b. 1936, St-Germain en Laye;
d. 1997, Paris
Novelist and publisher
A co-founder of Tel quel, Hallier’s career as a maverick intellectual was always inclined towards non-conformity, provocation and iconoclasm. A lover of publicity, much of his work was conceived to challenge the status of institutional and political authorities. After May 1968 such efforts were channelled into the left-wing and humorous monthly L’Idiot international (1969–73) and the establishment of his own publishing house, Les Éditions Hallier (1974). Having already attacked the regime of Giscard d’Estaing in 1979 in Lettre ouverte au colin froid (Open Letter to the Cold Hake), during the 1980s Hallier turned his efforts to delving into the past and personal life of his former close friend, François Mitterrand.
MARTYN CORNICK
See also: national press in France; Tel Quel group
Hallier, J.-E. (1972) La Cause des peuples, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
——(1992) La Force d’âme: l’honneur perdu de François Mitterrand, Paris: Belles Lettres.
b. 1943, Paris
Lyricist and singer, real name Jean-Philippe Smet
France’s best-known rocker, Johnny Hallyday sang mainly French translations of American rock, twist, and rhythm and blues songs in the early years of his career, before introducing more French compositions into his repertoire. Seemingly the incarnation of violence and of loneliness in many of his stage performances, Hallyday has perfected his high-tech public appearances for a great (if mainly ageing) band of fans. Despite huge success in France, he has made no impact in the English-speaking world. He married for the fifth time in March 1996.
IAN PICKUP
See also: song/chanson
b. 1944, Paris
Singer-songwriter
An instant star of the pop world at the age of 18 with her first composition, Tous les garçons et les filles (All the Boys and Girls), Françoise Hardy has progressed from rock and twist, to ballads, and to ever more reflective (often poetic) songs, some of which were written for her by Michel Berger, Michel Jonasz and others. One of the survivors of the 1960s generation, Hardy is often seen as the incarnation of loneliness. She is married to Jacques Dutronc, the singer and film star.
IAN PICKUP
See also: song/chanson
Over the postwar period, health has become an important concern for governments in Western industrialized nations. Medical advances and the organized provision of health services may have contributed in no small measure to increasing life expectancy, but the soaring cost of providing medical care has led governments to search for ways of containing expenditure, while maintaining the high standards of provision people have come to expect.
As a proportion of total expenditure on social protection and in relation to gross domestic product (GDP), within the European Union (EU) France is among the big spenders on health. In 1993, per capita expenditure on health was higher in France than in any other member-state, although the level of provision in terms of the proportion of medical practitioners, chemists, hospital beds or length of stay in relation to population size was not consistently above average.
Irrespective of whether a high level of spending on health can be interpreted as the cause or effect of declining mortality rates, French women register the greatest life expectancy of all Europeans. The evidence is less positive for men, who display higher mortality rates at all ages, and particularly in the 20– 24 age group. The disparity here is explained by the greater propensity of young men to be involved in fatal accidents. Among the older age groups, the main causes of death for men are malignant tumours, followed by circulatory diseases. The order is reversed for women. With Spain, France records the highest incidence of AIDS in the Union, with 42.55 cases for 100,000 inhabitants—more than three times the level in the United Kingdom.
The health care system that developed in France in the postwar period to meet the demands of a rapidly growing population and changing lifestyles is based on two fundamental principles, which may help to explain why the system is one of the most costly to operate in Europe. The health service was premised on the freedom for patients to choose their own medical practitioners, consultants and hospitals, and on equality of access to services.
Health is one of the main branches of the French social security system. The health insurance funds (caisses d’assurance maladie) cover sickness, disability and accidents at work for about 80 per cent of the insured population. The remaining 20 per cent are covered by special schemes or as self-employed workers. In return for employer and employee contributions, which are calculated as a proportion of salary, insured persons and their dependants are eligible for partial reimbursement of medical fees and most pharmaceutical costs incurred in the course of treatment. The amount paid by the patient, known as the ticket modérateur, was intended to ensure that patients had a financial involvement in their treatment and developed a sense of responsibility. Payment for in-patient hospital care is made direct by the funds to the hospital. The full cost of medical care during pregnancy is covered by the same funds. In addition, employed persons receive a daily rate to compensate for loss of wages during absences due to illness or industrial accidents.
