Newspaper
Ici-Paris is one of France’s main weekly scandal sheets, euphemistically classified as the ‘escapist press’ (presse d’évasion). Founded in 1945 by Henri and Suzanne de Montfort, as successor to their Resistance newspaper, Ici-Paris soon changed to target a lowbrow market, featuring horoscopes, titillating love intrigues, cartoons and society gossip. Locked in permanent battle to outdo its main competitor, France-Dimanche, it has consistently plumbed the depths of outrageous, shocking and far-fetched reportage, drawing on bizarre tales of the occult, gory accounts of medical mishaps, exposés of secrets, and in particular the intimate detail of marriages and divorces. It has made a speciality of speculatively probing the private lives of internationally known figures in politics or entertainment, often printing wholly fictitious accounts, and focusing with particular relish on Europe’s royal families, especially that of Britain; for example, since the 1960s it has regularly headlined lurid announcements of the (secret) abdication, blindness, terminal illness or death of Queen Elizabeth II. Its circulation rose to a high point of 1.2 million in 1970, but fell in the 1990s to a third of that level. Like France-Dimanche, it is now owned by the powerful Hachette publishing group.
MICHAEL KELLY
See also: national press in France
Like other same-suffix terms, iconography designates both the object of investigation and the investigative method itself (for most current scholarly purposes, Panofsky’s distinction between iconography as description-cum-classification, and iconology as interpretation, is largely disregarded). Originally devotional or monarchical images, icons (from the Greek eikon) gradually acquired the triple functions of identification, mobilization and allegorical narrative. In increasingly secular societies, iconography expresses the beliefs and objectives of different sociocultural groups, from football clubs to political parties, and, like other forms of symbolic discourse which connote as well as denote, is capable of overdetermination and ideological recuperation with changing historical circumstances.
The Revolution of 1789 launched, and the nineteenth century consolidated, a particular iconographical and symbolic lexicon (allegorical female figures, Phrygian bonnet, Republican fasces, etc.), energetically idealized in works such as Rude’s sculpted Départ des volontaires (also known as La Marseillaise) and Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (La Liberté guidant le peuple). It was, however, the emergence in the 1920s of the antagonistic ideologies of Communism and Fascism which produced the high-water mark of political iconography in twentieth-century France, the period from the Popular Front of 1936–8, through the Vichy regime (1940–4) to the postwar ‘tripartism’ of the victorious Resistance coalition. Vichy’s corporatist experiment, enshrined in the motto ‘Travail, famille, patrie’ (Work, family, fatherland), was focused upon the cult of the head of state, Marshal Philippe Pétain, iconographically evoked in the military képi, and the seven-starred marshal’s baton which also constituted the shaft of the doubleheaded francisque (decorative Gallic axe). With its regionalist, culturalist and agriculturalist dimensions, Petainism was a sustained attempt to establish a coherent iconographical system whose very coherence did not reflect, and was doubtless designed in part to mask, its ideological and intellectual contradictions. The mood of national reconstruction and reconciliation, and the re-establishment of Republicanism which accompanied the Liberation, were encapsulated in Paul Colin’s strikingly ‘Christian’ Marianne (1944), but this was essentially a resurrection of prewar symbolism and, like the coalition itself, likely to unravel into its constituent political strands. A 1958 Colin poster combined the triadic arrows of Socialism with a stylized (female) bowsprit; Communism continued to give pride of place to the hammer and sickle, but the Phrygian bonnet also served (both featured on partisan Resistance memorials) and, after 1961, so did Picasso’s dove of peace. Gaullism, given its origins, its organizing principles and the personality of its founder, scarcely lent itself to the multiple variations of maréchaliste iconography and, apart from the Cross of Lorraine, it is rather a series of discreet photographic images that represent de Gaulle’s achievement: the garden and study at Colombey-les-deuxéglises, the Algiers prefecture in 1958, the televised appeals to the nation and, after definitive retirement in 1969, the last elegiac photograph of the general and Madame de Gaulle on an Irish beach. The student revolution of May 1968, which effectively ended his presidential tenure, generated innumerable posters and graffiti, some of which, replicated by cartoonists such as Sennep, Jean Effel and Jacques Faizant, became collectors’ items. 1968 also reactualized certain iconic symbols, notably the Phrygian-bonneted Marianne, since modelled by vedettes such as Bardot and Deneuve. The sexualization is not new; Marianne was always a phantasy figure, who survives in more traditional mode on the postage stamps. But the legacy of the events was literary as much as iconographical, and the ‘Occident’ symbol of the right-wing student group of that name provided a motif for textual variations by Ricardou in Révolutions minuscules (Minuscule Revolutions) of 1971.
