M

M6

Television channel

This private television company, funded from advertising revenue, came into existence in 1987. Its predecessor, TV6, had been established as a dedicated music channel by the Socialist government one year earlier. M6 provides a general entertainment service with an emphasis on comedy, feature films and television series, much of it imported from the United States. Its principal shareholders are the Groupe Lyonnaise des Eaux and the Luxembourg media company, the Compagnie Luxembourgeoise de Télédiffusion. The channel diversified into programme production and other media-related activities in the early 1990s.

RAYMOND KUHN

See also: television

Madelin, Alain

b. 1948, Paris

Politician

Madelin is France’s most avowedly ‘Thatcherite’ political figure, with the possible exception of Jean-Marie Le Pen. A Fascist militant in his Paris student days (his longtime political rival François Léotard claims to have had his first encounter with him on the wrong end of an iron bar), he soon mellowed into a political career on the right wing of the Parti Républicain that reached its apogee when Chirac, as a reward for Madelin’s perhaps unexpected support in the 1995 presidential elections, appointed him Finance Minister. Madelin resigned after only a few months in the post, the better to concentrate on his ultimately unsuccessful attempt to win the leadership of the Parti Républicain. His privatizing fervour has also manifested itself in his writings, including Chers Compatriotes (My Fellow French) of 1994 and Quand les autruches relèveront la tête (When the Ostriches Look up) of 1995.

KEITH READER

See also: parties and movements

Maeght Foundation

The first private museum of modern art in France, and the first building designed expressly for the exhibition of modern art, the Maeght Foundation was opened on 28 July 1964 by André Malraux, then Minister for Cultural Affairs. Situated in the hilltop town of St-Paul de Vence, Alpes-Maritimes, it attracts over a quarter of a million visitors each year: its permanent collection comprises over 6,000 works, and it stages frequent temporary exhibitions.

The foundation was established by Aimé Maeght (1906–81), lithographer, gallery owner, art publisher, dealer and collector, and his wife Marguerite. Both were lovers of contemporary art, and formed friendships with many celebrated artists including Georges Braque (who designed the chapel’s stainedglass windows), Marc Chagall, Alberto Giacometti, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse and Joan Miró; many works by these artists belong to the permanent collection. The main building, designed by the Catalan architect Josep Lluis Sert, houses the majority of the exhibits, while many sculptures are situated in the surrounding garden.

COLVILLE WEMYSS

See also: painting

maisons de la culture

A network of multidisciplinary regional arts centres in major cities, initiated in the 1960s by André Malraux to decentralize and democratize Parisian high culture. Underfunded, and considered either too subversive or too bourgeois, the network never matched initial ambitions and failed to alter the sociological composition of audiences. From 1969, government priorities shifted and financial problems ensued. In 1990, the surviving establishments were renamed scenes nationales (national stages), specializing in performing arts.

DAVID LOOSELEY

See also: cultural policy; theatre

Malle, Louis

b. 1932, Thumeries/Lille;

d. 1995, Los Angeles, USA

Director

A film-maker for the most part disregarded by critics in his own country (until a belated César awarded in the year of his death), Malle is one of the rare French directors to make a successful career in the USA, where his fine analysis of human beings has won him international acclaim (e.g. Atlantic City, USA in 1980). His ability to work with actors is a hallmark of his work, as is his careful mise-enscène. Malle’s work is at the vanguard of a moral cinema treating difficult subjects before their time; for example, issues surrounding sexuality (incest, infidelity, child pornography) and political taboos such as the Occupation (in Lacombe Lucien of 1973 and Au Revoir les enfants of 1987) and the Algerian war.

KEITH READER

See also: cinema

Malraux, André

b. 1901, Paris;

d. 1976, Créteil

Writer and politician

Malraux was already an established novelist and intellectual when his encounter with de Gaulle in 1945 took him into politics. Appointed Minister of Cultural Affairs in 1959, he is chiefly remembered for cleaning Parisian buildings, the Malraux act, and the maisons de la culture. Contested during May 1968, he resigned in June 1969.

DAVID LOOSELEY

Malraux act

This law, passed in 1962 and named after André Malraux (then Minister of Cultural Affairs), legislated for the protection, development and restructuring of historically significant urban areas (secteurs sauvegardés), in the face of modern urban expansion. The act influenced conservation strategies adopted by other European governments of the 1960s, notably that of the UK.

ALEX HUGHES

Man Ray

b. 1890, Philadelphia, USA;

d. 1976, Paris

Photographer and artist

Trained as a painter, Man Ray discovered the work of Duchamp and Picabia at the 1913 Armory Show. The following year he began taking photographs, originally to reproduce his paintings. He went to Paris in 1921 and was part of the Dadaist and then Surrealist movements, whose members he famously photographed. His work includes such celebrated photographic images as Ingres’s Violin (Le Violon d’Ingres) of 1924 and Tears (Larmes) from 1930. He spent 1940 to 1951 in the United States, where he had several one-man shows, painted a great deal and, again, photographed many of the great writers and painters of the period. He was the inventor of several photographic techniques, particularly using light effects such as solarizations and ‘rayographs’, a personal variant of the photogram.

DEBRA KELLY

See also: photography

Major works

Man Ray (1963) Self Portrait, London: André Deutsch (an autobiography in which he also explains his techniques).

management style

The management style of the French has often been criticized for being overly authoritarian and distant. Indeed, the traditional French approach to management is seen as partly to blame for the confrontational nature of industrial relations in France. In order to understand how this management style developed, it is necessary to trace the history of the French management class, les cadres.

Small family-run firms continued to dominate the economy in France until much later than in its main competitor countries, and this had a significant influence on French management style. In such companies, the owner, or patron, retained much everyday control of the labour force and the production process. In other words, there was no distinction to be made between the owners of these businesses and their managers. Unsurprisingly, these petits patrons were often authoritarian and paternalistic in their dealings with their workforce.

It was only in the larger companies in the 1930s that a new class grew up in French industry situated between the patronat on the one hand, and the workers on the other. This new class was that of the cadres. This category of employee normally constituted the engineers who took control of production processes, which were becoming ever more complicated and impossible for one person (or a small team of family members) to oversee. However, the development of the cadre did nothing to change the authoritarian and distant management style set in place by the patronat. Although the cadre class expanded to cover areas which did not necessarily demand a technical knowledge, because of its roots in engineering, cadres continued to be recruited from the prestigious engineering grandes écoles. This meant that French cadres were, and still often are today, individuals who have come straight in to their positions from higher education, rather than having served any kind of shopfloor apprenticeship, and whose training is of a type which prizes abstract thinking and logic over interpersonal skills or creativity.

However, more recently, and with the influence of American and latterly Japanese work practices, the French have become aware of the shortcomings of their own management style. This is particularly true for those trying to manage workers in the ever-expanding service sector in which, because of the nature of the tasks to be performed, it is not possible to control the workforce in the same way as on a production line. Rather, it is necessary to motivate them to work harder. In response to this need for a new kind of manager, a number of management schools have been set up in France, offering an education perhaps more suited to contemporary conditions in which marketing and organizational behaviour take pride of place in the curriculum over mathematics and technical specialisms.

JAN WINDEBANK

Manessier, Alfred

b. 1911, St-Ouen

Artist

Alfred Manessier, a painter usually associated with the École de Paris, demonstrated the clear influence of Cubism and Fauvism until the end of World War II. Returning to Paris from the Normandy coast after the Occupation, he reasserted his pantheistic reification of nature. The extraordinary synthesis of structured surface picture plane derived from Cubism, with the vibrant colour rendered admissible by the Fauves, gave rise to his distinctive ‘stained-glass’ style, and provided the vehicle for an abstraction more accurately designated ‘nonfiguration’. Subject matter for these vast sublime paintings is divided between the ecstasies of religious passion and the grandeur of the sea. Avoiding literal figuration, these paintings are none the less profoundly humanist and, above all, affective.

SIMEON HUNTER

See also: painting

Manet, Éduardo

b. 1927, Santiago de Cuba, Cuba

Playwright and novelist

Manet was a director of Cuban theatres and cinemas, until his play Las Monjas (The Nuns), directed by Blin in France in 1969, sparked off a prolific French writing career. His plays include Eux ou la prise de pouvoir (Them or the Seizure of Power), Un balcon sur les Andes (Balcony Over the Andes) and Ma’dea.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Mano Negra

Musicians

A leading indie group of the 1990s at the confluence of rockabilly, hip-hop and punk, rap, raï’, salsa and many more styles, which they mix with panache. Singing in French, Arabic, English and Spanish, they are generous, unconventional and exuberant performers on the world circuit. Their latest products are Puta’s Fever (1990) and Casa Babylone (1994).

GÉRALD POULET

See also: rock and pop

manufacturing industry

The manufacturing industry was the backbone of the thirty glorious years of French economic growth from 1945 to 1974; since then, however, a deep crisis has affected a number of ‘traditional’ industries, contributing to increasing unemployment and to the decay of regional infrastructure. Now the fourth industrial power in the world, France has developed some larger world-weight conglomerates, especially in the 1980s, but still lags behind European competitors in this respect.

Manufacturing, excluding activities such as energy and building, only accounts for onefifth of France’s national product and employment, and the sector has lost the leading role it had in the economy from 1945 to 1974. During that period, French society underwent deep material changes which helped the development of manufacturing industries catering for the new mass markets—cars, white and brown electrical goods, leisure goods—or infrastructures required by the postwar reconstruction and the sudden transformation of urban areas. France, which had long trailed behind other countries, then entered consumer society with a vengeance. After the 1974 crisis, however, manufacturing industry suffered a succession of problems, which resulted in the closure of many plants, with pockets of mass unemployment particularly concentrated in areas of old industry, such as the north or Lorraine, or in the industrial towns surrounding the Massif Central. In other cases, efforts to increase competitiveness brought considerable loss of jobs—the so-called dégraissage (slimming down). In the car industry, for instance, the Renault workforce went down from 223,000 to 138,000 employees between 1980 and 1994.

Manufacturing industry is highly diversified, from traditional shoemaking, say, to high-tech space electronics. Since the mid-1980s, firms have made considerable efforts to penetrate foreign markets, especially European ones. Indeed, some companies are true multinationals, but they are usually only midtable in world size rankings.

Manufacturing in the past was concentrated in specific areas (the Vosges mountains for textiles mills; the Alpine valleys for aluminium; toy-making and watch assembly a speciality of farmers in the Jura…), because of either availability of natural resources or a skilled workforce. This regional distribution has changed dramatically. Regions of heavy traditional industries have suffered badly since the 1970s. Other regions, however, have benefited from recent development, such as those of Toulouse (home of the aerospace industry) or Grenoble, but localization of industries is now more flexible, and manufacturing employment less important than services.

FRANÇOIS NECTOUX

Marais plan

The area of Right Bank Paris known as the Marais is one of the showpieces of post-World War II urban conservation in France, but at the same time it is where the political weight of popular protest about social change accompanying building restoration has been greatest. It is an area of 126 hectares designated a secteur sauvegardé in 1965, at which time its legacy of valuable classical architecture from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had become much degraded by subdivision, neglect and the introduction of industrial activities. Many street façades have now been restored by the conservation project known as the Marais plan, and new economic activities have been introduced. However, many of the indigenous residents have been forced to leave. Rents and property prices have risen as a consequence of the conservation work, which has changed the popular perception of the area from a slum to one of urban chic.

ROGER KAIN

Marceau, Félicien

b. 1913, Cortemberg, Belgium

Playwright, essayist and novelist, real name Louis Carette

A member of the Academic Française since 1975, and the author of popular plays written during the 1950s and 1960s and directed by Barsacq, these include L’Oeuf (The Egg) and La Bonne Soupe (Good Soup).

