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Sagan, Françoise

b. 1935, Cajarc, Lot

Writer and playwright

A popular novelist, Sagan has also written plays, short stories and volumes of autobiography. Of her numerous fictions, which frequently focus on women’s experience of the pleasures and pain of love, two early novels— Bonjour tristesse (1954) and A Certain Smile (Un certain sourire) from 1956—are the best known. The first, written when Sagan was in her teens, won the Prix des Critiques, and established Sagan’s international reputation. Sagan’s work is usually considered as ‘light’; however, her novels offer, arguably, significant insights into feminine psychology.

ALEX HUGHES

Saint Laurent, Yves

b. 1936, Oran, Algeria

Fashion designer

Saint Laurent studied fashion design in Paris. In 1953, he was hired by Christian Dior and developed the ‘trapeze’ silhouette. In 1962, after being drafted by the French army for the French-Algerian conflict, he opened his fashion house. After introducing successively the cowboy and the sailor look, Saint Laurent turned to contemporary art and in 1965 launched his Mondrian dress. In 1966, he opened his first ready-to-wear boutique, Saint Laurent Rive Gauche. He mass-produced his clothes to make them accessible, and developed accessories, a men’s line and perfumes.

JOËLLE VITIELLO

See also: Algerian war; fashion

Saint-Phalle, Niki de

b. 1930, Paris

Artist

Niki de Saint-Phalle first attracted attention with her ‘rifle-shot’ reliefs incorporating containers of paint which, when shot at by the viewer, would stain the surface—a parody of abstract art informel painting. A member of the Nouveau Réalisme group founded in 1960, she used objets trouvés to create playful reliefs and sculptures. The representation of women was the theme of her series of Brides and Nanas, huge, gaudily painted female figures, which culminated in a monumental, hollow, reclining woman, 28 m long, containing ‘rooms’ which were entered via the vagina. This collaboration with Jean Tinguely was f1ollowed by others, notably the Stravinsky fountain outside the Pompidou Centre. In 1979, she began work on her Gaudi-inspired Tarrochi Garden in Tuscany.

CAROL WILCOX

See also: sculpture

Salacrou, Armand

b. 1899, Rouen;

d. 1989, Le Havre

Playwright

Salacrou’s home town, Le Havre, provides the focus for many of his plays. His works since 1940 are notable for their Sartrean outlook, such as Les Nuits de Colère (Nights of Anger) and Dieu le savait (God Knew), and for their satire of the bourgeoisie, like Histoire de rire (History of Laughter) and Une femme trap honnête (The Over-Honest Woman).

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Sallenave, Danièle

b. 1940, Angers

Writer, academic and literary theorist

Sallenave’s early publications, including Paysage de ruines avec personnages (Ruined Landscape with Figures) and Le Voyage d’Amsterdam (Amsterdam Journey), bear witness to her theoretical interest in narrative and semiotic innovation. However, her bestknown novel, Les Portes de Gubbio (Gubbio’s Gateways), published in 1980 and awarded the Prix Renaudot, represents a return to a more traditional, less experimental form of novelistic practice. Sallenave has also worked in the medium of the theatre.

ALEX HUGHES

Salvador, Henri

b. 1917, Cayenne, French Guiana

Singer-songwriter and musician

Having gone to Paris at the age of 7, Henri Salvador joined Ray Ventura’s big band, Les Collégiens (The College Boys), touring with them in 1941 in South America, where he stayed until 1945, having become a star in his own right. Back in France, Salvador established himself as a singer (particularly in the 1960s), comic actor and parodist, though his first love was and remains jazz. This French version of Sammy Davis Junior was the highly respected guest of honour at the eleventh ‘Victoires de la Musique’ (French Pop Music Awards) in 1996.

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

Sanson, Véronique

b. 1949, Paris

Singer-songwriter

Adopting a style which blends jazz, blues and rock, Véronique Sanson has, from the early 1970s, remained in the forefront of French popular music. Having benefited from the guidance of Michel Berger on her first two records, and having been married to the musician Stephen Stills, she successfully split her time for a number of years between France and the United States. A distinctive (if ultimately repetitive) style on the piano is allied to a voice influenced by the phrasing of American blues singers. One of her more unusual successes is her album Symphonique Sanson (1989), with the Prague Symphony Orchestra.

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

Sardou, Michel

b. 1947, Paris

Singer-songwriter

A third-generation member of a family of French show-business artists, Michel Sardou has scarcely been out of the limelight since 1970. He is often associated with right-wing and unfashionable views—as in Les Ricains (The Yanks), a song highlighting the French debt to the USA during World War II, which was released when it was fashionable to decry American involvement in Vietnam. Sardou has regularly expressed controversial opinions, which have none the less won him a large and faithful following. He had notable successes at Bercy in 1991 and 1993 and at the Olympia in 1995, and has written songs with Jacques Revaux, Pierre Billon and Pierre Delanoë.

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

Sarraute, Nathalie

b. 1902, Ivanovo-Voznessensk, Russia

Writer

In his preface to her 1948 novel, Portrait of a Man Unknown (Portrait d’un inconnu), Sartre situated Sarraute’s writing by observing that the novel genre, like postwar France itself, was entering a period of self-reflection. Sarraute’s work was well under way by the time the nouveau roman emerged, and her approach contributed to its development. Like others among the new novelists, Sarraute sees the novel as a quest for (rather than a representation of) reality; unlike them, the reality she seeks is that of psychological interiority.

In her 1956 essay collection, The Age of Suspicion (L’Ère du soupçon), Sarraute outlines her goals for renewing the novel: she seeks to remove conventional narrative props that would construct a reassuringly familiar world. Her desire to establish unmediated encounters between the reader and another consciousness is the driving force behind her formal innovations.

In Sarraute’s novels, the only plot consists of proto-events without label or description, devoid of distancing past tenses or narrative viewpoint. Most significant are her reforms of characterization, introduced in her 1939 collection of texts, Tropisms (Tropismes), reissued in 1957. The term ‘tropism’, borrowed from biology, refers to an organism’s instinctive turning towards light or heat. Sarraute’s tropisms chart the involuntary impulses, emotions and perceptions below the surface of consciousness. She invented the techniques of ‘subconversations’ and ‘predialogue’ in an attempt to capture these unarticulated and uncodified movements of subjectivity. Recognizing the inadequacy of traditional modes of writing to capture these fragmentary, interior voices, Sarraute explores the limits of intelligibility. She replaces names and descriptions with imagery and metaphors to evoke the liquidity of laughter, for example, or the cutting edge of interpersonal hostility.

Sarraute’s career is unified by her search for techniques capable of communicating her conception of subjectivity. After Tropisms, her 1953 novel, Martereau (Martereau), and the 1959 The Planetarium (Le Planetarium) convey the inner experience of anonymous characters in their familial and social interactions. Her 1963 novel The Golden Fruits (Les Fruits d’or), the 1968 novel Between Life and Death (Entre la Vie et la mort), and her 1972 Do You Hear them? (Vous les entendez?) explore, from within, the creative process itself. Several radio and stage plays investigate the capacity of spoken dialogue to incorporate the voices hidden below conscious awareness. Finally, her 1983 fictionalized autobiography, Childhood (Enfance), examines the tropisms of a particular child. Sarraute here rejoins other nouveaux romanciers such as Robbe-Grillet, Duras and Simon, who problematized and renewed the autobiographical genre in the 1980s.

LYNN A.HIGGINS

See also: women’s/lesbian writing

Sarrazin, Albertine

b. 1937, Algiers;

d. 1967, Montpellier

Writer

The author of a series of autobiographical fictions chronicling her disrupted and disruptive life—she was a foundling child whose difficulties with her adoptive family led to a stint at reform school, followed by a series of sojourns in prison, punctuated by several escapes— Sarrazin’s work captured the attention of French critics and readers when it began to appear in the mid-1960s. Best known for novels telling of prison life and its aftermath— Astragal (L’Astragale) in 1965, The Runaway (La Cavale) in 1969 and La Traversière (The Crossing) in 1966—Sarrazin was also a prolific producer of diaries, poems and letters. Many of these were published posthumously in the 1970s, after their author died prematurely.

ALEX HUGHES

Sarrazin, Maurice

b. 1925, Toulouse

Actor, director and troupe leader

A pioneer of postwar theatre decentralization, and a founder of the Grenier de Toulouse in 1945, which took numerous classical productions on tour and gave Gatti a stage for his work.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Major works

Sarrazin, M. (1970) Comédien dans une troupe, Toulouse: Grenier de Toulouse (an autobiographical account of his work).

Sartre, Jean-Paul

b. 1905, Paris;

d. 1980, Paris

Philosopher and writer

Sartre ranks alongside André Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and Marguerite Duras among writers born between 1900 and 1915 whose experiences of war and revolution deeply affected French literature between 1945 and 1970. More doggedly than these others, Sartre cultivated the role of the committed— also known as ‘engaged’—intellectual who spoke out on contemporary issues without acceding to party line, ideology, or doctrine. Between 1945 and 1980, the force of Sartre’s public presence built in large part on his sustained explorations of formats and genres ranging from essay, letter and treatise to theatre and film. It was no coincidence that Sartre’s refusal of the 1964 Nobel prize extended the very oppositional position that the award committee had sought to recognize.

Sartre emerged following the Liberation as though on a mission to ensure that literature in postwar France would be fashioned by intellectuals for whom culture was inextricably linked to concerns for social and political freedom. In fact, this postwar vision evolved out of narrower conceptions of literature and the writer that had propelled Sartre to prominence as a novelist and literary critic in the late 1930s. Sartre was initially converted to activism by his 1940 prisoner-of-war experience of literature’s capacity to disclose the simultaneous freedom and responsibility of all men and women. Four years later, Sartre sought the best possible format to convey this capacity to as wide a public as possible following the Liberation of France.

When the first issue of Les Temps modernes appeared on 15 October 1945 under the joint direction of Sartre, de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it was less of a literary monthly in the mould of the Nouvelle Revue française than a descendant of the left-wing weeklies Marianne and Vendredi. But, unlike its interwar predecessors, Les Temps modernes inscribed essays on politics and literature within a programme of committed literature (littérature engagée) that called for the writer to disclose and correct the full range and variety of injustice he or she encountered. While this double injunction to disclosure and correction made his monthly a forum for debate and consciousness-raising, Sartre’s efforts on behalf of Les Temps modernes were only one aspect of a broad personal programme of writing that included essays, fiction, theatre, screenplays and biography.

The cost of Sartre’s commitment to high visibility in public was the inevitability of conflict. When Albert Camus published The Rebel (L’Homme révolté) in 1951, Sartre could no longer set aside the growing differences that placed his involvement with political revolution increasingly at odds with what he perceived as the disinterested and ahistorical notion of rebellion set forth in the book by his former colleague and friend. Sartre’s break with Camus was acrimonious and—because of Camus’s death in a January 1960 automobile accident—definitive.

From 1945 through to the mid-1970s, Sartre was seemingly everywhere at the same time, as though compelled to execute his decision to act in and on history on the most public of stages. On one front, he was a tireless voice in debate on issues ranging from the 1956 anti-Communist uprising in Hungary, to torture and the violation of human rights by French soldiers, police and intelligence agents during the Algerian war. When circumstances required it, Sartre was not above taking to the streets to picket, protest and gather signatures in support of a chosen cause of the moment. On another front, he travelled to China, Poland, Yugoslavia and Cuba to meet with political leaders and local intellectuals.

Most of all, Sartre continued to write: newspaper and magazine articles, prefaces and editorials, as well as plays and film scripts. The thirty years that Sartre devoted on and off to his 3,000-page, three-volume study of Gustave Flaubert, The Family Idiot (L’Idiot de la famille), illustrate the extent to which his desire to write as a witness (and historical conscience) of postwar France forced him to postpone and even to abandon a number of long-term intellectual projects. Inevitably some of these projects resurfaced where Sartre and his readers least expected to find them.

