W

Waechter, Antoine

b. 1949, Mulhouse

Environmental activist and politician

A founder of the main French Green Party, Les Verts, in 1984 and its main leader and speaker for the following ten years, Waechter became known for his uncompromising, earnest views. He represents a radical, fundamentalist approach to green politics, refusing alliances with other political groups. He was the Green candidate in the 1988 presidential elections, and an MEP from 1989 to 1991. His views were defeated within the Green Party in 1994, by an alliance of less ‘fundamentalist’ activists, and he left to create his own movement, the Mouvement Écologiste Indépendant, which has not been successful in attracting support.

FRANÇOIS NECTOUX

water sports

A variety of water sports are popular in France and each has its national federation (Fédération Française de…): Canoë-Kayak (canoeing), Natation (swimming), Ski Nautique (waterskiing), Surf et Skate (surfing and skateboarding), Voile et Planche à Voile (sailing and windsurfing), Water-Polo. Sailing is particularly popular and France has produced sailors of world stature such as Alain Colas and the incomparable Éric Tabarly.

IAN PICKUP

Wenzel, Jean-Paul

b. 1947, St Étienne

Playwright, actor and director

After national theatre school in Strasbourg, Wenzel acted for Brook, and helped create the company Théâtre du Quotidien in 1975, before writing plays such as Loin d’Hagondange (Far from Hagondange) and La Fin des Monstres (End of the Monsters). A supporter of decentralization, Wenzel often collaborates with the Théâtre Ouvert and directs the Centre Dramatique National at Montluçon, Les Fédérés.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: Attoun, Lucien; theatre

wine

It is commonly said that France is the home of the best food and drink—particularly wine—in the world. With a tradition which goes back to the Gauls and an unrivalled reputation which goes back many centuries, in the last century the French wine industry had to recover from a devastating blow caused by the phylloxera louse. A native of America, the Phylloxera vastatrix crossed the Atlantic in the mid- to late nineteenth century (probably through the ignorance or negligence of an unsuspecting botanist) and found the roots of European vines much to its liking. The result was the almost total devastation of France’s (and ultimately Europe’s) vineyards. The solution eventually adopted in France as elsewhere, after the failure of different chemical treatments, was the grafting of European vines on to American root stock unaffected by phylloxera (a practice still followed today). In France, only Bollinger’s Vieilles Vignes champagne is produced from pre-phylloxera, ungrafted vines.

Although the development of the global market has meant greater competition for the French wine industry abroad (and the country imports twice the quantity of wine it exports; something in excess of 800 million litres per year), Germany, the United Kingdom, the Benelux countries and the United States remain its best customers and France retains a tight grip on the top end of the market (claret or Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne, for example, are recognized words across the world). Some 1.5 million hectares (3.35 per cent of France’s arable land) are planted with vines, and some 6 million French people work in (or make direct or indirect profit from) the wine industry.

The varieties of vines grown in France vary significantly from region to region: while the Bordeaux region is planted with Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Merlot for its red wine, and Sauvignon (dry) and Sémillon (sweet) for its white wines, Burgundy cultivates Pinot Noir and (for its lesser wines) Gamay grapes for reds and Chardonnay, and (for its lesser wines) Aligoté grapes for its whites. Whereas the red Beaujolais wines are produced from Gamay grapes, the Rhône area shows greater variety: Syrah grapes for red wine and Viognier, and Roussanne and Marsanne grapes for white wine, are to be found in the north of the region, while in the south there is a mixture including Syrah, Grenache, Mourvèdre and Cinsaut for reds. The Nantes area cultivates Muscadet and (for its lesser wines) Gros Plant grapes for its distinctive whites, while further south in the Loire region (around Anjou and Saumur) Cabernet grapes produce the well-known rosé wines—Groslot and Gamay grapes (for the reds) and the Chenin Blanc variety (for whites). The Pinot Noir variety is also the source of red wines in Alsace and of white wines in the Champagne region. Other varieties of grapes cultivated in France include Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc, Pinot Meunier, Riesling, Muscat and Sylvaner.

The two most prestigious regions of France for still wine are the Bordeaux region (which stretches from Saint Estèphe in the north to Sauternes and the area which produces Graves wines in the south), and Burgundy, which goes from Chablis in the north to the Beaujolais vineyards in the south. Both of these regions illustrate well the prestigious French wine classification system which is based on what is known as the Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC, the label of origin which is also something of a guarantee of quality and of a specific method of cultivation and production; it is reserved for a tiny fraction of the national production). The hierarchy of wine in the Bordeaux region moves upwards from the straightforward Appellation Bordeaux Contrôlée through the various crus bourgeois (bourgeois growths or vintages) to the so-called crus classes (classed growths) which relate to a particular chateau or commune. These, in ascending order, are bans crus (good vintages), crus supérieurs (superior or higher growths), grands crus (great growths), the crus exceptionnels (exceptional growths) and, at the very pinnacle, the crus hors classe (the most exceptional growths, which in the 1978 classification number only eight chateau wines, four from the Haut-Médoc, one from the Graves area, two from St Émilion and one Pomerol). The very mention of a wine from the highest category (the incomparable Château Lafite-Rothschild from the Haut Médoc, for example) is guaranteed to capture the attention of any oenologist. Bordeaux produces twice as much red wine as white and it is on the former that its reputation is primarily founded.

