b. 1912, Cairo, Egypt;
d. 1991, Paris
Poet
Edmond Jabès is the outstanding self-consciously Jewish poet writing in French during the second half of the twentieth century. Born in a French-speaking community, he began writing poetry in 1943, having cultivated friendships with Max Jacob and Gabriel Bounoure. After the Suez crisis he left Egypt to settle in Paris and pursued his activity as a writer with renewed vigour. Deeply marked by the trauma of the Holocaust, Jabès tried in his writings to come to terms with the silence and absence of the Hebrew God during the years of persecution and extermination. After an initial collection of poems published in 1959, Je bâtis ma demeure (I Build My Dwelling), he developed a poetic style comprising lyrical expression, narrative, meditation, journal entries and aphorisms. The first cycle of six books (1963–5) is called The Book of Questions/The Book of Yukel/Return to the Book (Le Livre des questions/Le Livre de Yukel/Le Retour au livre), followed by the anagrammatic series Yaël/Elya/Aély (1967–72) and closed off by a seventh volume entitled El, ou le dernier livre (El, or the Last Book) (1973). ‘Livre’ occurs consistently in these, as well as in Jabès’s later works, such as the three volumes of 1976–80, The Book of the Resemblances (Le Livre des ressemblances); its specific significance lies in the fact that Jabès thinks of the persistence of Judaism as being informed and confirmed by ‘the Book’. Thus, for him the act of writing has become in certain ways the most authentic Jewish (and also human) act in the time of God’s eclipse: how to speak the unutterable.
WALTER A.STRAUSS
See also: poetry
b. 1896, Moscow, Russia;
d. 1982, Boston, USA
Linguist
Jakobson worked successively with the Moscow, Prague and Copenhagen linguistic circles before settling in the United States, and published highly influential essays in a variety of fields: phonology, language acquisition, general linguistics and poetics. His model of the six functions of communication, and his binary analysis of the metaphoric and metonymic poles, have been widely quoted in France, particularly in connection with structuralism.
BÉATRICE DAMAMME-GILBERT
See also: Lévi-Strauss, Claude; linguistic/ discourse theory.
Jefferson, A. and Robey, D. (eds) (1986) Modern Literary Theory, London: B.T. Batsford (has several clear sections on Jakobson’s poetics and a bibliography).
b. 1948, Lyon
Composer and musician
Jean-Michel Jarre is France’s most famous and commercially successful popular composer and musician of the modern era. His unprecedented success—based on technical and technological innovations with synthesizers, such as his semicircular ‘Magic Keyboard’ and his famous Laser Harp—has guaranteed him huge audiences worldwide: for example, 1 million spectators for his Bastille Day concert in the Place de la Concorde in 1979, 150,000 spectators at five concerts in Peking and Shanghai in 1982 (with 30 million watching on television and 500 million listening on radio), and 1.3 million people at his free concert in Houston in 1986 (a feat which won him his second entry in the Guinness Book of Records). Worldwide record, tape, CD and video sales are now almost impossible to calculate, but record sales alone were of the order of 32 million by 1986.
Jarre’s family contained a number of musicians and it was therefore not surprising that he began to learn the piano at the age of 5. While he was still at the Lycée Michelet, he took lessons in harmony, counterpoint and fugue with Jeannine Rueff of the Paris Conservatory. He also learned to play the electric guitar before gaining his degree and joining the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (Musical Research Group) in 1968. The direction his career was to take was now clear: seeking to create something other than conventional or classical music, he experimented with a new acoustic world that went beyond traditional scales and musical notation. The initial result was The Cage (1970), a piece of pure electronic music, followed in 1971 by the audacious but eminently successful introduction of his avant-garde music to the Paris Opera with AOR. The experimental Deserted Palace followed in 1972.
Jarre now diversified his activities by writing music for films, television, advertisements and other performers, not to mention compositions for ballet and the theatre. His first recording intended for release, the revolutionary Oxygène, dates from 1976 and became the best-selling French record of all time, topping the charts worldwide. This instant success brought with it prestigious accolades at home and abroad (the Grand Prix de l’Académie Charles Cros in France, and ‘personality of the year’ awarded by People magazine in the USA), while his achievements were recognized by the world’s press (‘Jean-Michel Jarre Oxygenius’, proclaimed Interview; ‘A French revolution to rock the world’ announced the Daily Mirror). The world of popular music had been introduced to new sounds—electronic in origin but vibrant with emotion and rich in their powers of suggestion.