The appearance of Words (Les Mots) in 1964, in the wake of the deaths of Camus and Merleau-Ponty, marked a turn towards introspection beyond self-critique. Driven more by self-hatred than by self-centredness, Words was a kind of test case for the broad analyses that Sartre soon applied at length with regard to the life of the nineteenth-century novelist, Gustave Flaubert. The Family Idiot combined Sartre’s interests in the irreducible specificity of Flaubert as an individual or, universel singulier, with what looked very much like a Freudian enquiry into the effects of early trauma on adult creativity. Moreover it confirmed that the bitterness with which Sartre had judged Flaubert in his What is Literature? (Qu’est-ce que la littérature?) of 1948 was part of his lifelong ambivalence toward a tutor figure whom he admired but could not but also condemn.

Words recalled Sartre’s early literary and philosophical ambitions at least as much as his commitment to Marxism and politics over the previous twenty years. After the fact, even the ponderous 1960 Critique of Dialectical Reason (Critique de la raison dialectique) seemed less to resolve than to reconfigure the theoretical implications of Sartre’s evolution from committed writing to the action in and on history that he referred to as praxis. By the time he wrote Words, Sartre was no longer simply the good dialectician thinking against himself in an exercise of auto-critique. Nor was he an essayist in the mould of a Montaigne reflecting on his mortality and the world around him. From the early 1960s until his death in April 1980, Sartre led a life of increasing contradiction between his efforts to resolve literary and philosophical issues that had long preoccupied him and attempts to assert militancy in social and political causes imposed by the force of circumstance.

So while Sartre hawked La Cause du peuple on the streets of Paris in the hope that his arrest by police might bring mass-media exposure to the newspaper he sought to sponsor on behalf of young post-May 1968 militants, his writing focused increasingly on the nineteenth century in order to understand how Flaubert’s progression through childhood, adolescence and young adulthood resulted in an alienation that Sartre saw objectified in Madame Bovary. For Sartre, The Family Idiot was less an escape from the present than the very contemporary project of a total biography that sought to link the immediate environment represented by Flaubert’s family and a literary generation marked by the failed revolution of 1848. Sartre never completed the close reading of Madame Bovary that he had planned as the fourth volume of his study. After the fact, it is reasonable to wonder if the ambition of a total biography was an impossibility whose failure Sartre foresaw from the start as a counterpart to the privilege and success that he had enjoyed as a product of the upper middle class that he came to loathe.

The shortcomings of The Family Idiot that derive from Sartre’s long-term obsession with Flaubert are offset by placing this final project of total understanding in the guise of biography within a series of biographical studies that Sartre devoted to Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé and Jean Genet. In each case, and including The Family Idiot, Sartre attempted to trace the genesis of identity in a trauma that eventually turned the individual to rebel against the bourgeois environment into which he or she had been born. In retrospect, these biographies can be read as attempts at self-analysis and self-understanding that evolved through and beyond the ostensible mixture of autobiography and fiction visible in The Words.

It is curious and fitting that ongoing interest in Sartre is devoted to the full range of his writings from The Transcendence of the Ego (La Transcendance de l’égo) and Nausea (La Nausée) published between the wars, to the posthumous War Diaries (Carnets de la drôle de guerre) and unfinished second volume of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. For beyond the writings it is also very much the example of Sartre’s life—and often that of decisions that he later regretted—that continues to draw readers to see in his personal itinerary a clear sense of what committed literature can (and cannot) accomplish.

STEVEN UNGAR

Sautet, Claude

b. 1924, Montrouge

Director

Sautet is something of a ‘sleeper’: although he has been an important film-maker in France for all but forty years, his work has only just begun to become known in English-speaking countries. His dissection of bourgeois social relations relied heavily on his work with Montand, Piccoli and (above all) Romy Schneider, who starred in five of his films. His most recent work has featured Emmanuelle Béart, who stars with Daniel Auteuil in Un coeur en hiver (1992) and with Michel Serrault in Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud (1995).

KEITH READER

See also: cinema

Savary, Jérôme

b. 1942, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Director, actor and writer

Noted since 1988 for his theatrical spectacles as director at the Théâtre de Chaillot, Savary is the founder of the famous Grand Magic Circus company in 1965, famed for its provocative, experimental approach.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Major works

Savary, J. (1985) La Vie privée d’un magicien ordinaire, Paris: Ramsay (an autobiographical account of his work).

science fiction

Science fiction, properly speaking, explores the limits and possibilities of scientific discoveries and, as such, was born with the impact of modern science on life. The underlying theme of the genre is change and it projects mankind’s possible evolution on the basis of what is now known. In contrast to previous works of fantasy or utopia—More’s Utopia, some pamphlets by Cyrano de Bergerac, Voltaire’s Micromégas, works which were of a primarily philosophical preoccupation—modern science fiction is based on contemporary scientific and social theories and thus serves to explore new dimensions of human experiences, dreams and nightmares. The application of science to modern life meant that science fiction entered into the domain of mass preoccupation, and the science fiction genre explored not only its beneficial possibilities but also its destructive powers. The pioneering founder of the genre is the Frenchman Jules Verne, whose fantastic adventures, written in the nineteenth century, introduced the excitement of science to a mass audience. His first major success Five Weeks in a Balloon (Cinq semaines en ballon) of 1863, and his most famous Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers) from 1870, brought together traditional themes and fantasies, narrated within the boundaries of contemporary scientific probability. However, science fiction has not attracted a mass audience in the modern postwar period. Popularity reached its peak in the 1950s when the term science-fiction came to replace anticipation, under the influence of Boris Vian, Gérard Klein and others, and serious interest was paid to it in periodicals like Les Temps modernes and Esprit. Publishers dedicated series to the genre—notably ‘Fleuve noir-Anticipation’, ‘Le Rayon fantastique’ and Denoël’s ‘Présence du futur’—and this period saw the birth of the work of writers such as Klein, Carsac and Sternberg, but the enthusiasm of French readers was and still is primarily inspired by the quality of works of science fiction written by American writers.

GEORGE PAIZIS

See also: literary journals

sculpture

The abstraction/figuration debate associated with postwar painting did not generate the same degree of antagonism within the field of sculpture. Sculptural abstraction seemed to have gone as far as it could with Constructivism, and the ideals of progress associated with it were unable to survive the horrors of war. Those who continued in this tradition tended to move into architecture. The most important figurative sculptors working in France in the immediate postwar years were Giacometti and, to a lesser extent, Germaine Richier, but they expressed themselves in such a personal way that no ‘school’ of sculpture could develop from their work. While they may have had imitators, they had no successors.

Giacometti’s postwar sculpture is rooted in the prewar period. The opportunity for selfexamination that the war years offered him, along with many other sculptors, resulted in a transformation that allowed him to confront a changed world. In the aftermath of a war involving genocide, death camps and the Holocaust, man’s humanity was called into question and only figuration that disturbed and questioned was henceforth credible. There are resonances of the death camps and the economic deprivation of the postwar years in Giacometti’s attenuated figures, but also reflected are the feelings of alienation and the inability to communicate present in Sartre’s analysis of the human condition. Sartre’s critical endorsement of Giacometti in the catalogue of his 1948 New York exhibition at the Pierre Matisse gallery helped him to become one of the most celebrated of postwar sculptors, not only in France but internationally. These postwar sculptures were also about perception. Giacometti was seeking a sculptural means of representing the figure as it is perceived in reality, in space, as leaving or having left a much larger visual field. The phenomenological undertones here link him to the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, with whom Sartre was also associated.

Germaine Richier’s postwar figurative sculpture has often been compared to Giacometti’s. Like him, she was able to reconsider her approach to sculpture during the war. She was aware of his work and, like him, she had undergone the influence of prewar Surrealist discourse. In her Mante religieuse of 1946, the hybrid woman/insect figure, comparable to Giacometti’s Femme égorgée, embodies an existential nightmare evoking the thirst for destruction which the war years had witnessed.

During this period, Picasso’s innovative prewar sculpture found a public for the first time, not least thanks to Brassai’s book of photographs, Les Sculptures de Picasso (Picasso’s Sculptures), published in the late 1940s. His application of collage techniques to three-dimensional work had led him to break down the prevailing hierarchy of materials. This was to influence much subsequent post-1945 sculpture. Although the ground for this had already been broken by Duchamp and his ‘ready mades’, Picasso’s use of the objet trouvé was different. Duchamp’s true successors were the Surrealists, who exploited the associations triggered off by the juxtapositions of disparate objects. Picasso, on the other hand, was more interested in the forms created by discarded objects, evident in his practice of casting in bronze his final assemblage of found objects after covering them in plaster. This division, between sculpture that demands a formal reading and that which works by association, still persists.

Jean Arp’s postwar sculptures also worked as plastic statements rather than through association, despite his previous involvement with Surrealism. His biomorphic shapes can be read as distillations of natural forms, body parts, and so on. Here seemed to be an example of sculpture that was arguably ‘abstract’ but not descended from Constructivism. However, Arp’s very originality isolated him and although, like Giacometti, he had imitators, his postwar work produced no real successors, although its echoes can be found in the sculpture of Anish Kapoor working in England and some of the more recent work of Claes Oldenburg in the United States.

The first generation of entirely new names in sculpture in postwar France were to become, for the most part, members of that (fairly disparate) group of artists dubbed by the critic Pierre Restany Nouveaux Réalistes. César established his reputation in 1960 with his series of Compressions, works consisting of scraps of multicoloured metal from old cars. This was followed in 1967 with his Expansions, for which he exploited the properties of the new material polyurethane. The actual creation of these sculptures was turned into a series of Happenings.

Nouveau Réalisme was, loosely speaking, the French equivalent of British or American Pop Art of the 1960s, although the individualism of its main players ensured that it was a short-lived movement. Apart from César, those working in three dimensions included Arman, who is best known for his accumulations of everyday objects of the same type—echoes here of Warhol—as well as for his assemblages of objects cut into strips. He has cast some pieces in bronze, a practice which recalls Jasper Johns’s beer cans as well as Picasso.

Niki de Saint-Phalle was also at work in the 1960s, creating her Nanas, figures made of polystyrene painted in primary colours. The use of this new material, associated with mass production and a product of the industrial/ consumer age, together with the sexual and feminist overtones in her work, identifies her with the issues of that decade and popular culture in particular. But Saint-Phalle seems also to have been inspired by another artist whose roots go back to the prewar period, Jean Dubuffet. His painted objects of expanded polystyrene made in the 1960s were to develop into often monumental sculptures of steel and fibreglass.

The work of Daniel Spoerri and much of the creative output of Yves Klein, also onetime Nouveaux Réalistes, can be loosely classified as sculpture whose idiom is that of Pop Art. Spoerri’s tableaux pièges, debris randomly displayed in glass-sided boxes, and Yves Klein’s sponges and ‘aerostatic sculptures’, crossed the boundaries that traditionally separated high art from popular art.

Jean Tinguely, also a so-called Nouveau Réaliste, is usually regarded as a kineticist whose sculptures are descendants of Dada rather than Constructivism. His motorized assemblages, often inviting public participation, sometimes ‘self-destructing’, seem to be mocking technology rather than honouring it. He is one of the few kinetic sculptors to have survived that period.

Minimalism, which dominated sculpture internationally in the 1970s, like its Conceptualist offshoot, was largely an American/British phenomenon, as is the ambiguously titled Land Art. Christo invented empaquetage (packaging) soon after arriving in France in 1958, and has been identified with the Land Art movement, but his interventions in the landscape, unlike those of other Land Artists, take place not in a wilderness far from public view but precisely where they can disturb. Through his temporary transformations he appears to be questioning and making us look again at what we take for granted environmentally (for example, the Pont-Neuf for Parisians). A similar motive seems to be behind the work of the French sculptor Jean-Pierre Raynaud, whose most famous work is the construction of his own house—a domestic space conforming to none of the traditional criteria, forcing one to move around, live and breathe differently. Through his cheap, white, commonplace china tiles, he orders his space, showing the poetic side of untransformed objects.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, sculpture worldwide began to demonstrate a multiplicity of styles. Within the context of French sculpture, this postmodern stylistic pluralism and love of pastiche is evident in the archaeological collages of Anne and Patrick Poirier. Bernard Pagès also appears to be quoting from the past when he deals with the theme of the column, although this may also be seen as an attempt to rediscover the instinct of the first builders. Postmodern eclecticism, in France as elsewhere, subverts any attempt to map current sculptural trends.