The tendency for iconography as an accumulation of complex signifying practices to return to its origins, for iconography to regress to icon, to single images whose meaning is transparent and not constructed (the replacement of traditional Socialist symbols by the red rose, a phenomenon typical also of the British Labour Party), accelerated significantly in the 1980s. This arose partly from greater televisual mediation, and partly from the decline of traditional party politics, and stable, overarching, totalizing ideologies with the rise of single-issue groups representing feminists, sexual and ethnic minority rights, ecologists, etc. Whether a ‘rainbow coalition’ will emerge from ‘this division of the French into heterogeneous consumer groups’ (translated from Fumaroli 1991) remains to be seen. Moreover, while the extreme right-wing amalgam of Lepenism and Catholic intégrisme (pre-Vatican II fundamentalism) briefly juxtaposed images of the Sacred Heart, Joan of Arc and Pétain, iconography traditionally associated with the Left and Centre Left has increasingly been experienced in a nostalgic or caricatural mode: the Bicentenary reenacted 1789 as tourist spectacle and heritage industry; a Mitterrand campaign poster with its country village and the candidate’s tricolour rosette contained echoes of a previous ‘return to the land’, which, in the light of subsequent revelations about the late president’s wartime role, could be deemed ironic as well as iconic. The powerful marketing imperatives of the advertising industry, the transient consecration of le look, also played a part in this transformation. As ‘icon’ and ‘iconic’ came variously to designate media personalities, sport and leisure fashion items (an international brand of training shoes, for example), and the once-sacrosanct base interest rate of the caisse d’épargne (Trustees Savings Bank), some commentators adopted the term ‘emblematic’—equally evocative, equally vague, but giving fewer hostages to fortune. Paradoxically, but perhaps predictably, in the 1990s traditional French iconography enjoyed greater transnational and crosscultural resonance: Delacroix’s Liberty, and Géricault’s more problematic Radeau de la méduse (The Raft of the Medusa) have become established in the representational arsenal of contemporary British cartoonists, a tool for the portrayal of Anglo-Saxon attitudes, social and political, and a graphic expression of underlying ambivalence towards the United Kingdom’s nearest European partner.
WILLIAM KIDD
See also: Catholicism and Protestantism; comic strips/cartoonists; Le Pen, Jean-Marie; nationalism; painting; parties and movements
Agulhon, M. and Bonte, P. (1992) Marianne: les visages de la République, Paris: Gallimard (an anatomy of France’s major icon).
Forbes, J. and Kelly, M. (eds) (1995) French Cultural Studies: An Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press (a collection of essays).
Fumaroli, M. (1991) L’État culturel: essai sur une religion moderne, Paris: Folio (a polemical critique of state cultural intervention).
Immigration has become an issue of major political, social and cultural significance. In recent times, it has been used as both a political football and an umbrella term to refer to a diverse range of issues. The term ‘immigration’ is therefore ambiguous, since it can embrace both the limited questions of migration flows and the nature of the foreign population in France, and wider issues and debates in contemporary French society, such as French national history and national identity, Islam and secularism, and racism and anti-racism.
Let us briefly consider the recent history of migration flows and immigration policy in France. Until the beginning of the 1970s, immigration was largely confined to the realm of technocrats concerned with the economy, the labour force and questions of demography. The state had a minimal role in regulating migration flows (despite the presence of the Office National d’Immigration, established in 1945 precisely for that purpose), and immigration was not a prominent political issue. A more interventionist approach by the state was only deemed necessary when the nature of immigration changed from predominantly European flows to North and sub-Saharan African flows, was believed to have shifted from the temporary residence of single men to the permanent settlement of families, and was consequently deemed to be no longer simply an economic but now a social and cultural question. The new ‘problem’ of immigration required a new ‘solution’ which, as in other Western industrial democracies at the time, took the form of immigration controls of non-European foreigners whose presence was conceived as a threat to social cohesion.