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Marceau, Marcel

b. 1923, Strasbourg

Mime artist, real name Marcel Mangel

An internationally famed mime artist, and the founder of a troupe which performed his mimodrames, including Le Manteau (The Coat), adapted from Gogol, and Mont-de-Piété. Due to lack of subsidy, he moved to Germany, where he developed his renowned solo routines. The city of Paris now finances his mime school.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Marceau, Sophie

b. 1966, Paris

Actor

Her career was launched by Pinoteau’s successful La Boum (1980) followed by La Boum 2 (1982), where she typified the 1980s French adolescent, and for which she received a César as most promising actress. Pinoteau picked up her ‘story’ in L’Étudiante (1988). Although she has acted, somewhat unsuccessfully, in auteurist films (such as Pialat’s Police of 1985), her roles have been mostly confined to bigbudget films, like Corneau’s Fort Saganne (1984), with a penchant for historical films— for example, de Broca’s Chouans! (1988) and Tavernier’s La Fille de d’Artagnan (1994). Her part in Mel Gibson’s Oscared Braveheart (1996) made her an international star.

PHIL POWRIE

See also: cinema; stars

Marcellin, Raymond

b. 1914, Sézanne

Politician

Appointed Minister of the Interior by de Gaulle in the major governmental reshuffle after May 1968, Marcellin’s name was to become a byword for repressive legislation. The loi anti-casseurs of 1970 rendered anybody found in the vicinity of a demonstration liable for any violence committed on it—it was repealed in 1982. Marcellin’s fervent belief in a Communist/leftist conspiracy to take over France (illustrated throughout his political testament, L’Ordre public et les groupes révolutionnaires (Public Order and Revolutionary Groups)) led him to deport more or less instantly any foreigner found taking part in a demonstration on French soil.

KEITH READER

Marchais, Georges

b. 1920, La Hoquette, Calvados;

d. 1997, Paris

Politician

Originally a machine fitter, Marchais was a Communist member of the National Assembly from 1947 until 1997. A member of the Political Bureau of the Parti Communiste Français from 1959 and general secretary of the party from 1970 to 1994, he publicly condemned the student movement of May 1968, criticized Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968, backed his party’s alliance with the Parti Socialiste from 1972 to 1984 and supported Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979. As the Communist presidential candidate in 1981 he gained 15.34 per cent of the vote. Renowned for his dogmatism and verbal gaffes, he presided over his party’s electoral decline in the 1980s and early 1990s, refusing to acknowledge the consequences of the crisis of international Communism.

LAURENCE BELL

See also: parties and movements

Major works

Marchais, G. (1990) La Démocratie, Paris: Messidor/Éditions Sociales (a restatement of the traditional French Communist line).

Maréchal, Marcel

b. 1937, Tassin-la-Demi-Lune, Rhône

Actor and director

Known for his love of directing and acting in text-based works from playwrights including Claudel, Audiberti and Novarina, Maréchal is currently based at Paris’s Théâtre du Rond Point with his company, which moved from Lyon to Marseille in the 1970s, and received regional dramatic centre status in 1981.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Major works

Maréchal, M. (1974) La Mise en théâtre, Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions (Maréchal’s theories).

Marie-Claire

Women’s magazine

One of today’s best-selling women’s magazines in the haut de gamme (luxury) monthly category, Marie-Claire is aimed at young, professional women.

It was first launched as a weekly magazine, in 1937, by the powerful Prouvost press group. In 1939, the magazine was moved to Lyon, its distribution restricted to the Vichy zone. The extension of Nazi rule to the south forced the magazine to cease production in 1943. After 1945, Marie-Claire, along with other publications which had continued under Vichy rule, was banned. However, 1954 saw the relaunch of the new Marie-Claire as a luxury but affordable monthly, whose professed aim was to promote the interests of modern, young women who had obtained the vote in 1944.

The magazine’s luxurious appearance and energetic style appealed to women under 35. Its mixture of fashion and beauty items, style and culture pages—together with practical pages on cooking, health and home decoration—made for an approach which worked. By 1957, its annual circulation figure had exceeded a million. However, by 1963, readers were beginning to tire of the same format and content and this marked the beginning of declining circulation figures. By 1968, it was clear that fresher, bolder ideas were needed and in this respect the magazine gave a big nod to new feminist ideas which were gaining currency among young, working women, who had started to question traditional feminine roles. A major innovation was the inclusion of a substantial supplement entitled Femmes, which contained news about feminist organizations, events and literature. This approach proved successful for a part of the 1970s, boosting circulation to an extent, but it failed to restore magazine sales to the levels of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Furthermore, it was an approach which was not to last into the 1980s, as a media ‘backlash’ against feminism was to emerge.

From the mid- to late 1970s, Marie-Claire, in common with all other categories of the periodical press, saw sales decrease again as competition from other media, within the context of a stagnating economy, drove readers towards alternative sources of information and entertainment. In the 1980s and 1990s, the magazine has maintained its position within the category of luxury women’s magazines, despite the threat of legal liquidation in December 1993 from which it was saved by the Marie-Claire Album group in 1994. Since then, its yearly circulation has stabilized between 500,000 and 600,000. As far as style and content are concerned, the magazine has stayed with certain well-developed themes: fashion and beauty, the beautifully illustrated reportages à l’étranger (overseas reports), interviews with famous people and topical social issues treated through personal testimonies. Added to these are items on horoscopes, recipes, home, holidays, arts and so on. Along with other magazines in its category, Marie-Claire has remained an important channel of information within the cultural universe of French women.

KHURSHEED WADIA

marriage/cohabitation

While it remains the dominant model of family formation, marriage has become a less stable relationship in France, and it is gradually being replaced by unmarried cohabitation. Since the early 1970s, marriage rates have fallen consistently. By the mid-1990s, France displayed one of the lowest rates in Europe, with 4.4 marriages per 1,000 inhabitants. Fewer of the marriages being contracted were for the first time: more people were remarrying. Couples were also delaying getting married, with the result that mean age at marriage had reached 26.4 years for women and 28.4 years for men. Even though more marriages were ending in divorce, the vast majority of men (84 per cent) and women (88 per cent) were marrying at some point in their lives. The divorce rate had doubled since the beginning of the 1960s: nearly one in every two new marriages would end in divorce.

Falling marriage rates do not, however, mean that couples no longer want to live together. The number of unmarried cohabiting couples has increased significantly, together with the proportion of extramarital births, indicating that the institution of marriage is not seen as the only environment in which couples can live together and raise children. By the early 1990s, about 13 per cent of all cohabiting couples were unmarried, but the proportion of consensual unions in the 20 to 24 age group reached 82 per cent for men and 73 per cent for women. From a level below 6 per cent in the mid-1960s, the proportion of all live births outside marriage had risen to 33 per cent. Whereas, in the 1960s, extramarital conception was usually legitimized by marriage, by the 1990s couples were no longer deciding to get married when they were expecting children, and the children of unmarried cohabitees had acquired the same rights as those of married couples. One in three children conceived outside wedlock was born to a mother aged under 25, but more extramarital births were occurring in reconstituted families, following divorce or separation. The number of births to women living alone remained constant at around 3 to 4 per cent, while a growing proportion of lone parents were likely to be either separated or divorced. Marriage can no longer be seen as a stable and enduring relationship, and unmarried cohabitation even less so. By the early 1990s, 10 per cent of children had experienced life in a lone-parent family and 13 per cent in a reconstituted family.

LINDA HANTRAIS

See also: demographic developments

Marxism and Marxian thought

As a corpus of ideas inspired by the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marxism comprises an economic and social theory, a theory of the politics of class struggle and a materialist philosophy of history. Adopted by the international Communist movement, it has been interpreted and developed in a variety of ways, mainly in response to different perceptions of the needs of the political struggle. Elements of Marxist thought have also been incorporated within theoretical frameworks, deriving from other traditions.

The influence of Marxist thought on French intellectuals was at its height in the two decades following World War II. To a great extent, this was a result of a political rather than a theoretical choice. The French Communists had emerged from the war with their political reputation greatly enhanced, as a result of their leading role in the national resistance against the Nazi occupier. Although their identification with the political interests of the Soviet Bloc was to lead once again to their isolation from mainstream French political life with the development of the Cold War from 1947, their credit remained high with a large number of intellectuals for two main reasons. First, the French Communist Party (PCF) was the largest single party in France and attracted the support of a majority of the working class. Second, the polarization of international politics fostered a climate in which intellectuals felt that they had to take sides in the conflict between East and West; many felt that, overall, the forces for peace, progress and a better economic and social order were on the side of the Soviet Union, in its battle to defend itself against imperialist designs on the part of the USA.

Although by the early 1950s more intellectuals than ever before were members of the PCF, philosophers such as Louis Althusser, writers such as Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard, scientists such as Marcel Prenant and Jacques Monod, the mathematician Jean-Louis Desanti, the historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, to mention just a few, or ‘fellow travellers’ sympathetic to it, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, there were considerable ambiguities in their relationship with Marxist theory. On the whole, intellectuals joined the party for political reasons, rather than because of any theoretical commitment to Marxism. The party’s ouvrièrisme, or distrust of anyone without working-class credentials, meant that intellectuals constantly had to prove their loyalty to the leadership of the working class, by renouncing the right to independent thinking. What passed for theory in party circles was a version of Marxism simplified into dogma and passed on to party militants in the form of selected extracts and quotations from a limited number of texts by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, especially the latter’s History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, which summarized Marxist philosophy in a schematic exposition of the laws and tenets of dialectical and historical materialism.

The loyalty of the Communist intellectuals, along with their willingness to sacrifice theoretical integrity to the requirements of politics, was put to one of its most severe tests at the time of the Lysenko affair in 1948. Lysenko was a biologist who claimed to have disproved the theories of classical genetics, with his work on the transmission of acquired characteristics into new generations of agricultural crops. The political significance of this claim resulted from the endorsement of his thesis by the full weight of the Soviet regime. In French Communist circles, it gave rise to the theory of the ‘two sciences’, in which Lysenko became the champion of ‘proletarian’ science, as against the ‘bourgeois’ science of geneticists like Mendel and Morgan. The importance of the scientific evidence was minimized in favour of the test of political loyalties and French Communists, including some of the most distinguished scientists of the time, were called upon to toe the party line.

During this period, developments in Marxist theory were taking place, but on the whole from outside the French Communist Party. Previously unpublished texts, such as Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology and Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks, had begun to be published in French in 1937 and 1938. The publication of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) in 1937 was to have a significant effect on the development of a new current, which presented Marxism as a humanism, in which the predominant influence was Hegel. Bridges were built between Marxist and non-Marxist philosophers, in which the work to popularize Hegelian philosophy done by Jean Hyppolite and Alexandre Kojève, especially the latter’s 1947 Introduction a la lecture de Hegel (Introduction to the Reading of Hegel), played an important role. Marx was portrayed as a mainstream philosopher, following in and continuing the Western European philosophical tradition. At the same time, Catholic thinkers, such as the priest, Jean-Yves Calvez, with his 1956 text La Pensée de Karl Marx, (The Thought of Karl Marx) attempted to synthesize elements of Christian theology and Marxist thought. Of the group including Georges Politzer, Paul Nizan and Henri Lefebvre, which had begun work in the 1930s and drew on psychoanalytical and other theories—such as Politzer’s Critique des fondements de la psychologie (Criticisms of the Foundations of Psychology), Lefebvre’s Dialectical Materialism (Le Matérialisme dialectique) and Lefebvre and Guterman’s La Conscience mystifiée (The Mystification of Mind)—only Lefebvre, who survived the war, was able to produce substantial new work in the postwar period. Lucien Goldmann, much influenced by Lukács, was to provide a bridge between literature and sociology, with his ‘genetic structuralism’, in The Human Sciences and Philosophy (Les Sciences humaines et la philosophie) and The Hidden God (Le Dieu caché).