Jarre’s second album, Equinoxe (1978), confirmed his international status and encouraged him to break new ground in the realm of live performance. The result was the spectacular and highly innovative Bastille Day concert of 1979 which, in addition to attracting the (then) record-breaking number of spectators, was seen by a television audience of some 100 million. On a personal level, this live concert allowed Jarre to realize one of his ambitions: the re-establishment of the free, ‘open-house’ musical festival. On a commercial level, it also led to the production of France’s first ‘fulllength’ video featuring a popular concert (though the duration—forty minutes—may seem short by current standards). Further successes have followed, such as Magnetic Fields, Zoolooks, Rendez-Vous, Waiting for Cousteau, and Jarre made a huge impact on the United Kingdom with his much-acclaimed Docklands Concerts (1988). Jarre continues to produce innovative, emotionally charged music of the highest quality and to perform in multimedia concerts which exploit every form of entertainment technology.
IAN PICKUP
See also: concert music
Jean-Michel Jarre Songbook (1989), Paris: Francis Dreyfus Music (Distribution ID Music) (contains English and French texts which look at Jarre’s career in addition to the music of some of his compositions).
France is considered to be a special place for jazz, because of its extraordinary development there as the most popular form of ‘scholarly’ music since the 1950s. At the end of World War II, American troops entered France and in their wake came the jazzmen.
Before the war, jazz was already known in France. It had inspired some authentic jazzmen, like the orchestras of Jacques Hélian and Ray Ventura, and Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli formed the Quintette du Hot Club de France. This was the beginning of a French tradition of string jazz which is still very much alive. Jazz had also inspired the critical and sometimes controversial writings of Hugues Panassié—for example, his critical 1946 survey, Douze années de Jazz (Twelve Years of Jazz) and the influential review Jazz hot started in 1935 by Charles Delaunay. At the end of the 1940s, Panassié and Delaunay found themselves on opposite sides: the former defended pure jazz, the latter was open to new trends (such as swing and bebop). In Paris, it was the golden age of St-Germain des Prés, with Boris Vian the soul and mentor of the new musical wave. He reigned at the Tabou and other caves of the Latin Quarter, where the cellars of some cafés were transformed into temples of jazz. He regularly wrote his Chroniques de jazz, in Jazz hot among others, until his premature death. Jazz, for him, was a way of life.
Besides the richness of French critical discourse in the 1960s and 1970s, jazz in France did not exist only in books. French musicians were particularly fertile in adopting this idiom and transforming it beyond its conventional borders. At the beginning, the controversy about the orthodoxy of New Orleans sound, compared to the new bebop closer to Charles Delaunay’s and Boris Vian’s hearts, was only concerned with conforming to the American model. A considerable number of American jazzmen went on tour in France. Some liked it so much they stayed—Sydney Bechet, for example. But if imitation for some was enough to express their musical talents, others, such as the pianist Bernard Peiffer and the saxophonist Jean Claude Fohrenbach, explored original paths. André Hodeir was to see his own original compositions triumph abroad.
The end of the 1960s coincided with a new page in the history of jazz worldwide in general, and France in particular. The younger generation rejected the old purists; even the beboppers were in decline. Miles Davis and free jazz were the new models. Jam sessions were everywhere and some talented bands systematically explored improvisation, such as the Workshop de Lyon. In the absence of structured codes, and with the generalization of a variety of practices, the improvisations took a new turn. When they met, artists listened to each other, rather than initiating collective improvisation. Often this came through drama or scenic endeavours, for example, La Compagnie Lubat.
The pendulum swung the other way at the end of the 1970s, with a neoclassical revival. Some very talented musicians, still organically linked with the tradition of free jazz, expressed their private world through more independent avenues. As a jazz intrument the violin was transformed, like the guitar, by becoming electric; and there was a whole new generation of jazz violinists whose talents would blossom in the 1980s (Dominique Pifarély, Pierre Blanchard). The strings would swing again (D. Levallet’s Swing Strings System). The Hammond organ and the accordion were brilliantly used and the best example of the creative virtue of mixing free improvisation with the rigorous code of old could be found with the associations of Henri Texier (doublebass) and François Jeanneau (saxophone). This was the period of a more intimist form of neoclassical jazz performance in duos and trios, without the drum kit because of the illegal level of decibels at night in urban areas.