Following the suspension of primary immigration in 1974 by Giscard d’Estaing, initial efforts to aid the process of integration of immigrants (for example, in the areas of housing and employment) and to recognize cultural difference soon gave way to a more rigorous attempt to control and reverse migration flows from North Africa. This policy was pursued through measures which linked the right of residence to employment, clamped down on illegal immigration (immigration clandestine) and established a package of financial aid for repatriation (aide au retour).
Despite Socialist claims that they would introduce a new and coherent policy on immigration when they took over power in 1981, the broad lines of Mitterrand’s policy of ‘integration and control’ in the 1980s could be said to be simply a continuation of the approach adopted by Giscard in the 1970s. Measures improving the lives and conditions of immigrants—the right to free association of immigrant groups and the amnesty for illegal immigrants in 1981, the ten-year residence and work permit in 1984—were offset by tighter controls from 1983 onwards, the refusal to grant immigrants the right to vote in municipal elections (a promise which was contained in Mitterrand’s 110-point manifesto programme for the presidential elections of 1981), and the reintroduction of a voluntary repatriation scheme (aide à la réinsertion) in 1984. Since 1986, the alternation of right- and left-wing governments has had little bearing on the direction of immigration policy, which has continued to favour restrictive controls on entry and residence, the removal of illegal immigrants, and the tightening up of rules on political asylum.
Despite the fact that the foundations for this politicization of immigration were laid in the 1970s, it was only in the 1980s that immigration became an issue of major political significance: the rise of the extreme right-wing Front National (founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen), and the parallel rise of new anti-racist organizations (notably SOS Racisme in 1984 and France Plus in 1985), polarized the issue around pro- and anti-immigrant positions; political parties sought to use immigration for electoral ends; the media raised the stakes through their generally emotive treatment of the question; while secondgeneration youth sought new forms of expression of cultural and political identities. By the middle of the decade it had become difficult to debate immigration in a rational, non-partisan way, because the issues had become obscured by half-truth and distortion, while the term ‘immigration’ had itself become a euphemism to refer to those of North African origin or ‘appearance’. In this atmosphere, the fact that the Portuguese community was roughly the same size as the Algerian community, or that almost half a million Harkis (Algerians who fought for France during the Algerian war) and many second-generation immigrants born in France had French nationality, did not disturb the general impression that ‘immigration’ was a question of what to do about ‘others’ from the Maghreb. Increasingly, this unholy alliance of euphemism, dubious statistics and cultural stereotyping was bracketed (in political and media discourse) with wider social and political questions, such as the problems of housing and employment in the suburbs of major cities, the crisis in universal values and the ‘integration’ of society, and the future of secular education (laïcité).
In other words, the contemporary politicization of immigration is symptomatic of wider crises affecting France in a post-colonial and postmodern era: migration from the poorer south and the post-Communist East to the richer Western democracies; the breakdown in processes of assimilation of diverse people through the major institutions of the state; the question of cultural difference in a society which has traditionally prided itself on uniformity and equality in the public sphere (la République une et indivisible); new forms of racism accompanying the fast-changing political and cultural landscape; the nature of national identity in what is, arguably, a post-national era.
Accompanying the debate on immigration has been a far-reaching reappraisal of French national history and the idea of the nation. For some, it has been an opportunity to view France’s past in terms of an historical cultural unity which is threatened by the cultural difference of today’s immigrants. For others, it has been a chance to reaffirm the importance of immigration (and hence diversity) in the development of the French nation, and to challenge the mythical cultural homogeneity of a ‘pure’ France. The historical question of whether the nation is a contractual association of individuals (irrespective of race, religion or origin), or a community of cultural or racial heritage, is at the heart of these debates. This was most evident at the time of the proposed changes to the Nationality Code by the Chirac administration in 1986–7. The plan to transform the acquisition of French nationality for second-generation children born in France from an automatic right to a voluntary request was shelved at the time, but became law under the Balladur government in 1993. Many saw this as a clear sign that France had abandoned its traditionally open model of the nation based on residence (known as the political model) in favour of the ‘German’ model based on blood (the ethnic or racial model). The debate on the Code of Nationality demonstrated to what extent ‘immigration’ raised fundamental questions about the history and institutional fabric of the French nation.