Jean-Paul Sartre, claiming that Marxism was ‘the indispensable philosophy for our time’, (Sartre 1985) was to develop his own original version of this philosophy, culminating in the publication of the Critique of Dialectical Reason (Critique de la raison dialectique) in 1960, which attempted to theorize the possibilities of individual, group and collective action in history.

In spite of the many significant differences between these different strands of Marxist thought, what they all had in common was an emphasis on the philosophical and ethical elements of Marx’s thought; his contribution to economic and political theory was largely ignored. Thus, in these hands, Marxism became primarily an analysis of the alienation of the individual and the possibilities available to the individual to transcend this alienated status. Marx’s analysis of the mode of production of the capitalist system, and the class relations which were built upon it, had little or no role to play in work of this type.

Within party ranks, theoretical work was tightly controlled by the party leadership. The works of Maurice Thorez, party leader from 1930 to 1964 and subject of a mini personality cult in his own right, were required reading, and all were expected to defend the party analysis of French state monopoly capitalism and Thorez’s theory of the progressive impoverishment of the French working class, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary.

With the death of Stalin in 1953 and the revelations and criticisms of the excesses of his regime, first expressed within Communist circles with Khrushchev’s secret report to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956, it appeared that the lid might be lifted and greater intellectual freedom allowed. The Italian response to the revelations, which was to lead toward a more pluralist approach and ultimately to the development of Eurocommunism in the 1970s, found favour with a significant strand of French Communist intellectuals. The French party, however, was reluctant to follow the Italian example and was slow to tackle the issue of de-Stalinization of the party machine. The Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising, also in 1956, led to many intellectuals leaving the party. None the less, attempts were made, most notably through the works of party philosopher, Roger Garaudy—such as Humanisme marxiste (Marxist Humanism), Perspectives de l’homme (Perspectives for Mankind), De l’Anathème au Dialogue (From Anathema to Dialogue) and Marxism and the Twentieth Century (Marxisme au XXe siècle)—to appeal to a broader intellectual public and build bridges with humanists, Socialists and Catholics outside the PCF.

If Sartre had been by far the most influential figure in the 1950s, defending the integrity of the intellectual within a loosely Marxist framework, the 1960s were to see an attempted theoretical revolution from within the party, which was to have a profound effect on the newer generation of intellectuals, whose political education had been vouchsafed by the Algerian war. Louis Althusser, from his intellectual base at the École Normale Supérieure, put the case for the development and modernization of Marxist theory, through a rereading of the classical texts in the light of contemporary theories: the epistemology of Bachelard, Canguilhem, Cavaillès, the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan.

At the same time, he developed new concepts— theoretical practice, the autonomy of theory—which gave a privileged role to theoretical work, and stressed the status of Marxist theory as a science, with its own objective validity, beyond all political considerations. All of this was set against the split in the international Communist movement, following Soviet attempts to disavow the legacy of Stalin, and the inspirational force of the new path followed by the Chinese Maoists.

The events of May 1968, when the explosion of the student movement sparked off a country-wide workers’ revolt, represented both the high point and the beginning of the end of this type of Maoist-inspired Marxist militancy. Althusserian theory had little (if any) role to play in the actual political events. The Paris Maoists mostly moved on to a factory-based militant politics and the Union of the Left, bringing Socialists and Communists together in 1971, brought the more pedestrian concerns of ballot-box politics to the top of the agenda. Already by the end of the 1970s, even before the collapse of Soviet and eastern European Communist regimes in 1989, Marxism had long ceased to be the indispensable reference for French intellectuals which it had once been. This was in spite of the fact that, during this decade, Marxism had in fact penetrated the academic barrier which had been set against it in previous decades and permeated many of the university bastions which had denied it entry. The decline of the PCF; the failure of the Union of the Left, which split in 1977; the subsequent election of François Mitterrand as president of the Republic from 1981 to 1995; and the political domination of the Socialists during this period—all this contributed to the marginalization and demise of Marxist influence, together with the failure of more radical political action to transform in a fundamental manner the French social and political system. Many of the most important intellectual figures of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Foucault, acknowledge, but fleetingly—if at all—any debt to Marxist theory.

The key difficulty for French Marxism throughout the postwar period has been the harmonization of theory and practice. Marxism developed as a theorization of the economic exploitation and political oppression of the working class in a bourgeois society dominated by capitalist class relations. It was further developed by Lenin and others into a theory of the strategy and tactics of the international proletarian revolution. On both counts, French Marxists have found it difficult to reconcile the theory with the reality of postwar French politics, in which a belief in the possibility of the proletarian revolution has receded, along with the increased prosperity of an ever smaller working class, albeit increasingly at the expense of an expanding, marginalized subclass of the unemployed and underemployed. On the whole, they have not looked beyond the borders of France, to take on board the globalization of capitalism and set the specific difficulties of French workingclass politics within a wider international framework. As a result, they have been unable to resolve the difficult problem of the divorce between theory and practice.

MARGARET MAJUMDAR

Maspero, François

b. 1932

Publisher

The doyen of left-wing publishing in France, who made available the work of figures as divergent as Mao Ze Dong and Régis Debray in affordable editions. He left the Communist Party in 1956 and thereafter was associated with the ‘new Lefts’ that flourished in and after May 1968. His bookshop La Joie de Lire, just off the Boulevard St-Michel, was long renowned as the intellectual epicentre of the revolutionary movements of the time, stocking material often difficult or impossible to obtain elsewhere. His 1989 text Roissy Express (Les Passagers du Roissy Express) is an itinerary through the working-class suburbs (banlieues) that were to prove so inflammable in the following decade.

KEITH READER

Mathieu, Georges

b. 1921, Boulogne-sur-mer

Artist

There were two principal intellectual referents for Mathieu’s work—the Surrealist concept of ‘automatic writing’, and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (Phénoménologie de la perception) of 1945. Merleau-Ponty’s identification of self with body (‘…je suis mon corps’) was paramount in defining Mathieu’s technique. Working rapidly, on a large scale, Mathieu added suggestive signs or ideograms to his paintings, earning himself the title of ‘calligraphe occidental’ (Western calligrapher) from Malraux. In 1957, Mathieu made a painting (15 m long) in just one hour prior to an opening, working in the window of a Tokyo gallery before an ecstatic audience. This ‘direct universality’ of the sign identified with the body was the particular achievement of an artist whose paintings are also of extreme elegance and restraint compared with their more ‘heroic’ American counterparts.

SIMEON HUNTER

See also: art informel; painting

Matisse, Henri

b. 1869, Le Cateau, Picardy;

d. 1954, Nice

Artist

Matisse, whose reputation as leader of the Fauves soon after the turn of the century secured his enduring membership of the artistic avant-garde, continued to produce important and influential work in the years following World War II. The increasing critical recognition of abstraction as an alternative to the figurative tradition in painting would seem to have played a part in the radical simplification of form that characterized Matisse’s postwar work, although this development can be seen to have had a more immediate cause.

Ill-health and the after-effects of surgery meant that, from 1941 to 1944, Matisse was often bed-ridden, with the result that the artwork he continued to produce during this period was necessarily small in scale. Numerous drawings produced between 1941 and 1942 were followed by the design and illustration of a number of literary works, whose authors included Montherlant, Pierre Reverdy and Baudelaire (Les Fleurs du mal). In 1943, Matisse agreed to design and illustrate a book entitled Jazz for the Greek publisher Tériade. Physically unable to paint at this stage, he made collages using cut-outs from sheets of paper pre-painted in gouache with motifs drawn from dream, folk art and circus life. These were reproduced via stencils for the book.

Matisse continued to use his papiers découpés in his designs for the screen-printed hangings Oceania, the Sea and Oceania, the Sky, and for the tapestry commissions, Polynesia, the Sea and Polynesia, the Sky (1946), using the marine imagery of Jazz on a much larger scale. His designs for the windows and vestments for the Chapelle du Rosaire at Vence, on which he worked from 1948 to 1951, were also realized through the same process. Papier découpé was used as a pictorial medium in its own right from 1950, when Matisse reworked the theme of the Moroccan odalisque. He found that, by cutting directly into the painted surface, he was able to resolve the conflict between line and colour which he had experienced in the execution of his paintings, while the formal simplicity of the imagery imposed by this technique enabled him to resolve what he perceived as the ‘fashionable’ division between realism and the non-representational. The sharp edges produced by the scissors when cutting out the motif clearly defined not only the figure but also the ground as a positive element, once the motif was collaged on to the support. La Piscine (1952), in which this traditional pictorial distinction between figure and ground was so obviously lost, became one of the most ‘abstract’ of Matisse’s works and illustrated his assertion that, for him, expression resided above all in the entire arrangement of the picture—the place occupied by the figures as well as the empty space surrounding them. The same could be said of Matisse’s papiers découpés of 1952/3, L’Escargot, in the Tate Gallery, and Souvenir de l’Océanie, where any vestige of recognizable figuration has all but given way to an expression of the rhythms sensed in nature through the simultaneous interplay of colour and form. His 1952 series of Blue nudes, which seem to have been carved from blocks of pure colour, recall his sculptures of the female form made over forty years earlier.

After his health had recovered enough to allow him to resume oil painting, Matisse produced his last series of Interiors. In Le Silence habité des maisons of 1947 and his Grand intérieur rouge of 1948, in which the figures depicted lack solidity and the formal values of colour and form dominate, he seems to be approaching the abstraction of his papiers découpés. These gouache cut-outs, far from being the decorative doodlings of an old man, as has often been suggested, are arguably the culmination of an artistic journey, his way of resolving the conflict between colour and form, abstraction and figuration, which had occupied him throughout his long career.

CAROL WILCOX

See also: painting

Mauclair, Jacques

b. 1919, Paris

Director, writer and playwright

The founder of the Théâtre du Marais in 1971. His vast repertoire of acting and direction has included Ionesco works, including Victims of Duty (Victimes du devoir), and plays by Pirandello, de Filippo and Adamov.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Mauriac, Claude

b. 1914, Paris;

d. 1996, Paris

Writer and memorialist

The son of the novelist François Mauriac, at the Liberation Claude Mauriac became General de Gaulle’s private secretary (1944–9) and editor of the Gaullist intellectual monthly, Liberté de l’esprit (1949–53), before gaining a reputation as a novelist. In the 1950s he became associated with those writers experimenting with the nouveau roman, but his major achievement is the cycle of memoirs known as Le Temps immobile (Time Immobile), in which the relationship between memory and chronology is explored.

MARTYN CORNICK

Major works

Mauriac, C. (1958) La littérature contemporaine, Paris: Albin Michel.

——(1974–88) Le Temps immobile, 10 vols, Paris: Grasset.

Mauroy, Pierre

b. 1926, Cartignies

Politician

Rooted in the northern tradition of workingclass, municipal Socialism and mayor of Lille from 1973, Mauroy was chosen by Mitterrand in 1981 to be his first prime minister and was one of the main architects of the ‘Socialist experiment’ of the early 1980s. Despite also having been behind the U-turn towards a policy of economic ‘rigour’, his image is inextricably associated with the supposed errors of the 1981–4 period and with old-style Socialism. As first secretary of the Parti Socialiste between 1988 and 1992, he argued for a form of social democracy which would entertain a ‘critical relationship’ with capitalism.

LAURENCE BELL

See also: parties and movements

May 1968

Viewed with hindsight, the events of May and June 1968 mark a turning point in the history of the Fifth Republic, so much so that during the next decade France would undergo a process of irreversible change that constitutes a watershed in modern French history. As opinion polls consistently show, May 1968 is the event most frequently recalled by the French since 1945. Part of the fascination resides in the paradoxical nature of the events themselves: on the one hand, no one could have foreseen the sheer scale of the crisis, despite the signs of discontent which had existed for some time; on the other hand, the events may be said to constitute a ‘failed’ or a ‘non-revolution’ which ended up transforming France and particularly the French people in a quite fundamental way. Although interpretations of May are varied, often determined as much by political orientation as by the degree of hindsight characterizing them, one thing is certain: after May 1968 France would not be the same again.