While the health funds are run by the social partners (employers’ and workers’ representatives) and are, in theory, responsible for managing their own affairs, the Ministry of Health lays down the conditions for levying contributions and the principles for setting rates of reimbursement, and it decides on the allocation of hospital budgets. Private hospitals (cliniques) also fall under the administrative and financial control of the ministry and are obliged to engage in contracts with the funds. Medical practitioners can choose whether to enter into such an agreement, and some 80 per cent of all general practitioners are under contract. In return for doctors observing set fees, their patients are reimbursed at a higher rate. Chemists are subject to a numerus clausus. Although similar restrictions are not imposed on medical practitioners, the number of medical students has been limited since the 1970s. While doctors are expected to display moderation, they have retained their freedom to prescribe whatever drugs they consider necessary, and patients can consult any number of doctors if they are not satisfied with their diagnosis or treatment. In line with the principle of solidarity, low income groups and certain categories of chronic illnesses may be exempt from the patient’s contribution, but about half the population contribute to supplementary schemes, mutual insurance companies (mutuelles) or private insurance schemes, which provide additional cover for their members.
The constraining regulatory function exercised by the state was intended to ensure that both patients and the medical profession assume responsibility for the demand and supply of treatment, but it has not been effective in containing costs. Since the 1980s, schemes have, therefore, been introduced to control hospital budgets and cut administrative overheads; daily charges have been levied for patients in hospital; restrictions have been introduced on exemptions from medical bills; and the level of reimbursement for patients has been reduced. One of the results of retrenchment is that the share of expenditure borne by the health funds has fallen. The burden has shifted more heavily on to private individuals and the supplementary insurance schemes. It is doubtful, however, whether the attempts at reform have resulted in long-term efficiency gains, since policies have been introduced in piecemeal fashion. In any case, they have met with strong opposition from the medical profession and the social partners, who see reform as a threat to their freedom of action.
LINDA HANTRAIS
See also: alcohol, cigarettes, drugs; demographic developments; social policy
European Commission (1995) Social Protection in Europe, Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities (a wide-ranging review covering current debates on social protection).
Wilsford, D. (1991) ‘The Continuity of Crisis: Patterns of Heath Care Policymaking in France, 1978–1988’, in J.S.Ambler (ed.) The French Welfare State. Surviving Social and Ideological Change, New York and London: New York University Press (a thorough analysis of an important period of change in the development of the French health care system).
b. 1920, France;
d. 1996
Press baron
A controversial right-wing figure, Hersant successfully circumvented anti-concentration legislation, and in the early 1990s controlled roughly 30 per cent of French dailies, including Le Figaro, France-Soir and numerous regional titles, as well as advertising agencies, printing plants and radio stations. Despite a suspect past and wartime collaboration, he held political office locally and nationally. His newspaper career began with the creation of the successful motorists’ monthly L’Auto-Journal in 1950. He built his empire by buying up and ruthlessly restructuring or merging newspapers in difficulty (over fifty titles in forty years). His holdings extended to Belgium, Spain and eastern Europe.
PAM MOORES
See also: advertising; national press in France; regional press in France
Television programme
A current affairs programme which started in 1982. Broadcast on Antenne 2 (later France 2) the format was based on a studio interview between a leading politician and three journalists. The peculiarity of the programme lay in its use of public opinion as an active element in the discussion. For example, from 1985 onwards the programme included an instant audience opinion poll on the views expressed by politicians, concluding with a verdict on their ability to produce convincing arguments.
RAYMOND KUHN
See also: television
b. 1927, L’Isle-Adam
Actor
A Comédie Française sociétaire between 1951 and 1972, noted for his flexibility as an actor and his interpretations of Molière and Marivaux, as well as performances in the lead role of Arturo Ui at the Théâtre National Populaire in 1968, and in Thomas Dörst’s 1989 Feuerbach.
ANNIE SPARKS
See also: theatre
b. 1946, Boulogne-Billancourt;
d. 1988, Paris
Intellectual, gay activist, writer and journalist
In 1971 Hocquenghem was one of the founders of the FHAR. Although he was a prominent media spokesperson for the cause in the 1970s, he was uncomfortable with the orthodoxies of identity politics. This is clear as early as 1972’s Homosexual Desire (Le Désir homosexuel), which is heavily indebted to Deleuze and Guattari, and his iconoclastic social dissidence is developed throughout his theoretical works and five novels.
