R

racism/anti-semitism

Racism has changed considerably over the last fifty years. The major transformation is the change from modern forms of racism, underpinned by the concept of the biological hierarchy of races, to postmodern forms, underpinned by the concept of cultural difference.

Since the war, scientific theories of the hierarchy of races have been discredited and ‘race’ itself, as a means of categorizing human groups and understanding human behaviour, has been delegitimized. However, the delegitimization of ‘race’ has not brought about the disappearance of racism. Today, racism in France tends to take the form of the stigmatization of groups defined in cultural rather than biological terms, and through the discourse of their difference and incompatibility, rather than their inferiority and their need to be assimilated or eradicated.

This change can be related to the crisis of modernity in contemporary Western democracies brought about by the growing awareness of the relativism of Western values, the development of post-industrial and post-national forms of organization of society, the globalization of communications and culture, and the rise in new forms of identity formation based on ethnicity. In France, the crisis is perceived as a breakdown in the traditional processes of integration (through schools, trade unions, political parties, etc.) leading to the fragmentation of society and the creation of a new ‘space’ for the clash of ethnic/cultural particularisms (Wieviorka 1991). In this climate of cultural relativism, the notion of difference is used both for the purposes of individual and group identity, and for the stigmatization of others.

Probably the two most significant examples of contemporary racism are anti-semitism and anti-immigrant racism. In general, antisemitism today differs from its modern genocidal form in that it involves an increase in symbolic violence aimed at cultural signs of Jewishness. Hence, the increase in recent years in the desecration of Jewish graves (the mostpublicized example of which was the incident in Carpentras in May 1990), the desecration of synagogues, anti-semitic graffiti and tracts, and revisionist history denying the Holocaust.

The same might be said of the racism associated with new forms of immigration from North Africa, for here too visible signs of cultural difference (headscarves, mosques, ritual slaughter) are the object of racial violence. In this case, cultural difference is conflated with that of national difference: nations are viewed as culturally homogeneous entities whose distinctive identity is threatened by mixing and infiltration. The debates around immigration and national identity are the major areas through which this racism is expressed. Clearly, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National is the most prominent exponent of this form of racism, but the ideas are not confined to the fringes of French political and social life.

The use of code words as a means of stigmatizing certain groups (immigration, national preference, cultural difference, and so on) is indicative of the shift in contemporary racist terminology and practice. It has been called a neo-racism or a ‘racism without races’ (Balibar and Wallerstein 1988). This has posed innumerable problems for anti-racist organizations. First, the right to difference (le droit a la difference) was once their own slogan for challenging ethnocentric, assimilationist and racist practices, and has since been turned against them by the New Right for the ends of separation and exclusion of particular groups. Second, their attempt to demonize Le Pen by equating his ideas with Fascism fails to ring true when his ‘respectable’ discourse of cultural/ national difference contains few traces of Fascist ideology.

Although the concrete results of racist action are (today as in the past) discrimination and violence, its underlying forms are profoundly related to contemporary social and political processes.

MAX SlLVERMAN

radio (private/free)

The law of 9 November 1981 authorized the creation of private local radio (radios libres) in France, so heralding the end of the state monopoly of broadcasting. President Mitterrand’s blow for freedom was intended to encourage non-profit-making local associations, hence the initial prohibition of advertising. The law of 1 August 1984 changed all this by belatedly allowing la pub. By 1989, there were 3,000 private local radio stations in France, transmitting on FM. They have become the victims of their own commercial success, however, and have gradually organized themselves into national networks or been taken over by larger concerns like RTL or Europe 1. With very few exceptions, while remaining private, they can no longer be considered very free or local.

These new private radio stations are specialist (mainly in popular music) and increasingly eating into the general-interest (both public and private) audiences. NRJ has become France’s third most popular radio station (according to 1995 estimates), with an 11 per cent share. Originally targeting the 15– 34 age range, it has managed to attract older listeners by diversifying its offerings (e.g. quiz programmes). Three other privately owned stations of a similar nature also attract over 5 per cent of the national audience: Fun Radio (France’s sixth most popular station), very much for the teenager; Nostalgie (seventh) targeting the 25–45 year-olds, offering game shows and appealing very much to the emotions; Skyrock (ninth), the noisiest and most provocative of these music stations. Another successful private station is Chérie FM (eleventh), which targets adults who like tuneful and romantic music. In twelfth position comes RFM, which concentrates on traditional favourites such as Piaf, Brel and Brassens.

The other privately owned FM network stations in France cover a variety of interests. Fourvière, based in Lyon, is an ecumenical Christian radio station. Montmartre targets the over-50s and specializes in unashamedly oldfashioned French songs; it has recently been taken over by RMC (Radio Monte-Carlo, the périphérique station created during World War II, occupying tenth place in the national listening league table). Radio Classique specializes in classical music. TSF targets those who enjoy listening to a wide range of music and songs, from traditional French songs to folk and hard rock. Finally, mention should be made of Sud Radio, the smallest of the non-specialized radios périphériques, transmitting from Andorra, but with studios in Toulouse. Created in 1939, it has had a chequered career.

In 1989, to encourage genuine private local radio, the government introduced legislation offering state subsidies to stations complying with CSA regulations and in receipt of an advertising income not exceeding 20 per cent of their turnover. On a less positive note, more recent government legislation (January 1996) insists that private popular music stations (NRJ, Skyrock, RFM, Europe 2, RTL 2) must broadcast a minimum of 40 per cent of francophone songs, in a vain attempt to stem the tide of Anglo-Saxon culture.

ALAN PEDLEY

radio (state-owned)

About 20 per cent of the total radio audience in France listens to some of the 466,000 hours of programmes broadcast each year by Radio France, the state-owned company. It was created in 1974 when the ORTF was divided into seven autonomous organizations. Although the state officially enjoyed a broadcasting monopoly until 1982, a number of francophone radio stations, known collectively as radios périphériques, operating from outside France’s frontiers (notably RTL, Europe 1 and RMC), had been available to the bulk of the French listening public through long-wave transmission since the 1940s and 1950s. Radio has thus been a highly competitive business in France for a long time. Since the creation of local radio stations, both public and private, brought about by the decentralizing policies of the early 1980s, competition has become even keener. The overall tendency is indeed increasingly a move away from generalist, national (whether state-owned or private) radio, to localized, specialized stations.

Radio France, whose chairman and managing director (currently Jean Boyon) is appointed by the CSA (Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel), runs several centrally operated stations from its Paris base. It is financed almost entirely (88.5 per cent in 1992) by the licence fee, la redevance (700F in 1997). Commercial advertising is not allowed on stateowned radio in France, but collective and public- interest advertising is authorized and contributed 4.6 per cent of Radio France’s 1992 revenue. Its headquarters in the impressive Maison de la Radio houses sales and information services, as well as a Museum of Radio. Its main mission is to provide a public service for the French listening public, through entertainment and information. It also supports two national orchestras, the Orchestre National de France and Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, as well as a choir, the Choeur de Radio France. It has a full-time personnel of over 3,100, 14 per cent of whom are journalists.

Radio France’s flagship, enjoying 11.2 per cent of the national audience according to a recent estimate, is France-Inter. Created in 1947 as Paris-Inter, it assumed its present title in 1964. It is a general-interest station, offering a wide range of programmes, each of which has its regular daily or weekly slot. A daily dose of satirical humour is offered at 11 a.m. (French time) on weekdays by Rien a cirer; Le Telephone sonne provides informed discussion (with listener participation) of an issue of current concern at 7.20 p.m. on weekdays; Les Guetteurs du siècle, an in-depth interview of a personality, is hosted by Jacques Chancel every Sunday at 6 p.m.; Le Masque et la plume offers a lively debate on the arts on Sunday evenings at 10 p.m.; En avant la zizique champions the French song just after midnight on weekdays. A number of these programmes (in addition to Inter-Treize, a daily news programme) are broadcast in the presence of a live audience. France-Inter broadcasts twenty-four hours a day on long wave (ensuring good reception well beyond the national frontiers), medium wave and FM stereo.

While France-Inter’s audience is in slow decline (down 2.4 per cent over the period 1989–95), France Info (FM only), a nonstop news service created in 1987, has been recently showing a healthy annual increase in its audience (up 2.1 per cent 1994–5). The first such station to be set up in Europe, it currently attracts over 10 per cent of the total national radio audience. Like its British counterpart Radio 5, it also offers sports coverage.

France Culture (FM stereo, twenty-four hours a day), created in 1963, lives up to its name, offering intellectually challenging programmes to seriously-minded listeners. It broadcasts six news bulletins each day, ten hours of radio drama each week, along with debates, discussions, documentaries and news magazines. France Musique (FM stereo, twenty-four hours a day), also created in 1963, offers mainly classical music but also jazz, interspersed with a good deal of discussion. The station broadcasts a thousand concerts each year and five news bulletins per day.

