality can also be intensely problematic, either because it is associated with young male violence, as in Éric Jourdan’s 1984 Les Mauvais Anges (The Bad Angels) (banned since 1956) or because it leads to a sense of isolation and rootlessness: Loïc Chotard’s first novel Tiers Monde (1994) (Third World) follows the desultory, almost despairing, erotico-sentimental flâneries of a group of youngsters in a cocooning but anonymous Paris. Equally problematic is the viewing of adolescent sexuality from the perspective of the potentially exploitative older male partner. Even if, as Christopher Robinson has indicated, adolescent sex ‘is not, in a French text, automatically a pederastic theme’, the older male tends to be either provocatively selfjustificatory, as in Tony Duvert’s Journal d’un innocent (Diary of an Innocent) of 1976; masochistic and wistful, as in Julien Green’s 1974 Youth (Jeunesse); or reproaching himself with the suicide of the younger partner, as in Roger Vrigny’s Le Garçon d’orage (The Storm-Boy) from 1994. The voyeurism and the power of the older male is, however, repudiated in Guillaume Le Touze’s Comme ton père (Like Your Father), also of 1994. The dying Giuseppe takes refuge, along with his mother, Claudia, in the retreat of his gay father, Paul, in a remote part of Africa—the fusion of gay, straight and cross-generational bonds gives all the characters new strength and serenity. In Michel Braudeau’s 1992 Le Livre de John (John’s Book) and 1993 Mon ami Pierrot (My Friend Pierrot), intimacy between different generations of males raises the issue of homoeroticism in actual or adoptive paternities. The novel of sexual initiation is thus opening up and out into more general questions about male-tomale relationships, masculinity, fatherhood, homosexuality—and gay writing.

Another way of interrogating (gay) male identity is by associating it with violence, whether the violence of social stigmatization, as in Navarre’s 1980 Goncourt-winning Cronos’ Children (Le Jardin d’acclimatation), or the violence of self-oppressive masochism, or ‘natural’ male violence converted into ritualized, sadistic male-to-male relationships. Internalized, masochistic violence is shown to be a source of pain, self-reappraisal and creative energy in writers such as Marcel Proust, André Gide, Julien Green and the Japanese writer influential in France, Yukio Mishima (Confessions of a Mask). Ritualized or consenting/unconsenting violence, in the écrivain maudit tradition exemplified by Sade, Mirbeau and Bataille, features in Tony Duvert’s Paysage de fantaisie (Imagined Country) of 1973; Jean Genet’s Funeral Rites (Pompes funèbres) and The Thief’s Journal (Journal du voleur) from 1947 and 1949; Hervé Guibert’s Vous m’avez fait former des fantômes (You Made Me Invent Ghosts) from 1987; Pierre Guyotat’s 1970 Éden, Éden, Éden; and Éric Jourdan’s Charité (1991), Révolte (1991) and Sang (1992). Here the main characters, who usually (but not invariably) self-identify as gay, foreground their position of outsiders and outlaws through a violence which can, like gay SM, be seen as either gender-stereotypical or as self-ironizing and subversive. This writing—as, for example, in Guyotat’s incorporation of blood and semen—also reflects an attempt to write (with) the male body and ‘to put the sex back into homosexuality’ in forceful and intentionally shocking ways. A celebrated example of this is Renaud Camus’s Tricks (1988), whose description of some forty-six one-night stands achieves a certain verbal and psychological violence through relentless repetition, even if actual physical violence is absent from the ‘tricks’ themselves.

Another form of violence which inevitably questions both identity and its inscriptions (both written and visual) can be found in works which treat AIDS. The most well-known of these are, perhaps, Hervé Guibert’s three novels—To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (A l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie) of 1990, which, notoriously, evokes Foucault via the character of Muzil; The Compassion Protocol (Le Protocole compassionnel) from 1991 and Cytomégalovirus (1992)—together with his 1992 televised film-journal of his own body with AIDS, La Pudeur ou l’impudeur (Modesty or Immodesty). Guibert’s surgically precise self-analyses contrast with the exuberant brinkmanship of Cyril Collard’s Savage Nights (Les Nuits fauves), both in its novel (1989) and his highly successful film version, with himself in the lead role (1992). Different again are other works by well-known writers, such as Dominique Fernandez’s 1987 La Gloire du paria (The Glory of the Pariah), Guy Hocquenghem’s Ève (1987), Yves Navarre’s Ce sont amis que vent emporte (It is Friends the Wind Bears Away) from 1991, and Alain-Emmanuel Dreuilhe’s 1987 Corps à corps: journal du sida (Body to Body—An AIDS Diary). In most of these, anger at medical inadequacy and social ostracization tends to recede before the loyalty and devotion provoked (within the partnerships affected) by the prospect of death. In Fernandez’s La Gloire du paria, moreover, the onset of AIDS reassures the older, ‘neo-romantic’ partner, Bernard, that he is still different, still the eternal rebel, still the outlaw—a theme repeated in his racy provocatively decadent historical novel, Le Dernier des Médicis (1994). In Ève and Ce sont amis que vent emporte death from AIDS is at least partly redeemed by the presence of a healthy daughter or son to continue life in their father’s place. Elsewhere, in Hugo Marsan’s 1995 Les Absents (The Absent Ones) and Jean-Noël Pancrazi’s 1990 Les Quartiers d’hiver (Winter Quarters), very different clandestine bars (La Maison Rose and Le Vagabond respectively) are haunted by a sense of AIDS-associated death: instead of the visible, lived illness of Guibert, AIDS infiltrates as an image of nostalgia, inertia and decay. Rather than being etched in and on the body, AIDS contributes to the embodiment of an aesthetic.