In recent times, immigration has been transformed from a minor non-political issue into a major issue encompassing diverse aspects of French society and history. At stake are fundamental questions concerning France’s present and future: Are equality and uniformity the only means by which social solidarity and cohesion can be preserved, or can an acceptance of difference and pluralism provide the answer? Or can France find a satisfactory middle path between the two?
MAX SlLVERMAN
See also: beurs; demographic developments; Désir, Harlem, and SOS Racisme; Islam; Judaism; parties and movements; postmodernism; racism/anti-semitism
Hargreaves, A.G. (1995) Immigration, ‘Race’ and Ethnicity in Contemporary France, London: Routledge (good overview of current debates and issues).
Ireland, P. (1994) The Policy Challenge of Ethnic Diversity: Immigrant Politics in France and Switzerland, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (analysis of immigrants’ political mobilization within the context of a national framework of a ‘host’ society ).
Silverman, M. (1992) Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France, London: Routledge (immigration treated as a symptom of wider crises in contemporary France).
Weil, P. (1991) La France et ses étrangers, Paris: Calmann-Lévy (detailed and comprehensive analysis of French immigration policy).
Musicians
An influential, highly instrumental rock group with a harsh, rhythmic, powerful sound, whose career in France took off in the 1980s. Internationally renowned, they export their product—polished, but with a hint of derision in their style—to the rest of Europe, Canada, the Far East and Latin America. Their tours include numbers from their last three albums: The Birthday Album (1991), Un jour dans notre vie (One Day in Our Life) from 1993 and Radio Indochine (1994).
GÉRALD POULET
See also: rock and pop; song/chanson
Newspaper
A new-style newspaper (created 10 January 1994), targeted at a young and busy citydwelling audience and published on weekdays only, InfoMatin survived longer than any other new national title since the advent of Liberation. A product of market research, it was a small-format news-sheet, weighing just 60 g, and was printed on good-quality paper. Colour on every page and extensive use of photographs emphasized the visual. Serious news coverage was provided in short, accessible articles, and practical advice offered on a wide range of topics. Initially enthusiastic reception soon subsided: André Rousselet came to the paper’s rescue in March 1995, but on 8 January 1996 InfoMatin was obliged to cease publication.
PAM MOORES
See also: national press in France
The term ‘informal economy’ refers to those activities which are productive of goods or services, but which are ignored by or hidden from the state for tax, social security and labour-law purposes, albeit legal in all other ways. Interest was kindled in the informal economy in France by the huge rises in unemployment which took place during the 1970s and 1980s.
Because the term ‘informal economy’ covers very diverse phenomena, it is necessary to distinguish between paid and unpaid informal economic activity. Paid informal work is often known as clandestine or ‘black market’ work. The term covers a range of activities from oneoff cash-in-hand jobs undertaken for friends or neighbours, to the exploitation of illegal immigrant workers in sweatshops. Unpaid informal work includes voluntary work, work done for family, friends or neighbours and the everyday unpaid domestic work carried out in the home often by women for their families.
It is obviously very difficult to discover the actual amount of informal economic activity taking place in an economy, but estimates are possible. In France, it has been suggested that the paid informal economic sector may be worth anything up to 10 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). This figure is higher than that for Britain and other northern European states, but lower than the figure for many southern European nations. Furthermore, national studies have revealed that the number of hours the French population spend engaged in unpaid informal work outstrips the amount of time spent on employment and professional activities. Moreover, monetary estimates of the value of unpaid informal work in France indicate that it is worth around 50–65 per cent of GDP.