BILL MARSHALL
See also: gay activism; gay writing; lesbian activism
Hocquenghem, G. (1993) Homosexual Desire, Durham: Duke University Press.
Marshall, B. (1996) Guy Hocquenghem, London: Pluto (essential reading).
French horse racing is dominated by its staterun and café-based system of pool betting, the Pari Mutuel Urbain (PMU), which forbids private bookmaking. The weekly gambling highlight is the televised Sunday tiercé, a 1–2–3 forecast bet which attracts some 8 million punters. This may focus on anything from a humble handicap to one of the great events in the racing calendar, such as the Prix de l’Amérique (a showcase for French trotting, the country’s most popular form of racing), or the culmination of the European flat-racing season, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.
PHILIP DINE
See also: sport
In the immediate postwar period, a major building programme was launched in France to replace the housing stock destroyed or damaged during hostilities, to cater for the fastexpanding and urbanizing population and to modernize the existing stock. As population growth began to ease in the 1960s, and as the economy went into recession in the mid-1970s, new building slowed down, and policy shifted towards a more targeted approach aimed at encouraging owner-occupation and assisting low-income families. By the 1990s, the majority of housing in France was either pre-1918 or had been built between 1949 and 1967, but over 90 per cent of dwellings were equipped with a telephone, indoor toilet, with access to a bath or shower and hot water, and nearly 80 per cent had central heating.
Despite the high concentration of population in the major cities, particularly in the Paris area, almost 60 per cent of French people live in houses rather than flats, a proportion that is above the European average. Couples with children are more likely to live in houses, which they have acquired by moving to the outskirts of towns where affordable housing is available in the developing residential areas. As arrangements for obtaining mortgages have improved, and home ownership has been encouraged by state-funded mortgage subsidies, more couples have become owner-occupiers, accounting for nearly 60 per cent of occupancies in the 1990s, a level slightly below the European average. Almost 10 per cent of French people own a second home, inherited from a parent or relation in one in four cases. Although less than half of owner-occupiers are paying for a mortgage, the share of the household budget devoted, on average, to housing costs has doubled since the 1960s, accounting for a fifth of consumer spending.
Postwar governments in France have intervened in two main ways to subsidize housing: first, by building social housing (habitations a layer modéré), particularly between the 1950s and 1970s; and second, by paying housing benefits to families in need, as part of family policy. Over 15 per cent of all housing belongs to the social sector, representing a rapidly expanding proportion of rented accommodation, though a lower level than that found in the United Kingdom. From the 1980s, policy shifted from subsidies on buildings to more personalized forms of housing benefit (aide personnalisée au logement and allocation de logement social), which are paid to low-income families, including young couples without children, young workers and students (about 25 per cent of households). While making an important contribution to the standard of housing for the population in general, these measures have not been able to stem the rising tide of homelessness, estimated to affect some 202,000 people in France in the mid-1990s.
LINDA HANTRAIS
See also: demographic developments; family; social policy
INSEE (1993) ‘Cadre de vie’, La Société française: données sociales 1993, Paris: INSEE, (a collection of informative contributions covering various aspects of housing in France).
Newspaper
Originally a Socialist newspaper, founded in 1904 by Jean Jaurès, it became Communist in 1920, and has been the official newspaper of the French Communist Party since 1923. Its fate parallels the demise of Communism: peak circulation of over 400,000 copies in 1946 was halved by 1958, and dropped in the 1990s to around 60,000. The last French daily to be directly associated with a political party, its readers are primarily party members and supporters. The party appoints senior executives and editor; many journalists are party members. The stance is partisan, the tone combative. L’Huma, as it is commonly known, devotes special attention to social and industrial problems, emphasizing the universal dimension of the workers’ struggle.
PAM MOORES
See also: left-wing press; national press in France; parties and movements
b. 1955, Paris
Actor
Her career was launched in Goretta’s The Lacemaker (La Dentellière) in 1977). She has made films for many auteurist directors: several for Chabrol, including Violette Nozière (1977) and La Cérémonie in 1995, Pialat’s Loulou (1980), Godard’s Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1979) and Passion (1981), Tavernier’s Coup de torchon (1981), Blier’s La Femme de mon pote (1983). Her favoured persona is that of the rebel with feminist overtones, e.g. the closet lesbian in Kurys’s Coup de foudre (1983) or the abortionist in Chabrol’s Une affaire de femmes (1988).