By endowing both past pleasures and present intimacies with a sense of irretrievable loss, AIDS novels also develop two related leitmotifs of gay, gay-authored or at least sexually ambivalent fiction—the cultivation of a moral, physical or aesthetic asceticism and of a certain erotico-philosophical mysticism—evident, for example, in the very different works of Gide, Green, Mauriac, Montherlant and even Proust. This combination of asceticism, eroticism and mysticism also links to the topos of the ‘gay martyr’, evoked by the title of Sartre’s Saint Genet (1952) and described with relish by Mishima (the St Sebastian theme) and Jourdan. An initially more positive version of the same combination can be found in novels such as Michel Tournier’s Les Météores (1975) where the homosexual Alexandre seeks to sexualize social rejection in a hunt for ‘exogamic’ partners and to sublimate his sense of abjection through ‘endogamic’ fraternal union. Alexandre does, however, achieve neither of these unions, since he is murdered mid-‘chasse aux garçons’ in North Africa. Eroticomystical unions, whether through brothertwins (Les Météores), boy pairings (Jourdan’s Les Mauvais Anges) or doubling across generations (the two Adams in Hocquenghem’s Ève, and the various Romans in Jourdan’s Révolte and Sang), fail ultimately to shield men from the sterility and death which haunt Marsan’s Les Absents and Pancrazi’s Les Quartiers d’hiver. A more humorous, satirical version of this erotico-mystical union is to be found in Conrad Detrez’s 1975 Les Plumes du coq (Cockfeathers), where the supposedly closed world of the Catholic boarding school is the incongruous launch pad for revolt, violence and farmyard intimacies. In Renaud Camus’s Le Chasseur de lumières (The Light Tracker) of 1993, it is again the setting of the novel, here the semi-spiritualized countryside of Gascony, which offers glimpses of eroticomystical union between its interlinked characters, notably between the young chasseur de lumières and landscape photographer Vincent, and the older, impecunious, semi-aristocratic Adam. Despite Vincent’s reappearance in Camus’s L’Épuisant Désir de ces choses (The Draining Desire for Such Things), contact between the characters is here even more spasmodic and elusive: mystical union gives way to self-conscious intertextual play and eroticism to an unspecified longing in absence. The combination of asceticism, eroticism and mysticism has itself been absorbed into a self-conscious narrative style—whether the baroque extravaganzas of Detrez or the impressionistic kaleidoscopes of Camus.

Given that the interrogation of identity has been one of the hallmarks of gay writing from Proust and Gide through to Pancrazi and Guibert, it is appropriate that this interrogation be accompanied by a corresponding exploration of literary forms, notably the firstperson narration. The commodiousness and the flexibility of first-person narrative allows for the identity of author and characters to be inextricably fused and confused—as in Collard’s Les Nuits fauves—or simultaneously revealed and masked—as in Duvert’s Journal d’un innocent—or for the writer to be both exposed and distanced as in the multiperson Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) and in nearly all Guibert’s oeuvre. The first-person narrative also allows for very different representations of the male body, from René Crevel’s surreal Mon corps et moi (1925) to Navarre’s 1979 wistfully melancholic Le Temps voulu (Time Willed), and to Jouhandeau’s erotic Chronique d’une passion (1949) and Tirésias (1954). The first-person narrative also allows for intermittent or extended flashbacks to point to the pain or the pleasures of memory (Camus, Navarre), while the juxtaposition of multiple-person narratives within the one novel creates complementary or divergent perspectives: Le Touze, Marsan, Tournier. When these are combined with a rich vein of third-person narratives, whether formally conventional (Navarre, Pancrazi, Vrigny) or unconventional (Camus, Detrez), or simply flamboyantly erotic (Éric Jourdan’s Sexuellement incorrect of 1995) it can be seen that gay writing in France is sufficiently substantial and varied for its explorations of the gay self, the gay body and gay identity to offer a map and a platform for the future.

OWEN HEATHCOTE

Geismar, Alain

b. 1939, Paris

Academic

A physicist and Ingénieur des Mines, Geismar became a university teacher in Paris in 1963 and general secretary of the higher education teachers’ union (SNESup) in 1967. He was catapulted to notoriety as one of the triumvirate (alongside Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Jacques Sauvageot) who acted as leaders and spokespersons for the May 1968 student movement. His ‘Maoist’ political affiliations in the immediate post-1968 years seem to have had no adverse effect on his subsequent career. He was an official in the Département d’Education Permanente (1974–8) and vicepresident of the University of Paris VII (1982– 4). In 1985, he became assistant director-general of the Agence de l’Informatique and later acted as an adviser to Jack Lang, when he was Minister of Culture.

LAURENCE BELL

See also: parties and movements

Genet, Jean

b. 1910, Paris;

d. 1986, Paris

Writer, dramatist, poet, essayist and political activist

One of the great lyrical writers of modern times, as well as one of the most shocking, Genet spent much of his life creating an image of himself as the archetypal outcast: a thief, a traitor and a homosexual. However, even his most meticulous biographers cannot agree on the sequence—or, indeed, the truth—of the major events in his life. He was certainly abandoned as an infant by his mother, never knew who his father was, and was raised by a foster family in the Morvan. His childhood was much happier and calmer than he would have us believe, but he had to leave the Régnier family at the age of 13 to learn a trade; after ten days he ran away from the school where he had been sent to learn typography and began a life of petty crime that resulted in him finally being sent to Mettray Reformatory until he was 21. He had his first homosexual experiences there, and in his 1946 novel, Miracle de la rose, transformed this borstal into a paradise of mystical and melancholy passions. His first important works are autobiographical novels, even Querelle de Brest, the only novel in which ‘Genet’ is neither a character nor the narrator. These novels can perhaps best be seen as autofictions, as the traces of a life that was both lived and invented, both real and imaginary. In them, Genet juxtaposes confession, imagination and scandalous provocation, creating a world in which established social and moral systems are both inverted and (paradoxically) maintained, a fictional world which he called—and which was—his ‘chant d’amour’. In The Thief’s Journal (Journal du voleur), the most evidently autobiographical of his texts, he repeatedly insists that his aim was to make his life a legend: for him, his ‘real’ life was only ever the preparation for further adventures that would find their full meaning only when written down—and read. In fact, Genet’s true triumph over a society he both despised and needed was through language—it was in and by his writing that he defined himself and defied society.