It is important to note the international context in which the events occurred. As David Caute (1988) records, the social and political crises of 1968 were not limited solely to France. French unrest was part of a much wider groundswell of protest across the globe. Indeed, the student movement developed in the United States, where, from the early 1960s onwards, the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) protested about enduring inequalities there. The event which did most to catalyse the wider spread of student protest was, however, American involvement in the Vietnam war. During April 1967, student draftees in the United States signalled their opposition to the war by burning their draft cards, and almost half a million people took part in antiwar demonstrations and marches. The civil rights movement also added momentum to the protests. Across Europe during 1967 and into 1968, in major cities in Britain, West Germany, Poland, Spain and Czechoslovakia, as well as in France, students protested against what they considered to be state oppression and authority, whether originating at home or inflicted abroad. Already during 1967, French students had begun to protest about general conditions in higher education, especially about the regime prevailing in university residences; although these protests may have appeared trivial, they were symptoms of a profound malaise in French higher education.

In analysing the unrest in France it is commonplace to divide the events into three successive phases: the university or student crisis, 2–12 May; the social crisis, 13–27 May; and finally the political crisis, from 27 May to 23 June. Because of demographic factors (principally the ‘baby-boom’ generation of the immediate postwar years having attained university age), pressure on the university sector in France had reached a critical point. In just five years, student numbers had doubled from 250,000 in 1963 to over 500,000 in 1968. Dissatisfaction regarding both the curriculum and the distant and authoritarian delivery of teaching, combined with anxieties about disciplines taught and the inadequate preparation of university courses for the world of work, all led to explosive pressures on the system. Symbolic of the half-hearted measures taken to deal with the crisis was the opening in 1963 of Nanterre University, situated to the west of Paris. Designed to relieve ever-growing student numbers at the Sorbonne in central Paris, Nanterre was an impersonal, outwardly soulless concrete and glass development situated in a bidonville (a sort of urban wasteland). The student protest movement focused on Nanterre, where the central administrative building was occupied on 22 March 1968. A movement named after this date was created, led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a sociology student who had followed the protests in Germany. Sharing ideals with two of the most active unions in higher education (the students’ Union National des Étudiants de France, or UNEF, and the lecturers’ Syndicat National de l’Enseignement Supérieur, or SNESup), the movement of 22 March brought together small groups of revolutionary student militants (mainly Trotskyists, Maoists, Revolutionary Communists and anarchists). Among their aims were the rejection of the values of consumer society, opposition to the Vietnam war, and the creation of a new, libertarian society in which power would be decentralized, and in which conventional moral, religious and social constraints would be challenged, if not severed. Protests against the university represented a starting point for these objectives and, although their aims and politics were certainly not universally shared, these militant groups nevertheless struck a chord with the larger student body. At a more general level, the protests reflected young people’s increasing dissatisfaction with the values and culture of the society in which they had been brought up: to this extent, May 1968 was a clash of generations, in which youth protested against both parental authority and the monolithic character of Gaullist France. By 2 May 1968, student disruption of classes had reached such a level that the authorities decided to close Nanterre University. This served only to move the protests from the periphery to the centre of Paris, resulting in students and their leaders occupying the Sorbonne on Friday 3 May. At the request of the university’s director, the police moved in, making 500 arrests. However, the unrest spilled over into the Latin Quarter, with students erecting barricades, and the police resorting to the use of tear gas and increasingly violent retaliation, the effect of which was to escalate the protests, causing major disruption in the area and adding weight to the students’ cause. In its turn, the Sorbonne was closed on 6 May, and classes suspended. Now the whole student body was free to join in the protests, which began spreading to the provinces. By the end of the week, during the night of 10– 11 May the unrest reached a crescendo, with police charging the barricades and demonstrators burning cars and smashing shop windows. At last the prime minister, Georges Pompidou, having just returned from a tenday official visit to Iran and Afghanistan, addressed the situation by appearing to make some relatively minor concessions to student demands. However, the unrest had gathered such momentum that on Monday 13 May (coincidentally the tenth anniversary of the Algiers insurrection which had signalled the beginning of de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958), a wave of strikes and demonstrations unfurled, with trade union representatives marching with students for the first time. In over 150 provincial towns throughout France, the unrest spread. Thus began the second, social, phase of the crisis.

It was partly the violence of the police repression which caused trade union leaders to join the students, a gesture of solidarity which brought the crisis into the world of work. A huge demonstration of 200,000 people marched to the place Denfert-Rochereau in Paris. Increasingly, strikes took hold across provincial France: on 14 May, the Sud-Aviation factory in Nantes stopped work; on 15–16 May, large car factories in the Paris region were occupied by workers; coal and steel production in the Lorraine was disrupted. As the week went on, more and more workers downed tools or occupied their workplace, with schoolteachers, public service employees, banking and transport staff and broadcasters among them. Estimates vary as to the numbers involved; by 18 May there were between 3 million and 6 million strikers, and by 22 May the figure had risen nearer to 10 million. It is not an exaggeration to say that, in the third week of May 1968, France was facing almost total paralysis. What distinguished the strikes from those which had occurred during former periods of social strife in France (e.g. in 1936 or 1947) was that they did not merely encompass employees in the traditional working classes (the car industry, coal and steel)— white-collar workers in both public and private sectors were also extensively involved. Apart from demands for higher wages, much of the social unrest was aimed at improving working conditions, and was especially concerned to modify the rigid hierarchical structures that typified Gaullist France (what the sociologist Michel Crozier characterized as the ‘stalemate society’). Most importantly, employees demanded more consultation with their bosses and a greater degree of devolved responsibility. Of course, such changes have to evolve over the longer term, but during the upheavals of May 1968 demands for greater autonomy (autogestion) were made for the first time. Measures would be introduced to achieve greater worker participation during the 1970s and the early years of the Mitterrand presidency.

At length Prime Minister Pompidou responded to union demands by convening consultative meetings at the employment ministry in the rue de Grenelle in Paris (25–27 May). As a result of these so-called ‘Grenelle negotiations’, undertaken by representatives of the employers’ organization (the CNPF, or Conseil National du Patronat Français) and the trade unions, Pompidou proposed an increase of 35 per cent in the minimum wage (known as the SMIC), a 10 per cent salary increase (to be delivered in two stages), and increased tradeunion rights in companies. By the time the Renault workers rejected these proposals on 27 May, after they had been communicated by the leader of the Communist CGT union (Confédération Générale du Travail), the crisis had passed into its final, political, phase.

Coming after General de Gaulle’s ineffectual public intervention in the crisis on 24 May (a rather stilted televised broadcast proposing a referendum), and coinciding with the rejection of the Grenelle negotiations, if there was any ‘revolutionary’ potential in the unrest, then it was at this point that it became most manifest to the Left. At a meeting held at the Charléty sports stadium on 27 May, the possibilities of a united left-wing front were discussed, and it even seemed that Pierre Mendès France (a veteran left-wing politician and fervent opponent of de Gaulle), who was present at the rally, might be a candidate to lead the movement. Mendès France, however, remained silent. The next day, François Mitterrand, then leader of the FGDS (the Centre-Left Fédération de la Gauche Démocrate et Socialiste), held a press conference at which he announced his intention to stand as presidential candidate, and put forward the idea of a provisional government headed by Mendès France to fill what many believed had become a vacancy of political power. Mendès France stated that he would be willing to lead the united Left should de Gaulle stand down. The impression that there was indeed a political vacuum was reinforced by de Gaulle’s sudden and unexplained absence from Paris. Rumours abounded: where was the saviour of France? It turned out that in the morning of 29 May the president had gone to Baden-Baden in West Germany to consult with General Massu, the army commander there. The reasons behind this visit remain clouded by controversy, but in the immediate aftermath of his return to Paris de Gaulle turned potential disaster into triumph.

On 30 May, after a cabinet meeting, at 4.30 p.m. de Gaulle made a radio broadcast. Using forthright language, raising the spectre of ‘totalitarian communism’, and declaring that if need be he would take exceptional measures to restore order, de Gaulle postponed the referendum, dissolved the National Assembly and announced a general election for the end of June. The appropriateness of this action seemed to be confirmed when a huge procession, apparently spontaneous, but in fact carefully orchestrated by de Gaulle’s entourage, took place the same evening: around 400,000 people marched down the Champs-Élysées in support of the general. Pompidou reshuffled his cabinet, and passed decrees to begin implementing the proposed increase in the minimum wage. Over the next few days and weeks before the elections, work gradually resumed in the factories and, to forestall any further student unrest, on 12 June the government banned all demonstrations and dissolved eleven revolutionary student groups. The elections took place on 23 and 30 June. Any lingering doubts there may have been about the general’s actions were dispelled when the Gaullist party, the UDR (the Union pour la Défense de la République), gained a spectacular electoral victory. In the first round, the party gained 46 per cent of the poll, an outright majority over the other main contenders. After the second round (a week later), the Gaullists were returned with no fewer than 294 seats out of a total of 485, with the other major parties (the Communists and the FGDS) losing at least half the seats they had held before the election. The Gaullist party (renamed the Union des Démocrates pour la République) won an unprecedented victory: for the first time in a century, a single party was able to form the government without the support of any other political formation. The silent majority, so it seemed, had taken revenge on those militating for revolution. However, the events of May and June inflicted a severe shock on French society: the demands which had been made by students and workers could not be ignored, and the reform process began.

In the immediate term, the new government addressed the crisis in the university sector through legislative reforms. In November 1968, the loi Edgar Faure set out to overhaul the sector by introducing greater autonomy into universities, which were reorganized into more modern teaching and research units incorporating disciplines the student body demanded. Students were given a greater say in management, and a number of new universities were opened to cope with rising demand for places. As for the world of work, employees gained salary increases, better mobility and extended rights in the workplace. The strikes had protested against the hierarchical rigidity of the world of work in France. In the years which followed, the bosses’ organization (the CNPF) gradually responded by introducing increased responsibilities for workers; participation and autogestion became keywords during the 1970s as French industry modernized and adopted fairer working practices. In the political domain, notwithstanding the Gaullist party’s triumph over the divided Left, May 1968 marked the beginning of the end of de Gaulle’s own long political career. Maurice Couve de Murville was appointed to replace Pompidou as prime minister on 10 July 1968. However, opinion polls showed that it was de Gaulle’s own standing and credibility which had suffered, not Pompidou’s, and less than a year later, on 27 April 1969 the general was voted out of office in a referendum (53 per cent of the voters saying ‘no’). Thus ended the Gaullist Republic: on 15 June 1969, Georges Pompidou was elected president as de Gaulle’s successor.

From today’s perspective, May 1968 is most usefully studied through a range of interpretations (e.g. Reader and Wadia 1993 and Pouvoirs 3 9). As far as their political consequences are concerned, the events did not constitute a revolution because the regime was neither overturned nor replaced—if anything, in the immediate term, it was reinforced. Yet, if May 1968 did have a revolutionary dimension, it was long-term, and much more traceable in the areas of attitudes, values and culture. Youth culture in particular, as it is variously manifested in music, drugs and fashion, has tended to follow a pattern set in the late 1960s. The longer-term consequences of May 1968 in France may be traced in the development during the 1970s and 1980s of working practices, left-wing politics, feminism, ecology, decentralization and movements for regional autonomy or separatism. In the words of Laurent Joffrin (1988), ‘May 68 changed France. This failed revolution ended up revolutionizing society, and the French do not always realize it.’

MARTYN CORNICK

MC Solaar

b. 1969, Dakar

Singer

France’s leading rap artist of the 1990s, who invites contemplation rather than conflict. MC Solaar acknowledges the influences of hiphop, acid jazz and West Coast sounds, but what he has given us in his first two CDs— Qui sème le vent récolte le tempo (Who Sows the Wind Reaps the Beat) and Prose Combat, from 1992 and 1994 respectively—has a very French flavour. In MC Solaar’s own words, ‘no slang, good subjects and sometimes just poetry’. He has had the merit of taking rap to a wider audience than its roots in disenfranchized banlieues (suburbs).