In France, much interest has been shown in the informal economy, particularly in the early 1980s, before a universal welfare benefit was introduced for the long-term unemployed. Some were surprised that revolution had not broken out on the streets, given the rising numbers of long-term unemployed who had come to the end of their period of entitlement to statutory unemployment benefits (Rosanvallon 1980). The conclusion was therefore drawn that the unemployed, having the time and the incentive to do so, were busying themselves working in the informal economy. However, research found that this was not the case (Barthe 1985). It was discovered that, although the unemployed have the time and the incentive to carry out informal economic activity, various factors prohibit them from undertaking such work. Often the unemployed do not have the skills to work informally, nor can they afford to buy the equipment or raw materials necessary for such work. Equally, if there is no market for their labour in the formal sector, it is likely that there will not be a market in the informal sector either.
JAN WINDEBANK
See also: economy; employment
Barthe, M.-A. (1985) ‘Chômage, travail au noir et entraide familial’, Consommation 3 (article reporting a research project into the relationship between unemployment and the informal economy).
Rosanvallon, P. (1980) ‘Le Développement de l’économie souterraine et l’avenir des sociétés industrielles’, Le Débat 2 (theoretical article suggesting the unemployed are active in the paid informal economy).
Windebank, J. (1991) The Informal Economy in France, Aldershot: Avebury (a discussion of competing theoretical perspectives concerning the informal economy in France).
Conceived in the context of the oil crisis under the presidency of Giscard d’Estaing as part of a policy to improve relations with the Arab world, this became one of the Grands Projets built under François Mitterrand. The site and architect originally chosen were changed under the auspices of Jack Lang at the Ministry of Culture and his adviser Christian Dupavillon. The building, designed by Jean Nouvel and partners, was acclaimed as an architectural masterpiece. Inaugurated in 1987, its facilities include a museum, a library and exhibition space, but its record of activities has been generally disappointing, due to persistent conflicts between the founding partners.
SUSAN COLLARD
See also: architecture under Mitterrand
b. 1912, Slatina, Romania;
d. 1994, Paris
Playwright
One of the most internationally famous playwrights of twentieth-century French theatre, Ionesco began writing plays in the 1950s, which by the following decade had become associated with the so-called Theatre of the Absurd. Characterized by his rejection of traditional notions of form, structure, character and language, Ionesco’s works incarnate his philosophical ideas through employing both absurd and absurdist material and methods of structure and presentation. He defines the Absurd as ‘that which is devoid of purpose…Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless’ (Esslin 1980).
Born to a Romanian father and a French mother, Ionesco grew up in France until 1925, when he returned to Romania, teaching French in a Bucharest lycée and writing articles for publication. He returned to Paris in 1940, where he worked in publishing until 1949. At this time, he vowed that he detested the theatre, finding it both embarrassing and false as a medium. It was only after embarking on a series of English lessons that he found himself, almost against his will, writing his first play. Inspired by the nonsensical dialogue of his English primer, Ionesco produced The Bald Primadonna (La Cantatrice chauve), first staged by Nicolas Bataille in 1950. Billed as an ‘antiplay’, this marked his first challenge to the traditional, bourgeois theatre he detested. After acting for the first time for Bataille in his adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, he went on to write The Lesson (La Leçon), staged in 1951, which he dubbed a ‘farce tragique’, an extremely black comedy, using language as a symbol of power, with seemingly nonsensical communications between characters and grotesque political and power-related imagery. Jacques or Obedience (Jacques ou la Soumission) followed, re-employing the idea, emphasized through the language, of the individual forced into conformism, with strong sexual imagery to stress the slavery of sexual desire. Then followed The Chairs (Les Chaises), a set of cabaret-style sketches, and Victims of Duty (Victimes du Devoir), the latter arguing strongly against considered ideas of drama at the time, and moving away from the theme of language. In L’Improtnptu d’Alma in 1956 he argued once more against the dramatic dogmas of the day, this time attacking Brechtian drama. In The Killer (Tueur sans gages), staged in 1959, he developed the character of Bérenger, who was to reappear in several subsequent plays, notably Rhinocéros. He epitomized the struggling individual trying to challenge the absurdity of society, a theme which was to dominate much of Ionesco’s later work. Rhinocéros, staged by Barrault at the Théâtre de l’Odéon, in 1960, was perhaps his biggest success, attacking totalitarianism in all its forms and exploring the desire for conformism in human nature. By now, Ionesco was enjoying international success, ironically finding himself part of the regular repertoire of the theatre establishment which he had sought to subvert, and applauded for the way his work redefined the possiblities of theatre. His plays are still regularly performed worldwide.