CAROL WILCOX

Sebbar, Leïla

b. 1941, Aflou, Algeria

Writer

Brought up in Algeria where her French mother and Algerian father taught French, and educated at university in France, Leïla Sebbar differs from beur writers in ethnic origin, class, education and age, but her influential novels, short stories, journalism and letters also explore questions of exile and identity in postcolonial France. Her work particularly foregrounds the perspectives of marginalized Algerian, beur and mixed-‘race’ female characters, culminating in the emblematic heroine of 1982’s Shérazade Missing: Aged 17, Dark Hair, Green Eyes (Shérazade, 17 ans, brune, frisée, les yeux verts), the nomadic beurette whose unconventional identity quest informs a series of novels.

CARRIE TARR

Seberg, Jean

b. 1938, Marshalltown, USA;

d. 1979, Paris

Actor

Famed above all else for her role opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo in Godard’s A bout de souffle (1959), Seberg had already appeared in Otto Preminger’s adaptation of the Françoise Sagan novel, Bonjour tristesse in 1958. Her brand image as the young American woman in France was further consolidated during her marriage to the novelist Remain Gary. Her career did not sustain its early momentum and her radical views earned her persecution from the FBI—she committed suicide.

KEITH READER

See also: cinema; stars

Séguin, Philippe

b. 1943, Tunis

Politician

The RPR’s leading Eurosceptic, but of a totally different stripe to the politicians on the British Right who bear that name. Séguin took control of the RPR after its defeat in the legislative elections of 1997. Like de Gaulle, he is imbued with a belief in the importance of the nation on the one hand, and the state on the other. His brand of what might be called ‘social Gaullism’ is thus a long way removed from the privatizing zeal of a Balladur or a Madelin, and in many respects is more attuned to elements on the Left.

KEITH READER

See also: parties and movements

Serrault, Michel

b. 1928, Brunoy

Actor

Noted for the precision of his acting, in many boulevard theatre productions as well as for mime work with Decroux, cabaret and sketches, Serrault played in 1,700 performances of La Cage aux Folles in the 1970s, and in Planchon’s famous 1986 L’Avare. He also starred in Molinaro’s film of La Cage aux folles (1980) and in Claude Sautet’s Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud (1995).

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: cinema; theatre

Serreau, Coline

b. 1947, Paris

Director, screenwriter, actor and playwright

A trained musician, trapeze artist and actress, Coline Serreau achieved celebrity in 1985 with the hilarious César-winning hit, Trois Hommes et un couffin, remade in Hollywood as Three Men and a Baby, in which confirmed bachelors develop maternal instincts. Her earliest films are indebted to the women’s movement, exploring women’s desires in Mais qu’est-ce qu’elles veulent? (1976) and utopian alternatives to the nuclear family in Pourquoi pas! (1977). Subsequent films like Romuald et Juliette (1989) and La Crise (1992) provide acute comic observations of contemporary bourgeois mores without the earlier feminist edge. She has also written and performed in successful stage comedies, including Quisaitout et Grosbêta, which received four Molières in 1994.

CARRIE TARR

Serres, Michel

b. 1930

Philosopher and science historian

Michel Serres’s voluminous writings bear four principal traits. First, the early articles on literature and science, published in five volumes under the title of Hermes (Hermès), studied the dynamics of exchange in relation to language, place and subjects. Therein Serres detected how the laws of thermodynamics that characterize scientific theory and practice in the nineteenth century have earlier literary expression in the classical age but also inflect writings in human sciences. Second, his major two-volume and crowning study, Le Système de Leibniz (Leibniz’s System), shows how the monad co-ordinates the birth of an ‘inner realm’ of subjective experience to the world at large: Leibniz breaks decisively with the relativism and reason in ways that open experience to what is imponderable in language. Third, Serres has studied social, aesthetic and literary relations through the dynamics of parasitism, understood here as a productive symbiosis. Most recently, his work has embraced ecology in its broadest sense. He argues that human expression must embody relations of equilibrium and balance that serve as models for human activity in the next century. Serres’s work is both a great reflection on the history of science in all disciplines and a history of a consciousness that moves from science to aesthetics and ethics at large.

TOM CONLEY

Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Jacques

b. 1924, Paris

Journalist and politician

Co-founder (with Françoise Giroud) of L’Express in 1953, he was successively general secretary of the Radical Socialist Party (1969) and a member of parliament (1970). The author of The American Challenge (Le Défi américain) in 1967, he was on all fronts a proponent of social change and modernization and a leading voice raised against Gaullist anti-Americanism. Politicians as different as Giscard d’Estaing and Michel Rocard bear the trace of his influence.

KEITH READER

service industry

The service industry in France employs twothirds of the country’s workforce, in a wide range of activities. It is currently affected by a series of changes and conflicts. On the one hand, the concentration and ‘rationalization’ of activities oppose large-scale networks to traditional, small-scale providers who fight for survival with little success. On the other, the considerable importance of ‘public services’ is now threatened by a process of liberalization and market deregulation.

The service industry is a heterogeneous, unevenly developed sector, grouping activities with little in common. These range from personal services and traditional retail activities or religious organizations to large-scale ‘public services’ such as health, education, public transport, police, and also fast-changing activities such as financial services, mass-retailing hypermarchés (giant supermarkets), media and telecommunications, transport and services to enterprises, increasingly integrated or controlled in large corporate entities. All these activities have gone through an accelerated modernization process, which has brought in its wake considerable social, economic and cultural upheaval. Trade has been particularly affected. The dense network of retail shops and associated support crafts (artisans)— which, up to the 1960s, constituted the socioeconomic backbone of rural areas and generated a large proportion of urban employment—is now largely destroyed. The continued urbanization of the country and industrial mass production coincided with changes in trade patterns: hypermarchés and shopping malls have now swamped the outskirts of urban areas. Hypermarchés, which sell anything from food to computers, are an established part of French culture, and groups such as Mammouth, Leclerc, Continent and Intermarché have become household names. In 1993, they controlled 55 per cent of retail trade, including 74 per cent of all food sold— a considerable proportion for a country priding itself on food traditions.

The crisis affecting traditional service trades, artisans and shopkeepers has given rise to a number of populist protest movements, always anti-state (their main target is usually tax offices) and conservative-leaning (sometimes belonging to the extreme Right). The Poujadiste movement (from the name of its founder, Robert Poujade) in the 1950s, and the corporatist shopkeepers union CID-UNATI, which organized violent protests in the late 1960s, are the best-known examples of such protest movements. These movements did not significantly alter trends, and neither have the legal limits imposed since 1973 (the Royer act) on the installation of hypermarchés.

Another important change concerns ‘public services’. Many of these, such as health, education and social services, are controlled by central administrations, and their employees (such as teachers) have civil servant status. Other service industries (such as the post or telecommunications), although commercial in nature, are considered as ‘public services’. The concept of public service, which has been part of the political culture of the ordinary citizen, is losing its relevance: since the mid-1980s, deregulation and competition rules, partly pushed by the European Union’s increasingly insistent free-market programme, are transforming the nature of these services and are enlarging the scope for market-based provision, as shown particularly in areas such as telecommunications.

FRANÇOIS NECTOUX

See also: dirigisme; economy

Seuil

Publishing house

Éditions du Seuil was founded in 1935 by Henri Sjöberg, who was joined by Jean Bardet and Paul Flamand later in 1937. In 1945, it established itself by publishing the work of several authors with reputations as ‘left-wing catholics’. It gained further renown during the 1960s and 1970s for publishing the work of literary and critical theorists such as Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov and Gérard Genette in collections such as ‘Critique’. In 1971, Seuil launched a series of cheap editions, ‘Points’, and it has interests in the reviews Communications, Esprit, La Recherche and L’Histoire.

MARTYN CORNICK

See also: publishing/l’édition

Seyrig, Delphine

b. 1932, Beirut, Lebanon;

d. 1990, Paris

Actor

Also known as Beltiane, Seyrig is one of France’s great but underestimated actors. Renowned for her extraordinary voice and delivery, her stylized performance was both gracious and intense. An international star, she was at ease on both stage and screen. She took on primarily contemporary theatre roles (plays by Beckett, Stoppard and Cixous) and equally challenging parts in auteur cinema (Resnais, Duras, Buñuel, Ottinger). Her film roles delve into questions of the unconscious and memory (Resnais’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad of 1961), expose bourgeois hypocrisy—Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie) of 1972— and speak out strongly for the feminist cause, which is a rare phenomenon among French screen stars (for example, Duras’s India Song of 1975, and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce 1080 Bruxelles of 1975).

SUSAN HAYWARD

Sheila

b. 1946, Créteil

Singer, real name Annie Chancel

The archetypal ‘manufactured’ pop star, Sheila had her career carefully plotted for her by the impresario Claude Carrère. Marketed as the girl next door, a fashionable but respectable French teenager, Sheila had a string of hit recordings in the 1960s when she mimed her records on television (her first live concert appearance was at the Zénith over twenty years after her career was first launched). Hit songs include L’École est finie (School is Out), Ma première surprisepartie (My First Party) and C’est toi que j’aime (You’re the One That I Love).

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

short-story writing

Although a surprisingly high number of modern French writers have at some stage in their literary careers been drawn to short fiction, with the likes of Colette, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus achieving notable success, the nouvelle (short story) in the twentieth century has generally been regarded (not least by the French themselves) as a disappointment, especially when compared to the ‘golden age’ of French short-story writing in the nineteenth century. Yet there is much to savour in the realm of postwar short fiction, where a number of key trends stand out in terms of both literary quality and cultural significance. Three such trends are highlighted here.

Between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s, during the period dominated by the deconstructive energies of the nouveau roman, writers like Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Samuel Beckett and Alain Robbe- Grillet gave short fiction a new ‘point’—a new function, import and relevance—as an experimental form. That none of these writers chose to call their texts nouvelles reflects a core dissatisfaction with the very idea of genre, which has continued ever since to find one of its strongest expressions in the domain of short fiction. Indeed, young writers in the 1980s and 1990s have tended increasingly to think of themselves as authors of récits brefs (short fictions) or even textes courts (short texts). The contemporary writer insists on being genetically as well as ideologically ‘unprogrammable’.

This principle of ‘unprogrammability’, of resistance to wholesale political, philosophical and artistic theories, has become a salient feature of the French postmodern sensibility. The connection between this and short fiction was strongly suggested, in fact, at an early stage in the emergence of French postmodernism, when in 1979 Jean-François Lyotard defined the postmodern attitude as one of incredulity towards ‘grand narratives’ (grandiose theories claiming universal significance). Accordingly, we are invited to enter the era of the petit récit, or ‘little narrative’. And, while it would be an oversimplification to draw too direct a link between the general politics of the petit récit and the more circumscribed poetics of the récit bref, the gradual emergence of a postmodern sensibility has undoubtedly fostered a renewed sense—not unlike that found during the mid- 1950s—of the contemporary ‘point’ of short fiction. Besides remaining attractive as a site of generic overlap (with the prose poem, the autobiographical fragment, the essay, and even certain kinds of novel writing, for instance), short fiction in the late twentieth century comes helpfully fitted with a kind of default option known as the nouvelle-instant. This is the French term for the main Modernist variant of the nouvelle, typically focused on a single event set within a limited time and space, and frequently geared towards an ‘epiphany’, a moment of illumination or insight. Despite a decline of belief among writers in the depth and power of the individual moment, the nouvelle-instant has proved readily adaptable to embodying postmodern interest in the value of the local, the provisional and the plural.