GÉRALD POULET

See also: song/chanson

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)

A private international organization established in 1971 by a group of French doctors who had previously worked for the Red Cross, and were determined to create a non-governmental agency for emergency medical relief. MSF assists victims of natural or man-made disasters, irrespective of race, religion or political affiliation, observing strict impartiality. Funding comes primarily from private donations, also the European Community and UNHCR. In 1979, a rift within MSF led to the creation of new associations, Aide Médicale Internationale in 1979, and Médecins du Monde by Bernard Kouchner in 1980. MSF is also active within France in the fight to secure health care for immigrants, and to assist drug addicts.

PAM MOORES

Melville, Jean-Pierre

b. 1917, Paris;

d. 1973, Paris

Director, real name Jean-Pierre Grumbach

A film-maker largely credited as being the thriller maker of the mid-1950s and 1960s, Melville often used Alain Delon, the fetish star of the 1960s (e.g. Le Samourai in 1967). He is also heralded as a precursor to the Nouvelle Vague, because of both his unorthodox production practices (very much an independent) and his film style (low budgets, grainy realism). His films often treat the question of individual choice in the face of almost impossible odds sometimes due to national conflicts (e.g. Le Silence de la mer in 1949).

SUSAN HAYWARD

See also: cinema; stars

Mendès France, Pierre

b. 1907, Paris;

d. 1982, Paris

Politician

Despite, or perhaps because of, a relatively short ministerial career, Pierre Mendès France acquired a durable reputation as the conscience of the French Left. He entered politics as a Radical Socialist in the 1930s and quickly demonstrated the economic competence for which he became famous. His Jewish origins, and outspoken Republicanism, made him a natural target for the anti-semitic, anti-democratic Vichy regime which imprisoned him. He escaped to London and emerged in 1945 as a clear-headed modernizing political leader. It was these qualities, rather than any powerful party backing, that led to his appointment as prime minister in 1954 after the French military disaster at Dien Biên Phu. Mendès France rapidly extricated France from an impossible military situation in Indochina and began the process of disengagement from Morocco and Tunisia. His modernizing zeal led him to attack out-of-date economic attitudes and privileges. He was, by contrast, lukewarm about the cause of European integration and this contributed to his loss of office in February 1955. He opposed de Gaulle’s 1958 return to power on the grounds of democratic principle and never accepted the legitimacy of the Fifth Republic. A prestigious, but ultimately powerless, figure, he lived to see François Mitterrand gain the political benefits of his oppositionism.

PETER MORRIS

Messiaen, Olivier

b. 1908, Avignon;

d. 1992, Paris

Composer and organist

Messiaen has described himself as a rythmicien et ornithologue (rhythm-artist and ornithologist); of course, he is much more than that. His career spans practically the entire twentieth century and marks the continuing importance of French music since Debussy. Yet Messiaen stands more outside than inside the Western tradition. His major interest does not lie in counterpoint or even tonality: both of these fundamental characteristics of Western music involve variation, development and drama, i.e. motion within a time frame. Messiaen’s music, on the other hand, strives towards a structure that makes time, or rather timelessness, a subject for contemplation and expression. In this sense, Messiaen should be regarded as the most ‘Catholic’ (in the sense also of the original meaning, ‘universal’) composer of our time. His strongest antecedents in the West are plain-chant and the Greek modes (arrangements of the musical scale); to a lesser extent, Berlioz; and his more immediate models, Debussy, Stravinsky and Bartók. In addition to these formative influences, there is a strong indebtedness to Hindu rhythms and scales, and pervasive in all his music after 1950 is the presence of birdsong. In order to achieve the kind of circularity and stasis to which his music aspired, Messiaen invented a set of ‘modes of limited transpositions’, which have been very influential on his best students at the Conservatoire, Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis and Barraqué. Moreover, Messiaen’s music is richly textured and coloured harmonically; he believed that chords are ‘coloured’. All of these creations are inspired by a devout Catholicism reflected in the titles of his works and their individual movements. These works also strive to reflect the ecstasy of the contemplation of the Incarnation or Resurrection. The piety and occasional ‘whiff of incense’ have alienated a number of listeners, but his music is steadily gaining admirers, for his sensuousness as well as for his astonishing mastery.

Educated at the Paris Conservatoire (his principal teacher being Paul Dukas), in 1931 he was appointed organist at La Trinité in Paris and he held the post for most of his life. His organ works, notably Le Livre d’orgue and Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité, mark him as one of the most prolific organ composers since Bach. But his most striking successes have been in the orchestra hall: Turangalîla-Symphonie in twelve movements, Oiseaux exotiques, Chronochromie, Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, Des Canyons aux étoiles, Éclairs sur l’au-delà. There are practically no chamber works, except the remarkable Quatuor pour la fin du temps written and performed in a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1941. There is also an important body of piano music, notably the highly influential Quatre études de rythme; and several song cycles. In many respects, the crowning achievement of his long career is the long opera Saint François d’Assise (‘Scènes franciscaines’), performed in 1983 by the Paris Opéra, which crystallizes Messiaen’s musical individuality: his concern with ‘the presence of the eternal within the temporal, the unmeasurable within the measured, the mysterious within the known’ (Griffiths 1985).

WALTER A.STRAUSS

See also: concert music

Metz, Christian

b. 1931, Béziers;

d. 1993, Paris

Philosopher

An influential film theorist who during the structuralist period of the 1960s attempted to establish a grammar of film—see his Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (Essais sur la signification au cinéma) of 1968–72. His grammar of film was strongly influenced by Saussure’s concept of a linguistic system that functioned as a general science of signs (semiology). His endeavour to uncover the rules governing film language marked an important step forward in film theory, by providing a framework within which to discuss the relationship between film image and representation. Sensing the limitations of this total theory approach, Metz then went on to explore the relevance of psychoanalysis to film theory, particularly in relation to spectator positioning, as in The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Le Signifiant imaginaire: psychanalyse et cinéma) of 1977.

SUSAN HAYWARD

See also: cinema; structuralism

Michaux, Henri

b. 1899, Namur, Belgium;

d. 1984, Paris

Poet

Despite being close in spirit and manner to the Surrealists, Michaux was never part of the movement. His poems, most of them prose poems, are marked by an intense anguish, a fear of existence—but one that usually takes clownish, fantastic and exotic forms. His originality lies in his ability to turn poetry into a form of exorcism by the manipulation of obsessive sounds, word coinages—often displays of linguistic violence, incantatory rhythms: he is constantly attempting to propel himself (and the reader) into an ailleurs. This aspiration also accounts for his experimentation with drugs (Misérable Miracle, from 1956, is a typical as well as an eloquent comment on these experiences, and there are other accounts of similar drug experiments). Some of the most important titles of his later poetry are: Épreuves, exorcismes (Trials, Exorcisms) from 1945; La Vie dans les plis (Life in the Folds) in 1949 and L’Espace du dedans (The Space Within) of 1966—all of them bearing revealing titles.

WALTER A.STRAUSS

See also: poetry

Michel, Georges

b. 1926, Paris

Playwright

Michel is known for plays written in the late 1960s about the individual and society, of which L’Agression (Aggression) and La Promenade du dimanche (Sunday Stroll) were directed at the Théâtre National de Paris. Disappearing during the 1970s, he returned to the theatre in 1986 with Rhapsodie-Béton at the Théâtre de la Huchette.

ANNIE SPARKS

Miéville, Anne-Marie

b. 1945, Lausanne, Switzerland

Director

After an unsuccessful singing career in Paris during the 1960s, and after working on two short films with the Swiss film-maker, Francis Reusser, Miéville made personal and professional contact in the early 1970s with Jean- Luc Godard. She worked as a set photographer on his Tout va bien, co-directed Ici et ailleurs, and has collaborated with Godard ever since, most notably on films such as Numéro deux and Sauve qui pent (la vie), Godard’s television work of the late 1970s, the video piece Soft and Hard, and, most recently, 2 x 50 années de cinema, a celebration of French cinema. Miéville’s own films (which she also edits) are mainly intimate and sensitive depictions of domestic crisis. The short Le Livre de Marie (1983) traces the effects of divorce on a young girl, while Lou n’a pas dit non (1993) studies a couple on the point of breaking up. Other films include Papa comme maman, L’Amour des femmes, How Can I Live?, Faire la fête, Mon cher sujet and Mars et Vénus.

JAMES WILLIAMS

mime

Mime, the tradition of physical, non-verbal expression in theatre, has its roots in pantomime and the tradition of characters such as the well-known Pierrot (in his white clown costume with a black tear on his cheek), but today it has become part of the established repertoire of theatrical communication. The importance of the actor, the role of physical theatre and the importance of the gesture in performance are all factors in current theatre practice which have been influenced by mime during the last century in particular. Thus, as well as yielding famous mime artists such as Étienne Decroux, Marcel Marceau and Jean-Louis Barrault, techniques used in mime have also influenced general ideas of theatrical performance, with the emphasis on the physical importance of the stage. Barrault’s concept of ‘total theatre’ and his numerous productions exploring it are notable examples of this, although the tradition of mime in theatre continues to this day through the work of directors such as Jean Vilar, Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine.

Many of the key figures in the movement of mime within the French theatre tradition share a similar background, whether directly or indirectly—that of Copeau’s theatre school at the Vieux Colombier, where the famous mime artist and teacher, Decroux, and Dullin, future founder of his own celebrated school, studied. At the time, an increased interest in physical education was in the air outside the theatre world, as well as inside it, with pioneers such as Georges Demeny in France encouraging participation in sport. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Copeau had begun experimenting with physical theatre using mime and masks, exploring this with his troupe, which eventually moved down to Burgundy to concentrate on its work. One of the troupe, Charles Dullin, left in 1920, but went on to form his own theatre and theatre school, based largely on the same principles as Copeau’s teaching, with the emphasis on le tréteau nu (the bare stage) and on the importance of gesture and physical expression. It was here that Decroux (now a teacher of mime), Barrault and Artaud were to meet, and that (after the war) Decroux would teach the nowlegendary mime artist Marcel Marceau.

Decroux’s work was central in pushing back the boundaries of mime with his famous silent mimes, nude on an empty stage, based on many of the principles he had learned himself with Copeau’s troupe in Burgundy. His skill helped inspire his pupil Barrault, who went on to become one of the most celebrated mime artists of the century in film roles such as Baptiste in Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis (1945), a film in which his teacher Decroux also performed. At the same time, Jean Dasté, another protégé of Copeau’s, had also founded a troupe, the Comédiens de Grenoble, including among others Jacques Lecoq, which also sought to explore the possibilities of mime and masks in performance. Lecoq himself went on to found his famous theatre school in Paris, focusing his training on movement, gesture and body language, although disagreeing in the importance of teaching pure mime as an art form in its own right.

It was Barrault and Decroux who, between them, were largely responsible for formalizing what could be described as modern mime, codifying and defining the ‘language’ of the body for use within a theatrical context. Marcel Marceau, Decroux’s pupil at the Dullin school, was especially impressed by the work of Barrault; the latter’s mimodrames, such as As I Lay Dying (Autour d’une mere), were a particular influence on his work. The actor’s training imparted to him by Dullin was also to play its role in his development of his renowned character Bip in 1947 and his mimodrames. He was also certainly influenced by foreign theatre traditions from the East, as were Mnouchkine and Brook in later decades. Both of these directors focused on physical as well as verbal theatre, looking to popular performers such as the clown figure to inspire wider audiences, and experimenting with Japanese and Indian theatrical traditions, rich in their intricate tradition of gesture and mime. Today mime remains an important ingredient in theatrical expression, both in its own right (as pure mime, in the mimodrame) and also as part of the actor’s training and tools for expression within the world of ‘spoken’ French theatre.