Among his early admirers were Cocteau and Sartre, who obtained a presidential pardon for him in 1949. This public recognition, however, amounted in his eyes also to recuperation of him by society, and when it was followed in 1952 by Sartre’s monumental biography Saint Genet, which presented him as an existentialist hero, he burned all the unpublished manuscripts he had written over the previous five years and thereafter wrote no more fiction. At the heart of his work lies a duality whereby every act elicits and merits both praise and condemnation. But Genet does not seek resolution of such oppositions; rather he envisages a transcendence of them in and through poetry. In the mid-1950s he devoted himself to theatre, repeatedly presenting his vision of a world divided into oppressors and oppressed, the latter able to conceive their function only in terms of the needs and desires of the oppressors. His plays all have a political dimension—notably The Blacks (Les Nègres), with its exposition of the impotence of the blacks’ attempts at revolt, and The Screens (Les Paravents), set in Algeria, which scandalized French society with its indictment of colonial conflict. While Genet’s theatre highlights the urgent reality and importance of struggle, it is also highly ritualized, the distinction between illusion and reality being blurred and language being used less as a means of communication than as a constant fountain of incantation.

In 1964, the suicide of his lover Abdallah (a young tightrope walker) devastated Genet, who once again destroyed his manuscripts and disappeared, reappearing as a political activist, working with the Black Panthers in the United States and then with Yasser Arafat and the PLO. These activities inspired his last finished work, Prisoner of Love (Un Captif amoureux), a book in which he explicitly swears to tell the whole truth as in a court of law. Much more than a political book, it is a speculation on the nature of truth, a meditation on the interdependence of egoism and altruism, an exploration of different narrative techniques and, above all, a hymn to love, both erotic and fraternal. Here Genet finally presents us with a non-erotic couple, Hamza, a young feddai, and his mother, and the book draws together all of Genet’s philosophical, political, theological and mythological ideas as well as many biographical references, into a new vision of unity centred on a sense of family and community. In one of the most radical and astonishing reversals of his career, Genet, who had often parodied the cult and iconography of the Virgin Mary, as in his novel Our Lady of the Flowers (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs), places at the centre of this, his last book, the Christian image of the pietà and the figure of Mary mater dolorosa, who in the very moment of her mourning is able to forgive everything and everyone. Several posthumous works have been published, but none has the force or the profound emotion of this work of redemption and reconciliation.

MICHAEL WORTON

Genette, Gérard

b. 1930

Literary theorist and critic

Genette has published several important essays on literary forms. His 1972 Discours du récit (translated in 1980 as Narrative Discourse), which attempts to build a comprehensive theory of narrative, based on copious examples from Proust’s work, has been particularly influential in the field of poetics. His original categories for analysing time in the novel and his concept of focalization have, for example, been widely quoted.

BÉATRICE DAMAMME-GILBERT

Giacometti, Alberto

b. 1901, Borgonovo, Switzerland;

d. 1966, Chur, Switzerland

Artist

Giacometti’s early work, after his move to Paris in 1922, was influenced by Brancusi, Cubism via Lipchitz and, more significantly, the Surrealist movement. After the war he produced the sculpture for which he is best known—his attenuated, almost undifferentiated, bronze figures, isolated or in groups, seen as if from a distance and inviting comparisons, during this postwar period, with concentration camp victims or displaced persons. The critical recognition and international acclaim these works received was largely due to their endorsement by Jean-Paul Sartre, who discerned in Giacometti’s rejection of the traditional sculptural presentation of the human figure an assertion of the artist’s existential freedom and saw in the figures themselves the spiritual isolation of the human condition as interpreted by existentialism.

CAROL WILCOX

Gipsy Kings

Musicians

A paradox of the French pop scene, the Gipsy Kings are a highly talented group of gypsy musicians who sing in Spanish and manage to ‘represent’ France at some official cultural events. They are based in France and provide evidence of the multicultural heritage of their ‘adopted’ country, with its tradition of openly welcoming artists of other nationalities. Their latest productions are Este mundo (1991) and Love et liberté (1993).

GÉRARD POULET

See also: song/chanson

Girard, René

b. 1923, Avignon

Philosopher and critic

In novels, primitive mythology and the Bible, Girard discerns an essential association between violence and desire, and an opposition between desire and knowledge. Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structures (Mensonge romantique, vérité romanesque) of 1961 examines how literature helps us to understand the unconscious workings of desire. The essayistic Violence and the Sacred (La Violence et le sacré) from 1972, and 1978’s more systematic Things Hidden Since the foundation of the World (Des Choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde), present the attenuation of desire through the religious ritual of universal victimage, as embodied in the scapegoat. The singularity of Girard’s theme and his confident crossing of generic boundaries distance him from most major schools of contemporary theory.

SEÁN HAND

Giroud, Françoise

b. 1916, Geneva, Switzerland

Journalist, writer and political figure

One of France’s leading journalists, Giroud has written for a number of newspapers and magazines, including Elle, Le Nouvel Observateur, and L’Express, which she cofounded with Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber. In the 1970s, she headed the short-lived Secretariat for Women, established in 1974 by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, before becoming Secreatary of State for Cultural Affairs (1976– 7). As well as collections of articles, she has published literary and biographical works, including 1981’s Une Femme honorable (An Honourable Woman), and Alma Mahler ou l’art d’être aimée (Alma Mahler, or the Art of Being Loved).

ALEX HUGHES

Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry

b. 1926, Koblenz, Germany

Politician

Giscard was president of the Republic from 1974 to 1981, and the only Fifth Republic head of state to have gone down to defeat at a presidential election. From an haut-bourgeois background, and a graduate of the prestigious École Nationale d’Administration, he rose to prominence as an inspector in the Ministry of Finance, becoming member of parliament for an Auvergne constituency in 1956.