Radio Bleue (medium wave, 7a.m.–7 p.m.), created in 1980, targets the over-50s. Its song output is reputedly 100 per cent French. FIP (FM and medium wave, 7 p.m.–4 p.m. or 6 p.m.) targets the motorist and offers music, traffic and weather news and urgent personal messages. Created in 1971, this station originally served only the Paris region; in 1992, it became a national network. Formerly known as Victor, France Culture Europe (FM, twentyfour hours a day) broadcasts via satellite (Eutelsat 11-F6) to the whole of Europe and is a mixture of mainly France Culture (75 per cent) and France Musique (20 per cent). Hector also broadcasts via satellite (1 a.m.–7 a.m.) and carries France Musique’s programmes. Finally, Sorbonne Radio France (medium wave) broadcasts university lectures during term time from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. The best guide to radio programmes, wavelengths and FM frequencies in France is the weekly audiovisual magazine, Télérama.

Radio France also runs thirty-nine local radio stations, created in the 1980s, to compete with the local private stations, the radios libres (mainly ex-pirate radio stations) authorized by the newly elected Socialist government in their Loi sur la communication audiovisuelle du 29 juillet 1982. Three pilot stations were initially set up in 1980: Fréquence Nord (Lille), Radio Mayenne (Laval) and Melun FM. The remaining thirty-six were created in the years 1982–8, conveniently supporting the Socialists’ decentralization reforms introduced in 1981. There are four regional programme-production workshops, at Nantes, Bordeaux, Nice and Strasbourg. Administration is also distributed over a number of regional centres, namely at Avignon, Besançon, Nantes, Bordeaux and Paris. The thirty-nine stations broadcast a variety of programmes, from soap operas to documentaries. Many of these regional productions are later broadcast on all the other stations. Many programmes are of an interactive nature. The stations function twenty-four hours a day on FM, geographically covering about 50 per cent of the country.

ALAN PEDLEY

rap

Appearing in France in 1983, rap has become an important trend on the popular music scene, but was only heard on the airwaves in 1993, when Je danse le Mia by IAM became a huge success.The root of this art form is the hip-hop culture in the United States and suggests an oppressed black minority. In France, rap could not really have existed without the presence of black and beur immigrants. If it was originally a protest song against the injustices of urban society, French rap has developed another dimension: fun and pun.

GÉRARD POULET

Rappeneau, Jean-Paul

b. 1932, Auxerre

Director and scriptwriter

He began his career as a director, but spent the 1960s mostly as a scriptwriter. Two of his six 1960s films were scripted with Malle, including Zazie dans le métro (1960). He turned to directing again in the 1970s, making films with Belmondo (Les Mariés de l’an II in 1970), Montand (Le Sauvage in 1975) and Adjani (Tout feu, tout flamme in 1982). He made one of the best sellers of the 1990s, Cyrano de Bergerac (1990), with Depardieu, followed by another heritage film in 1995, The Horseman on the Roof (Le Hussard sur le toit), with Binoche.

PHIL POWRIE

See also: cinema

Redonnet, Marie

b. 1948, France

Playwright and writer

Having begun to write in the late 1970s, after the death of her father, Redonnet is the author of plays, short stories and a series of novels, including: the trilogy, Splendid Hôtel (1986), Forever Valley (1987) and Rose Mélie Rose (1987); Silsie (1990); and Nevermore (1994). The denuded, pared-down style of her writing and its staging of strange, fairy-tale worlds have caused it to be likened to that of Samuel Beckett. Key themes within Redonnet’s work are identity and maturation—especially in relation to women—and inter-/intragenerational relationships.

ALEX HUGHES

See also: women’s/lesbian writing

regional economic development

The uneven economic development of France’s regions and the growing concentration of population and wealth in the Paris region after World War II brought policy changes, grouped under the concept of aménagement du territoire (town and country planning), which aims at ‘re-equilibrating’ the various regions. These policies had mixed results, although they helped in directing the flow of investment and contributed to a greater awareness of regional issues. Recently, regional planning has found a new lease of life, because of the need to organize relations better between central government, regional authorities and Europe.

In 1947, J.F.Gravier’s book, Paris et le désert français, had a considerable impact, showing the widening gap between the Paris region, increasingly populous and wealthy, and those rural areas relying on family agriculture and small scale rural industries (such as most of the Massif Central, the Provence back-country, and large areas in the west of France), losing their younger generations to rural exodus and slowly dying out. Later, the geographical distribution of economic activities and, especially, industry appeared to change things dramatically. A number of regions with older, heavy industries started to decline. New areas of economic growth were attracting investments, population and infrastructure, with large regional capitals such as Toulouse or Grenoble acting as magnets. The crisis from the mid-1970s accentuated regional imbalances. Some old industrial regions went into terminal crisis, and some rural areas (for instance, in the south of the Massif Central in regions such as the Lozère) were close to becoming real deserts. Indeed, the Paris/Île-de- France region has twice the gross product per person per year of peripheral regions such as Corsica and the Pas de Calais, with considerable differentials also as far as unemployment rates, education levels, etc. are concerned.

In the face of this uneven socioeconomic development, regional planning has been organized since the early 1960s around an autonomous agency (DATAR) and regional commissions, sometimes the responsibility of a minister.

Contrary to economic planning, regional planning is still a tool of public policy. The 1982 Defferre law on decentralization gave local authorities new political powers, with wider budgetary and investment responsibilities, requiring co-ordination with central government, especially through regional planning. European economic integration has a growing impact on regional development: because some peripheral areas (such as Brittany or the Pyrenees) were left out of the richer, fast-growing middle Europe, this led regional planners to establish strategies, and devote resources to a better integration in Europe, complementing the European Union’s own structural policies for poorer areas. Regional planning has also been drafted since the mid-1980s into implementing policies against social exclusion evident in many deprived urban areas.

FRANÇOIS NECTOUX

regional music

The postwar cliché on French cultural life in general and musical enterprises in particular was encapsulated by the formula, Paris et le désert français (Paris and the French cultural desert). If, in terms of creation, Paris remains the centre of attraction, a systematic policy of cultural regionalization since 1958 under various governments (whether conservative or Socialist) has eventually brought about, with various degrees of success, some significant changes in the musical life of the regions, evident in terms of creativity and diffusion. Bridging the cultural gap between Paris and the regions was an essential element of the aménagement du territoire (town and country planning). Under Giscard d’Estaing (1974–81) and Mitterrand (1981–95) French cultural practices changed towards a greater consumption of all kinds of music (classical, opera, jazz, rock and pop and chansons) and the capitals of the twenty-five regions became cultural centres of excellence. As far as music is concerned, some had a greater impact than others in certain genres. But it is as if every regional capital has been concerned with furnishing itself with an original cultural symbol of identification: Bourges and its ‘Printemps’ (spring festival) and La Rochelle and its ‘Francofolies’ (French extravaganza) are the two main events in the domain of rock, pop and variétés in France.

Opera in the provinces was revived in the 1970s by Rolf Liebermann. Twelve towns host this symbol of highbrow culture, and Bordeaux, Lyon, Toulouse, Strasbourg and Nancy outshine some Parisian productions with their creations. Rock has its capitals sometimes unknown to a wider public: Rennes, Valenciennes, Nancy. Singers like Nougaro and Cabrel have been able to record their soundtracks and vidéoclips in Toulouse (at the Condorcet Studio and, after 1984, the Polygone). As far as classical music is concerned, the models have been the regional orchestras of Lille (with Jean-Claude Casadesus) and Toulouse (with Michel Plasson). From the 1970s, jazz saw the emergence of numerous regional associations defined as centres of creation and diffusion and subsidized as such; some of these musical co-operatives have been active since then, such as the ARFI (Lyon) and the GRIM (Marseille), while some are seen more as teaching centres (the JAM in Montpellier and Caen Jazz Action). Each region develops its own voluntarist policy for the development of all forms of music, attempting to avoid the inherent danger of insularity. At the end of the 1990s, Paris is no longer surrounded by a cultural desert and some might argue that it is now only the first of the provinces.

Regional music could also be understood as the expression of the musical cultural consciousness of the regions, involving the re-creation from a traditional heritage, of music for a modern audience. We must refer to ‘real’ regions rather than their administrative divisions (e.g. the Occitan, Catalan and Basque territories, Brittany, Aquitaine, Auvergne, Limousin, Berry, Provence and Picardy.) Then we get into folk-music territory.