The most well-known French short-story writers since the demise of the nouveau roman are probably Jean-Marie Le Clézio and Michel Tournier, though it is significant that both made their names primarily as novelists. Anyone who bothers to look beyond the big names, however, will soon discover that one of the main trends in French short fiction during this period has been the growing contribution of women writers. Reasons for this development range from material constraints on women writers who are also holding down full-time jobs to identification with both the marginal status of short fiction as genre and the marginal figures so often brought to life in the stories themselves. Indeed the theme of the outcast, the misfit, frequently embodied in the figure of the child, has been the mainstay of the many volumes of nouvelles written by the most important short-story writer in France over the 1980s and 1990s, male or female: Annie Saumont. Drawing inspiration from modern American short fiction in particular, Saumont writes soberly and unsentimentally about moments of human disarray. Among other established women writers who have specialized with great success in the domain of short fiction, the names of Christiane Baroche and Claude Pujade-Renaud immediately spring to mind. The range of exciting talent within the emerging generation of women writers makes short-listing a far more difficult task, but the volumes of short fiction already published by Régine Detambel, Liliane Giraudon, Linda Lê and Catherine Lépront suggest that these are among the most promising.

The third significant trend which deserves to be reported concerns the popularity and vitality of short fiction in the non-metropolitan francophone world. Whereas French attitudes towards short fiction veer predominantly between indifference and disdain, outside of France the genre has come to command levels of respect comparable with those found in most anglophone cultures. In Quebec, as in Ireland, short fiction tends to be regarded as a co-ordinate of identity, a means of differentiating a minority culture from its ‘big brother(s)’. Thus, within a particular kind of symbolic universe, ‘small’ or ‘short’ once more assumes a point, indeed a very political kind of pointedness. The situation is somewhat different in Africa and the Caribbean, where the growth of interest in short fiction is explained partly by the genre’s perceived affinities with indigenous oral traditions (as attested in the work of Francis Bebey and Birago Diop in Africa, and of Gisèle Pineau and Sylviane Telchid in Guadeloupe), and partly by the impact of short-story competitions promising financial reward and eventual publication.

In the age of the so-called ‘three-minute culture’, where, from sound bites to pop videos, so many of the messages aimed at us are designed to provide a quick fix, is short fiction part of the problem or part of the solution? The very ‘point’ of the best short fiction written in French since the 1960s has been to enhance rather than diminish our powers of critical attention.

JOHNNIE GRATTON

Signoret, Simone

b. 1921, Wiesbaden, Germany;

d. 1985, Paris

Actor, real name Simone Henriette Kaminker

Signoret changed her name during the Occupation (1940–4). A committed woman of the Left (which saw her banned from the United States in the 1950s), she had both star and antistar qualities. Her multifaceted nature made her attractive to men and women alike. Her incendiary eyes, long slim legs, heavy voice and lisp were matched by her image of independent womanhood. While her roles place her as victim—for example, Yves Allégret’s Dédée d’Anvers (1947) and Becker’s Casque d’Or (1952)—in her performance style she acts as agent of desire. One of the few women stars to sustain a film career into old age, she was still delivering stunning performances when blind and ravaged by the effects of cancer, as in Moshe Misrahi’s La Vie devant soi (1977).

SUSAN HAYWARD

See also: cinema

Simenon, Georges

b. 1903, Liège, Belgium;

d. 1989, Belgium

Writer

Simenon is the prolific author of approximately 200 works. Between the early 1930s and 1970s, he wrote mainly detective fiction based on the adventures of his now famous detective Maigret. From the early 1970s, Simenon’s production concentrated on autobiographical narratives—for example, his 1981 publication Mémoires intimes (Intimate Memoirs)—and testimonials of historical events taking place in the 1930s and 1940s, like Mes apprentissages (My Apprenticeship). Simenon’s novels have been adapted for the screen by Renoir, Duvivier and Leconte, and for television series.

JEAN MAINIL

Simon, Claude

b. 1913, Tananarive, Madagascar

Writer

Grounded in family legends, visual arts and personal experience of the Spanish Civil War and the 1940 fall of France, Simon’s radically disrupted narratives problematize the notion of historical fiction. His protagonists struggle to know the world and the past against the unreliable meanings produced by language and memory. Simon’s 1985 Nobel prize for literature honoured his broadly humanistic though despairing and pessimistic vision of the twentieth century.

LYNN A.HIGGINS

See also: nouveau roman

situationism

The intellectual and political movement dubbed situationism, a descendant of Dada and Surrealism, worked against the passivity of the ‘society of the spectacle’ (the title of Guy Debord’s 1967 text, La Société du spectacle), and aimed at nothing less than the revolutionary overthrow of bourgeois art, politics and society from within. The Situationist International, founded in 1957, lasted until 1969 and was rent by expulsions and dissensions, notwithstanding which the work of its bestknown members, Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, had a major influence in May 1968 and has attracted renewed interest in the wake of postmodernism and of Debord’s 1994 suicide.

KEITH READER

See also: revolutionary groups

slang/argot/verlan

Argot or slang goes back to the secret language of the medieval underworld, the jargon of the criminal classes, for which documentation exists as early as the fifteenth century. By the nineteenth century, argot had become widespread, confused with the spoken vernacular, particularly of the working classes.

Essentially, argots are social dialects, usually belonging to an urbanized group: they include the speech of trades and professions, student groups, the army, and in the late twentieth century, the younger inhabitants of certain banlieues (suburbs).

Argot is a parasitic development of language in so far as it consists in the substitution of parts of the spoken lexis according to predetermined rules: the basic phonic system, the syntax and morphology are not affected, except for word formation.

One attractive aspect of argot is the free development of metaphors, such as la cafetière (coffee pot)=head (cf. ‘mug’ in English); le mouton (sheep)=police informer (cf. ‘grass’, ‘snout’); les rosbifs (roast-beefs)=the Brits; se poivrer (be peppered)=get drunk (cf. ‘get ratted’, ‘tight’). Such metaphorical creation is ongoing and subject to quite rapid attrition, so that the new vocabulary of one generation may seem very dated to the next. It is noteworthy that in the choice of metaphors, as in much of argot, there is a strong pejorative tonality and often a coarse humour.

Other typical devices in lexical creation are:

truncation, e.g. jar=jargon (slang); clandé= maison clandestine (brothel); charr=charriage (bluff, joke); ricain=américain; and
parasitic suffixation, the addition of an unnecessary suffix, more to disguise a word than to modify it, e.g. fortiche=fort (strong); raidillard=raide (1,000-franc note); matouser=mater (spy on). In many cases, other transformations take place, e.g. dodo—clochard (tramp, bum); perniflard= Pernod; rencard=rendez-vous; cinoche= cinema. Again, we may note a pejorative tonality in such suffixes, e.g. -ard, -aille, - oche,—-ouser.

The best-known type of argot is verlan, dating from the 1950s, although the feature of inverting syllables is found early in the nineteenth century: verlan is thus the inversion of l’envers (reverse, back to front). This is significantly different from English back slang, e.g. yob, kool.

Although verlan can seem to be easy to decipher (e.g. féca=café), some examples are less obvious—e.g. meuf=femme, and beur (born in France of North African immigrant parents) is explained as an inversion of Arabe but with a change of vowel. Moreover, a major communicatory difficulty resides in the uncertainty as to which words are verlan forms; as a result such speech can retain something of the secret code of argot.

Other forms of argot exist: largonji=jargon in which T replaces the initial consonant, which is placed at the end of the word, e.g. lacsé =sac (bag); en loucedé=en douce (quietly); le loucherbem (butchers’ slang) is a particular form of largonji; le javanais uses the parasitic infix -av-, e.g. baveau=beau (handsome), javardin=jar din (garden).

Argot words can achieve respectability, e.g. cambrioleur (burglar) and rossignol (skeleton key), but most remain on the fringe of the system. Note, however, the many writers from the nineteenth century onwards (Balzac, Hugo, Zola, Céline, San Antonio) who make regular use of argot.

Jo REED

soap

Soap opera is not France’s forte. After the failure of two 1980 attempts, Châteauvallon and En cas de bonheur, July 1991 witnessed the launch of a third attempt to get soap right— Riviera, a collaborative production between TF1 and an American company (EC Television). Due to run for a trial year, by January 1992 it had disappeared off the screen. The only other attempts, though they are much disliked by their target teenage audience, are the Americanized teen soaps produced by the major independent children’s TV production company Club Dorothée. These programmes are pastel-shaded versions of an imagined French-Californian space (e.g. Hélène et les garçons, Les Filles d’à côté). Furthermore, because they are a hybrid between soap and sitcom, they fail to satisfy the codes and conventions of either genre and so cannot be taken seriously as either.

The soap of the 1990s was the supposedly French soap Riviera, which was in actuality a multinational affair. A third of the mostly very rich ‘soap community’ were American; production practices were also American. To keep production costs down, and with an eye to English-speaking markets, the soap was shot in English and dubbed in French. This marketing strategy did not pay off. If English audiences do not like dubbed products, French audiences like French soap masquerading as an American product even less. Undoubtedly the overAmericanization of the product in terms of its look and its consequent lack of cultural specificity caused it to fail with French audiences. However, Riviera did have strengths and should not be deemed a total failure. The strengths lay in its narrative strategies. The storyline focuses around the wealthy de Courcey family (whose business is perfumery and whose name dominates Riviera society) and their arch-rival, Diego Marquez (an arriviste), a property speculator who plots the family’s downfall (la vieille France clashes with the nouveaux riches). Meantime, Marquez’s wife strives to be accepted by the upper echelons of society, and both husband and wife fail in their ambitions. Woven into this fabric are further intrigues: an illegitimate son, incestuous love, orphaned twins with identity crises, sibling rivalry and, finally, Oedipal triangles between father, son and daughter. Everyone in Riviera has a secret, a past or an illicit passion—true melodrama French-style. Riviera succeeds also in achieving spectator identification, in so far as the various storylines of crises, crime and mystery do intrigue the viewer, thanks to a multiplicity of subjective points of view. Further practices to stitch the audience into the plot are the representations of gender in the form of stereotypes (including the battle of the sexes) and representations of sexuality (especially as taboo) which both repel and attract the viewer. Thus we see men as wheeler-dealers and women as schemers— stereotypes we love to hate. That men are morally and sexually weaker is a generic fiction of soap, but one that pleases the female viewer, as must the representation of women in control of their own sexuality. Enigma is the soap of the masses. However, hybridity as exemplified (culturally and linguistically) by Riviera counters too many generic codes to permit the suspension of disbelief and, ultimately, lack of familiarity breeds discontent.

SUSAN HAYWARD

social policy

Social policy covers a broad field of analysis, from the formulation of policy objectives, and measures to achieve them, through to the provision of social protection and minimum standards of income. Social policy is not, however, a neutral or autonomous area of public policy. Its parameters vary according to the ideology of the governments in power and their priorities, and they in turn cannot act independently of domestic and, increasingly, international pressures. Nor can social policy be properly understood in isolation from economic policy: it may be constrained by economic forces, or it may serve to modify or counteract the adverse effects of the economic system.

France has long been recognized as a highly centralized and bureaucratic state, with a concern for social justice, equality and solidarity as a legacy of its Republican tradition. The social security institutions which developed over the postwar period as the main vehicle for the delivery of social policy are, however, characterized by their decentralization, autonomy, pluralism and corporatism. Proposals from ministers for social reform, whatever the political persuasion of the government in power, rarely meet with consensus; strikes and protest movements have become common features of the social landscape, signalling the opposition to change by strong interest groups intent on defending their acquired social rights.

In the phase of postwar reconstruction, the social security system was able to develop in a climate of economic growth. Its primary aim was to protect an expanding labour force and to enable workers and their families to maintain their standard of living, rather than tackling residual problems of poverty. The decision, taken after a long process of negotiation, to opt for an employment-related insurance system meant that national solidarity and universality were not dominant guiding principles. Occupational groups were allowed to retain their own well-established insurance schemes. Although coverage was gradually extended to the whole of the non-working population and to socio-occupational groups not initially entitled to protection under the general scheme or schemes operating for particular categories of employment, different conditions and levels of benefits applied. Nor was unemployment integrated into the social security system; a separate employment insurance scheme was instituted only in 1958 for workers in industry and commerce (associations pour l’emploi dans l’industrie et le commerce, ASSEDIC).