He was Finance Minister from 1962 to 1966, during which period, while loyal to the Fifth Republic, he kept his distance from de Gaulle through his membership of the Républicans Indépendents (RI) party. The distinctive Giscardian style—‘French’ in its elitist and patrician qualities, ‘American’ in being technocratically forward-looking and in its economic liberalism—began to emerge in these years. Critical of Gaullist centralization, though he refused to join the vote of censure against the government after May 1968, he remained in eclipse until Pompidou came to power in 1969, when he returned as Finance Minister, a post he was to occupy for the entire Pompidou presidency.

Giscard’s political position is best encapsulated by his October 1972 assertion that France wanted to be governed from the centre, and his 1974 election slogan of ‘change without risk’. Such blandness, after the upheavals of the Algerian war and 1968, was what a great many French wanted to hear, and his victory over Mitterrand, while an extremely narrow one, was far from surprising. As president, he attempted to offset his aristocratic name and demeanour with a series of not always convincing demotic gestures, such as posing in a lounge suit for the official presidential photograph, inviting the Élysée dustmen to breakfast with him and getting himself invited to dine, with ostentatious spontaneity, in the homes of ‘ordinary’ French men and women. He had to contend in his early years with poor relations with his first prime minister, Chirac (replaced by Raymond Barre in 1976), and a resurgent Left opposition; but their defeat in the 1978 legislative elections and the Giscard/ Barre tandem’s image of economic competence strengthened his position. Major reforms under his rule included the breaking-up of the ORTF into a number of smaller companies, the legalization of abortion and France’s entry into the European Monetary System. He felt unable to abolish the death penalty, however, despite proclaimed personal opposition.

As the youngest president this century, Giscard was clearly looking forward to a lengthy period in office, and his defeat by Mitterrand in 1981—only three years after the collapse of the Union of the Left on which the latter had built his strategy—was all the more traumatic for him in consequence. With neither a House of Lords nor the equivalent of the United States’ Carter Foundation to provide a political ‘retirement home’ for him, he has had to content himself since with the presidency of the Auvergne Regional Assembly, and in 1995 a mortifyingly failed attempt to capture the mayorship of Clermont-Ferrand from the Socialists. His recent publication of an erotic novel has merely reinforced the rather sorry sense of a figure a long way past his sell-by date.

KEITH READER

Major works

Giscard d’Estaing, V. (1983) Démocratie française, ed. A.Clark, London: Methuen (a well-annotated and well-contextualized republication of Giscard’s 1976 political credo).

Glucksmann, André

b. 1937, France

Philosopher

Glucksmann is the best known of the new philosophers of the 1970s. After passing the competitive agrégation examination in philosophy in 1961, Glucksmann became a Marxist student militant, gravitating towards the Maoists and taking an active role in the intellectual debates around May 1968. In the aftermath of the events, he became one of the leading figures of the ‘new philosophers’ movement, comprising former radicals who developed a trenchant right-wing critique of their own former beliefs, drawing inspiration from Solzhenitsyn. He campaigned for causes such as the Vietnamese ‘boat people’, and is generally credited with promoting the reconciliation of Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron in 1978. In the 1990s he wrote forcefully on the treatment of AIDS sufferers, and campaigned against the siege of Sarajevo by Bosnian Serbs. His thought focuses on moral issues, rejecting systems of lofty ideals and proposing a permanent revolt against indifference, oppression and other manifestations of evil in society. His bestknown book remains The Master Thinkers (Les Maîtres penseurs) of 1977, whose title became a byword in the postmodernist attack on Marx, Freud and other proponents of systematic thought.

MICHAEL KELLY

Godard, Jean-Luc

b. 1930, Paris

Director and critic

Considered by many the greatest film-maker of his generation, certainly the most prolific and influential, Godard has produced an oeuvre of unparalleled range, energy and ambition. With provocative wit and intelligence, as well as an acute sensitivity to beauty and form, he has consistently brought together questions of aesthetics, politics and philosophy. His is the most sustained and challenging analysis in cinema of the relations between sound and image, and all his work—critical and filmic—is to some extent essayistic, at once speculative and transitional. When this process fails, it can sometimes expose Godard as politically naive, overintellectual, even nihilistic. However, what made him such a critically important voice during the 1960s and 1970s was the fact that people could identify with this son of the bourgeoisie negotiating the great social and political changes of the Fifth Republic by confronting directly French culture and tradition.

Godard’s first film, Opération béton, a twenty-minute short made in 1954 about the construction of a dam in Switzerland, was an undistinguished beginning, yet already anticipated the documentary aspect of his work. On returning to Paris, where he had studied ethnology at the Sorbonne and attended the cineclubs of the Left Bank, he worked on a series of short films with a group of aspiring film-makers and critics—Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer, François Truffaut—who would eventually become known as the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), all united in their contempt of the traditional French cinéma de qualité. In 1956, using the pseudonym Hans Lucas, Godard became a regular contributor to the magazines Arts and Cahiers du cinema and, inspired by the work of American directors like Hawks and Hitchcock, helped to formulate an aesthetic policy of the auteur. In 1957, he met the film producer Georges de Beauregard, who financed his first feature-length film, A bout de souffle, a homage to American ‘B’ gangster movies starring Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Shot by Raoul Coutard in natural light on location in Paris, the film was an unexpected critical and commercial success. Bristling with quotes and references, it used the techniques of hand-held camera and jump-cut to disrupt the act of narration and so create spontaneity. Godard’s second film, Le Petit Soldat (made in 1960, but not released until 1963), was a fierce exposé of the Algerian war, disturbing both for its realistic depiction of horror and for the ambiguous politics of its protagonists. It featured the actress Anna Karina, whom Godard later married. So began a remarkable period of uninterrupted creativity during which Godard developed a fragmented, intensively edited and self-ironic style that broke down the divisions between fiction and documentary, actor and character, narrative and experimental film. The films of this first period (almost all shot by Coutard), include Vivre sa vie (1962), an analysis of prostitution in twelve tableaux, the classically perfect Le Mépris (1963) made in Cinemascope and mischievously employing Brigitte Bardot, and Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965), a mixture of film noir and science fiction. The poster-bright Pierrot le fou (1965), regarded by many as Godard’s masterpiece, follows the love-hate relationship between Marianne (Karina) and Ferdinand (Belmondo) and is clearly a reflection of the state of Godard’s marriage with Karina, then nearing its end.