GÉRARD POULET

regional press in France

Only a quarter of the 10 million daily newspapers produced in France are Paris-based; only 10 of the nation’s 75 daily titles are produced in the capital. The relative strength of the provincial press seems to run counter to the traditionally centralized nature of French institutions. The balance between national and regional dailies has been shifting slowly but constantly, during the twentieth century, away from a Parisian to a provincial dominance. Just before World War II, parity had been reached, each sector providing about 5.5 million copies per day. By the 1990s, while the number of copies of regional dailies had risen to over 7 million, the total of Paris dailies had dropped to well under 3 million.

In a situation of generally declining newspaper readership, this provincial success story appears all the more remarkable. Provincial media consumers in France perhaps need the more locally focused regional papers to counteract the impact of the largely national and international bias of television. Another factor worth mentioning is that the more densely populated regions of France are, the less their inhabitants read. This tendency is demonstrated by the fact that, whereas 52.8 per cent of the inhabitants of the provinces read a daily paper, the figure for the Paris region is only 35.4 per cent.

Apart from Le Parisien, which produces a ‘national’ edition, Aujourd’hui, the capital’s papers are all-embracing, single-edition publications. By contrast, many provincial dailies publish several differentiated local editions. Quest-France, for example, publishes forty editions. This flexibility gives regional papers a distinct advantage over Paris papers, catering for the never-satiated appetite of the French for faits-divers and the rubrique des chiens écrasés (human interest stories).

Three other factors account for the relatively healthy state of the regional press in France. First, production processes, both in terms of composition and printing, have tended to be more technologically developed in the provinces. Regional papers tend, for example, to be far more colourful than Paris papers. Second, provincial papers have suffered less than their Parisian counterparts from the decline in advertising revenue caused by the ever-increasing share that television has been claiming over the past few years. The more specifically targeted adverts in local papers continue to provide a regular income. Finally, the average price of a provincial daily is considerably lower than the typical Paris daily: Quest-France, for example, only costs about two thirds of the price of Le Monde and Le Figaro.

Whereas only 8 Paris-based dailies sell more than 100,000 copies, 19 regional dailies have circulations in that range. By far the leading title is Quest-France, based in Rennes and like so many French dailies founded in August 1944, which not only outsells all other provincial dailies, but all Parisian ones too, with over 750,000 copies. This paper’s penetration extends well beyond the borders of the old province of Brittany and benefits from the fact that it serves a region boasting the highest level of newspaper readership in France (62.4 per cent). While far behind Quest-France, seven other titles nevertheless have circulation figures of over 250,000: La Voix du Nord (based in Lille, founded in 1941); Sud-Ouest (Bordeaux, 1944), which took over La Petite Gironde (founded in the nineteenth century but, like all other papers (whether in Paris or in the provinces) which continued to appear under Germany occupation, forced to close after the Liberation); Le Progrès (Lyon, 1859), Le Dauphiné Libéré (Grenoble, 1944) and La Montagne (Clermont-Ferrand, 1919).

Three other titles top the 200,000 mark: L’Est Républican (Nancy, 1889); La Dépêche du Midi (Toulouse, 1870) and Les Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace (Strasbourg, 1877), which enjoys the unique distinction of being read by an absolute majority of the inhabitants of the region it serves. The following eight titles have circulations of between 100,000 and 200,000: Le Républicain Lorrain (Metz, 1919); Midi libre (Montpellier, 1944), Le Télégramme (Morlaix, 1944); Le Provençal (Marseille, 1944); L’Alsace (Mulhouse); Paris-Normandie (Rouen, 1944); L’Union (Reims) and Le Counter de l’ouest (Angers).

This overall diversity of titles does not mean, however, that there is any degree of choice for the individual reader in any given locality. Very few towns in fact offer a choice of regional daily titles. Thanks to mergers, takeovers or closures due to ever-increasing problems caused by a variety of factors (diminishing advertising revenues, increasing production costs, increased prices deterring would-be purchasers leading to falling sales, strikes, distribution problems and competition from television as a provider of information and entertainment), the number of provincial titles has fallen from 175 to 65 in fifty years.

Readership figures can obviously only be estimates, but in most cases they can be calculated as being three (or occasionally four) times the circulation figures. In addition to the nonpurchasing readers in families and workplaces, it must be noted that most cafés in France make free copies of local papers available for their clients.

As for the identity of readers, the following differences are worth noting: provincial papers attract a higher female readership (49 per cent) than Parisian papers (41 percent); provincial papers also attract a higher proportion of readers aged 50 and over (46.5 per cent) than Parisian papers (35.3 per cent) and a low proportion of readers aged 35 and below (28.6 per cent as opposed to 36.6 per cent).

It is worth making a final point with regard to the distribution of newspapers in France: they are virtually never delivered to readers’ homes by newsagents (although of course they can be obtained by subscription through the post). Distribution difficulties probably account for the scarcity of Sunday papers both in Paris (two titles only) and in the provinces, where only twenty-two titles are available, selling a total of just over 3 million copies.

ALAN PEDLEY

regional writing: Breton

The dominant current in literature in Breton, from the 1920s to the 1970s, has been the Skol Walarn, the brainchild and lifelong struggle of Roparz Hemon, associated with his review, Gwalarn, and its successor Al Liamm. Hemon denounced clichés of sacrifice and faith, the stereotype of a primitive, rural, Catholic other. He called for a national literature open to the modern world, a literature modern in all respects, that would make Breton worthy of being part and parcel of European culture. It would have to be written not in imitation of village speech but in a literary form intelligible to all educated readers of Breton, a highculture tongue capable of functioning in all the ways that French is wont to do.

Fañch Elies (Abeozen), Hemon and Maodez Glanndour are the leading poets. Hemon’s Barzhonegoù (Poems) contain noble meditations on the destiny of the warrior and the poet who struggle for the eternal Brittany. Glanndour composes powerful, complex, rich Christian verse which evokes the simple, quotidian reality of Breton life, always suffused with the sacred, and calls for overcoming worldly deception through a quest of the spirit to God. Anjela Duval, a peasant who began to write in her fifties, in Kan an douar (Song of the Earth) and Traoñ an dour (The Dale of Water), displays comparable mastery in portraying Dinglichkeit. The ‘1960s poets’ created a literature of postmodernism: a turning away from high art towards a more popular register in texts committed to the politics of rebellion. Paol Keineg’s Barzhonegoù-trakt (Tract Poems), Mojennoù gwir (True Stories), and Iwerzhon ar C’hreistez, Iwerzhon an Hanternoz (Southern Ireland, Northern Ireland) contain dense, powerful, nightmare evocations of insanity and physical torture, the poet’s lot and the lot of his fellow Celts.

In the immediate postwar years, the leading novelists were Youenn Drezen, whose 1940 Itron Varia Garmez (Our Lady of Carmel) is a strike novel in the line of Zola, the hero of which is a would-be artist who cannot complete his sculpture, held back by political injustice and his own illness. The three-volume 1972–4 Skol-louarn Veig Trebern (Little Hervé Trebern Plays Hookey) recounts in the picaresque mode the adventures of two 8-year-olds, in about 1910, who enjoy a month-long truancy from school. Hemon wrote Nenn Jani in the realist mode, telling of little people leading little lives in Brest; Tangi Kerviler in the fantastic and utopian register, and Mari-Vorgan (The Mermaid), a powerful, symbolic evocation of a ship’s doctor (the unreliable homodiegetic narrator) who goes mad, under the sway of passion for a hallucinatory creature who may or may not be real. More recently, Per Denez plays with narrative structures and furthers a trend towards something approaching magical realism in the 1979 Diougan Gwenc’hlan (Gwenc’hlan’s Prophecy), a tale of a modern man possessed by the ghost of an ancestor, and Blue Like Blue Eyes Which Were Not My Own (Glas evel daoulagad c’hlas na oant ket ma re), a powerful story of murder, obsession and madness.

The theatre has traditionally played a vital role in Brittany. Jarl Priel and Hemon composed a number of plays. The most brilliant dramatist, however, is Pierre-Jakez Hélias, famous for his ‘testimony’ The Horse of Pride (Le Cheval d’orgueil). Hélias’s dramas, first performed and published in French, include finely crafted demystifications of rural life such as Mevel ar Gosker (The Top Hand of Kosker Farm) and Katrina Lenn-zu (Katrina of the Black Pond), and poetic visions for today of history and legend, like An Isild a-heul (The Second Iseult).

WILLIAM CALIN

regional writing: Occitan

Literature in Occitan (Provençal) since World War II is of a quality and richness unequalled since the age of the troubadours. The leading writers from southern France have, in general, adhered to the programme enunciated by the Institut d’Estudis Occitans (Institute for Occitan Studies) associated with the review Oc. In brief, the new writing is grounded in modernity: realist and post-realist novels of modern life; hard, arcane poetry in the line of Valéry and Perse; and a serious modern theatre treating serious questions in a modern way. Implied is the repudiation of folklore and nostalgia for a Catholic, rural past, the latter associated with the Provençal epigones who claim the heritage of Mistral and the Felibrige.