Despite anomalies in coverage, by the late 1970s, it could be claimed, with some justification, that the French population was protected from the risks of ill-health, disability, old age, unemployment and family responsibilities. Social policy had been less successful in reducing social inequalities, particularly with regard to old age, where income inequality was greater than among the working population. From the mid-1970s, policy-makers were, however, facing new social problems, as the country went into economic recession. At the same time, the growing population in retirement was imposing an increasing burden on the working population in the absence of fully funded pension schemes. Rising unemployment created a severe drain on resources, social security slid into deficit, and new forms of poverty and social exclusion began to emerge.

The social policies pursued by the left-wing governments of the early 1980s involved high levels of spending: the Left had pledged themselves to increase the minimum wage and minimum income for older people, to raise family allowances, housing and unemployment benefits, to lower retirement age and reduce working hours. A period of sounder financial management followed in response to the funding problems that ensued. By the end of the decade, additional sources of income were, however, still needed to ease the evergrowing deficit without imposing a heavier burden on employers: one of the solutions was to raise a tax across all sources of income (contribution sociale généralisée, CSG), and this was followed in 1996 by an additional levy (rem-boursement de la dette sociale, RDS).

By the early 1990s, spending on benefits and social services had reached over 30 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), representing a substantial increase since the early 1970s. The share of the social budget devoted to old age accounted for nearly 43 per cent of the total, and health for almost 27 per cent. Despite attempts to spread the burden of contributions, employers still paid by far the largest share— over 50 per cent—as part of the wage package. A number of the policies introduced to alleviate unemployment involved exempting employers from social insurance contributions as an incentive to take on unemployed people. A more innovative work-related scheme (revenu minimum d’insertion, RMI) was introduced in 1988, to lessen the impact of unemployment: it provided a minimum income for unemployed people aged over 25 in return for an agreement to undertake some form of training or work placement to facilitate their re-entry into the labour market.

The growing awareness by governments of new sources of poverty and social exclusion, combined with the need to meet the demand for a high standard of social benefits and services, while containing spending, has led to a shift in the focus of social policy towards a more solidaristic approach, based on social justice. This does not mean that retrenchment of social spending has disappeared from the social policy agenda or that proposals for radical reform of the social protection system will receive unqualified support from the social partners, but it does imply that central government is exercising stronger control over the policy-making process and seeking to instil a greater sense of social responsibility among the population at large.

LINDA HANTRAIS

social security

Although cover has been extended and provisions have been improved since World War II, the French social security system has not achieved the objectives set out by its founder, Pierre Laroque, in 1945. The system was to be based on the principles of equality, solidarity and social democracy, enabling universal access to benefits and services, redistribution of income, and participation by representatives of employers and employees in its management, without undue bureaucratic interference from the state.

The system was designed to protect workers and their families against a number of contingencies that might pose a threat to their well-being. Three major areas of risk were covered: sickness, maternity, invalidity, industrial accidents and diseases; old age; and family responsibilities. Unemployment assistance was not an integral part of social security in the 1940s, and separate schemes have since developed to cater for the growing number of unemployed people and for other population groups not adequately covered by employment- related insurance.

Social security is funded largely by contributions from employers and employees, proportional to income up to a ceiling, rather than from taxation. Access to benefits is related to contributions in line with the insurance principle, except in the case of health care, family allowances and other derived rights, which are paid, or reimbursed in the case of medical services, at fixed rates. Non-contributory benefits are generally means-tested.

The French system is difficult to classify in terms of welfare regimes: in some respects it is universalistic, like the British system as conceived by Beveridge; in others it functions as a corporatist employment-insurance system, like that developed in Germany under Bismarck. The anomalies can be largely explained by the fact that the system resulted from a compromise in response to the pressures exerted by different interest groups, intent on preserving the advantages they derived from existing arrangements. Thus, although a general scheme was established for employees in commerce and industry, innumerable special and supplementary schemes (including mutuelles) were allowed to continue. The whole population is, in theory, now protected, but the standard of cover and level of benefits are variable, particularly with regard to pensions.

Since employers and employees were the main contributors to the schemes, their representatives were made responsible for managing the funds. Between the 1950s and 1970s— when the population was growing rapidly, the economy was thriving and unemployment was minimal—social security operated efficiently. Since the mid-1970s, deficits have become endemic, and the government has sought ways to cut back spending and reduce the burden on employers from high labour costs, while also coping with the growing problems of unemployment and social exclusion.

LINDA HANTRAIS

See also: social policy

Sollers, Philippe

b. 1936, Bordeaux

Writer and critic

After the conventional and sentimental Une curieuse solitude (1958), Sollers gained notoriety as editor of Tel quel. The structurally austere late 1960s novels Drame (Drama) and Nombres (Numbers) were followed by the humorous and formally more anarchic Lois (Laws) in 1972 and the unpunctuated ‘epic’ Paradis (Paradise) in 1981. In an apparent volte-face Sollers abandoned experimental form with the 1983 work Femmes (Women), a vast roman-à-clé of the previous decade, and a critical meditation on society and sexuality. Since then, as novelist and reviewer in Le Monde, Sollers articulates an increasingly ironic perspective on all forms of orthodoxy, social, literary and intellectual, while affirming the transcendent value of art.

PATRICK FFRENCH

song/chanson

La chanson française (French song) is an important element of French popular culture which combines lyric expression, satirical, political and social commentary with music which is usually relatively simple, often linking verses to a repeated chorus or refrain. Allegedly in crisis today because of the high volume of anglophone music played on French radio and television (though a minimum 40 per cent quota of songs in French was imposed by legislation brought into force in January 1996), French song has none the less produced a number of outstanding performers and singer-song-writers since World War II.

The origins of French song can be traced back to the troubadours, medieval poets of southern France, and to their northern equivalents, the trouvères. There has always been a strong oral tradition in France and song has been used since the medieval period as a vehicle for lyric expression. As a means of articulating emotion, as a popular method of commemorating events of national importance or of expressing satirical or political views, it has always been an important form of popular entertainment. Song flourished, then, through the centuries and by the time of the Third Republic, the café-concert, or caf’conc’ as it was known familiarly, had become one of the most popular forms of public entertainment and was to remain so until World War I. The next notable development in the history of popular song was the advent of the music hall in Paris in the early years of this century and this provoked a trend still apparent today: the audience now listens more than it sings along with the performer on stage. The music hall saw the rise to stardom of legendary names: Mistinguett, Maurice Chevalier, Rose Amy, Tino Rossi, Josephine Baker, Alibert and so on. However, with the advent of the cinema, two-thirds of Parisian concert halls were converted into cinemas between 1910 and 1920.

Anglo-Saxon influences were by now bringing themselves to bear in the world of French popular music and of French popular entertainment in general. Not only in the cinema but also in the music hall, American popular culture made its mark. In music, ragtime, jazz and blues exerted a strong ongoing influence, as did a whole succession of popular dances. The world of music was now changing beyond recognition: the microphone, the silent cinema, the talkies, television, long-playing records and, more recently, digitally recorded CDs and video-clips, have all provoked a metamorphosis in the French music industry.

The most striking result of technological innovations and inventions is that, by the end of World War II, the world is a shrinking place in which communication has improved beyond recognition and in which the fashions of one continent are immediately accessible to the inhabitants of another. During the immediate aftermath of the big-band era, during and after the period which saw the birth and immediate explosion of rock and roll (the late 1950s and the early 1960s), during the period which saw the re-emergence of folk music and the vogue of the protest song (the 1960s in particular), popular music became increasingly a global phenomenon and French song was increasingly open to alluring Anglo-Saxon influences at a time when American (and also British) culture in its various manifestations became a real threat to the homogeneity of Gallic traditions.

French song, though, was in good health at the end of World War II. Charles Trenet had already charmed the French public with an often poetic, more wholesome form of song which replaced the vulgar excesses of the songs which were characteristic of the heyday of the music hall. While Trenet’s career reached new heights in the 1950s, Édith Piaf followed in his footsteps by helping to reverse the trend of Anglo-Saxonization: she made a huge impact not only in France but also in America, where she toured (initially with Les Compagnons de la chanson) from the late 1940s. In her entourage at various points were several composers who were later to become outstanding performers in their own right (Montand, Moustaki and Aznavour, for example).

French song was soon to be transformed, however, particularly for young people, with the advent of rock and roll, which was to inspire a new form of music in France, known— quite revealingly—as yé-yé (1960s pop). Aspiring young French singers adopted Anglo- Saxon names (Johnny Hallyday, Eddy Mitchell, Sheila, Richard Anthony) and ‘cover versions’ of American (and later British) songs became the vogue. The electric guitar (sometimes supplemented by the saxophone and occasionally the trumpet, a legacy of jazz and the big-band era) now became the most popular instrument, and loud, catchy music with extremely simple lyrics captivated the young and horrified the old.

Alongside the influx of Anglo-Saxon music, French song was, none the less, enjoying something of a new golden age: while cabarets on the Left Bank gave birth to a more intellectual form of song known as the chanson rive gauche, performers such as Montand and later Bécaud were to maintain French traditions (though they did allow jazz, swing and other imported influences to be incorporated in their songs). Even more significantly, however, two outstandingly original talents rejuvenated French, song from the late 1950s: Georges Brassens and the adopted Belgian singer-song-writer Jacques Brel wrote and recorded songs of the highest quality and, in the case of Brel, took performance to new heights.

French popular music has subsequently undergone the influence of punk, heavy metal, reggae, rap, Afro-Caribbean and North African elements, and so on, but a distinctly Gallic tradition has been maintained in the realm of the politically committed or provocative song (Ferrat, Renaud and Gainsbourg, for example), in the realm of lyric expression (Souchon and Cabrel, to name but two) and in the domain of live performance in venues as big as Bercy (Sardou’s 1991 and 1993 concerts providing examples to set alongside the more Americanized, but technically brilliant concerts of Hallyday). Although casual listening to French airways will not make it immediately apparent, French song is still in good health today, though the genuine article does have to be sought out with patience.

IAN PICKUP

Souchon, Alain

b. 1945, Casablanca, Morocco

Singer-songwriter

Having failed to make an impact for many years, Alain Souchon suddenly found fame in the mid-1970s when he teamed up with Laurent Voulzy to write songs. Souchon’s somewhat elliptical texts, which juxtapose what are often wistful images, are complemented perfectly by Voulzy’s music. His stage and recording persona is that of a perpetual adolescent lost in an adult world and nostalgic for times past. His successes include Bidon (Phoney), Dix ans (Ten Years Old), Allô maman bobo (Hello Mummy Hurt), Casablanca and S’asseoir par terre (To Sit Down on the Ground). An original and enduring talent.

IAN PICKUP

See also: song/chanson

Soulages, Pierre

b. 1919, Rodez

Artist

Soulages was influenced by the ancient Gallic megaliths and Romanesque buildings of his native Rouergue. His palette is dominated by black and white, and his early figurative paintings present outlines of bare dark trees. In his first non-figurative compositions, black or brown shapes, painted with broad energetic brush strokes, appear on a white ground; he was interested in calligraphic signs and rhythmic shapes. From 1950, bright colours were added, giving depth to the black and, in the 1960s, his compositions evolve from strong contrasts in light and shade to graded tones from deep black to pale grey. His latest compositions are large paintings in luminous black paint.