Godard was seeking to develop a materialist film poetics, the first signs of which are visible in 1966’s Masculin-Féminin, starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, about the generation of ‘the children of Marx and Coca-Cola’. In 1966–67 he made a trilogy exploring modern alienation, in particular the Americanization of French economic and cultural life highlighted by the Vietnam war. Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle is a social and psychological portrait of Paris and its new suburban sprawl as seen through the eyes of a housewife-cum-prostitute. La Chinoise, about a Maoist cell in Paris, is an accurate premonition of the student uprisings of 1968. Weekend, a savage indictment of social violence and arguably Godard’s most extreme film, offers an apocalyptic vision both of society and of cinema (the closing caption reads ‘FIN DU CINÉMA’). May 1968 saw Godard leading the protests over the dismissal of Henri Langlois from the Cinémathèque Française, and producing a series of cinétracts, or impromptu collages, of revolutionary sounds, images and slogans. Le Gai Savoir (1968), a treatise on ‘progressive’ education which heavily foregrounds its means of production, marks the culmination of Godard’s self-reflexive film aesthetic. He then began to disavow his earlier work, claiming that it functioned only at the level of theoretical experiment rather than of social and political struggle. His setting up with Jean-Pierre Gorin of the Maoist film collective, the Dziga Vertov Group, marked a complete break with commercial film structures. Joint works like Pravda, Luttes en Italie, Vent d’est, (all 1969), and Vladimir et Rosa (1971), commissioned by European television although never broadcast, deconstructed in different ways the signs of bourgeois ideology. Tout va bien (1972), featuring Yves Montand and Jane Fonda as characters and as themselves, is Godard’s most authentically Brechtian film, but failed to excite either his increasingly impatient Marxist following or the capitalist film system which had intended to welcome back a prodigal son. Godard had reached an artistic impasse, a fact crudely symbolized by his motorcycle accident in 1971 which left him an invalid for two years. Despite its analytical rigour, his work was becoming less revolutionary than simply didactic, losing its audience in the process. The Group disbanded and Godard left for Grenoble with Anne-Marie Miéville, a set photographer on Tout va bien, to set up a new production company called Sonimage (romantically conceived as a combination of her ‘sound’ and his ‘image’).

Godard then underwent a process of complete self-evaluation unlike that of any other major film-maker. After Ici et ailleurs (1974), which used video and previously shot film of Palestine to take personal and political stock of the post-1968 situation, Godard and Miéville returned deliberately in 1973 to basic themes with Numéro deux, a stunning exposé of the blockage in French society which incorporated and superimposed video within the cinematic frame. Two major television series followed, Six fois deux (sur et sous la communication) (1976) and France/tour/détour/deux/ enfants, (1977/8) which, although meeting with general incomprehension and disapproval, revealed that Godard was seeking above all to resolve the antagonism between video and cinema (Cain and Abel). By the late 1970s, he was back in Switzerland (his country of citizenship). There he made Slow Motion (Sauve qui peut [la vie]) (1979), a return to the mainstream and explicitly autobiographical in nature. Produced with a minimal crew and featuring Jacques Dutronc as Godard’s alter ego, Paul Godard, the film used the video technique of stop-starting images to analyse the relations between female prostitution and male impotence, space and representation. It also included a voice-over sequence with Marguerite Duras, illustrating Godard’s desire to engage directly with female discourse and, perhaps even more importantly, literature (Godard is himself the author of six published collections of poetry). Passion followed (1981), a soaring tale of aesthetics, painting, class politics and religion which inspired the even more astonishing Scénario du film ‘Passion’, a video where Godard explores how Passion came into being. Prénom: Carmen (1983), which won the Lion d’Or at the 1983 Venice Film Festival, confronts Mérimée with Beethoven to examine the relationship between (pre-)language and identity. Its burlesque figure of Uncle Jean marks the first of Godard’s appearances in his own film-fictions. ‘Je vous salue, Marie’ (1983), a contemporary reworking of the story of the Nativity, explored the metaphysical themes of love, faith and creativity. Although condemned by the Pope, the film was an honest attempt by Godard (a Protestant) to deal with the question of divine mystery, and its dense soundtrack mixing Dvorák with Bach showcased his total mastery of sound.

An extensive and still evolving phase of personal, historical and philosophical contemplation was initiated by the video Godard made with Miéville in 1986 entitled Soft and Hard. Putting aside self-indulgent exercises like King Lear and Soigne ta droite (both 1987), this fifth period includes works like Puissance de la parole (1988), a dazzling video piece exploiting techniques of speed and pulsation; Nouvelle Vague (1991), a paean to nature stripped of all but the barest threads of narrative; Allemagne année 90 neuf zero, a meditation for television on the solitude of post-Berlin Wall Germany and Europe; and JLG/JLG: autoportrait de décembre (1991), an intimate and elegiac short which is less a self-portrait than a study of childhood, memory and loss. Godard has also experimented with filmed poems, letters, reports, contributions to collective works, historical studies, work notes, fragments of a private diary and dialogues. However, the key work of the recent corpus is the eight-part video Histoire(s) du cinéma. Here, Godard, the self-styled artisan, reinvents the cinematic process by means of an extraordinary ‘videographic’ flux of clips, stills, art reproductions, captions and photography. This approach confirms the view of the film critic Serge Daney that Godard is less an iconoclast and innovator than a radical reformer tirelessly correcting and redefining. A work of genuine humanist commitment and passion, Histoire(s) du cinéma has rarely been seen, suffering the fate of much of Godard’s recent output which, if it attracts producers, lacks adequate distribution. In fact, although revered by young filmmakers such as Léos Carax, Godard is generally known less for his recent work than for his enduring fame as a public figure, the author of axioms like ‘cinema is truth 24 times a second’, or ‘it’s not a just image, just an image’. He received the prestigious film award of an honorary César in 1986.