Two of the leading poets are René Nelli and Bernard Manciet. Nelli’s 1981 Òbra poëtica occitana (Poetical Works in Occitan) is a meditation on fin’ amor (courtly love) and Catharism, with the accompanying alienation, longing and terror, wrought in a new Mediterranean classicism, a fusion of antiquity and the high art of the troubadours. Manciet’s masterpiece is the 1989 Enterrament a Sabres (Burial in Sabres), a magnificent, baroque evocation of an old lady in the village, one-half Gascon notable, one-half local witch, and her fierce erotic and intellectual duel with God, an encounter highlighting the village, the Gascon people, and the history of the race. Since 1968, one trend has been a more simple, populist, rhetorical and politically committed ‘Poetry of Decolonization’, best represented in the work of Yves Rouquette and his brother, Jean Larzac. Larzac, an ordained priest, declaims against French capitalism and Paris; he also utters, in powerful sacred verse, his desire for the absent God Unknown.

By general accord, Jean Boudou (Joan Bodon) is the best of the novelists. La Grava sul camin (The Gravel on the Roadbed) tells, in the behaviourist mode of Hemingway or Camus, the botched life of a young farm labourer returned from the camps in Germany. No less powerful is the first person story of an intellectual dying of cancer in Lo Libre dels grands jorns (The Book of the Last Days). In this novel and in La Santa Estèla del Centenari (The Felibrige Centennial), however, Boudou breaks away from realism into a more fantastic mode comparable to magical realism. Similarly, Robert Lafont, after Vida de Joan Larsinhac (The Life of Jean Larsignac), a stark tale of urban realism, in L’Icòna dins l’iscla (The Icon on the Island), writes a futurist postnuclear holocaust fantasy, recounting the horrible life and death of some of the last Europeans on a Greek island near Crete. His masterpiece, nevertheless, is the 1983 La Festa (The Festival), a two-volume nouveau roman located in both the eighteenth and twentieth centuries and spanning much of European topography and history. The youngest novelist is Jean-Claude Forêt, whose 1990 La Peira d’asard (The Stone of Chance), also a form of nouveau roman, is composed in three distinct languages: modern literary Languedocian, spoken northern Auvergnat and standard medieval Occitan.

The theatre remains inevitably the most difficult genre to conquer in a minority language. Lafont is the leading dramatist, with a number of fine plays in Occitan, such as La Loba (The She-Wolf), retelling the story of the troubadour Peire Vidal, and others in French and Occitan, dramas in the modern style, like La Croisade (The Crusade), with a political message.

Writers in the Provençal or Felibrige or Mistralian school include the poet Max- Philippe Delavouët, author of the five-volume Pouèmo, and the novelists Bernard Giély and Charles Galtier.

WILLIAM CALIN

regionalism

Regionalism has been a constant element of French political and cultural discourse for the past half-century, reflecting a long-standing opposition between capital and provinces, between governing and governed. It is also the focus for an unresolved debate about the dictates of national unity and the demands for individual and local freedoms.

It is a commonplace of modern French history that successive governments have regarded the concept of la république une et indivisible as sacrosanct. Whether its purpose was to weld together the constituent parts of a country as geographically, culturally and linguistically diverse as France or to assert national identity in the face of the monolithic power blocks of the United States and the Soviet Union, the indivisible Republic symbolized the coming-together of state and nation.

The legacy of historic centralization, brought about by the age-old concentration of political and economic power in Paris, can be found in the rigidly hierarchical administrative system founded after the Revolution of 1789. The establishment of the commune as the basic unit of French administration, together with the département as the main territorial division, formed the basis of a centralized system of administration which changed little until well after the end of World War II. The appointment to each département of a préfet as the authoritative representative of central government imposed a quasi-military discipline on the relationship between the capital and the provinces, ensuring that the term administration locale was more appropriate than gouvernement local.

The stability of a predominantly rural population meant that, until World War II, there was little pressure for change. From 1945 onwards, however, unprecedented population growth, together with industrial advances, began to lay bare the uneven economic development of the provinces. In the thirty years (les trente glorieuses) from 1946 to 1975, the population grew from 40.5 million to 52.75 million. The dramatic increases in living standards during this period, however, tended to mask regional imbalances. As the period of expansion drew to a close in the mid-1970s, the first signs of a determination to proclaim regional identities, as opposed to a single national identity, began to emerge. Regions such as Brittany, underindustrialized and with a surplus of farm labour, and the south, suffering from foreign competition in agriculture and with declining traditional industries, were those in which the impetus for change and the assertion of regional identity were most in evidence.

The first concerted initiatives for regional reform were private ventures: the groupingtogether of local chambers of commerce such as the Comité d’Étude et de Liaison des Intérêts Bretons (CELIB) in 1952 was widely imitated, and was rapidly followed by the official recognition of Comités d’Expansion Économique. The impact of these comités was sufficient to bring about a new territorial division, superimposed on the departmental system, of twenty-two circonscriptions d’action régionale, eventually to be called, simply, regions.

It is clear that the impetus behind the changes, which were not accompanied by any attempt to democratize local decision-making, was essentially economic, and gave currency to the phrase l’aménagement du territoire (town and country planning). However, the period since the mid-1950s has also seen the resurgence of a belief in regional identity. Geographically peripheral regions such as Brittany, Alsace, Provence, the Basque country and Corsica have seen a ground swell of support for, and pride in, local and regional values and traditions.

The failure of the state to respond to the aspirations which such values represent was perhaps one element of the social and political turbulence of May 1968. De Gaulle’s failure to advance the cause of regional reform in the referendum-cum-plebiscite of 1969 led not only to his own political demise but to a decade of inaction. However, following François Mitterrand’s victory in the presidential election of 1981, and the decision to place regional reform at the heart of his legislative programme, the pace of reform quickened. The law of July 1982 enshrined two major innovations: the principle of direct election to regional assemblies, and the curtailment of the power of the préfet, whose role was limited to an a posteriori evaluation of the legitimacy of local decisions. The attribution of a statut particulier (special statute) for Corsica, providing for generous representation on its regional assembly, and for Paris, Lyon and Marseille, offering directly elected conseils d’arrondissements (district councils), completed the main elements of the reform. These latter measures also ensured that, for the first time in postwar France, a breach was created in the principle of la république indivisible.

It should be noted that these reforms, for all their genuinely innovatory features, did not release the hitherto untapped sources of enthusiasm and dynamism among the electorate that had been predicted at the time of their promulgation. Neither can it be said, however, that the major political shifts signalled by the legislative elections of 1993 and presidential election of 1995 revealed a desire to roll back the reforms of the 1980s, widely seen as a sensible modernization of an archaic and overly rigid system. Indeed, it may reasonably be claimed that the relationship between Paris and the regions has undergone its first significant modification for two centuries. The role of the European Union in seeking to promote inter-regional contact and co-operation, both within and across national boundaries, seems likely to attenuate further the influence of France’s historic centralization.

PETER WAGSTAFF

Reinhardt, Django

b. 1910, Charleroi, Belgium;

d. 1953, Fontainebleau

Musician and composer, real name Jean-Baptiste Reinhardt

Reinhardt, who led the Quintette du Hot Club de France (1934–9), devised his singular technique on guitar after losing two fingers of his left hand in a childhood accident. The success of the Quintette’s swing sound played off Reinhardt’s gypsy-prince charisma against the lush melodics of Stéphane Grappelli’s violin, as in the classic Nuages. After touring the United States in 1946 at the invitation of Duke Ellington, Reinhardt toured throughout Europe with a new Quintette until he died of a stroke at the age of 43.

STEVEN UNGAR

See also: jazz

Renaud

b. 1952, Paris

Singer-songwriter and actor, real name Renaud Séchan

In turn anarchistic, irreverent and amusing, this left-wing exponent of contemporary French slang—in songs which often espouse the cause of the working class and the underprivileged— projects the image of a latter-day Aristide Bruant, of an urban hooligan who can also be considered to be the creator of an imported form of song, the suburban western. Successes include Hexagone (France), Miss Maggie (an attack on Margaret Thatcher) and Morgane de toi (In Love with You). Renaud played the role of Lantier in Berri’s Germinal.