ELZA ADAMOWICZ

See also: painting

Soustelle, Jacques

b. 1912, Montpellier, Hérault;

d. 1990

Ethnographer and politician

As a young graduate of the École Normale Supérieure in the 1930s, Soustelle supported the left-wing Popular Front, but became a companion of de Gaulle in London during the war. During the Fourth Republic, Soustelle supported Gaullism as an activist and député in Lyon, helping de Gaulle regain power in 1958. Having served as governor-general in Algeria and been won over by arguments for l’Algérie française, he subsequently bitterly opposed de Gaulle’s policy of abandonment. Tainted by contacts with the extreme Right, Soustelle fled France, returning only after the amnesty of 1968. In 1984, he was elected to the Académie Française. Rising to intellectual and political distinction from humble Protestant origins, Soustelle exemplified the social mobility allowed by educational elitism, and his split with de Gaulle epitomized the divisive effects of the Algerian war.

HUGH DAUNCEY

spelling reform

French spelling vies with English in terms of inconsistency and difficulty, for native speaker and foreign learner alike. Contemporary modifications in spelling are the product of a historical process which it is necessary to understand in order to get to grips with twentieth-century spelling reform.

Standard French is considered to have thirty-six phonemes, whereas the written code possesses as many as forty-three signs (the twenty-six letters of the alphabet together with diacritic forms); in addition, through historical evolution, French contains numerous compound graphemes, e.g. ch, gn, au, eau, ain. This means that a particular sound may have several written forms, e.g. [s] in sac, presse, science, nation, six, leçon; likewise a written letter or letters can have several values, including zero, e.g. s in sac, rose, femmes.

Ideas for spelling reform, or for making the orthographic system consistent, began to flourish with the development of printed texts and the consequent evolution of an accepted literary French. As early as the sixteenth century, printers and scholars engaged in debate and experiment to establish a norm for texts in the vernacular: until this time, Latin had been the language of scholars and the essential written language, but French had many features alien to Latin. G.Tory, for example, recommends the use of the cedilla, apostrophe and accents, and other sixteenth-century printers rapidly develop proposals for a modern orthographic system, including the separation of ‘i’ and ‘j’, ‘u’ and ‘v’.

The seventeenth century recognized a traditional spelling lingering on with certain writers and officials, together with the new, reformed orthography. However, the first edition of the Academy dictionary (1694) declared that it wished to follow l’ancienne orthographe. Scholars such as Richelet, and writers like Corneille, continued to argue for (and to use) a spelling code in which the written form attempts to reproduce the spoken form as closely as possible, reducing double consonants, eliminating parasitic letters and making full use of the diacritics.

The various editions of the Academy dictionaries have authorized various spelling reforms— in particular the third edition (1740), which modified up to 6,000 words and gave French its modern shape by eliminating some superfluous letters; one example is the replacement of preconsonantal s by a circumflex on the preceding vowel. The 1835 edition replaces oi by ai in many words, e.g. français (French), paraître (appear) and, more importantly, in all conditional and imperfect endings. The eighth edition (1932–5), replaces the apostrophe in nouns such as grand’mère (grandmother) by a hyphen and modifies some 500 words in total.

In the twentieth century, there have been numerous projects for spelling reform— Dauzat (1939), Beslais (1952), Thimonnier (1967), Conseil Supérieur de la Langue Française (1990)—all of which have revealed the inconsistencies of French but failed to provide acceptable solutions. Certain phenomena are regularly cited: double consonants, Greek features (th, rh, ph, y), mute consonants, hyphen, circumflex and other diacritics, as well as individual anomalies.

The failure of the Academy to adopt the limited programme of reforms in 1990 is testimony to the stability of French spelling, however eccentric, but this should not conceal the fact that French has come to accept many changes and will continue to do so.

Jo REED

sport

Modern sports, like the industrialization and urbanization of which they were historically an expression, came late to France, but have since been widely disseminated, developing in ways which reflect the demographic, economic and even political character of French society. Having been introduced from Britain in the 1880s, the first modern sports (rugby, football, athletics) were initially the preserve of fashionable Parisian society, as exemplified by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games. However, as the appeal of these sporting imports spread, they were democratized, commercialized, ever more intensely mediated, and joined by indigenous sports, such as France’s first and still most important sporting spectacle, professional cycling, epitomized since 1903 by the Tour de France, an event perfectly adapted to the demographic reality of a nation of many small rural or semi-rural communities as well as a few major conurbations.

State involvement in the organization of sport dates back to the 1901 law on associations, which requires formal registration of sports (and all other) clubs. Such associations, which may be single-sport but are more often multi-sport, must be affiliated to the appropriate national federation(s), which in turn come under the umbrella of the Comité National Olympique et Sportif Français (CNOSF). Each governing body is authorized to administer its own sport, receiving significant funding to enable it to carry out its responsibilities. Such is the federations’ power that no sportsman or sportswoman may participate in formally constituted matches, leagues or championships without previously having been granted a licence by the appropriate federation. The numbers of such licenciés (licenceholders) indicate that football is the most popular team sport in France, with tennis, skiing and cycling being the major individual sports (both in competitive and leisure terms), followed by ‘minority’ interests like judo, basketball, rugby, horse riding, sailing and golf. The democratization in the 1970s and 1980s of hitherto socially exclusive sports like tennis and skiing reflects a general rise in disposable incomes available for leisure expenditure, together with improvements in sports and travel infrastructures. It also underlines the success of state initiatives such as the now firmly established classes de neige (skiing classes for schoolchildren), which began in the 1950s.

Spectator sport similarly reflects a preoccupation with soccer, with the televised performances of the leading clubs and, especially, of the national side in international competitions representing a regular high point for viewing figures. (Half of all French TV viewers are believed to have watched Michel Platini’s team in the 1986 World Cup semifinal.) François Mitterrand, as president of the Republic, maintained a tradition first established by Charles de Gaulle of identifying the nation with top-level sport by regularly attending the final of the French football knockout cup. His re-establishment in 1991 of a full ministry for youth and sport underlined the renewed importance attached to sport under his presidency, as did the doubling of the weighting attached to the physical education component of the baccalauréat school-leaving examination in 1995.

De Gaulle’s own well publicized attachment to rugby union—a sport rooted firmly in southwest France, where it has given rise to a unique, and regularly applauded, style of play which is the source of considerable local (specifically municipal) pride—was part of the transformation of a regional passion into a national preoccupation made possible by the massive expansion of televised sports coverage from the 1950s onwards. (Today’s TV highlights also include particularly the Open tennis championships at Roland Garros and the ‘the hell of the north’, the Paris-Roubaix cycle race). The appointment, under Georges Pompidou’s presidency, of Jacques Chaban-Delmas (a former rugby and tennis international) to the post of prime minister is likewise of significance as regards the process of national identification with sports stars, as is the massive coverage provided by both a specialist press (notably L’Équipe and Le Miroir des sports) and the general national (and especially regional) press. Indeed, such is French sport’s sociological significance that it has periodically attracted the attention of distinguished commentators from Barthes to Bourdieu.

Such diverse factors as long-term structural unemployment, the television-led emergence of the home as the primary cultural space, the collapse of established social hierarchies including particularly traditional gender roles, the advent of le sport-business (typified, in spite of recent set-backs, by Bernard Tapie) and even administrative decentralization can all be linked to changes in French leisure patterns. The rise of the so-called ‘Californian’ sports (such as windsurfing and hang-gliding) and the ‘informal’ use of new sporting spaces (such as street basketball or skateboarding) reflect profound changes in French society, as they do in other developed industrial nations. The centralized and hierarchical model of sports administration is increasingly challenged by the development of sporting activity outside the formal structures of the federations (including jogging, aerobics and modern dance), as part of broader social changes often characterized as the privatization of leisure. In these circumstances, the vexed question of whether (as has sometimes been optimistically suggested) sport may provide a privileged mechanism for the integration of alienated youth of ethnic minority origin remains undecided.

PHILIP DINE

sport and education

Since World War II, the French Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Youth, Sport and Leisure have strengthened considerably the role of sport in the lives of French youth and have developed professional qualifications in sport and exercise science in universities (Sciences et Techniques des Activités Physiques et Sportives). Sporting facilities have been radically improved in educational and municipal establishments throughout the country.

Historically, physical education in France was associated with the military, although as early as 1817 the government was supporting a mixed civil and military training centre (the Gymnase Normal Civil et Militaire). It was only in 1937, however, that the first Ministère des Sports (sports ministry) was created, along with sports diplomas. This new ministry was responsible for sport and physical education in educational establishments (gymnastics had been compulsory in secondary schools since a decree of 1869). The Vichy government reinforced the trend with a Commissariat for general education and sport and, in the aftermath of the war, the Institut National du Sport (National Institute for Sport) was created in 1945.

In 1958, the Fifth Republic formed the socalled Commissariat à la Jeunesse et aux Sports (Youth and Sports Commission) before transforming it into a ministry in 1966. In 1968 it became a Secrétariat d’État (ministry of state). Sport was, then, being increasingly recognized as an important element in the curriculum (as witnessed, for example, in the official instructions issued to educational establishments in 1967 which proclaimed the crucial role of sport and competition in the pursuit of ‘material and spiritual progress’).

Another highly significant development of national importance was the merging in 1976 of the Écoles Normales Supérieures d’Éducation Physique (the top-level teachertraining establishments for physical education) and the Institut National des Sports (National Institute of Sport), which became the prestigious Institut National du Sport et de l’Éducation Physique, or INSEP (the National Institute of Sport and Physical Education). This institute now attracts the elite of French sportsmen and sportswomen and has done much to improve France’s standing in the world of sport.

The Ministère des Sports oversees school, university and civil sport from international level down to that of the départements; it maintains close relations with the federations which control individual sports. Each federation has a national technical director (DTN) who is at the top of a pyramid which goes all the way down to individual clubs. School sport has its national ‘union’ at primary and secondary level (Union Sportive des Écoles Primaires, Union Nationale du Sport Scolaire), while universities have their own sports federation (Fédération Nationale du Sport Universitaire). Despite the undoubted improvements in organization, training and sports facilities, France had limited success in competitive sport before the outstanding achievements at the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996. The country has also made great strides in tennis, has maintained its high standards in rugby and improved them significantly in football.

IAN PICKUP

sports funding

French sport relies upon both public and private funding, with a central role played by local government. The principle of state involvement in the organization and funding of sport became firmly established as part of the broader process of economic and social reconstruction which occurred after World War II. The present Ministère de la Jeunesse et des Sports administers the financial support given to the national federations responsible for overseeing individual sports. While seldom exceeding 0.2 per cent of total government expenditure, this funding has provided both a lifeline for the weaker organizations and a means of exerting influence on sports development for the government. At present, state support may make up anything between 10 and 90 per cent of the revenue of an individual federation, depending on its ability to generate additional income from subscriptions, sponsorship and television rights, with the average figure being in the region of 40 per cent. (These and other statistics cited are derived from Miège 1993.) Since the early 1960s, such aid has taken two main forms: personnel and grants. Some 1,700 technical advisers are made available to individual federations at both national and local levels. The salaries of these civil servants, like the awards made by the ministry to cover the federations’ operating costs and their support for top-level performers, are financed jointly through direct taxation and the Fonds National pour le Développement du Sport (FNDS), a specifically targeted levy on alcohol sales and gambling (principally horse racing and the national lottery, including its version of the football pools, the loto sportif). Since the administrative decentralization of 1983, the state has ceased to be directly involved in the financing of capital projects, with the exception of major initiatives such as the loss-making Albertville Olympic Games in 1992 and the new national stadium in the Paris suburbs. The regions and the départements have thus joined the communes in what has long been a privileged field of local government action, with an average 7 per cent of municipal funds currently devoted to sport, and over one-third of the total sports budget coming from the municipalities. The involvement of the regions and the départements, at under 4 per cent, remains modest, but is rapidly expanding. However, this apparently solid structure is under strain as a result of a general crisis of commercialization, with entrepreneurial attitudes replacing a traditional associative ethos reliant upon voluntary involvement. The funding of professional sport has similarly been subject to stress, as evidenced by both regular administrative reforms and the periodic financial crises of major clubs (most notably Bernard Tapie’s Olympique de Marseille).