JAMES WILLIAMS

Major works

Godard, J.-L. (1980) Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma, vol. 1, Paris: Éditions Albatros (a first version of the Histoire(s) du cinéma project).

——(1985) Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma/Éditions de l’Étoile (a lavishly illustrated compilation of all Godard’s film criticism).

Goldmann, Jean-Jacques

b. 1951, Paris

Singer-songwriter

Goldmann is a prolific songwriter and a performer. He started his career in 1975 with the group Tai Phong, where he first met the Welsh guitarist Michael Jones. In 1981, Goldmann started a solo and highly successful career for ten years and then formed a new group Fredericks, Goldmann et Jones. A talented musician, he gives the traditional poetical chanson a modern musical idiom. Against his own wishes he is perceived as a leading voice of the new moral generation.

GÉRARD POULET

See also: song/chanson

Gorz, André

b. 1924, Vienna, Austria

Political philosopher, real name Gérard Horst

Gorz left his homeland when it was annexed by Hitler in 1938 and it was in 1946, during his exile in Switzerland, that Gorz met Jean-Paul Sartre, thus beginning a long association with Les Temps modernes. Gorz’s books are concerned mainly with the nature of work in post-industrial societies: he examines the emergence of and tendency towards societies having to contend with mass unemployment in economies experiencing jobless growth. His analysis extends also to changing class structures in such societies, and discusses how work should be more equitably distributed. Gorz’s name has in more recent years become associated with the ecology movement.

MARTYN CORNICK

See also: employment; green issues

Major works

Gorz, A. (1980) Ecology as Politics (Écologie et politique), Boston: South End Press.

——(1982) Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism, London: Pluto.

——(1988) Métamorphose du travail: quête du sens, Paris: Galilée.

——(1994) Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology (Capitalisme, socialisme, écologie), trans. C.Turner, London: Verso.

Gracq, Julien

b. 1910, St-Florent-le-Vieil

Writer, real name Louis Poirier

Gracq is the author of novels and essays, was initially close to Surrealism (he was a friend of André Breton) and is noted for his rare poetic style and his individual vision of literature. In 1950 he delivered a violent attack on the Parisian literary establishment in Literature in the Gut (La Littérature a l’estomac) and later refused the Goncourt prize awarded for his 1951 novel The Opposing Shore (Le Rivage des Syrtes). Standing apart from all literary trends, his work has moved from fiction towards original forms of personal and reflective writing.

BÉATRICE DAMAMME-GILBERT

See also: literary prizes

Grand Magic Circus, Le

Theatre company

An anarchic, lively company led by Jérôme Savary, whose aim was to bring culture to the people by ridiculing the existing cultural establishment. Collectively scripted shows were designed to shock middle-class audiences, and used the music-hall tradition of song, dance, stage effects, clowning and pantomime for which shows such as its 1973 De Moïse a Mao, and its 1981 Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme are particularly famous.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Grappelli, Stéphane

b. 1908, Paris

d. 1997, Paris

Musician

A legendary jazz violinist who formed an unforgettable partnership with the guitarist Django Reinhardt in the 1930s. The two of them were members of the Hot Club de France Quintet which was formed in 1934 and stayed together until the war (when Grappelli came to England). Reformed in 1946, the Quintet continued to perform until Reinhardt’s retirement in 1950, since when Grappelli pursued a solo career, working with the likes of Duke Ellington, Oscar Peterson, Barney Kessel, Earl Hines, Yehudi Menuhin and Claude Bolling until his death in December 1997.

IAN PICKUP

See also: jazz

Gréco, Juliette

b. 1926, Montpellier

Singer and actor

Known in her early years as the ‘muse of St-Germain-des-Prés’, Juliette Gréco began her career in the late 1940s and early 1950s performing songs with words by Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Queneau. Having alienated the French bourgeoisie in her early years, Gréco progressively captivated a wider public, singing songs by Brel, Prévert, Guy Béart, Gainsbourg, Aznavour, and others. An outstanding stage performer, Gréco projected the image of the archetypal ‘liberated’ woman. She is also important as an ambassador of French song abroad and (to a lesser extent) as a film star. Gréco was married to Michel Piccoli.

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

green issues

Green issues emerged as part of France’s social and political agenda in the 1960s, although the debate about the relationship between nature and society is an old one. Modern environmentalism, which followed the growth of the nature protection movements, has been shaped by a number of specific factors, especially the role of the state and the conflicts around nuclear power.

The relationship between society and the natural environment has been a much-debated issue for a long time. Indeed, it was pivotal during the Enlightenment period; Rousseau, with his vision of humans as ‘good in Nature’ in Le Contrat social and in Émile, differed from the modernism of the Encyclopedists such as Diderot or D’Alembert, for whom ‘reason’ and ‘industry’ control ‘nature’. In the Romantic period, this debate was continued from all sides. The impulse to ‘preserve’ nature can be dated back to the creation of the first nature reserve in the forest of Fontainebleau in 1853, after a long campaign by well-known artists and writers such as George Sand and Victor Hugo. Later, the deeply rural character of French society strongly marked the relationship with the natural environment. However, the ambient modernism which, from the 1950s, presided over the ‘30 Glorious’ years of economic growth, and which at first reacted against the ‘ruralist’ ideology of the collaborationist Vichy regime of World War II (which had a wheatsheaf as its symbol), had soon to respond to the deep environmental changes provoked by industrialization and urbanization. These changes, which accelerated the disappearance of traditional rural society, assured the continued popularity of works extolling the values of doomed rural cultures in touch with ‘nature’—hence the success of writings by authors such as Pagnol, Genevoix, Giono and Ramuz. On the other hand, it became obvious that the natural and human environments were threatened through pollution and degradation, and that a serious policy response had to be developed.