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

Renaud, Madeleine

b. 1900, Paris;

d. 1994, Paris

Actor

Renaud left the Comédie-Française in 1946 to found the prestigious Renaud-Barrault company with her husband Jean-Louis Barrault. She is most remembered for her 1960s interpretations of Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days (Oh les beaux jours) and Maude in Harold and Maude, and appeared in Genet’s The Screens (Les Paravents) and many Duras productions.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Renoir, Jean

b. 1894, Paris;

d. 1979, Beverly Hills, USA

Director

Renoir’s great period in film-making predates World War II. However, in the 1950s, he was canonized by the Cahiers du cinema group as an auteur and his reputation as a reference point in contemporary cinema marks him out as an ongoing influence.

The son of Auguste Renoir (whose paintings he sold in order to finance film projects he had difficulty funding), critics have persisted in seeing the influence of the father in his film images. In fact, Renoir is far more in the realist tradition and he has been hailed, justifiably, as the precursor of neo-realism. In this respect, Renoir preferred location shooting to studio wherever possible, and synchronized rather than post-synch sound. He mostly avoided stars, and worked with professional and non-professional actors with equal ease. In terms of production practices, he believed in the principle of collective team work (thus, for example, actors would learn to wield cameras, camera operators would have small acting parts, and so on). These hallmarks to his films and production practices are ones that readily identify his work as belonging to a French tradition that still holds sway today and which has been particularly influential with Nouvelle Vague film-makers.

A pacifist, humanist and man of the Left, Renoir made what could be termed a moral cinema, one that asks us to examine our own sets of values and prejudices. His prewar films are especially enlightened in their observations of the working and proletarian classes. Toni (1934), Le Crime de M Lange (1935) and La Bête humaine (1938) are among some of his most sensitive treatments of the struggles and hardships of these classes and also reveal the solidarity of the working classes in an unheroized way. Sexuality, desire and love’s potential to exacerbate as well as heal divisions between the sexes are key issues in all his films. Renoir was also a great champion of Republican ideals and his films have consistently analysed human behaviour, particularly in relation to class and to individual as well as group aspirations, such as La Vie est a nous (1936) and La Marseillaise (1937). His most controversial films—La Grande Illusion (1937) and La Règle du jeu (1939)—examine questions of class boundaries and the artificial nature of national identities. Both were condemned by the authorities in 1940 as demoralizing and pacifist and banned during the Occupation.

Renoir went to Hollywood after the Occupation of France by Germany. He became an American citizen in 1944, although he retained dual citizenship. Of the 37 films he made during his career, 13 were made postwar and of those only 5 were made in France. The most successful of these attest to his continuing love of the theatre and group work— French Cancan (1954) and Le Petit Théâtre de Jean Renoir (1969). As a testimony to his international status among film-makers, he was awarded an Oscar for life achievement in 1975.

SUSAN HAYWARD

renovation projects

Architectural and urban conservation is an area of cultural affairs in which France can claim to have established a ‘model and exemplar’ for other European countries to follow (see Kain 1982, 1993). At the end of World War II, France had already enjoyed almost exactly a century of European supremacy in this field, during which one of the first European ‘lists’ of protected historic buildings was drawn up (1837) and the idea of extending protection to the buildings and streets which surrounded a listed building was first enacted (Kain 1986).

In the immediate post-World War II period, France, in common with most other European countries, suffered chronic housing shortages (due in part to the fact that about a quarter of the total housing stock was either war-damaged or destroyed). The 1950s solution was ‘comprehensive redevelopment’ involving slum removal and rehousing in the now notorious grands ensembles of high-rise apartments on the peripheries of cities (see Scargill 1983; Pariset 1991). Properties demolished could be both slum housing in social amenity terms and of significant historical and/or architectural value, notwithstanding their run-down physical condition.

It was against this background of the mass destruction of the historic quarters of French cities in the name of housing improvement that, in 1962—at precisely the time that this activity was at its apogee—the French government once again enacted reforms which were radical not only for France but for the whole of Europe (see Kain 1981). An act, known since as the Malraux act after André Malraux (then Minister of Cultural Affairs, and its chief sponsor), provided for the designation of secteurs sauvegardés (conservation zones) within historic towns and gave powers for state intervention to enhance their historic qualities.

The Malraux act involved much more than the mere repair and preservation of old buildings. It also envisaged the demolition of eyesores within secteurs sauvegardés; the conversion of old buildings to adapt them to modern uses; the upgrading of housing by providing baths, sanitation and proper sewage disposal; the management of traffic and parking; and, most radically, provision for the integration of new buildings with the old where restoration was not practicable. Of fundamental significance were attempts to introduce new economic activities to help retain populations and provide some positive functional role for secteurs sauvegardés within the wider urban context. It was certainly not the intention that they become open-air museums of historic architecture, but that their historic qualities be retained in a restructured functional context.

From the perspective of today we can judge that the secteur sauvegardé approach to urban and architectural conservation, while undoubtedly producing some spectacular individual beauties, has not brought about the general renaissance of the French urban past that André Malraux had planned. Designation has been slow (only some 75 secteurs sauvegardés exist out of about 400 initially envisaged), and the work of enhancement has progressed equally slowly and has been dogged by political problems, not least the fact that local communities had little say in what the central, Paris-based authorities intended to happen in each town. There has also been equally powerful popular political protest at the social changes that conservation in secteurs sauvegardés encouraged. However, any criticism should take account of the fact that the political and economic worlds of the present and thirty years ago are very different, particularly in the sense that the threats to historic quarters of towns today come less from the comprehensive redevelopers than from the inexorable processes of physical decay fuelled by economic stagnation and decline in innercity areas. Nevertheless, the very limited public participation and an equally low order of local input to the decision-making process in secteurs sauvegardés are now politically unacceptable (Tuppen 1988).

In 1975, in what proved to be an analysis of the first importance, Nora and Eveno (1976) reported to the French government that, despite all the attempts in the thirty years since the end of World War II, 39 per cent of the national housing stock was still substandard. Their report underlined the (perhaps not unexpected) fact that it was the lowest income sector of the population, particularly the elderly, who suffered the worst conditions and who were effectively trapped. Nora and Eveno highlighted the scale of the reservoir of old, and often ‘historic’ housing stock for rehabilitation, and argued for rehabilitation rather than renewal on social and economic grounds, as well as for reasons of cultural heritage conservation.

The indictment of the failings of postwar housing improvement in France by the Nora- Eveno report and the recognition of the political opposition and the social problems consequent on the secteur sauvegardé approach brought about a radical change of government policy in the late 1970s. First, in 1976, a new single body, the Fonds d’Aménagement Urbain, was instituted to be responsible for the administration of all government funding of urban works; part of its brief was to establish a socially just approach to restoration. Opérations Programmées d’Amélioration de l’Habitat (OPAH) introduced in 1977 were designed both to avoid the local opposition which was slowing down work so much in the secteurs sauvegardés and to do something more in quantitative terms to improve the poor housing stock of French towns. The aims of OPAH are much more modest than those of the secteurs sauvegardés, and the areas they cover much smaller—perhaps about 300 dwellings on average. Gone also is the sweeping curetage of ‘alien’ structures built in recent times to return a secteur sauvegardé to a ‘pure’ state in which it was known to have (or more likely imagined to have) existed at a particular time in its past. Instead, the object with OPAH is to upgrade existing buildings to statutory norms of amenity and effect necessary structural repairs to buildings, providing that the continued survival of the indigenous population can be assured (see Kain 1993).

In practice, however, reality does not match up to these ideals. The voluntary principle which underpins them means that municipalities can declare OPAH but are not obliged to do so. Furthermore, even where an OPAH has been declared, owners are not required to do work on their properties. In the three OPAH of Bordeaux, for example, Michel Genty (1989) finds that all the restoration activity of the 1980s has resulted in only a modest number of rehabilitations of low-rented dwellings. By contrast, some 500 dwellings a year for uncontrolled letting have been produced and this process is bringing about substantial changes in the socioeconomic structure of these historic areas. In place of low-income families, there is a temporary and transient population of students, single people and childless couples who value a city-centre living environment, appreciate the historic aura engendered by the old buildings and are prepared and able to pay for it. Plus ça change?

ROGER KAIN

See also: architecture

Resnais, Alain

b. 1922, Vannes

Director

Resnais’s use of close-ups, tracking shots and subjective montage makes his style among the most distinctive in contemporary French cinema. He has always worked from pre-written screenplays—a metteur-en-scène in the full sense of the word—in which the exploration of time, place, memory and imagination looms large. Those factors, of course, are associated not only with the Nouvelle Vague, of whom Resnais is a close cousin, but also with the nouveau roman, and it is not surprising that his first two feature films, after a remarkable series of documentaries including the harrowing concentration-camp record Nuit et Brouillard (1955), should have been scripted by nouveaux romanciers. Hiroshima man amour (1959) adapts a Marguerite Duras screenplay about a French actor whose love affair with a Japanese in Hiroshima rekindles the memory of her German lover, killed during the war. If the audacious equation of personal with historical trauma is Durassian, the slow tempo of filming, and cuts back and forth between remembered past and lived present, became recognized as Resnais’s trademarks. Last Year in Marienbad (L’Année dernière a Marienbad) of 1961, from a Robbe-Grillet script, carries the earlier film’s experimentation with time several stages further, to the point where past, present and future, remembered and imagined, cease to be clearly distinguishable. The flurry of possible interpretations this provoked contributed as much as the unforgettable performance of Delphine Seyrig to the film’s reputation.