In the 1980s the jazz scene saw the revival of big bands, with a prolific number of new talents in this area. This phenomenon culminated in 1986 with the creation of the National Jazz Orchestra (ONJ), proving that since 1981 the cultural administration has been taking music in general, and jazz in particular, very seriously by providing generous subsidies for its development. It also provided the right context for an extraordinary increase in the number of music schools teaching jazz, as well as for a singular development of associations whose main objective was the creation and diffusion of jazz music. Another sign of this revolution was the creation (in 1992) of a substantial jazz department within the respected and scholarly Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Paris. The growth of the number of jazz musicians living or expecting to live off their trade in France is significant too—currently estimated at about 3,000. Unsuprisingly, half of them live in Paris, a centre of excellence, with a friendly rivalry between home-grown talents and jazz performers from America, Europe and Africa. It is happening within a fragile commercial world. Jazz counts for 3 per cent of record sales, of which 75 per cent are reissues—a stifling situation for creative artists who can only rely on a few independent producers to express their talents, within a market dominated by a handful of multinational concerns. The growth in the number of festivals is also significant—from 5 in 1975 (e.g. Juan-les-Pins), to 180 musical events exclusively concerned with jazz in Paris and in all regions (e.g. Provence-Côte d’Azur). All this points to the extrordinary vitality of jazz in the 1990s.
GÉRARD POULET
See also: cultural topography (Paris); music venues; regional music
Anquetil, P. (1995) ‘Géographie du jazz en France aujourd’hui’, Les Cahiers du jazz 6 (an analytical and critical survey of the jazz scene in Paris and the regions).
Bergerot, F. and Merlin, A. (1991) L’Épopée du jazz 2: au delà du bop, Paris: Découvertes Gallimard (a remarkably wellillustrated and informative study of postwar jazz in general, with a relevant chapter on jazz in France).
b. 1947, Drancy
Singer-songwriter
This former member of the group King Set initially wrote songs for others (including Alain Souchon) before becoming a most successful solo performer whose hits include Jean-Claude Vannier’s Super nana (Fantastic Chick) and his own J’veux pas qu’tu t’en allies (I Don’t Want You to Go Away). The anguish which his songs often express (and the influence of blues is most pronounced) is sometimes tinged with humour—a combination of mood also characteristic of Souchon’s work.
IAN PICKUP
See also: song/chanson
b. 1937, Meudon
Politician
A civil servant at Foreign Affairs and then a university teacher, Jospin joined the Parti Socialiste (PS) in 1971. A protégé of Mitterrand in the 1970s, he was First Secretary of the PS between 1981 and 1988. Elected to the National Assembly in 1981, 1986 and 1988, and to the European Parliament in 1984, he was Minister of Education from 1988 to 1992. In the absence of other credible Socialist candidates, he emerged from the background to represent the PS in the 1995 presidential election and turned a predicted electoral débâcle into an honourable defeat (47.37 per cent of second-ballot votes). His conviction and promise of an honest, ‘citizen’s’ (implicitly post-Mitterrand) approach to government contributed to his victory at the head of a Socialist-Communistgreen coalition, which took him to the premiership following the 1997 elections.
LAURENCE BELL
See also: parties and movements
Jospin, L. (1991) L’Invention du possible, Paris: Flammarion (his vision of Socialism and interpretation of the Socialists’ experience in power).
——(1995) 1995:2000 propositions pour la France, Paris: Stock (Jospin’s 1995 campaign platform).
b. 1888, Guéret;
d. 1979, Rueil-Malmaison
Novelist, essayist and memorialist, real name Marcel Provence
Jouhandeau was a prolific, gay Catholic writer tortured by what Claude Mauriac termed a ‘mystique de l’enfer’. In works such as Chroniques maritales (Chronicles of a Marriage), which features his alter ego Monsieur Godeau, Chronique d’une passion (Chronicle of a Passion), L’École des garçons (The School for Boys) and Du pur amour (On Pure Love), Jouhandeau examines the moral crisis created by having simultaneously a wife, a male lover and personal, spiritual needs. Accused of compromising himself with the Nazis during the war, and much criticized for his often overbearing candour and egotism— as evidenced in his twenty-seven-volume collection of autobiographical chronicles-cum-reflections, Journaliers (1961– 1981)—Jouhandeau only achieved popular success with his early novels depicting the inhabitants of ‘Chaminadour’, an area drawn from his native town of Guéret. However, with the recent republication of ‘secret’ texts like Traité de l’abjection (Treatise on Abjection) and Tirésias (both eulogies of anal sex) he can now be better appreciated for exploring, with vivid and compassionate intensity, both the physical and the spiritual dimensions of male gay experience.