ANNIE SPARKS
See also: theatre
Bradby, D. (1991) Modern French Drama 1940–1990, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (see Chapter 4 for a discussion of Ionesco).
Esslin, M. (1980) The Theatre of the Absurd, Harmondsworth: Penguin (a thorough analysis of plays and philosophy; see especially Chapter 3).
Lamont, R. (1995) Ionesco’s Political Imperative, Michigan: University of Michigan Press.
b. 1932, Belgium
Psychoanalyst and philosopher
Irigaray is a feminist working in the areas of psychoanalysis, philosophy and linguistics. Her work in general has been more warmly received in Italy, Canada, the United States and Britain than in France, although the importance of her studies in sociolinguistics is recognized in France far more than in anglophone circles.
Initially the aspects of Irigaray’s work which attracted widespread attention were her critiques of Freud and Lacan, and her poetic celebrations of the female body in This Sex Which is Not One (Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un). This skewed perspective on her oeuvre led to her being associated with women such as Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva as a ‘French feminist’ or advocate of écriture féminine. In the course of the 1970s and 1980s, these terms came to imply an emphasis on the joys of the female body, particularly in its reproductive capacity, which appeared biologically essentialist, heterosexist and Eurocentric to many other feminists—whether materialist or reformist. They also implied esoteric and thus elitist writing, which was difficult to penetrate, both because of its technicality (the range of psychoanalytical and philosophical reference) and because of its avant-gardist literary qualities. From the late 1980s onwards, a number of works have been published by Margaret Whitford and others which have addressed Irigaray’s work with the seriousness and attention to detail which it requires, helping to unpick these misconceptions or oversimplifications.
Unlike Cixous and Kristeva, Irigaray has fairly consistently presented herself as a feminist. The former have both trained as analysts of literature, have produced literary works themselves and, more unusually to an Anglo-Saxon feminist eye, have focused their celebratory analysis of linguistic transgressions and modernist or avant-garde literary practices (which Cixous has called écriture féminine) on male-authored texts (with one or two notable exceptions, such as the writings of the Brazilian modernist Clarice Lispector). Irigaray appears to have little interest in literature as such, although her amorous dialogues with philosophers such as Nietzsche—as in her Marine Lover (Amante marine)—have an undoubted poetical quality. Her mode of reading does not display Kate Millett’s hostility to male authors, but it combines amorous dialogue (approaching Cixous’s reading practice) with a feminist critique which would be more welcome to an Anglo-Saxon feminist audience than Cixous’s readings of Joyce. While, as a practising psychoanalyst, she is not as hostile to Freud as certain radical feminists, her approach is more openly feminist than that of Kristeva, who also practises psychoanalysis (see Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman).
Irigaray’s loving words about women’s sexual organs and possible relations between women still provoke charges of biologism, despite hopeful pronouncements by her admirers that the debate is dead. Clearly her words are designed to help make women feel more positive about what has been denigrated and degraded in our society. Irigaray is aware that for change to occur a transformation must take place on several levels; she does discuss economic, political and legislative issues. However, her expertise is in philosophy and psychoanalysis, and she has focused on questions of language. Crucially this is not a disembodied language—Irigaray has emphasized our need for a sensible transcendental which would overcome the deathly opposition between body (indeed, all matter) and mind or soul. That opposition, which privileges the mental and spiritual above mere matter, has not only had lethal effects in the biosphere, Irigaray tells us, but is also a question of sex, of downgrading the maternal body in favour of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Women will only be able to exist as women (as opposed to the opposites of men, the mothers, virgins and whores assigned value in the masculine economy) when they have a place in the Symbolic and Imaginary Orders—when they have their own spiritual and aesthetic place, but also when the spiritual and cultural ceases to be cut off from the (maternal) body.