Resnais’s subsequent work has often had a more overtly political dimension, as with Muriel (1963), dealing with among other things the aftermath of the Algerian war, or La Guerre est finie (1966), in which Yves Montand plays a disabused Spanish Republican veteran. He has tackled the problems posed by accelerated social mobility in Giscard d’Estaing’s France (Mon oncle d’Amérique, with Depardieu, in 1980), the question of the boundary between life and death (L’Amour a mort in 1984) and latterly adaptations of bourgeois theatre (1986’s Mélo, after Henri Bernstein, and the Alan Ayckbourn-scripted duo Smoking/No Smoking of 1993). His current companion Sabine Azéma has prominent roles in the three last-named.

For all this wide range of subject matter, Resnais’s films are generally instantly recognizable as his. No other film-maker is quite so readily associated with the inescapability and elusiveness of memory, a theme dominant in contemporary French culture, as the obsession with the Occupation and Resistance and the centrality of psychoanalysis both show (in different ways). By turns solemn and humorous, his films almost always repay repeated viewings.

KEITH READER

See also: cinema

restaurant guides

The first and most famous of France’s restaurant guides was the red Guide Michelin, which made its first appearance in 1900 and whose annual awarding of stars up to a maximum of three still causes much suspense and heartsearching. Michelin was long associated with the rich traditional style of la haute cuisine, to which the polemical embracing of nouvelle cuisine by the Guide Gault-Millau (founded in 1972) represented something of a riposte. Gault-Millau awards toques (chef’s hats) up to a maximum of four, along with marks out of twenty. Unlike Michelin, which contents itself with a brief list of the principal dishes of each listed restaurant, Gault-Millau provides often lengthy discursive accounts of the specialities, atmosphere, decor and development of its choices. A more recent wave of guides catering for the young and/or financially challenged includes the ‘Petit futé’ series, dealing not only with restaurants but also with shops, accommodation and a variety of services on a town-by-town basis, and the ‘Guides du routard’, whose Liberation-like use of language and happy-go-lucky cover designs clearly target the discriminating backpacker market. Other noteworthy guides include the Bottin gourmand (founded in 1983), the Guide Kléber (1954–82) and that produced by the motoring magazine, Auto-Journal, available from newsstands rather than booksellers. However, the unquestioned market leaders would appear to be Michelin, with a circulation of 500,000, and Gault-Millau (200,000).

KEITH READER

See also: gastronomy

restaurants du coeur

These are soup kitchens, first established by comedian Coluche in 1985 to provide free meals for the hungry over the winter months. Friends in show business and politics joined Coluche in a massive media appeal. The charity’s name and logo (a heart between a knife and fork) summarize the philosophy of appealing to public generosity, the food industry and government in order to make available surplus food supplies and to mobilize volunteers in an annual, nationwide operation. After her husband’s death, Véronique Colucci maintained the initiative; assistance now also includes hostel accommodation for the homeless. During the winter 1995–6, over 50 million meals were provided.

PAM MOORES

See also: street papers

Rétoré, Guy

b. 1924, Paris

Producer and director

The founder of the Théâtre de l’Est de Paris (TEP) in 1950 with the Guilde, an amateurturned professional troupe, and an advocate of théâtre populaire, Rétoré is famous for his 1970s production of classics, and contemporary writings from Bonal and Besnehard. The Guilde became the TEP in 1963, and the TEP became a national theatre (Théâtre National de la Colline) in 1987, under the direction of Jorge Lavelli.

ANNIE SPARKS

Reverdy, Pierre

b. 1889, Narbonne;

d. 1960, Solesmes

Poet

Reverdy formed friendships with Apollinaire and Jacob and with painters (particularly Cubists) and founded the review Nord-Sud. His poetry was always private, centred on solitude, with strong emphasis on enclosures (‘Le monde est ma prison’ is a line from the poem ‘Outre Mesure’) and spaces that separate and isolate. There is in those poems a quiet anguish and a sense of dread, which point toward a continuing spiritual crisis. After 1926, he lived in retirement near the famous Abbey of Solesmes, as if to resolve a religious problem by living in the vicinity of a monastery. His most famous collections are Ferraille (Scrap-iron) of 1937, Plupart du temps (Most of the Time) from 1944, and 1949’s Main d’oeuvre (Workmanship), along with prose works such as 1956’s En vrac (Loosely Packed).

WALTER A.STRAUSS

revolutionary groups

Increasing dissatisfaction with the French Communist Party, culminating in the events of May 1968, led to the emergence of a number of selfstyled revolutionary groups on the Left. These rejected any suggestion of an electoral or parliamentary road to social change, seen as doomed to neutralization or ‘recuperation’ by the bourgeois state and the class interests underlying it, and favoured direct action—factory occupations, general strikes, sometimes even the taking of hostages. Groups of so-called Maoist inspiration fell into two categories: the unreconstructed Sinophile Stalinists of the Parti Communiste François (Marxiste-Léniniste) and the anarcho-spontaneists in such groups as Vive la Revolution or the Nouvelle Resistance Populaire, for whom France was occupied by the forces of capital much as she had been by those of Germany in the war years. The murder of Maoist militant Pierre Overney by a security guard at the Renault factory near Paris in 1972 led to the demise of the credibility of such revolutionary rhetoric; it would now be virtually impossible to describe oneself as a ‘Maoist’ in France, or indeed anywhere in Europe. The Trotskyist groups, the most enduring of which remains the Ligue Communiste

Révolutionnaire, led by Alain Krivine, were much more critical of individual acts of violence, advocating a Leninist strategy within an internationalist perspective that refused identification with any existent forms of Socialism. Less attention-attracting than the different varieties of Maoism, they remain active and substantially loyal to their earlier principles and programmes today.

KEITH READER

Reyes, Alina

b. 1956, Soulac

Writer

Alina Reyes’s first novel, the prizewinning The Butcher (Le Boucher), traces the sexual initiation of a young woman with a lyrical and visceral sensuality which Reyes later applies to other female voyages of self-discovery: for example, Lucie/Mélusine in Lucie’s Long Voyage (Lucie au long cours) and Lucile/Alice in Au corset qui tue (At the Sign of the Corset That Kills). Women’s self-discovery creates life, future and freedom from initially unappealing flesh, from the remote past, from enclosed spaces or from a seemingly hostile natural environment. Openness is also suggested by multiple narratives within narratives and Reyes’s luminous style. Behind Closed Doors (Derrière la pone) uses the tropes of pornography to deconstruct the mechanisms of male and female desire.

OWEN HEATHCOTE

Reza, Yasmina

birthdate unknown

Playwright

An actor graduate of Lecoq’s school, Reza has written film scripts, adaptations and plays, including Conversations après un enterrement (Conversations After a Funeral); La Traversée d’hiver (Getting Through the Winter), ‘Art’ [sic], her most successful theatre work to date, and L’Homme du hasard (Man of Fate). Patrice Kerbrat directs much of her work.

ANNIE SPARKS

Rezvani, Serge

b. 1928, place unknown

Playwright and writer

A writer of Persian and Russian origins, which influence his forty-plus works. His plays include the famous Capitaine Shell, Capitaine Ecco, Le Palais d’hiver (The Winter Palace) and Le Camp du drap d’or (Camp of the Golden Flag). Les Années lumière (The Light Years), an autobiographical novel, is his bestknown work.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Ricardou, Jean

b. 1932, Cannes

Writer and critic

Ricardou’s writings blend poetic fiction with guidelines to instruct the reader and theories of textual production showing how texts are generated from narrative and linguistic mechanisms. As organizer of numerous colloquia, Ricardou brought novelists and critics together and made the nouveau roman more visible.

LYNN A.HIGGINS

Richard, Jean-Pierre

b. 1922, Paris

Critic

A literary critic of the so-called Geneva School of criticism, Jean-Pierre Richard’s first major publication, Poésie et profondeur (Poetry and Profundity), appeared in 1955. After this, he went on to produce several more books on poetry. His work is characterized principally by techniques of close reading, that is, of subjecting segments of text to particularly detailed interpretive scrutiny. This penetrating approach may be most readily appreciated in his Proust et le monde sensible (Proust and the World of the Senses) of 1974, Microlectures (Microreadings) in 1979, and Onze études sur la poésie moderne (Eleven Studies on Modern Poetry) in 1981. He has also published works on the novelist Céline and the poet Mallarmé.