PHILIP DINE

See also: sport

Staël, Nicolas de

b. 1914, St Petersburg, Russia;

d. 1955, Antibes

Artist

Nicolas de Staël’s painting helped to define the lyrical and expressive form of abstraction that evolved in Paris and elsewhere in the postwar years. A Russian émigré, orphaned soon after his family was forced into exile, he was adopted by Russian expatriates living in Brussels, where he studied at the Academic Royale des Beaux-Arts. After serving in the Foreign Legion, he moved to France in 1940, settling for a time in Nice, where, through his companion, Jeannine Guillou, he made the acquaintance of a group of abstract artists including Magnelli, Marie Raymond (Yves Klein’s mother) and Sonia and Robert Delaunay. Their influence led him to abandon the figurative painting he had practised before the war in favour of abstraction.

After settling in Paris in 1943, he began to show his work in exhibitions alongside abstractionists such Domela, Kandinsky and Magnelli. His Compositions (1943/4) distinguished him from the ‘geometric’ abstractionists represented by Mondrian’s successors— Magnelli and Vasarély, for example—and identified him with the expressive and lyrical form of abstraction that was evolving as an alternative. While these early, rather decorative, works lacked a certain assurance, from 1946 onwards Staël proved that abstract painting could express mood while remaining self-referential. His De la danse (1946) has been hailed as an expression of ‘pure painting’, with its subtle and sombre beiges and grey-blues translating his subjective state at the time. The misery of these early years, which had been marked by penury and the death of Jeannine, began to dissipate with his marriage to Françoise Chapouton and growing artistic success. In 1948, he acquired French citizenship.

The influence of his friend Georges Braque, and his admiration for the painterly qualities in the work of artists such as Rembrandt, may have led him to focus on colour and texture, while a fellow Russian émigré, André Lanskoy, is said to have taught him, through example, the technique of applying thick paint with a palette knife to produce the rich, tactile surfaces that distinguish his work of the late 1940s. The expressive qualities of texture, also seen in Jean Fautrier’s Otages of 1945, was to become a recognizable characteristic of the lyrical form of abstraction with which Staël is associated.

From 1952, figurative elements began to appear in his paintings—still lifes, landscapes, the human body. A floodlit football match at the Parc des Princes in 1952 inspired his Footballeurs series, which provoked enthusiasm in the public and condemnation from the defenders of abstract art. Yet his human figures are treated as compact masses of colour, without a psychological or even an anatomical presence, and are analysable in purely formal terms, while his seascapes Marine claire and Marine foncée (both 1955) also serve to show that the distinction between abstract and representational art is, in many respects, meaningless.

The last five years of Staël’s life were marked by international acclaim, with important exhibitions in New York, London and other European cities. He committed suicide in March 1955 while working on paintings for two exhibitions planned for the summer. Since his death, his paintings have continued to be exhibited on a regular basis throughout Europe and America.

CAROL WILCOX

See also: painting

stars

Star studies have been an important part of film studies since the late 1970s, but tend to focus on Hollywood stars. There are therefore problems of definition in relation to French stars, who do not work in a studio system, and who cross over popular genres (comedies, police thrillers) and auteurist art films. If box office is used to justify star status, then the French star system is overwhelmingly masculine and dominated by popular genres, with an emphasis on comedy. In the postwar period, Louis de Funès and Bourvil, whose greatest joint success was Oury’s comedy La Grande Vadrouille (1966), dominated the 1960s, just as Belmondo and Delon dominated the 1970s in a mixture of comic action films and thrillers. During the 1980s and since, Depardieu has topped the league as the main male French star, whose appearance can ensure a film’s success, such as in Dupeyron’s Drôle d’endroit pour une rencontre in 1988. A 1990 poll by Télérama, however, placed Gabin at the top, followed by Gérard Philipe, and included Montand in its first six, suggesting that box office is not the only condition for stardom. The same poll listed the following women as stars, in rank order: Romy Schneider, Michèle Morgan, Simone Signoret, Isabelle Adjani, Catherine Deneuve, Brigitte Bardot. While Schneider has always been popular with French audiences, it is curious that Bardot should figure so low (only 8 per cent voted her as their favourite), since she seems the epitome of the female star, her retirement patterned on Garbo’s. The 1990 poll also asked respondents who the stars of tomorrow might be, and these (including Sophie Marceau, Emmanuelle Béart and Juliette Binoche) seem more likely candidates for star status. Stardom might therefore seem to be ephemeral, but this is contradicted by the first list of stars given in the same poll, since Schneider’s decade was the 1970s (she died in 1982), and Signoret’s decade straddled the 1960s and 1970s (she died in 1985). Another criterion is international status. Those who might be considered major stars in 1996— Adjani, Binoche and Depardieu—have all been in Hollywood films (although Depardieu was a star before Green Card). Conversely, Ardant has been in a number of European films since Swann in Love, often by well-known directors: Tato’s Desiderio (1984, in Italy), Scola’s La Famiglia (1987, in Italy/France), Von Trotta’s adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, Paura e amore (1988, in Italy/Germany/France), Peploe’s Afraid of the Dark (1991, in France/ Great Britain) and Bellocchio’s Il Sogno della Farfalla (1992, in Italy/France/Switzerland); but despite this, and despite her association with Truffaut, Ardant is not seen as a star. It would therefore seem that to be a star in the French system, you have to act in Hollywood films. The second major point to emerge is that stars, like the desires which give rise to them, fade, although at different speeds of light.

PHIL POWRIE

See also: cinema

street papers

Macadam Journal, Le Réverbère, La Rue and Faim de siècle, launched in rapid succession in 1993, followed by Le Lampadaire in 1994, are the main French street papers, commonly referred to as la presse SDF. SDF means people sans domicile fixe (of no fixed abode). These alternative newspapers, championing the cause of the homeless, are sold in the streets by homeless vendors in return for a percentage of the cover price, normally 60 per cent. Their aim is to provide a source of revenue, and act as an instrument of social integration for vendors, giving them self-respect and facilitating contacts with the public.

PAM MOORES

See also: restaurants du coeur

structuralism

An influential intellectual movement dominant in France from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. The origins of structuralism are multiple, and some commentators (such as Piaget and Serres) rightly insist on its transdisciplinary basis (e.g. in physics, mathematics and biology). However, the main path of assimilation of structuralism into the human sciences in France was via linguistic theory, and in this version at least it could more precisely be called linguistic structuralism.

The basic elements of linguistic structuralism can be found in the pioneering work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the Course in General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique générale), published in 1916. Saussure distinguished between two aspects or levels of language, langue and parole. Parole refers to the external and contingent aspect of language production in activities such as speech and writing, while langue—the principal object of linguistic science—is the set of patterns or rules which precedes and makes possible the realization of language in parole. For Saussure, langue is a system, in which it is the relations between elements, and not the elements themselves, that are responsible for meaning. On the semantic level, an individual word (e.g. ‘horse’) only makes sense in terms of its difference from other, related concepts (e.g. donkey, ass, unicorn, automobile, etc.). On the phonetic level, difference of meaning is generated by the substitution of minimally distinct units of sound: ‘horse’, ‘Norse’, ‘course’, etc. From this differential explanation of signification follows the central postulate of Saussure’s linguistic theory, the arbitrariness of the sign. Word and concept (or ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’) have no essential connection other than their habitual association within the system of langue. An important aspect of Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole is that it also implies a distinction between the individual and the collective. Saussure reiterates that langue is by nature a social construct, whereas parole, the exercise or execution of langue, is individual and variable.

Probably the most important mediation of Saussurean linguistics in postwar French thought came from the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Inspired by the phonological theory of the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson, in his first book, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté), Lévi-Strauss argued that it is possible to isolate a small number of elementary and invariant structures from which the diversity of observable kinship structures might be derived. He then went on to extend his application of the linguistic model to other areas of social life. Already in the Cours Saussure had indicated that linguistics dealt with only one of a number of sign systems used in human society, and for this reason he suggested that the study of language should ultimately be part of a more general science of signs—semiology. Lévi-Strauss developed this idea in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1960, where he defined social anthropology as a semiology, that is, the study of signs in social life. The different social practices and institutions studied by anthropologists are homologous in that, like language, they are symbolic systems with their own inherent significations, ensuring communication between members of the group. Social phenomena as diverse as kinship structures, totemism or myth could therefore be analysed in the same way as a language. Lévi-Strauss’s most elaborate application of the linguistic model can be found in his extensive work on myth, most remarkably in the four-volume cycle Mythologiques, published between 1964 and 1971. According to Lévi-Strauss, traditional interpretations of myth concentrated on the meaning of isolated elements or themes, whereas each myth should be considered as an integrated system. Just as linguists isolated the minimal constitutive units of language (phonemes, morphemes, etc.), so the mythologist could isolate the most basic elements of a myth (mythemes). As a system, the signification of the myth came not from any individual element or mytheme, but from the differential relations between these elements, more precisely their mode of combination. As in language, this combination of elements was not arbitrary, and followed certain definite rules. The aim of structural analysis was therefore to determine the rules of combination that would constitute the structure of the myth.

An important feature of Lévi-Strauss’s definition of structure is that, like Saussure’s langue, it is independent of the conscious intentions and interpretations of the individual member of the social group. This does not mean that structure is unconscious in the Freudian sense, that is, the subject of censorship or repression; rather, it is unconscious in the same way that the implicit rules of a language are not conscious to the average speaker of the language. As Lévi-Strauss asserted, it is not individuals that speak through myths but myths that speak through individuals.

Lévi-Strauss’s application of linguistic theory to social and cultural formations caught the imagination of a new generation of thinkers in search of new models and more rigorous methods of analysis. This was in a context where the human sciences, and anthropology in particular, were increasingly seen as a more scientific alternative to the old humanism. Few disciplines were left untouched by structuralist theory. In psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan’s proposed return to Freud was combined with a theory of the unconscious based on Saussurean linguistics. In history, Fernand Braudel described his analysis of long-term social and economic trends as ‘structural history’. For the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, structuralism announced the dissolution of ‘man’, a comparatively recent construct of Western philosophy and science. In the field of literary studies, Roland Barthes proposed a semiology of contemporary social and cultural forms, applying structural analysis to items of popular culture such as fashion writing. Related to the linguistic turn in literary studies was a revival of interest in theories of rhetoric and narrative discourse, which also drew on the earlier work of the Russian Formalists; this trend was evident in the work of Genette, Greimas and Todorov.

The differences between thinkers categorized as ‘structuralist’ were often very great, and many of these thinkers themselves resisted such assimilation and categorization. Significantly, Lévi-Strauss was doubtful of the validity of applications of structural analysis to literature, considering this an inappropriate extension of methods specific to the object of his own discipline, anthropology. Yet, despite such restrictions, and despite the heterogeneity of the thinkers involved, it can be said that during the period in question structuralism became the dominant paradigm in French intellectual life. This success cannot be attributed solely to the intrinsic merits of structuralist theory itself, which was open to criticism on a number of levels, even in its original, Lévi-Straussian interpretation; it was equally a function of the context in which structuralism first came to prominence. As a movement, it participated in the climate of reaction against the philosophical humanism which had dominated intellectual discussion in France since the war. After the war, Jean-Paul Sartre’s version of existentialism had emerged as the philosophy most suited to the urgent moral questions— questions of individual choice, responsibility and commitment—which the experience of war had rendered so immediate. However, as these conflicts receded into the past and France proceeded along the path of postwar reconstruction, to many the solutions offered by existentialism seemed less relevant and even inadequate to the moral, political and economic complexities of the post-colonial world. Increasingly, intellectuals turned to the specialized knowledge of the human and social sciences for answers which philosophy itself could not provide. This was also a period of major advances in the natural sciences, in new disciplines such as cybernetics, information theory and molecular biology. The Sartrean version of existentialism was primarily concerned with the immediate experience of the individual subject in-the-world, rather than with scientific objectifications of the world, the subject or the society inhabited by the subject. As Lévi-Strauss pointed out some years later, one of the significant weaknesses of Sartre’s thought was his failure to engage with contemporary science, which is precisely what structuralism had done. In addition to its assimilation of the methods of structural linguistics, structuralism also drew its inspiration from the recent achievements of the new sciences mentioned above. Whatever the ultimate limitations of this kind of interdisciplinarity, it at least gave the impression of a ferment of ideas which appeared to be absent in existentialism.