PHIL POWRIE
The name Hussards was given to a group of young right-wing writers working in the 1940s and 1950s, and including principally Roger Nimier (1925–62), Antoine Blondin (1922– 91) and Jacques Laurent (1919–), though also comprising Michel Déon, Kléber Haedens, Stephen Hecquet, Félicien Marceau and Michel Mohrt. Although often coming from right-wing backgrounds, they were for the most part too young to have active experience of collaboration during the Occupation. They adopted an acerbic right-wing stance in the postwar years as an expression of both disorientation in a world which provided no role for them and contempt for a political system which they saw as corrupt and hypocritical.
Their rebellion against an older generation and the political and moral orthodoxy took the form of ardent anti-republicanism and bitter opposition to what they saw as the ‘official philosophy of the regime’, existentialism. This opposition was translated into polemical texts, like Laurent’s Paul et Jean-Paul (1951), or intellectual fiction, like Nimier’s Les Épées (The Swords) and Le Hussard bleu (The Blue Hussar) from 1948 and 1950 respectively, which trace the disabused journey of the protagonist, François Sanders, through the Occupation and the French invasion and occupation of Germany in 1945. More importantly, the opposition to republican moral superiority founded on a Resistance past and the highserious didacticism of existentialism, took the form of fictional experimentation and exploitation of a strain of wistful comedy which both punctured the prevailing pomposity and expressed an underlying sense of frustration. Laurent’s 1948 novel Les Corps tranquilles (Quiet Bodies) is an ambitious attempt to evoke the interwar years through one of its major intellectual preoccupations—suicide— using a large cast of characters and a structure, indicated by the chemical title, which comes from scientific theory. In this, he joins both Queneau and Vian in turning the novel away from moral or political thematic concerns to the aesthetic, intellectual and ludic domain which is the heartland of fiction. Similarly, Blondin’s 1949 L’Europe buissonnière (Europe Plays Truant) depicts World War II in comic terms which owe much to Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit) and his 1952 Les Enfants du Bon Dieu (Children of God), evokes the lack of purpose of postwar youth through a whimsical psychological plot in which, literally, history, the cornerstone of existentialism, is rewritten. The Hussards constituted a powerful literary group and counterweight to existentialism in the late 1940s and 1950s, mainly, but not exclusively, clustered around the publisher Roland Laudenbach and Les Éditions de la Table Ronde. They also played an important part in postwar journalism, with Nimier as editor of Opéra, Laurent as editor of La Parisienne (of which he was also proprietor) and Arts, and Blondin as leading editorialist of Rivarol in its early years, while at the same time becoming one of France’s most distinguished sports journalists, writing regularly on rugby and cycling for L’Équipe. Their cultural heritage, however, came specifically from the 1920s and the ‘années folles’ following World War I, which they sought to replicate after the next world war: hence their devotion to Morand, Cocteau, Chardonne and, especially, the memory of Drieu la Rochelle. While this produced genuinely innovative literature in the 1940s and 1950s, it was (arguably) not able to sustain the group’s output into de Gaulle’s presidency and beyond.
NICHOLAS HEWITT
See also: committed literature; publishing/ l’édition
Hewitt, N. (1996) Literature and the Right in Post-War France: The Story of the Hussards, Oxford: Berg (a comprehensive account).
b. 1945, Paris
Writer
Hyvrard’s adoption of a pseudonym and her efforts to protect her privacy led readers of the novels she published in the mid-1970s— Les Prunes de Cythère (The Plums of Cythera), Mother Death (Mère la mort) and La Meurtritude (Murderation)—to assume that she, like their narrator/protagonists, was a black woman from the Antilles who had experienced madness and psychiatric incarceration. Hyvrard is in fact white and French, but was inspired to write after working in the Caribbean in the late 1960s. Much of her creative work deals with themes such as women’s identity/identity loss, their (oppressive) bond with the mother, their relation to writing, and the (deadly) restraints imposed upon them by patriarchal society and its language. Identified by critics as a kind of écriture féminine, her literary style is multivocal, poetic and grammatically unconventional. Apart from novels, Hyvrard has written short stories and, in the 1980s, philosophical essays, including Canal de la Toussaint (All Saints’ Channel) and La Pensée corps (Thinking Through the Body), published respectively in 1986 and 1989.
ALEX HUGHES
See also: Montrelay, Michèle; women’s/lesbian writing