JAMES WILLIAMS
See also: Catholicism and Protestantism; gay writing; Vichy
b. 1944, St-Loup
Director and writer
Co-founder of the Théâtre de l’Espérance in 1968, Jourdheuil is noted for his Brechtian approach, written collaborations with Bernard Chartreux in the 1970s, and the discovery and translation of writer Heiner Müller. In the 1980s he co-wrote many autobiographical spectacles with Peyret, and is now professor at the University of Paris-X (Nanterre).
ANNIE SPARKS
See also: theatre
Jourdheuil, J. (1976) L’Artiste, la politique, la production, Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions (writings on theatre).
b. 1887, Arras;
d. 1976, Paris
Poet, novelist, translator and critic
Jouve’s early formation was marked by Romain Rolland and the short-lived Unanimist movement. The next important event was his religious crisis in 1924, which caused him to renounce his early works and enter a new phase of poetic activity (plus the composition of five novels) in which spiritual and erotic sensibility predominates (the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis is also significant). His work during and after World War II continues along that same vein—La Vierge de Paris (The Virgin of Paris) of 1946, Hymne (Hymn) from 1947 and Diadème (Diadem) in 1949. The later poems, Ode and Langue (Language), from 1950 and 1954 respectively, make use of the verset (versicle) introduced into French poetry by Claudel and Saint-John Perse. A strong theme in Jouve’s poetry is the spiritual anguish caused by the sense of nothingness (frequent reference to ‘Nada’). Somewhat in contrast with most French poets, whose strongest affinities are with the plastic arts, Jouve maintained a lively attachment to music, publishing important lengthy essays on Mozart’s Don Giovanni in 1942 and on Berg’s Wozzeck in 1953. There is also a journal, En miroir (In the Looking Glass), published in 1954, and translations from Hölderlin, Shakespeare and St Theresa of Avila. The complete poems are published by Mercure de France (Poésies) in four volumes (1964–7).
WALTER A.STRAUSS
See also: poetry
Judaism (judaïsme) and Jewishness (judéité) are treated together here, although strictly speaking the first refers to the religion of Jews, while the second embraces the wider and less stable category of Jewish identity. Today, both are subject to a number of different influences: traditional links between French Jewry and the ideas of French Republicanism; the fate of Jews in France under German Occupation and the Vichy regime during World War II, and the continuing repercussions of these events after the war; the centrality of the Holocaust; traditional and contemporary forms of antisemitism; the history and destiny of Israel; the rise of ethnic particularisms and the reappraisal of monolithic concepts of identity.
Historically, the fate of Jews in France has been closely bound up with Republican ideals. The emancipation of the Jews in 1791 became symbolic of the power of the revolutionary ideal to free individuals from their particular ‘parochial’ backgrounds and bring them into the realm of ‘light’ as free and equal citizens. Jews, therefore, came to be associated, like no other group, with the revolutionary Republican and Enlightenment project of assimilation. This was a contract that both sides, Jews and Republicans, entered willingly in the name of freedom and equality. Hence, the Dreyfusards, in championing the falsely accused Jewish army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, at the end of the nineteenth century, were inspired more by pro-Republican than by philosemitic sentiment, and used Dreyfus as a symbol of the universalist and assimilationist Republican message. Jews themselves were far more comfortable fighting for universal human rights than in the name of ethnic difference. Until fairly recently, French Jewry has, in general, been a fervent supporter of the Republican message, which has meant repressing signs of difference in the public sphere (the neutral, egalitarian space of citizenship) and maintaining religious and cultural practices only discreetly in the private sphere.
However, a number of factors have brought about a reappraisal of the position of Judaism and concepts of Jewishness, three of which are considered here. First, the contemporary crisis in Republican institutions and ideals, the breakdown in traditional forms of political mobilization, and the re-emergence of ethnic identities, has led to new forms of Jewish selfperception and new directions for political action. Less and less reticent about expressing their difference, Jews are now just as likely to fight anti-semitism on ethnic lines (that is, as Jews) as on the traditional Republican lines of the Rights of Man (that is, as human beings). The robust challenge to revisionist histories of the war and to the latent (and often overt) antisemitism of the Front National demonstrates a greater willingness, especially among the generation of Jews born after the war, to reaffirm the Jewish presence in French history and in contemporary France. Hence, the infamous statement by Jean-Marie Le Pen that the Holocaust represented only a ‘detail’ in the history of the war and the desecration of Jewish graves in Carpentras in 1990 were both met by highprofile campaigns to mobilize popular support behind opposition to anti-semitism.