Inevitably, a polemic developed between the two movements, crystallizing around the figures of Sartre and Lévi-Strauss. In Tristes tropiques, Lévi-Strauss had already attacked the subjectivist bias of phenomenology and existentialism. A philosophy based on personal experience, he claimed, can never tell us anything essential about society or humanity, but is simply a dramatization of the individual. A few years later, in The Savage Mind (La Pensée sauvage), he questioned the obsession of philosophers like Sartre with history, arguing that their conception of the historical process was purely relative. The societies studied by ethnologists also possessed a history, but chose to represent it differently, constructing their social identity around the repetition of archetypal situations rather than in relation to a linear sequence of events. Sartre’s response to structuralism, both in this local debate and more generally, was to criticize the abstraction of structural analysis, which ignored the dialectical realities of concrete relations and of the historical process. In his view, the priority structuralism gave to autonomous and unconscious structures dehumanized the subject and excluded the possibility of individual agency. On a more general level, he saw structuralism as a symptom of the political stasis of France under de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic and as the intellectual incarnation of modern technocratic ideology.

Sartre’s resistance was by no means isolated. He was joined by French intellectuals of diverse persuasions (Marxist, Christian and others), who saw in structuralism a philosophy inimical to the interests of an authentic humanism. Despite their often valid criticisms, it was evident that the tide had turned in favour of the human sciences as exemplified in the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss. The events of May 1968 seemed to offer momentary vindication of Sartre’s position, as for many structuralism had become synonymous with the conservative elements of the discredited regime: one commentator memorably remarked that les structures ne descendent pas dans la rue (‘structures do not take to the streets’). The triumph was shortlived, however, and by the late 1960s the position of structuralism seemed assured as it finally received academic consecration in the post-1968 expansion of the university system.

To an extent it could be said that the decline of structuralism came from within: that is, it came from those who had enthusiastically assimilated its lessons and had come to recognize its inherent limitations. The diverse applications of linguistic structuralism could often be reductive and in the worse cases degenerated into the mechanical repetition of a preset formula. While Lévi-Strauss continued to refine his own version of structural analysis in the relatively specialized domain of mythology, by the early 1970s thinkers such as Barthes had abandoned structuralism. It remains that structuralism represented a crucial phase in postwar French thought, and it is a measure of its historical importance that the heterogeneous movement which succeeded it is commonly referred to as poststructuralism.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

student revolt of 1986

In late 1986, a bill before parliament (containing proposals that might have significantly increased university registration fees and introduced measures of selective entry) provoked widespread strikes in educational institutions, and brought students from universities and lycées alike on to the streets in their hundreds of thousands, in the common cause of protest at the infringement of the Republican constitutional right to free access to nonfee- paying higher education. It was the largest and best co-ordinated student protest since the events of May 1968, to which some commentators began to liken it. When clashes between demonstrators and police in Paris led to the death of a student, the legislation was withdrawn. The Junior Minister for Research and Higher Education responsible, Alain Devaquet, resigned.

RON HALLMARK

suburbs

The banlieue, as the urban periphery outside the urban core is called, has a history going back to the redevelopment of city centres and influx of rural migrants in the second half of the nineteenth century. Later, in the interwar period, urban peripheries expanded haphazardly with little planning. The term ‘red belt’, referring to the Communist-voting suburbs to the northeast of Paris, dates from this period. It was coined by Paul-Vaillant Couturier in articles that appeared in the Communist newspaper L’Humanité in 1924–6 and eventually became a reality after the 1935 municipal elections. Today, the tight network of Communist associations and culture has come to an end as the banlieue becomes truly part of urban civilization, an integral extension rather than an appendage of the city.

It was at the beginning of the 1960s that Sarcelles, then a dormitory suburb in the Paris agglomeration, gave its name to sarcellite, an illness equated with the concrete gigantism and poor living conditions of the HLM (habitat à loyer modéré). ‘Banlieue’ has increasingly operated, as the inner city has done in Britain, as the simplified shorthand for a cluster of social ills and problematic inhabitants. The coupling of security and foreigner, delinquency and immigration, violence and suburbs, has reinforced the sense of the suburb as being outside of normal society, a place of exclusion for the dangerous classes. Thus banlieue merges seamlessly into cités (estates), ghettos and quartiers difficiles (problem areas).

Disturbances in Vénissieux (1981) and Vaulx-en-Velin (1990)—both suburbs of Lyon—and in Sartrouville (1991) and Mantes- la-Jolie (1991) maintained the suburb in the forefront of media attention and public policy. From 1983, the ‘Banlieue 89’ programme, launched by Roland Castro and Michel Cantal-Dupart, began its work on creating a new urbanism. The projects in the ‘Banlieue’ programme, of which 200 had been undertaken in the 1980s, combined design, sociability and cultural activities; they sought to recentre places which had been peripheral and connect them together. However, the ‘Banlieue 89’ programme exuded an unwarranted optimism in the power of improvements in the built environment to provide an answer to inequalities and economic and social exclusion.

Not only has the banlieue come to occupy centre stage politically, but it has also gained prominence cinematically in the 1990s. Whereas in the 1960s the banlieue was an unusual setting, with the exception of a few films such as Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle directed by Jean-Luc Godard (1966), which examined women’s prostitution, and La Dernière Femme (1976) by Marco Ferreri, in the mid-1990s a new wave of French film adopted the themes of life in the banlieue— youth in their dealings with parents and the law, and relationships between different ethnic minorities—as central concerns. Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995) highlighted the lives of youths from different ethnic backgrounds who, bored and hassled on their estate, escape to the bright lights of Paris, for which they do not possess the necessary savoir faire. Other accounts, such as the voyage undertaken by François Maspero and Anaik Frantz through the Parisian banlieue, follow the route of the RER (express metro), presenting portraits of landscape which, though sometimes very desolate, are always peopled with real figures.

ELEONORE KOFMAN

Supervielle, Jules

b. 1884, Montevideo, Uruguay;

d. 1960, Paris

Poet, writer and dramatist

Supervielle was educated in France and lived in France after World War II. In his poetry as well as in his fiction, he is noted for his gracious intimacy, his ability to link himself to nature and the universe with fresh eyes, and without grandiloquence. His friendships with Gide, Valéry and Rilke were crucial in his formation, yet he maintained a fine balance between his Uruguayan and French cultural legacies. Primarily his works win readers by their charm and simplicity. There are many volumes of poetry, from Gravitations (1926) to 1959’s Le Corps tragique (The Tragic Body), plus several collections of fiction, notably the appropriately entitled Premiers pas de l’univers (First Steps in the Universe) from 1950.

WALTER A.STRAUSS

Supports/Surfaces

The Supports/Surfaces group, which existed as a coherent avant-garde between 1971 and 1972, was associated with the structuralist review Tel quel and its pro-Maoist faction, the Mouvement de Juin ’71. Marcelin Pleynet acted as ‘bridge’ between art and literature through his position as art critic and editor of Tel quel. Pleynet’s Painting and System (Système de la Peinture), which provides a model for interpreting the history of art with reference to Marx and Freud, was applauded by the artists of the Supports/Surfaces group.

The Supports/Surfaces artists made two important contributions to art practice: they attacked the Greenbergian Modernist paradigm (which insists upon abstraction and the sublime as qualitative measures of ‘Modern’ art) by revealing the extent to which the surface picture plane is itself constructed (falsifying); and insisted upon the semantic value of plastic practice. These projects were wrapped up in Far Left political rhetoric by the group’s journal, Peinture, cahiers théoriques. That the plastic works resemble American minimal art of the preceding decade has made it difficult to assimilate them within an international art market which demands aesthetic innovation, while rejecting politics and philosophy as determinants for value in art practice.

Bioulès’s Sans titre of 1971 (a diptych in which each panel is divided in two, coloured white, blue/white, red) would provide an example in which the refusal of the écran pictural is achieved through the use of acrylic washes, absorbed by the fine linen surface, emphasizing ‘objecthood’, and denying the assumption of colour as transcendent surface.

Bioulès ultimately resigned over the strict imposition of a posited ‘dialectical materialism’, which he felt limited Freudian interpretations of his pulsion towards colour.

Louis Cane’s Toiles découpées from 1970 (large felt squares, with the centre cut to form a protrusion on the floor and a ‘frame’ on the wall) negotiate the Matisse inheritance and its Freudian corollary through ‘cutting’, as well as invoking Stella’s shaped canvases (and thereby asserting the ‘objecthood’ of the work, its material reality as opposed to its transcendent aesthetic value). They question through their three-dimensional quality not only the Renaissance Véduta (window on the world) as structure in painting but also the Modernist critical intolerance of sculpture’s physicality. For a political interpretation to be defended, it is necessary to see Cane’s earlier Tampons (rubber stamp marks which read ‘Louis Cane, artiste peintre’) of 1967 as positing the artist as artisan-worker: the repetitive manual operation is seen as analogous to the ‘skilled ouvrier’ emergent under Pompidou, their identity disappearing in the almost infinite repetition of their ‘Fordist’ mechanized gesture.

Dezeuze was already a long way into his systematic investigations by the time he made his Échelle de bois verte et brune (Brown and Green Wooden Ladder) in 1971. The disruption of the categories painting/sculpture/architectural space may once again be seen as a refusal of Modernist critical preoccupations with transcendence and its analogous exclusion of non-codified genres. The concern with relocating the stretcher as structurally meaningful is clearer here than in almost any Supports/Surfaces work: the absorption of wood dyes for colour, affirming the rejection of the primacy of the surface screen (which is absent), the rolled-up part of the piece insisting upon a refusal of narrative closure, a refusal of mastery, the undetermined presence of excess.

Valensi’s tressages (weavings) and objet d’analyses (analytical objects) of 1970 engage strongly with questions of language, text(ile), intertextuality and refusal of narrative closure. Particularly, this artist may be seen to take on board the notion of ‘system’ as a scientific approach to a research-based art, seeking to explore the effects of stitching, knotting, weaving and layering materials traditionally associated with painting. There is no place here for ‘bourgeois’ aesthetic bliss. This work is functional, not in the propagandizing manner of socialist realism, but rather after the fashion of science ameliorating understanding in the domain of the arts, a position very much at one with the contradictory French cultural context of its moment.

Viallat’s Disparitions multiples (Multiple Disappearances) of 1970 engages with not only a refusal of the surface through the use of absorbed colours, not only with the refusal of closure which is implicit in the multilayered recto-verso work, not only with the refusal of surface narrative through the use of his repetitive non-referential form, but also with the notion of an acquired material narrative, liberated through this series of refusals.

His Pochoir de filet sur toile métis of 1972 cross-references his rope/knot pieces with his ‘disparition’ pieces by using the trace of an absent knotted rope net to indicate the absence of his non-referential forms (the marks forming in effect the tessellated outline of the usual pattern). His recuperation of materials and liberation of their narrative value uses a Derridean displacement to effect a structural revelation of semantic excess usually covered by painting.

Viallat never made any specific claims for the political value of his work, and this proved to be a stumbling block for his participation in the group. It should be noted that it was a political commitment to a culturally distinct Midi, rather than an absence of political stance, which was at stake. This ‘other’ political domain is expressed most clearly not in his painted/theoretical works but rather in his drawings, where the representation of bullfighting is central. Viallat’s separation of politics from art is reflected in his separation of art and drawing, where the former is deemed intellectual and theoretical, and the latter an expression of reality as lived by the artist.

These examples of the Supports/Surfaces group’s practice are intended to be representative rather than exhaustive. It should be noted that, while the group formally existed only between 1971 and 1972, its impact on French art practice was dominant throughout the 1970s. Its significance may be measured by the strength of its legacy, a legacy of postmodern art practice which works freely with shattered cultural narrative, as if its previous seeming coherence had never needed to be questioned.

SIMEON HUNTER

See also: Derrida; painting