MARTYN CORNICK

Major works

Richard, J.-P. (1961) L’Univers imaginaire de Mallarmé, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

——(1979) Microlectures, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

——(1996) Terrains de lecture, Paris: Gallimard.

Ricoeur, Paul

b. 1913, France

Philosopher

Paul Ricoeur is one of the most respected French philosophers. Trained at the Sorbonne, he blended Husserl’s phenomenology with his Protestant faith, and developed an ethical philosophy much influenced by the Socialist ideas of André Philip. After the war, he incorporated elements of Freudian psychoanalyis into his thought and, during regular visits to the United States, explored analytical philosophy, becoming a channel through which the ‘linguistic turn’ of English-speaking philosophers was introduced into French thought. He also joined Mounier’s review Esprit, for which he wrote the philosophy column. After the events of May 1968, he supported university reform and moved from the Sorbonne to become rector of Nanterre, but resigned after sustained attacks from radical students and staff. Thereafter, he mainly taught in the United States, at Yale and Chicago, while still working in Paris as a CNRS director of research, and from 1974 as editor of the prestigious Moral and Metaphysical Review (Revue de métaphysique et de morale). His three-volume Time and Narrative (Temps et récit) published between 1983 and 1985 examines how time and narrative are interlinked in historical, literary and philosophical writing, and has become the most influential of Ricoeur’s works, which are widely read in the English-speaking world.

MICHAEL KELLY

Rita Mitsouko, Les

Musicians

A rock double act which began in the 1980s— Rita is the singer Catherine Ringer, and Mitsouko is Fred Chichin the musician—and was successful throughout the 1990s. Their whole repertory is definitely eclectic, they have been iconoclastic on the world stage, and their musical style is baroque in the sense of being grotesque, whimsical, imaginative and at times disturbing. Their videos earned them the Prix Euro MTV in 1994, when the album Système D was released.

GERARD POULET

See also: pop video; rock and pop

Rivette, Jacques

b. 1928, Rouen

Director

Rivette followed the path from Cahiers du cinema criticism to direction in 1958, when he began shooting Paris nous appartient, whose length meant that it was not ready for release until 1961. The original version of Out One (1974) lasted twelve hours and forty minutes; understandably, it was only ever screened once. Rivette uses exceptional length to explore and distort the possibilities of narrative and the spectator’s sense of time within the cinema—a distortion mirrored in the relationship between painter (Piccoli) and model (Emmanuelle Béart) in La Belle Noiseuse of 1991. He attained perhaps unwanted notoriety when his 1966 Diderot adaptation La Religieuse was for a while banned by the French censor.

KEITH READER

See also: cinema

Robbe-Grillet, Alain

b. 1922, Brest

Writer and director

By generating fictions from linguistic play and from often sado-erotic fantasy, Robbe-Grillet’s self-reflecting novels and films show how imagination is shaped by language and popular culture. He reveals subjective states through description of the visual world. As an editor at Minuit, he has influenced contemporary fiction.

LYNN A.HIGGINS

See also: nouveau roman

Robuchon, Joël

b. 1945, France

Chef

Perhaps the outstanding French chef to concentrate his activity in the kitchens of his own restaurant (the Jamin, in Paris), Robuchon is famed for the rigour and precision of his cooking. He obtained the coveted three Michelin stars only three years after opening the restaurant in 1981, and represents the opposite tendency to the ‘galloping gourmet’ media stardom of such as Paul Bocuse.

KEITH READER

See also: gastronomy

Rocard, Michel

b. 1930, Courbevoie, near Paris

Politician

A Socialist minister (1981–5) and prime minister (1988–91) and several times would-be presidential candidate, Rocard was for many years a rival of Mitterrand and leader of a minority tendency within the Parti Socialiste. Undoubtedly influenced by his Protestant background and backed by intellectuals such as Jacques Julliard and Alain Touraine, and publications such as Le Nouvel Observateur, Rocard sought to define Socialism as an ethic of responsibility and autonomy. His brief period as party leader (1993–4) and his presidential ambitions were brought to an end by the PS’s catastrophic defeat in the 1994 European elections.

LAURENCE BELL

See also: parties and movements

Major works

Rocard, M. (1987) Le Coeur à l’ouvrage, Paris: Odile Jacob (an autobiography, followed by Rocard’s political prescriptions).

Rochefort, Christiane

b. 1917, Paris

Writer

Through play with language, genre and parody, Rochefort demystifies institutions such as marriage and social services. Her feminist, humorous, utopian and anarchic vision constitutes a passionate plea for an end to exploitation of all kinds. Rochefort’s 1959 The Warrior’s Rest (Le Repos du guerrier), her first novel, made into a film by Roger Vadim in 1962, shocked in its portrayal of eroticism.

LYNN A.HIGGINS

rock and pop

Since the late 1950s and early 1960s the French pop scene has seen significant developments as well as the steamrolling invasion— as everywhere else—of Anglo-American pop music in its various, successive or overlapping forms: rock and roll, rockabilly, West Coast, progressive rock, decadent rock, punk rock, hard rock, blues rock, indie pop, reggae, soul, disco, rap. As consumers of pop music, the French listen to more ‘Anglo-Saxon’ music than their own, which could explain the lowly status of French rock and pop.

The first French rock and roll number in France was written as a humorous parody of a genre with no apparent future by Boris Vian and performed by Henri Salvador (Rock’n’Roll Mops). But in the 1960s Elvis Presley had his followers; their temple was Le Golf Drouot in Paris. This venue saw the start of the careers of Hallyday, Mitchell and Dutronc. Rock and roll music represented a political stance for a young and largely working- class generation and a medium for individual liberation; it was cleverly harnessed by managers and producers of show business and generated the yé-yé phenomenon. The radio programme Salut les copains (Hello, buddies) on Europe 1 was their rallying point.

In the 1970s, rock music pervaded the sounds of the folk music revival. Pure French rock generated an extraordinary number of groups who came and went, producing endless carbon copies of British or American models. At the end of the 1970s disco music reigned—but, with a few exceptions, French rock was in the doldrums.

Since the 1980s, authentic rock groups like Telephone (highly popular at home and abroad), Starshooter, Marquis de Sade, Indochine, Les Rita Mitsouko and Les Négresses vertes have shown that French rock and pop is thriving, and have at last found international recognition even if in France itself it has generally been American and British artists who have attracted the biggest crowds. The cultural establishment gave the home product a helping hand. In 1984, Jack Lang, then Minister of Culture, officially inaugurated the first Zenith, at the Porte de Bagnolet, a new venue for rock and pop concerts, with Jacques Higelin, the charismatic rock figure, topping the bill. For a while, in 1989, there was even a Chargé de mission pour le rock et les variétés (a rock and pop official representative) within his ministry. Also significant is the huge contribution to the French pop scene from multiple ethnic communities and their musical hybrids (jazz, rock, funk, reggae, raï): Carte de séjour, Karim Kacel, Cheb Khaled, Mano Negra, Kassav’s and West Indian Zouk. French pop music’s success lies in the future reconciliation of rhythms and sounds coming from other continents and cultures.

GÉRARD POULET

Rohmer, Éric

b. 1920, Nancy

Director, real name Maurice Schérer

The only Nouvelle Vague director whose films are still regularly distributed in English-speaking countries, Rohmer has maintained remarkable success through filming on often impossibly tight budgets, using 16 mm film stock or video—as for The Green Ray (Le Rayon vert) of 1986, shown on French television before its cinema premiere—and confining himself to a miniaturist canvas in which ambiguities and misunderstandings between (generally wouldbe) lovers predominate. His literary antecedents are such as Marivaux or Jane Austen; in the cinema, though he has posterity (Christian Vincent or the American Whit Stillman both owe an obvious debt), ancestors are harder to find.

His first feature, Le Signe du lion of 1959 (but not released until 1962), is harsher than his subsequent work. It tells of the agony of a Bohemian musician (a distant cousin of Renoir’s Octave in La Règle du jeu?) left stranded and impoverished in a pitiless August Paris. Thereafter, his feature films fell generally into two series, Six contes moraux (Six Moral Tales) and Comédies et proverbes (Comedies and Proverbs). Best known in the first series is My Night with Maud (Ma nuit chez Maud) of 1969, in which Jean-Louis Trintignant’s sophistically Catholic engineer hesitates between the supposedly nice girl in the pew next door and the worldly wise divorcée Maud. Few other films have focused so closely on people talking themselves into love yet out of bed together; it is not surprising that Rohmer’s major critical work, in collaboration with Chabrol, was a study of that arch-exponent of Catholic sexual guilt, Hitchcock.