ANNIE SPARKS

minimum wage

In France, the wage levels of the lowest-paid workers are protected by minimum wage legislation. This minimum wage is known as the salaire minimum interprofessionel de croissance (SMIC), which replaced the salaire minimum interprofessionel garanti in 1970 when increases in the minimum wage were fixed to price and average earnings increases. From the mid-1980s onwards, liberal economists and politicians have criticized the SMIC for keeping the wage levels of those with few skills artificially high, which harms employment creation. However, an attempt by the government to reduce the SMIC for young workers in 1994 was brought down by popular protest.

JAN WINDEBANK

See also: employment

Minuit

Publishing house

Les Éditions de Minuit were founded by Pierre de Lescure and Jean Bruller (Vercors) during the Occupation, first publishing Vercors’s resistance parable, The Silence of the Sea (Le Silence de la mer) in 1942, among no fewer than twenty-five titles to appear up to August 1944. After Jérôme Lindon took over in 1948, Minuit achieved even greater fame for launching the nouveau romanciers Beckett, Butor, Duras, Pinget, Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute. Minuit also has an extensive philosophy catalogue, including authors such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard, and publishes the review Critique.

MARTYN CORNICK

Minute

Newspaper

A provocative, extreme right-wing weekly, launched by Jean-François Devay in 1962. Outspokenly critical of de Gaulle’s policy in Algeria, Minute has a reputation for polemic and sensational scandal-mongering. Pet themes include a denunciation of the abolition of the death penalty, the supposedly luxurious conditions in French prisons and the overgenerous treatment of immigrants. Circulation peaked at 188,084 copies per week in 1978. Despite resurgence of interest following the Socialist victory in 1981, circulation has since fallen dramatically (to below 50,000 copies by 1991). Internal squabbling as to how closely the paper should align itself with the Front National, and competition from National Hebdo, have exacerbated this decline.

PAM MOORES

Minyana, Philippe

b. 1946, Metz

Playwright

A former literature and drama teacher, who began writing in 1980. His works include Premier Trimestre (First Term), Titanic, Exhibition and Drames Brefs 1 (Brief Dramas 1). The Théâtre Ouvert publishes and performs many of his plays.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Miou-Miou

b. 1950. Paris

Actor

Her career began in Faraldo’s provocative Themroc (1972), which she followed in 1974 with Blier’s equally provocative Les Valseuses, alongside Depardieu and Dewaere. Blier made an updated version, Tenue de soirée, where she accompanied Depardieu and Michel Blanc in 1986. Although most of her roles have been comic, or sexually provocative (as in Deville’s 1988 La Lectrice), her persona is often that of a sensitive and proud woman, as can be seen in Kurys’s Coup de foudre (1983) and (especially) in her role as La Maheude, Depardieu’s screen wife in Berri’s Germinal (1993).

PHIL POWRIE

See also: cinema

Mistinguett

b. 1873, Enghien-les-Bains;

d. 1956, Bougival

Music-hall artist, real name Jeanne Bourgeois

Arguably France’s greatest female music-hall performer—she was known as the Impératrice du Music-Hall (Empress of the Music Hall)—Mistinguett (originally Miss Tinguette) had an early successful partnership with Maurice Chevalier and later with a number of other male performers. The star of a whole series of revues, Mistinguett appeared in North and South America and became a most successful recording artist. Despite the limitations of her singing voice, her humour and powers of mimicry helped to extend her career well beyond World War II. She will be remembered as the incarnation of la Parisienne in various guises.

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

Mitchell, Eddy

b. 1942, Paris

Lyricist, singer and television presenter, real name Claude Moine

Originally a member of Les Chaussettes Noires (1961–4), Eddy Mitchell rapidly became one of France’s outstanding singers of rock and roll from the mid-1960s. Having sung mainly American imports, he increasingly wrote the words of his songs (music by Jean-Pierre Bourtayre and later Pierre Papadiamondis) and broadened his repertoire to embrace country music, rhythm and blues and ballads. Endowed with a good sense of humour, he has appeared in films and as a presenter of films on television.

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

Mitterrand, François

b. 1916, Jarnac, Charente;

d. 1996, Paris

Politician

Often perceived as an enigma, François Mitterrand was the first ever president of a French Republic to complete two terms of office (1981–95). At times reviled by his adversaries and mistrusted by his allies, his death gave rise to genuine scenes of public grief, and brought forth tributes from former adversaries and allies alike. The ambiguity of his public persona undoubtedly owes much to the longevity of his political career, the variety of roles which he came to play and his highly personalized approach to politics.

Born into a provincial, Catholic, conservative, bourgeois milieu, there is little evidence to suggest that, as a law student in Paris in the mid-1930s, Mitterrand broke with the influences of his background. While his interest in the great debates of the day was eclectic, his assessment of their proponents was often based on literary and moral considerations rather than on political ones (indeed, he himself had literary ambitions).

His wartime experience brought about a certain change of direction. Mobilized in 1939, Mitterrand was wounded and captured by the Germans in June 1940. In the hardships and camaraderie of prisoner of war camps in Germany and Poland, he later claimed to have discovered the ‘natural’ moral principles required to underpin legitimate social organization: equity, social and economic justice, and freedom. On his third attempt, he escaped at the end of 1941 to unoccupied France, where he worked for nearly a year as a functionary in the Vichy administration for the War Prisoners Commissariat and was later awarded the Francisque medal by the regime. As a result, he was later accused of having harboured Vichyite sympathies. He himself always argued that he used his position in Vichy as a cover for his Resistance activities, notably as the self-styled head of a network for prisoners of war and escapees.

At the Liberation the network of contacts and influence he had assiduously developed through his Resistance activity placed Mitterrand in a position to play a political role. Yet he was not affiliated to a party and was reluctant to accept the idea of being led by anyone but himself. He was first elected to parliament in 1946 in the Nièvre on a conservative and markedly anti-Communist platform at a time when the tripartite coalition of Communists, Socialists and Christian Democrats was still in the ascendant. His profile was clearly that of a right-of-centre bien pensant Catholic. Once in parliament he allied himself with the Union Démocratique et Socialiste de la Resistance (UDSR), a small, loosely structured party, created by former résistants. By 1953 he had become its dominant figure. The hinge role of the UDSR in coalitions gave it an importance beyond its size and enabled him to occupy no less than eleven ministerial posts under the Fourth Republic (1946–58), some of them among the most senior. His opposition both to Communism and to de Gaulle’s Rassemblement du Peuple Français (RPF) placed him at the centre of gravity of Third Force politics.

One of Mitterrand’s priorities at this time was the maintenance of France’s colonies, particularly in Africa. When the Algerian war broke out in 1954 he was Minister of the Interior. Like the vast majority of French people, he did not envisage Algerian independence and only came to accept it reluctantly. His approach to the colonies was, however, reformist and this brought him into conflict with reactionary forces on the Right.

While Mitterrand had entered politics on the Centre Right, his reformism in colonial affairs, his opposition to the RPF, his move away from the institution of the Catholic church and his involvement in the 1956 Front Républicain alliance placed him, towards the end of the Fourth Republic, to the left of centre. He was a competent minister, who did not hesitate to assert his authority, and a skilful orator. His political ambiguity, obvious ambition and cavalier yet aloof manner often inspired cautiousness, if not mistrust. Nevertheless, he would probably have been called to the premiership in due course had the collapse of the Fourth Republic and de Gaulle’s return to power not changed the rules of the political game completely.

The feeling that de Gaulle had robbed him of the opportunity to reach the top government position, and that there would be no room for his ambitions in de Gaulle’s entourage, undoubtedly determined his decision to adopt an intransigent stance against the new regime of the Fifth Republic and all its works. Paradoxically, however, the presidential and bipartisan logic of the Fifth Republic enabled him to resurrect his political career. His strident opposition also placed him more clearly on the Left.

With the first direct election of the president of the Republic due to take place in 1965, Mitterrand realized that, for a candidate of the Left to stand a chance of success against de Gaulle, he had to be able to obtain the firm backing of the whole of the non-Communist Left and the vote of the Communist electorate, without frightening away too much of the centrist vote. Thus began the historic union of the Left.

Mitterrand drew on and expanded his clanlike network of personal followers (in whom he was able to inspire unstinting loyalty and a belief in his own destiny) to create the Convention des Institutions Républicaines (CIR) in 1964. With none of the substance of a political party, the CIR nevertheless gave the impression that he represented a considerable political force. In the run-up to the election he brought the Socialist Party, the Centre-Left Parti Radical and his own CIR together within the Fédération de la Gauche Démocratique et Socialiste (FGDS) and obtained the support of the Communist Party (PCF) while avoiding making any concessions to it. His ‘honourable’ defeat in the second ballot (45 per cent) provided momentum for the continuation of this strategy. There seemed to be a happy congruence between the resurrection of the Left and Mitterrand’s career ambitions.

Progress in this direction was abruptly halted, however, by the events of May 1968. With the Gaullist state briefly appearing to totter, Mitterrand put himself forward as the leader of a provisional government with a view to organizing early presidential elections, in which he announced he would stand. This led many to accuse him of illegality and opportunism. However, de Gaulle reasserted himself and in the subsequent parliamentary elections the parties of the Left, which had responded to the events in a disunited fashion, were roundly defeated. Shortly afterwards, the FGDS broke up and Mitterrand once again found himself in the wilderness.

However, following the humiliating defeat in the 1969 presidential election of the Socialist Defferre, who had stood on a centrist ticket, the union of the Left again seemed the only viable opposition strategy. In order to advance it, the CIR joined the partly renovated Parti Socialiste (PS) in 1971 at its famous Épinay Congress where Mitterrand, by dint of entering into an incongruous pact with the right-ofcentre and extreme-Left tendencies of the party, was able to snatch the leadership position.

For Mitterrand, as the joint candidate of the Left, the 1970s were marked by narrow defeat by Giscard d’Estaing in the 1974 presidential election, and by his unstinting effort to establish and maintain his control of the PS, which he had taken into a competitive alliance with the PCF. The strategic aim of this alliance was to assert the PS’s dominance on the Left and woo a substantial swathe of the Communist electorate. For this reason the PS had to be ideologically positioned as far to the left as was feasible and Mitterrand had to learn to ‘speak Socialist’. His diatribes on the corrupting influence of money may have seemed disingenuous to some, but were in fact not incompatible with the social Catholic influence of his early years.

The ‘110 Propositions’ of his 1981 presidential election campaign were to a large extent based on the PS programme of the 1970s. His main campaign poster, however, portrayed him against a rural backdrop, complete with church spire, and bore the reassuring slogan ‘La Force tranquille’.

Once in power, Mitterrand’s resolve to execute his programme as promised was made manifest in his appointment of four Communist ministers and in a series of radical measures which included nationalizations, a voluntaristic reflationary growth strategy based on public spending, the enhancement of employees’ rights, major decentralization reforms and liberal measures, such as the abolition of the death penalty and the authorization of independent radio stations. However, the reforming energy of the Socialist government soon foundered on the rock of economic failure and massive opposition to plans to integrate private (Catholic) schools into the state sector.

The subsequent U-turn in government policy left the Left in a defensive posture. Hedged in and deeply unpopular, Mitterrand sought to regain the initiative by launching France’s first private television channel and introducing proportional representation for parliamentary elections (which enabled the extreme-Right Front National to gain thirty-five seats in 1986). But such measures were not enough to prevent the PS from losing its majority in 1986. As a result, Mitterrand was obliged to appoint the neo-Gaullist Jacques Chirac as prime minister and embark on the first cohabitation of the Fifth Republic. This form of executive power sharing effectively stripped him of control of the domestic policy agenda and confined his initiatives to the field of foreign policy. However, his judicious handling of cohabitation obviated a constitutional crisis and earned him the gratitude of the public.