Second, the betrayal of the Republican contract by the Vichy regime and the continuing refusal (until relatively recently) of political leaders to acknowledge the complicity between France and the Holocaust have contributed to a loss of faith in the universalist egalitarianism of Republicanism, and the desire to be more assertive in protecting Jewish interests. The issue of war crimes in the 1980s and 1990s is, in part, a reflection of this desire: the pursuit (by the lawyer Serge Klarsfeld and others) of the Nazi Klaus Barbie and the French collaborators Paul Touvier, René Bousquet and Maurice Papon not only sought to bring to justice those who had committed crimes against humanity, but also aimed to challenge established myths about French protection of Jews during the war.
Third, the Holocaust itself has become, for many, the major determinant of Jewish identity and has therefore replaced the connections between Jews and the Enlightenment tradition of modernity as the central definer of Jewish history in France. Much cultural output by Jews since the war (notably that of Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès, Claude Lanzmann, Emmanuel Lévinas, Patrick Modiano and Elie Wiesel) has inevitably dealt with questions of survival and loss, memory, history, identity and representation deriving from the experience of the Holocaust.
For a number of French writers and philosophers (Maurice Blanchot, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard) Jewish experience of the Holocaust has been developed into a generalized critique of the project of modernity. The term ‘Jew’, inextricably linked to Auschwitz, is employed allegorically to signify the failure of the modern project of assimilation or eradication of the other, and the postmodern impossibility of the representation of truth, presence and reality. ‘Jew’ is therefore an affirmation of all that was stigmatized in the age of modernity, including otherness, difference and a non-essentialist concept of unrooted and diasporic identity. Here the specificity of real Jews, Jewish history and identity is replaced by the term ‘Jew’ as a sign of ‘otherness’ and postmodern flux.
Hence, Judaism and Jewishness in France today must be seen in the context of both wider historical processes and contemporary developments. In today’s climate of a crisis of assimilation and a decline in universal values, Judaism and Jewishness are more overtly particularistic, fighting their corner to reaffirm their past and present existence. Like other ethnicized groups today, Jews are caught between two extremes: on the one hand, fixed and monolithic versions of difference and history; and on the other, more flexible and pluralistic notions of difference and history in which Jewishness is not only itself seen as problematic (for example, the distinction within the Jewish community between Sephardi and Ashkenazi traditions), but constitutes only one aspect of a multilayered identity. Although poles apart in terms of identity-formation, both these positions have at least one thing in common: the view that Jews are not simply determined from the outside (through the look of the non-Jew or the anti-semite, as Jean-Paul Sartre famously argued in 1946 in Anti-Semite and Jew (Réflexions sur la question juive), but play an active role in the construction and perpetuation of their own difference.
MAX SlLVERMAN
See also: racism/anti-semitism
Birnbaum, P. (1992) Anti-Semitism in France: A Political History from Léon Blum to the Present, Oxford: Blackwell (a translation from the French of Birnbaum’s comprehensive treatment of the subject).
Hayoun, M.-R. (1991) Le Judaïsme moderne, Paris: PUF, ‘Que sais-je?’ (general introduction to modern Judaism).
Lyotard, J.-F. (1988) Heidegger et ‘les juifs’, Paris: Galilée (postmodern philosophical use of the term ‘Jew’ to signify otherness).
b. 1945, Mont-de-Marsan, Landes
Politician
One of a generation of technocrats whose political career was tied to that of Chirac from the late 1970s, Juppé was deputy mayor of Paris (1983–95), Minister for the Budget and government spokesman (1986–8), and General Secretary of the neo-Gaullist RPR (1988–95). As Minister for Foreign Affairs in the 1993–5 Balladur government, his competence was generally appreciated. Elected mayor of Bordeaux and appointed as prime minister by Chirac in 1995, he soon faced protracted strike movements and became deeply unpopular, owing to the apparent readiness of his government to sacrifice employment, welfare provision and public spending to the exigencies of preparing France for a single European currency. He was widely (but somewhat unjustly) blamed for the Right’s resounding defeat in 1997, following President Chirac’s ill-advised calling of early elections.
LAURENCE BELL
See also: European economic integration; parties and movements