In this context, two dates are particularly relevant. In 1960, the act creating the national parks was voted in. The first, the Parc National de la Vanoise, was established in the Alps in 1963, to be followed by six other national parks and many regional parks and nature reserves. In 1963, Jean Dorst’s book Avant que nature se meure (Before Nature Dies) rivalled Carson’s Silent Spring in the Anglo-Saxon world. At the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, green trends were developing in France (as elsewhere), generating debate about the ‘limits to growth’, the ‘hippy’ craze, a nostalgia for the terroirs and produits de pays, and associations for the protection of animals and nature becoming mass movements. The Amis de la Terre (Friends of the Earth) started in 1970; three years later came WWF’s French section (Greenpeace France had to wait until 1977). The term écologiste (environmentalist) became popular, especially in its familiar, slightly derogatory form of écolo.

The main area of conflicts during the 1970s was the development of nuclear power. The 1973 Messmer Plan planned to make of nuclear power the main source of electricity generation (le tout-nucléaire policy). This decision was never debated publicly, and local public enquiries for nuclear plants were seen as rubber-stamping procedures. The anti-nuclear movement, therefore, was also a protest against the centralized state. Many environmentalists associated themselves with the libertarian ideals of the May 1968 movement, pacifism (as the civil nuclear power programme had never been fully separated from the military nuclear programme) and regionalism (especially in Brittany).

The high point of anti-nuclear campaigning came in 1977, during the campaign against the Creys-Malville ‘fast breeder’ reactor near Lyon. With the arrival in power of Mitterrand in 1981, a few concessions were made, but the nuclear programme had largely been set in train, and the opposition foundered on the powerful alliance of pro-nuclear interests. Today, France is the country with the highest proportion of electricity generated from nuclear plants. Protests were renewed only when public authorities were accused of providing little or misleading information about the radioactive clouds from the Chernobyl disaster blowing across France in 1986. During the same period, other green issues attracted the attention of activists and the general public, especially urban pollution and the mismanagement of dangerous waste. A number of scandals around the import of hospital waste and illegal chemical dumps erupted across the 1980s. The degrading of the local natural environment by infrastructure encroachment was increasingly resisted—for instance, a new TGV rail track project in the Rhône valley, an area already cramped between existing railways, motorways and canals, and not far from the Côte d’Azur, a fragile environment destroyed by speculative and undercontrolled developments, was strongly opposed in the early 1990s.

From the mid-1970s, a new generation of activists, less marked by the political issues inherited from the 1960s, brought forward the Greens’ political project. Green politics, which have been marked by deep divisions and a gradual erosion of the electoral and political positions gained in the mid-1980s, have not managed to alter significantly the ways in which green issues are considered. Indeed, ‘green’ themes are used in widely differing ways. For instance, a conservative-orientated party, the CPNT or Chasse, Pêche, Nature, Traditions (Hunting, Angling, Nature, Traditions), claiming to have an environmental purpose by lobbying for ‘traditional’ hunting and angling, gained 3.95 per cent of the votes in the 1994 European elections—more than the main Green Party (Les Verts).

The CPNT’s relative success is typical of protest politics, but it reveals some of the specific aspects of ideologies on nature which are very different from the usual green image. There are 1.65 million licensed hunters in France, who constitute a powerful and active lobby which claims to have the protection of nature as its main aim. Some recent conflicts illustrate the force of such ideologies: for instance, the seasonal hunting of the palombe (a kind of migrant dove) in the southwest region of France is, in principle, forbidden by an EU directive, but is fiercely defended and practised by locals. Indeed, ‘ecocentrist’ thinking, influential in Anglo-Saxon environmentalism, has had little impact in France, and has been subjected to fierce attacks, for instance by the philosopher Luc Ferry. Alternative lifestyles influenced by green issues have yet to have the same impact in France as they do in the United Kingdom or in Germany, where problems of pollution, energy wastage, losses of wilderness or biological diversity are treated as technical and sociopolitical problems.

FRANÇOIS NECTOUX

green politics

Despite heightened international concern over the environment, the impact of green politics in France has been limited by chronic internal divisions.

The origins of French political ecology lie in the ‘new social movements’ of the late 1960s, particularly environmentalism, antinuclear protest, pacifism and feminism. Unresolved tensions within the green movement over appropriate forms of activism—be it through direct action, associations, pressure groups or mainstream politics—have resulted in ambivalent strategies. Structured political parties emerged late. Of the two main parties, the Verts (the Greens) was formed in 1984, and Génération Écologie (GE) in 1990. The former retains strong elements of grassroots democracy and has a radical platform (opposition to French nuclear power, to the rush for economic growth, to collaboration with the parties of government, advocacy of cancelling Third World debt). The latter is centralized, focused on its founder, Brice Lalonde, reformist in orientation and accepts civil uses of nuclear power (Lalonde was Environment Minister under the Socialists during 1989–92). However, both parties agree on the need for global environmental strategies, more worksharing and a deepening of democracy.

Despite the greening of the French public as measured by opinion surveys, between 1974 and 1988 no single ecology party or candidate polled 5 per cent in a major election. The breakthrough came in the 1989 European elections (with 10.6 per cent of votes, the Verts returned nine MEPs), followed by success in the 1992 regional elections, where ecology parties attracted nearly 15 per cent of voters. In both years, ecologists benefited from the popularity of environmental issues and proportional representation. But the 1993 parliamentary elections (only 7.6 per cent of votes in the first round and no seats won) and the 1995 presidential elections (3.3 per cent for Dominique Voynet) constituted serious setbacks. Explanatory factors for these disappointing performances included inexperience in major elections, poor communication of policy, the aftermath of recession, the first-past-the-post electoral system and the resurgence of the Right.