In the 1988 presidential election Mitterrand could convincingly present himself as a statesman able to unite the nation and comfortably beat the apparently volatile and divisive Chirac. In contrast to the ideological turbulence which had marked his first term, Mitterrand’s 1988 campaign promised reconciliation. His priorities would be to pursue European economic integration and reduce social inequality.

In the 1988–93 period, the PS enjoyed a relative majority and Mitterrand was again able to appoint Socialist prime ministers. Despite this, the functioning of the executive continued to bear some relation to cohabitation, in that prime ministers defined the orientation of domestic policy, albeit at the cost of occasional presidential obstruction and criticism (particularly in the case of Rocard). There was also a distinct cooling of relations between the PS and Mitterrand, whose presidential style became increasingly regal. In 1991 he dismissed the still-popular Rocard (whom he personally disliked) and appointed France’s first ever woman prime minister, Édith Cresson, only to have to replace her with the more reassuring Bérégovoy in 1992.

Mitterrand preferred, however, to devote his attention to foreign and European affairs. He showed himself to be more Atlanticist than his predecessors, staunchly defending the installation of US cruise missiles in Europe in the early 1980s. He engaged French troops under allied (American) command in the Gulf war in 1991 and co-operated with NATO in Bosnia in 1994. In African policy, his record is questionable, but he himself considered that French policy encouraged the development of democratic practices there (Adler 1995). He was one of the architects of the 1985 Single European Act and of the Maastricht Treaty, whose ratification he put to a referendum in France in 1992.

More than any of his predecessors, Mitterrand left his mark on the cultural and architectural landscape of Paris, thanks to the Grand Louvre, the Arche de la Défense (constructed for the Bicentenary celebrations of the 1789 Revolution), the Opéra de la Bastille and the grandiose and hyper-modern Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

The PS’s catastrophic defeat in the 1993 elections forced Mitterrand into a second cohabitation, this time with Balladur as premier. In this final period of his presidency, his executive initiatives were few: one can cite French humanitarian intervention in Rwanda in 1994. In the grip of terminal illness, he was dogged by fresh allegations concerning his ideological affiliations in the prewar and Vichy periods. Yet he refused to respond clearly to his detractors and allowed the existence of a 20-year-old daughter by a mistress to become public knowledge, as if he wanted to lay himself bare to the public.

This perhaps provides a key to understanding the man and his career. Possessed of a great belief in his own destiny and legitimacy, he rarely regretted his actions and tended to attribute whatever negative outcomes might be perceived in them as the failure of others to comprehend the rightness of his purpose, as if they did not see the big picture.

Despite his taste for provocation and his readiness to do combat, Mitterrand’s mode of leadership was, in essence, reactive. Like de Gaulle, he was a great legitimator of the (virtually) inevitable and contributed to reconciling France with some of the imperatives of the age (decentralization, a more liberal economy, European integration), while at the same time representing aspects of a traditional France, embodied in its literature and (often provincial) culture.

LAURENCE BELL

Mnouchkine, Ariane

b. 1934, Boulogne-sur-Seine

Director

Ariane Mnouchkine is perhaps the most influential director in France today, noted for her willingness to take risks, to experiment and to combine different theatrical traditions in order to search for a relevant, contemporary voice.

Since her student days, she has worked with the theatre company she founded in 1964 (and now directs), the now internationally renowned Théâtre du Soleil, which since 1970 has been based at the Cartoucherie, Vincennes. In terms of style, she is recognized for adopting a non-authoritarian stance: her view of the director’s role is to co-ordinate the thoughts and ideas of her company into a coherent form, rather than forcing them to conform to her own prescribed vision. During the last three decades she has aimed to explore the role of the actor and his or her relationship to the audience, retaining a political message in her productions. A confirmed left-winger, she directs the Théâtre du Soleil along strictly democratic lines. In the 1970s, the company was particularly noted for collective creations, such as the renowned 1789 (filmed by Mnouchkine in 1974), for their challenging new approach to performance, and for their staging and innovative methods of relating historical fact.

After other successful collective creation projects, including 2793 and L’Age d’or (The Golden Age) between 1972 and 1975, Mnouchkine turned to film for her new challenge, making Molière, la vie d’un honnête homme (Molière, the Life of an Honest Man) between 1976 and 1977 with a cast from the Théâtre du Soleil, using many of the principles acquired in previous stage productions. She went on to adapt Thomas Mann’s Mephisto in 1979, before returning to textbased productions. Inspired by her knowledge of Eastern theatre, Mnouchkine and the Soleil embarked upon a series of Shakespeare plays which gained her renewed renown for her radical, fresh approach, borrowing from Indian and Japanese performance traditions. She experimented further, between 1990 and 1993, with a series of plays based on Greek tragedies called Les Atrides, again exploring existing theatre traditions in a search for a way of conveying a contemporary political message. Mnouchkine’s recent work has also attempted to confront twentieth-century concerns, especially in her collaboration with Hélène Cixous. Her epic plays, sometimes as much as nine hours long, deal with issues as varied as: the legacy of colonialism in Cambodia, as in 1985’s L’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk roi du Cambodge (The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia); the partitioning of India in L’Indiade (1987); and French government corruption in La Ville parjure (Treacherous City), in 1994, into which she incorporates valuable lessons learned from the Soleil’s Greek cycle. In 1995, she directed a memorable production of Tartuffe, giving Molière’s classic contemporary relevance by setting it in the troubled Algeria of the 1990s.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Modiano, Patrick

b. 1947, Boulogne-sur-Seine

Writer

Modiano’s early work—such as La Place de l’étoile (1968) and Les Boulevards de ceinture (The Ring Road) (1972)—was among the first to deal graphically with the period of the Occupation, before it became virtually de rigueur to do so. His screenplay for Malle’s Lacombe Lucien (1973) brought this theme to an even wider audience. His more recent work, such as Une jeunesse (Youth) (1981) or Un cirque passe (A Passing Circus) (1992), may have a more contemporary setting, but is unceasingly worked and reworked by memories of the past.

KEITH READER

Mollet, Guy

b. 1905, Flers, Normandy;

d. 1975, Paris

Politician

As leader of the Parti Socialiste-SFIO between 1946 and 1969, Mollet presided over the decline of a party caught between its unrevised revolutionary doctrine and its reformist practice. As prime minister in 1956 he stepped up the repression of the independence movement in French Algeria. In the same year he joined with the British to organize the ill-fated Suez expedition. He facilitated de Gaulle’s return to power in the wake of the May 1958 crisis, but in the 1960s took his party into electoral agreements with the Communists in order to combat the Gaullists. His absolute loyalty to the traditions of his own party tended to block any significant renewal of the Left.

LAURENCE BELL

Monde, Le

Newspaper

An opinion-forming daily of international repute, Le Monde is the most comprehensive French newspaper, providing in-depth analysis of national news and unparalleled international coverage. An evening paper, it is an indispensable, authoritative source of information for the ruling classes, intellectuals and highly educated sections of the population, and can be relied upon to publish official reports from organizations otherwise neglected by the press.

Austere in appearance, with a dense layout and rare photographs, its tone is sober, restrained, even dry, and its style polished, elevated and analytical. Committed to a noble conception of journalism, Le Monde aspires to balanced, impartial reporting, and does not hesitate to criticize. While independent of political parties, it is the forum for much political debate. It is socially progressive and left of centre, demonstrating a commitment to justice and human rights.

The newspaper was founded by Hubert Beuve-Méry on 18 December 1944 at the instigation of General de Gaulle, who felt France should have a newspaper of reference to replace Le Temps after the war. Beuve-Méry remained associated with the newspaper until his death in 1989. He wrote his editorials under the pseudonym ‘Sirius’, and Le Monde’s reputation for ironic understatement and cultivation of an allusive, indirect style is generally attributed to his influence.

Following an internal crisis in 1951, Le Monde adopted a revolutionary legal framework, giving journalists an important role in decision-making. Priding itself on its financial and political independence, it organized its share ownership to give a stake to founder members, managers, journalists and employees, leaving only a minor shareholding available to external investors. In 1982, prolonged squabbling over who should succeed Jacques Fauvet as director demonstrated the drawbacks of this internal democracy. New appointee André Laurens was quickly replaced by André Fontaine in 1985, for the paper was in crisis, with accumulating deficits and falling readership. Liberation had won over younger readers, and Le Figaro was in the ascendant. Drastic measures were introduced: reductions in staff and salaries, the sale of the famous offices in the rue des Italiens, and an injection of capital from the newly founded readers’ association. The traditional presentation of the paper was revamped, new supplements introduced, and more importance attached to the investigative role (well demonstrated by Edwy Plenel’s reporting of the Rainbow Warrior affair). Fontaine succeeded in rejuvenating the paper and reversing the decline, but costly investment in new printing facilities at Ivry in 1989 brought further financial problems. Jacques Lesourne, appointed director in 1991, presided over increasing difficulties, and was replaced in 1994 by Jean-Marie Colombani, who undertook further innovation, including the introduction of André Laurens as mediator responsible for improving communications between readers and the editorial team.

Through the main newspaper and associated publications—such as Le Monde diplomatique, Le Monde de l’éducation, Le Monde des débuts, Le Monde: dossiers et documents—the title exerts considerable influence. None the less, in 1995 it was only the fourth French daily in terms of circulation, selling 379, 089 copies on average.

PAM MOORES

See also: national press in France

Montand, Yves

b. 1921, Monsumano Alto, Italy;

d. 1991, France

Singer and actor, real name Yvo Livi

Brought up in Marseilles after his parents fled from the Mussolini regime, Yves Montand made his first appearance on stage in 1938, performing songs made famous by Charles Trenet, Maurice Chevalier and Fernandel. Taken under the wings of Édith Piaf in 1944, he developed his own repertoire and emerged as one of France’s most admired stage performers of the postwar period, enjoying unprecedented success above all in the 1950s and early 1960s. Meticulous preparation (set, dance, gesture, modulation of the voice) enabled Montand to perform a whole range of songs, some of which reveal a left-wing political commitment (as do some of the many films he made from the late 1960s, notably Resnais’ La Guerre est finie of 1966). He was married to Simone Signoret.

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

Montparnasse Tower

A fifty-six-storey office tower, 210 m high, the Tour Maine-Montparnasse was built as part of a development project begun in 1958 which replaced the old railway stations of Maine and Montparnasse by a single new station. The tower formed the focal point of a new centre for business and commercial activity and was intended as a triumphal gesture to symbolize the embracing of modernism by the state as represented by the capital city of Paris. Inaugurated in 1973, it had taken four years to build, with a combination of both public and private investment. Opposition to the tower on aesthetic grounds was not openly expressed until it was near completion.

SUSAN COLLARD

See also: architecture

Montrelay, Michèle

birthdate unknown

Psychoanalyst

Author of L’Ombre et le nom: sur la féminité (The Shadow and the Name: On Femininity), published in 1977. This hermetic collection of essays on the subject of feminine difference is deeply indebted to Lacanian thought. It discusses the work of Marguerite Duras, Chantal Chawaf and Jeanne Hyvrard; écriture féminine and feminine discourse/language; psychoanalytic theories of the feminine; and women’s relation to the female/maternal body.

ALEX HUGHES

Morand, Paul

b. 1889, Paris;

d. 1976, Paris

Writer

Morand’s career spanned much of the twentieth century. His novels, short stories and travelogues often reflected his exploits as a diplomat and world traveller. His controversial story collection of 1928, Magie noire (Black Magic), elicited strong reactions from black intellectuals and others concerned about his use of racial stereotypes. Similarly, his virulent satire of the French film industry, France-la-doulce (1934), provoked accusations of anti-semitism. His active participation in the Vichy regime (as an ambassador to Berne, and then as director of the bureau of film censorship) led to his ostracization for a period after the war. He was elected to the Academic Française in 1968.