The talkiness and insecurity masquerading as sophistication of Rohmer’s characters is marked in more recent films, such as 1982’s Le Beau Mariage and 1984’s Les Nuits de la pleine lune, in both of which the bourgeois institutions of marriage and monogamy prove more resistant to attacks upon them than might be imagined. His most recent series, Contes des quatre saisons (Tales of the Four Seasons), displays, along with the somewhat prurient attitude towards young women for which he has earned predictable feminist criticism, a turn towards belief—however ironic—in destiny and the miraculous already foreshadowed in The Green Ray. Félicie’s reuniting with the father of her child at the end of Conte d’hiver (1992) is among the most moving moments in Rohmer’s entire oeuvre.

KEITH READER

romantic novels

Modern romantic novels (romans a l’eau de rose) comprise 15 per cent of all paperback sales in France. They are produced on a monthly basis to a standard format and length, much like magazines, and sell in supermarkets, railway station kiosks and corner shops as well as by mail order. Harlequin, owned by the Canadian media group Torstar, is the market leader and accounts for well over 60 per cent of sales of romantic novels. It began publication in 1978 with four novels per month and its translations of English-language contemporary romances were so successful that in six years it had reached a sales peak of 20 million books and a readership of 6 million. Harlequin’s success stimulated emulation and a number of French publishers followed with locally written contemporary romances, notably J’Ai Lu (who also publish Barbara Cartland), Presses de la Cité, Jean- Claude Lattès and Tallendier.

The romantic novel is a love story, narrating the birth of an affective and sexual bond between a man and a woman. The narrative programme is organized by an initial meeting of the protagonists, usually producing a conflict between attraction and repulsion. There then follows the overcoming of obstacles, both internal and external, and a resolution which culminates in a happy ending. The roots of the theme can be traced back to Ancient Greek mythology, via medieval romances, the classics L’Astrée, La Princesse de Clèves, Manon Lescaut, The New Heloise (La Nouvelle Héloïse) and The Lady of the Camellias (La Dame aux camélias). Its modern form, however, is more usefully seen as emerging in the mass market for literature that developed in the course of the nineteenth century, in the roman- feuilleton (serial novel) appearing in the popular press, via Georges Ohnet’s Le Maître de forges (The Ironmaster) and continued into this century by Delly, du Veuzit, Bernage, Magali and Anne and Serge Golon’s Angélique, writers whose books dominated the field till the arrival of Harlequin. Thereafter, the dominant model of the successful romantic novel has been derived from the Anglo-Saxon world, originally based on the books of the UK publisher Mills and Boon. The bulk are based on the contemporary workplace, though recently the romantic novel publishers have added series that evoke detective fiction. The central focus of the narrative, however, remains the love conflict of the two main characters, although the social profile and position of the heroine, as well as sub-themes, evolve to reflect the constantly changing expectations and aspirations of women in our times.

GEORGE PAIZIS

Ronis, Willy

b. 1910, Paris;

d. 1972, Paris

Photographer

From the beginning of his career, Ronis was ideologically attracted by assignments of a social nature, covering strikes and union activity for the Parti Communiste and, like Doisneau, charting the urbanization of the suburbs (in his case, those of Ménilmontant and Belleville). In the 1960s, he produced photographic illustrations for many news stories on Algeria and eastern Europe.

MICHAEL WORTON

See also: photography

Rouault, Georges

b. 1871, Paris;

d. 1958, Paris

Artist

Considered one of the greatest spiritual painters of the twentieth century, Rouault was a devout Christian and religious subjects dominate his work, particularly depictions of Christ. As a boy he was apprenticed to a restorer of stained glass and his paintings often resemble stained-glass windows with their simple shapes, outlined with thick black lines filled with rich colours. He remained outside the main currents of the art of the period.

DEBRA KELLY

See also: painting

Rouch, Jean

b. 1917, Paris

Documentarist

An ethnographic documentarist who started his film career making documentaries in Nigeria (in the 1950s) and whose belief in filming only what he saw—what he initially called cinema-direct—marks Rouch as one of the founders of the cinéma-vérité group of filmmakers. Lightweight 16 mm camera and recording equipment for direct sound are the tools of his committed politicized cinema that strives to record as close as possible the real. For Rouch, the personages on screen are the authors of their own scripts and verbal testimonies, and the footage must remain uncut (see Moi, un Noir from 1957). If this documentary style has its limitations by dint of its lack of editing, Rouch was to discover with Chronique d’un été (1961) that there are, equally, ideological problems inherent in any attempts at objectivity once the decision to edit footage has been made.

SUSAN HAYWARD

See also: cinema

Roudy, Yvette

b. 1929, Pessac, Gironde

Politician

Roudy will be best remembered as France’s first Minister for Women’s Rights (1981–6), responsible for initiatives and reforms favouring women. Of these, the 1982 law on statereimbursed abortion and that of 1983, establishing equality at work between the sexes, were the most notable.

A mitterrandiste, her career has spanned a period of over thirty years, in which time she has occupied high offices, both within the Socialist Party and those of deputy, MEP and mayor.

KHURSHEED WADIA

Major works

Roudy, Y. (1985) A cause d’elles, Paris: Albin Michel (an autobiographical work).

Rouge

Newspaper

Founded in September 1968 by militants from the ex-Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire, Rouge was initially published fortnightly but became weekly while supporting Alain Krivine, the Trotskyist candidate in the 1969 presidential election campaign. It has remained the newspaper of the French Section of the Fourth International through its various name changes (currently the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire). It was published daily for twenty issues during Krivine’s 1974 presidential campaign and was launched as a daily paper in March 1976, but financial problems forced it back to weekly publication. In 1996, Rouge had a weekly print run of 7,000.

DAVID DRAKE

Roy, Claude

b. 1915, Paris; d. 1997, Paris

Writer

A poet, novelist and critic, Roy began his career in right-wing circles, being attracted in particular to Charles Maurras’s nationalist Action Française movement and writing for the reviews and newspapers in its orbit. After being denounced in the collaborationist press, in 1942 Roy turned to the Resistance, joining the French Communist Party a year later. However, when the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956, Roy entered a period of dissidence from Communism which culminated in his resignation from the party in 1958. His intellectual itinerary is charted in a series of autobiographical memoirs—Moi je (Me, I) from 1969, Nous (Us) in 1972 and Somme toute

(When All’s Said and Done) in 1976—and in later years in his Livres de bord (Notebooks). He has also produced children’s books and travel writing; his work reflects a penchant for the lapidary phrase and a particular fascination for Chinese culture.

MARTYN CORNICK

Major works

Roy, C. (1970) Poésies, Paris: Gallimard.

——(1979) Sur la Chine, Paris: Gallimard.

RTL (Radio-Télévision Luxembourg)

Radio station

Attracting nearly 18 per cent of the listening public, RTL enjoys the status of not only France’s most popular radio station, but also its oldest radio périphérique. Created in 1933, its transmitters are in Luxembourg, although its studios are in Paris. Broadcasting on long wave, the station is available to a large proportion of listeners in western Europe. Its programmes are wide-ranging: news, debates, interviews, documentaries, quizzes and variety shows (hosted by such popular presenters as Patrick Sabatier and Philippe Bouvard), and listener participation (by telephone) plays an important role. In 1995, a subsidiary popular music station, RTL 2 (FM), was created.

ALAN PEDLEY

See also: radio (private/free)

rugby

With its stronghold in southwest France (Toulouse, Agen, Béziers, Biarritz, and so on), rugby has remained an important sport in France, with its national championship and the country’s participation in the Five Nations’ Tournament (which it dominated in the 1960s) and the World Cup. Only the Racing Club in Paris has been able to break the southwest’s stranglehold on the national championship in recent times, but the country unites behind its national team which had unusually limited success in the 1990s until its third place in the Rugby World Cup in South Africa (1995). Rugby League—le Rugby a XIII or le Jeu à XIII in French—is also at its strongest in the southwest but consistently fails to reach the heights of its British counterpart. Outstanding French players of the fifteen- a-side game include Pierre Albaladejo, Serge Blanco, Jean-Pierre Rives and Jean- Pierre Romeu.

IAN PICKUP

See also: sport

Rykiel, Sonia

b. 1939

Fashion designer

Rykiel studied modelling and decorated the windows at La Grande Maison des Blancs as an intern. She designed the famous pour girl sweater, an oversized sweater for women which launched her career as a designer when it was featured on the cover of Elle. In 1968, she opened her boutique and started to design original sweaters. She invented the outside seams and still designs clothes for various foreign fashion houses. She has created over 4,000 knitwear designs and is among the most successful and popular French ready-to-wear designers.

JOËLLE VITIELLO

See also: fashion