But the major weakness of French political ecology has been its ever-increasing fragmentation, with green politicians more intent on ideological finesse and factional disputes than on formulating environmental policy. These divisions prevented the election of a single green MEP in the 1994 European elections. By that year, there was a green party for most shades of the political spectrum, with the Verts moving leftwards, GE drifting to the centre, CPNT (a hunting lobby) and the Nouveaux Écologistes firmly on the Right, while Antoine Waechter’s Mouvement Écologiste Indépendant sought to be on neither Left nor Right. Although this is a fair reflection of the competing constituencies that form the environmental movement, it has led to voter confusion, the marginalization of green parties and the dilution of their influence on decisionmakers, despite the continued saliency of national and global environmental problems.

JOSEPH SZARKA

Greimas, A.J.

b. 1917, Tula, Lithuania;

d. 1992

Linguist

An influential French semanticist and semiologist who taught at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and worked in the 1960s alongside Barthes, Todorov and Genette on the structure of narratives. Two of his theoretical models exploring deep and surface structures, the semiotic square and the actantial model, have been widely used and applied to a range of subdisciplines within semiotics.

BÉATRICE DAMAMME-GILBERT

Groult, Benoîte

b. 1920, Paris

Journalist, novelist and essayist

The author of novels co-written with her sister Flora in the 1960s—Diary in Duo (journal a quatre mains); Feminine Plural (Le Féminin pluriel); II était deux fois (Twice Upon a Time)—as well as of single-authored fictions— including 1972’s La Part des chases (All Things Considered), and the erotic novel Salt on Our Skin (Les Vaisseaux du coeur), published in 1988—Groult is perhaps best known for two feminist essays. These texts—Ainsi soit-elle (So Be She) and Le Féminisme au masculin (Feminism in the Masculine Mode)— contributed to the rise of feminist awareness in 1970s France. A dedicated campaigner for equal rights, Groult became president of the Commission for the Feminization of Job Designations in 1985.

ALEX HUGHES

Grumberg, Jean-Claude

b. 1939, Paris

Playwright

Over three decades, Grumberg has been writing plays, such as Zone libre (Free Zone) and Linge sale (Dirty Linen), television scripts and a screenplay in 1988 (Les Années sandwichs). His work displays differing formats and subjects, employing humour to make social observation.

ANNIE STEPHENSON

See also: theatre

Guattari, Félix

b. 1930, Colombes;

d. 1992, Cour-Cheverny, Loir-et-Cher

Radical psychiatrist and intellectual

Guattari was influenced by the work which he began in the 1950s at Dr Jean Oury’s experimental Clinique de la Borde psychiatric hospital at Cour-Cheverny. In 1960, he was active in the creation of the Groupe de Travail de Psychologic et de Sociologie Institutionnelle. He was also the co-author of five important philosophical works with Gilles Deleuze, most notably Anti-Oedipus (LAnti-OEdipe) in 1972. As well as being politically active on the Left, Guattari worked with Deleuze to outline a philosophy of desire and ‘molecular’ revolution which calls into question the ‘molar’ organizing tendencies of contemporary societies. In the 1980s he began to write on ecological questions.

JOHN MARKS

See also: psychoanalysis

Guérard, Michel

b. 1933, Vétheuil

Chef

Guérard is the chef who founded la nouvelle cuisine (also known as la cuisine minceur), a reaction of the health-conscious late 1970s against heavy sauces and a surfeit of dairy products. This style of cooking, practised by Guérard at his restaurant in the southwestern spa town of Eugénie-les-Bains, makes great use of mousses, steamed dishes and low-fat reductions, flavoured with unusual (frequently Oriental) herbs and spices. Guérard’s imitators were often derided for their stress on fussy presentation and the supposedly minuscule size of the portions they offered, but his influence has been the major individual one on French cooking of the past twenty years.

KEITH READER

See also: gastronomy

Guérin, Daniel

b. 1904, Paris;

d. 1988, Paris

Political militant and thinker

Prominent in prewar left-wing politics as a revolutionary syndicalist and dissident Socialist, Guérin developed in the postwar era a form of libertarian socialism marked especially by antimilitarism and anti-colonialism. His writings on Kinsey and Reich, and the accounts of his homosexual activity in autobiographical works such as Autobiographie de jeunesse (Autobiography of Youth) and Le Feu du sang (Fire in the Blood), of 1972 and 1977 respectively, provide a link between the Socialist tradition and the post-May 1968 landscape.

BILL MARSHALL

Guibert, Hervé

b. 1955, Paris;

d. 1991, Paris

Writer and photographer

Hervé Guibert is the author of over twenty novels, plays, collections of stories, photographs and a televised film. Although not prominent until his three ‘AIDS novels’ and television appearances on Apostrophes and Ex-Libris, his medicalization and mediatization as an ‘AIDS writer’ also illustrate his main themes: the analytical representation of the external and internal human body; the relation between image/imagination and reality; shifts from the hallucinatory to the punctiliously precise. His combination of extreme restraint and mischievous, provocative excess, notably in his treatment of violence and the erotic, mark him as a fine literary stylist and moraliste.

OWEN HEATHCOTE

See also: AIDS; gay writing

Guignols de l’info, Les

Television programme

Les Guignols de l’info is a puppet-based satire programme which emulates the United Kingdom’s Spitting Image. Broadcast nightly on the pay-TV channel Canal Plus in an unencrypted form, it pokes fun at politicians, media personalities and show-business stars. It is watched by a smaller, younger and more leftwing audience than its competitor on TF1, the Bébête-Show. During the 1995 presidential campaign the possible electoral impact of the programme’s portrayal of the leading candidates became a topic of media and political debate. The format of Les Guignols has been exported to other countries with considerable success.

RAYMOND KUHN

See also: television