ELIZABETH EZRA

Moreau, Jeanne

b. 1928, Paris

Actor

A stage and screen actor, Moreau became the icon of the Nouvelle Vague as the new liberated androgynous woman. Her career began in 1947, but her big breakthrough into cinema as a screen name came with her decision to work with Louis Malle—most notoriously in The Lovers (Les Amants) in 1958, where she has an orgasm on screen. She is an international star and has worked with all the major film-makers. Both an intellectual and a feminist—at least in the roles she portrays— Moreau has exemplary depth in the compassion she brings to her performance. Dedicated to fostering new talent, she has also directed her own films, such as Lumière in 1976. Her wide-ranging talent as singer, actor, director, together with her natural performance style and intense curiosity, have brought her roles worldwide.

SUSAN HAYWARD

See also: cinema; stars; theatre

Morin, Edgar

b. 1921, Paris

Sociologist

During the Occupation, Morin entered the Resistance as a Communist, and ended the war in the French army of occupation in Germany, an experience he recorded in his first book, L’An zero de l’Allemagne (Germany Year Zero), published in 1946. From 1949, he disagreed with party policy and was finally expelled from the PCF in 1951 for his opposition to Stalinism; this intellectual itinerary is recounted in his autobiography (Morin 1959). Having become a sociologist, from the early 1950s he published a number of works on culture and cinema, and a variety of social responses to modernization in France. His complex thought may be traced across a wide range of theoretical works encompassing political and social anthropology, culminating in La Méthode, spanning a period of fifteen years.

MARTYN CORNICK

See also: parties and movements

Major works

Morin, E. (1957) Les Stars, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

——(1959) Autocritique, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Republished 1994 with a new preface.

——(1980–95), La Méthode, 4 vols, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Morin, E., Lefort, C. and Castoriadis, C. (1988) Mai 68: La Brèche, Brussels: Complexe (covers May 1968).

motor sport

Motor sport in France is governed by the Fédération Française du Sport Automobile (French Motor Sports Federation) and the sport divides into Formula 1 (and, at a lower level, Formula 3,000 and Formula 3), rallying and endurance races. France stages a Grand Prix as part of the world Formula 1 championships and this attracts huge crowds, but the annual Le Mans twenty-four-hour race has seen a decline in its popularity. Renault engines have been most successful in Formula 1 races, as have French drivers such as Jacques Lafitte and France’s first Formula 1 champion, Alain Prost. France’s bestknown rally, the Paris-Dakar (it involves cars, lorries and motorbikes) attracted much controversy. Motorcycle racing and motocross have seen a resurgence in popularity since the late 1960s.

IAN PICKUP

See also: sport

Mouloudji, Marcel

b. 1922, Paris

Singer-songwriter, playwright, novelist and actor

Having appeared in a number of films and having written plays, poems and novels (winning a Pléïade Prize for Enrico in 1945), Marcel Mouloudji turned to singing and progressively to songwriting from 1950. He is best remembered as the performer of Boris Vian’s Le Déserteur (The Deserter) in 1956, which, during the Algerian war, was banned from broadcasting and the record withdrawn from sale. Having experienced a barren period, Mouloudji made a successful comeback in 1971, ironically singing another anti-militarist song by Vian, Allons z’enfants (Go on, Children).

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

Moustaki, Georges

b. 1934, Alexandria, Egypt

Singer-songwriter, real name Joseph Mustacchi

Having studied at the Lycée Français (French secondary school) in Alexandria, Moustaki went to Paris in 1951. The turning point in his career was his meeting in 1957 with Édith Piaf, for whom he wrote Milord. He later wrote for Serge Reggiani—Sarah and Ma liberté (My Freedom), for instance—before becoming a highly successful performer in his own right: Joseph and Le Métèque (The Wog), for example. His songs reveal a variety of musical influences, ranging from Oriental to South American.

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

multinational companies

A multinational company is one which owns and/or controls resources engaged in production outside the country in which it is based. Companies need to reach a certain critical size before they can operate multinationally, and French industry has lagged behind its competitors in terms of its degree of multinational activity. French companies were relatively small at the beginning of the postwar period; subsequently only a limited number of very large French companies developed. Multinational companies are necessary for the international strength and prestige of a national economy, but their activities are very difficult for the state to control.

JAN WINDEBANK

music festivals

France has a proud tradition of music festivals associated with individual towns: for example, Aix-en-Provence hosts an international music festival (and also film and dance festivals); Dijon has a music festival (in addition to a theatre and wine festival), while Nice puts on a jazz festival; Rennes organizes a rock festival (Les Trans-Musicales) and Strasbourg a music festival. Paris has its own music festival (La Fête de la Musique) in June. However, since Easter 1977, the most significant music festival to promote essentially French song has been held annually in Bourges, a relatively small town situated to the southeast of Orléans and the southwest of Auxerre.

The so-called Printemps de Bourges (Bourges Spring Festival) began as a French version of popular music festivals held in the English-speaking world, such as the now-defunct rock festival on the Isle of Wight in the United Kingdom. The Printemps de Bourges— which was sponsored by the local maison de la culture and was run, as it still is today, by its director Daniel Colling—immediately established itself as the music festival; in no small measure, because it gave the outstanding Charles Trenet the opportunity to make himself known to a whole new generation of music lovers. From modest beginnings in terms of paying spectators (12,000 in the first year but 45,000 by 1980), the festival was able to claim an aggregate audience of something approaching two million as it reached its twentieth birthday. Perceived from the outset as a venue which attracted an audience interested in French song per se, rather than a specific singer-songwriter, the festival has always been an important meeting place, a point of contact and of discussion, as well as offering the opportunity to listen to established stars (Trenet, Guy Béart, Georges Moustaki, Claude Nougaro and Maxime Le Forestier, for example), those in the process of establishing themselves (Renaud and Alain Souchon being the most enduring examples), and others who were looking for a breakthrough (Francis Lalanne, for example).

The Bourges Spring Festival confirms recent trends in French song and in the changing nature of music venues since the heyday of the café-concert, the revue and the music hall. While relatively intimate variations of the cabaret and the larger music halls have long since lost their mass appeal (the Paris Olympia being a notable exception), festivals like the one at Bourges and also single concerts in much bigger arenas such as Bercy or the Palais des Congrès (both in Paris) now attract numbers of spectators which were inconceivable, even in the 1950s, to performances which are heavily reliant on the new entertainment technology. What is also apparent is that French audiences now spend more time listening to performers on stage than they spend singing along with—or indeed instead of—the singer or singers in question (though it is still common for live audiences to join in the singing of the biggest hits of the artists concerned). It is the continued success of music festivals such as the Printemps de Bourges, and, indeed, of the increasingly influential Francofolies (a music festival held in La Rochelle in July), which helps to guarantee the ongoing public attendance at live concerts in an age often dominated by television and pop videos.

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

music industry

The music industry in France has, as elsewhere, undergone major changes in the wake of the technological revolution and the creation of the worldwide market. If the microphone, the talkies, 78 rpm records, microgroove records, audio cassettes, CDs and video cassettes in turn signalled new stages in audio and audiovisual recording, successive changes in popular musical fashion which originated in France and (more often) abroad have seen the growth of an industry, aimed predominantly at the young, that makes overnight millionaires of performers whose careers are often very ephemeral. The globalization of the music industry saw the arrival—and rapid domination—in France of multinational companies at the expense of more modest indigenous ones. By the mid-1970s, Phonogram and EMI were outstripping French firms such as Carrère, Vogue and Barclay where the combined sales of singles and LPs were concerned. Symptomatic of the sea change the industry was undergoing was the takeover of the Barclay label by the Polygram Corporation in 1979 at a time when CBS was making great inroads in the market. Since then, Sony and Virgin are two of the multinationals claiming their own huge slice of the market (and the Virgin Megastore in Paris, for example, can hold its own against the indigenous FNAC). If an established French singer such as Jean Ferrat can still record on his own label (Bisques Temey—a combination of his own real name, Tenenbaum, and that of his artistic director, Gérard Meys), it is significant that the distribution of CDs is carried out by Sony Music. Further examples of the domination of the multinationals are easy to find: Gainsbourg’s CDs carry the Polygram label, Renaud’s that of Virgin, while those of Francis Cabrel and Patricia Kaas are labelled ‘Columbia’, which is ‘the exclusive trademark of Sony Music Entertainment me’.

If the commercial side of the music industry is now firmly in the hands of the multinationals, French song has for many years had to face the threat to its position in French popular culture posed by Anglo-Saxon music. From the time of the music hall, when a guest star was known as a vedette américaine, through the big-band era to that of rock and roll, punk, heavy metal and rap, English-language songs have had great success in France. The situation on the airwaves was deemed to be so critical in 1993 (the managing director of Skyrock had admitted that 85 per cent of the songs his radio station broadcast were in English) that the Pelchat amendment imposed a minimum quota of 40 per cent—effective from January 1996—for songs in the French language. Since the quota came into effect, one only has to peruse the programme listings for the M6 television channel to realize that, if one wishes to listen to songs in French, the middle of the night is usually the best time. Despite such ruses, and despite the significant presence at music venues in France of stars from abroad, French song continues to flourish, albeit for a discerning minority.

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

music venues

Changing tastes and the introduction of new technology have radically changed the size and nature of music venues in France since World War II. The café-concert had already been largely replaced by the cabaret, while music halls had declined dramatically in numbers with the advent of the cinema. However, the late 1950s and 1960s saw the fashion of the Left Bank cabaret in Paris where, in usually cramped and smoke-filled surroundings, a predominantly young, intellectual and often leftwing audience was able to listen to emerging talents, such as Jean Ferrat, Hugues Aufray, Serge Gainsbourg and Juliette Gréco; older artists such as Léo Ferré had been performing there since the 1940s. These cabarets, situated in the Latin Quarter and in St-Germain-des- Prés, often had evocative or slightly exotic names: Le Tabou, La Rose Rouge, L’Échelle de Jacob, L’Écluse, La Méthode, La Colombe, La Contrescarpe, Le Cheval d’Or, and so on. The songs of the Left Bank cabarets were often poetic, intellectual and anti-establishment. The cramped surroundings encouraged the use of the piano and, increasingly, the guitar for musical accompaniment.

Variety theatres and music halls were declining in number after the war but three of the most famous—Les Trois Baudets, Bobino and the Olympia—witnessed concerts by almost all the big names of French song of the period. Today, the Olympia (reconstructed in 1997) is the one remaining traditional venue which attracts the biggest stars, both French and foreign; the rebuilt Bobino still welcomes performers of lesser stature. Many cabarets still thrive in Paris, on the Left and the Right Bank, as do establishments which produce extravagant revues such as the Moulin Rouge, the Crazy Horse, L’Éléphant Bleu and La Belle Époque. Chansonniers (politically motivated singer-comedians who specialize in satire) can still be seen in such establishments as Le Caveau de la République and Les Deux Ânes. For jazz enthusiasts there are many cabarets specializing in traditional and modern jazz, while lovers of classical music are not limited to concert halls: many Parisian churches stage classical concerts (for example, the Église St-Germain-des-Prés, the Église St-Julien-le-Pauvre and the Église de la Madeleine). Opera lovers can listen to performances in such venues as the Opera Comique and the huge Opéra National de Paris-Bastille.

Technological innovations have also meant that popular music concerts can now be staged in much larger venues than was possible in the past and, after the pioneering concerts mounted at the Palais des Congrès, for example, the huge multisports complex at Bercy is capable of housing some 14,000 or so spectators. Similar concerts are staged at venues in the provinces (such as the enormous Palais des Sports in Toulouse). Much more modestly sized municipal halls offer concerts in provincial towns, many of which host their own music festivals.

Visitors to Paris may peruse the full list of music venues in the capital and the surrounding area by consulting L’Officiel des spectacles, a modestly priced weekly publication on sale at news-stands.

IAN PICKUP

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Morin, Edgar

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