Irigaray publishes on a range of topics using a range of styles. The articles in Je, tu, nous, covering the role of the placenta, sexual practices in the time of AIDS, women and employment, are accessible to a wide audience. Other texts, such as Elemental Passions (Passions élémentaires), invite the reader to read them over and over again, playing with the dense, polysemic and elliptical pronouncements. Others again, such as her collaborative work on sociolinguistics (see Sexes et genres), address an audience of specialists, and use technical language and scholarly style. Irigaray’s work can be conceptually divided into three strands:
The first strand has proved most generally palatable, although some feminists find aspects of this work both elitist and too kind to the great misogynists of the past. The second strand has sometimes been found comically detailed by more ‘sophisticated’ readers. The third strand inevitably provokes questions like ‘how’ and ‘when’. The best answer utopian feminists can suggest is the transformative effect of reading utopian writing—at least as likely as the transformative effect of reading Mallarmé.
JUDITH STILL
See also: feminist thought
Irigaray, L. (1974) Speculum de l’autre femme, Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Translated G.Gill (1985) Speculum of the Other Woman, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
——(1977) Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un, Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Translated C.Porter with C.Burke (1985) This Sex Which is Not One, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
——(1980) Amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche, Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Translated G.Gill (1991) Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, New York: Columbia University Press.
——(1982) Passions élémentaires, Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Translated J.Collie and J.Still (1992) Elemental Passions, London: Athlone Press.
——(1990a) Je, tu, nous pour une culture de la difference, Paris: Grasset. Translated A. Martin (1993) Je, Tu, Nous: Towards a Culture of Difference, New York: Routledge.
—(ed.) (1990b) Sexes et genres à travers les langues: éléments de communication sexuée, Paris: Grasset.
Burke, C., Schor, N. and Whitford, M. (eds) (1994) Engaging with Irigaray, New York: Columbia University Press.
Chanter, T. (1995) Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers, New York and London: Routledge (philosophical analysis).
Fuss, D. (1990) Essentially Speaking, London: Routledge (an interesting intervention into the essentialism debate although the opposition set up between Irigaray and Monique Wittig is somewhat schematic).
Grosz, E. (1989) Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists, Sydney: Allen and Unwin (an important survey).
Whitford, M. (1991), Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, London: Routledge (essential reading for anyone who wishes to take Irigaray seriously).
——(ed.) (1991) The Irigaray Reader, Oxford: Basil Blackwell (a clear, accessible introduction to Irigaray’s work).
Islam is often confused with islamisme. The former refers to the religion and cultural practices of Muslims; the latter to a political project associated especially with fundamentalist movements in Iran, Algeria, Egypt and elsewhere. The conflation of these two terms, coupled with the negative historical image of the barbarous Islamic hordes of the Crusades, has led to the popular image of Islam as a threat to the secular and ‘modern’ foundations of the Republican nation-state. Yet new constructions of Islam in France have challenged this image and, in the process, have reformulated both Islam and Frenchness.
Negative images of Islam in France have been fuelled not only by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism elsewhere in the world but by a number of other contributory factors. Amongst these we should mention the Algerian war and the debate around immigration. The bitter war fought between 1954 and 1962, which ultimately led to Algerian independence, has left deep scars in the French ‘psyche’. The uncertain position of about half a million ‘French Muslims’, or Harkis, in France (those who fought for the French during the war of independence and had to be repatriated to France in 1962 for their own safety) is testimony to the profound ambivalence in France towards Algerian Muslims.
The politicization of immigration over the last twenty-five years has had the effect of extending this ambivalence to all North Africans (Maghrébins) in France. The new discourse of the cultural difference of North Africans in France (frequently based on the criterion of religious difference) is a powerful weapon for those who argue for the incompatibility of French and Muslim identities. Following what is perceived as a crisis in integration of many from immigrant families, Islam has become associated with the ‘problems of the suburbs’, disaffected and delinquent ‘second-generation’ youth, and uncivilized foreign practices (like ritual slaughter).
Underlying the notion of a dichotomy between Frenchness and Islam is the powerful French tradition of laïcité (secularism). With its roots in Republican universalism and Jacobin anti-clericalism, this tradition is central to the profound belief that the modern nation depends on the division between public (political) and private (religious/cultural) spheres. Islam, which does not recognize this division, is therefore interpreted by many as incompatible with the modern French nation. However, in today’s post-colonial, postmodern and pluralist climate, not only does this doctrinaire version of laïcité appear more and more like an intolerant fundamentalism itself, but the separation of the public and private spheres (and hence political and sociocultural questions) is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. A number of commentators have suggested that the principles of laïcité need to be rethought in order to bring it into line with the contemporary national and international landscape, and to guarantee the possibility of a French Islam.
Many of the issues mentioned above were raised during the famous ‘headscarf affair’ of 1989, in which three Muslim girls were excluded from their school in Creil near Paris for wearing their Islamic headscarves, hence breaching the code of laïcité in state education. Although the event was often presented in the media as a struggle between the fundamentalist obscurantism of a foreign-based Islam and the modern, secular and enlightened French nation-state, the issues were far more complex (see Gaspard and Khosrow-Khavar 1995).
Unlike Christianity and Judaism, which (in their different ways and over the years) have reached compromises with the Republican secular tradition and have an institutional presence recognized by the state, Islam has never been granted the same opportunity to find a similar space of its own. Hence, the common perception that Islam functions as a fifth column in France, manipulated by foreign regimes and outside influences (for example, the grand mosque in Paris is under Algerian control), is largely due to the inability of the French state to establish the ground rules for a French Islam.
However, just as Jews are not simply the product of anti-semitism, so too Muslims are not simply the product of anti-Muslim racism. Today, more than ever, Islam in France is far from an unproblematic faith, reducible to extremist fundamentalist politics or the product of negative images. Kepel (1987) and Étienne (1989) have revealed the diversity of practices which go under the name of Islam, and the heterogeneous nature of the so-called ‘Muslim community’. Less than 5 per cent of the 2.5–3 million Muslims in France actually pray in a mosque or other place of worship, and most of them are of the older generation. For many young Muslims (for the most part born in France with French nationality, or eventually to acquire it at the age of 18), Islam has been either rejected or reinterpreted in a variety of ways. A number of young people have used Islam strategically, for the purposes of socialization and identity construction. For most, a Muslim heritage today is only one part of the wider process of socialization and identification; in conjunction with other forms of cultural and social identification, Islam contributes towards a hybrid sense of identity which challenges all-embracing religious/cultural stereotypes.
The so-called ‘second’ or beur generation has not only participated in political struggles to redefine rights and identities (for example, through anti-racist organizations like SOS Racisme and France Plus, and movements for new citizenship), but has also produced a vibrant cultural output, frequently born from the clash or mixing of traditions and identifications. In literature (Hargreaves 1991), music, theatre and the other arts, the new voices in the 1980s and 1990s of the beur generation have presented a challenge to the frequently ethnocentric nature of French cultural production and cultural theory, and rendered problematic some of the unquestioned assumptions underlying concepts of the French nation and national identity. The writers Mehdi Charef and Azouz Begag, the pop group Carte de séjour and the popular music known as raï have all, in their different ways, refashioned the terms ‘Muslim’ and ‘France’ to counter the notion of their mutual incompatibility.
Institutional rigidity and negative historical images are therefore being challenged by two processes: the breakdown of the divisions between the political and the sociocultural spheres, and the everyday construction by young French Muslims and cultural practitioners of a hybridized form of identification. Pluralism from above and below might yet lead to the erosion of monolithic stereotypes of Frenchness and Islam.
MAX SlLVERMAN
See also: beurs; Désir, Harlem, and SOS Racisme; education, the state and the church; postmodernism; racism/anti-semitism
Cesari, J. (1994) Être musulman en France: associations, militants et mosquées, Paris: Karthala/IREMAM (comprehensive overview of Muslims in France).
Étienne, B. (1989) La France et l’Islam, Paris: Hachette (historical account).
Gaspard, F. and Khosrow-Khavar, F. (1995) Le Foulard et la République, Paris: Éditions du Seuil (account of the ‘Creil affair’).
Hargreaves, A.G. (1991) Voices from the North African Immigrant Community in France: Immigration and Identity in Beur Fiction, Oxford: Berg (discussion of beur writing).
Kepel, G. (1987) Les Banlieues de l’Islam: naissance d’une religion en France, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.