Burgundy, second in importance only to Bordeaux as a wine-producing area, is composed of five different zones—if we include Beaujolais in the south with the Mâcon vineyards, those of the Côte Chalonnaise (or Region de Mercurey), the Côte d’Or (composed of the Côte de Beaune and the Côte de Nuit) and finally Chablis. If a typical claret is light, dry, not too heavy in alcohol and redolent of the oak casks in which it is matured, then the red and white wines of Burgundy show tremendous variety, from dark, often full-bodied, velvety reds which do not have the dryness of a claret, to crisp, dry white wines which are, none the less, full-bodied and (at their best) full of ageing potential. Burgundy wine may be purchased, at the bottom end of the market, as Bourgogne Grand Ordinaire, while a slightly superior wine is the so-called Bourgogne Passe- Tout Grains, followed by the plainer-sounding AC Bourgogne. Further up the market are the Bourgogne Hautes Côtes de Beaune, the Bourgogne Hautes Côtes de Nuit, Côtes de Beaune Villages, Côtes de Nuit Villages and the commune wines which bear the name of a village on the AC (Appellation Contrôlée) label. Burgundy also has its own list of grands crus.

Although this account has focused on the two great wine-growing areas of France, it must not be forgotten that Épernay and Reims are the major towns of the prestigious Champagne region, known throughout the world for its sparkling whites, while vins de pays (country wines) of very acceptable quality are produced in such areas as the Rhone, Roussillon, Minervois and the Gard, for example. Add the Appellation Contrôlée wines of Alsace, Lorraine, the Jura and Touraine (among others) and it becomes clear that, in addition to the huge amount of ‘plonk’ or table wine (vin ordinaire or vin de table) which it produces, France retains its reputation for quality and variety unrivalled by any other country in the world.

IAN PICKUP

See also: gastronomy

winter sports

The French Alps attract countless French and foreign skiers every year, and the facilities offered are probably second to none (if somewhat expensive). France has hosted the Winter Olympics (Chamonix in 1924, Grenoble in 1968 and Albertville in 1992) and produced world and Olympic champions, of whom the best known are Jean-Claude Killy and Marielle Goitschel. France has also had world champions in figure skating—including Alain Calmat, who went on to become Minister of Sport (the first former top-level sportsman to do so). Another popular winter sport in France is ice hockey: there is a national championship which in the 1950s and 1960s was dominated by the Chamonix Hockey Club.

IAN PICKUP

See also: sport

Wittig, Monique

b. 1935, Alsace

Novelist, playwright and feminist theorist

The work of Monique Wittig is widely known for its original combination of literary innovations and radical lesbian politics. A prominent figure in the French feminist movement of the early 1970s, Wittig emigrated to the United States in 1976. As a writer, her main concern is to dismantle language in its patriarchal forms and to reconstruct it from a lesbian perspective. To this end, she appropriates and transforms works by male authors, conventional genres and patriarchal mythologies. Unlike the practitioners of écriture féminine, however, Wittig does not celebrate ‘the feminine’, but aims to abolish sex and gender categories, as discussed in her theoretical work The Straight Mind and Other Essays.

Her first novel, The Opoponax (L’Opoponax), for which Wittig won the Prix Médicis, describes the experiences of a group of girls and the love between two of the protagonists. Apparent in this text are themes central in Wittig, such as the obliteration of lesbians from patriarchal culture and the conflict between feminine socialization and female subjectivity. In the modern epic Les Guérillères, female warriors wage a guerrilla war against the patriarchal order. The text charts different stages in feminism, representing the female culture which emerges after the destruction of patriarchy as a transitional phase, superseded by a genderless society. The Lesbian Body (Le Corps lesbien) is an incantation of lesbian passion, reminiscent of the poetry of Sappho. Here Wittig breaks down heterosexual constructs of the female body and recreates it as the subject of desire for another woman. Co-authored with Sande Zeig, Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary (Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes) rewrites history from a lesbian perspective through redefinitions of words and provides a key to the terminology used in Wittig’s other works. Across the Acheron (Virgile, non), a subversive reworking of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, is set in contemporary San Francisco and stages Wittig’s journey through the hell of women’s oppression, her excursions to the limbo of the lesbian bar scene and her arrival in a paradise of freedom. The Constant Journey (Le Voyage sans fin), a play written and produced with Sande Zeig, is based on Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It presents an allfemale cast, with Quichotte as a feminist struggling against patriarchal society. The striking dissociation between action and dialogue demonstrates the originality of Wittig’s technical experimentation. Her work has inspired feminists and lesbians worldwide and has influenced contemporary writers like Michèle Causse and Nicole Brossard.

RENATE GÜNTHER

Futher reading

Crowder, D.G. (1983) ‘Amazons and Mothers? Monique Wittig, Hélène Cixous and Theories of Women’s Writing’, Contemporary Literature 24, 2 (a lucid study of Wittig’s work in its French feminist context).

Duffy, J.H. (1990) ‘Monique Wittig’, in M. Tilby (ed.) Beyond the Nouveau Roman, Oxford: Berg (a comprehensive account of Wittig’s literary and theoretical texts).

Ostrovsky, E. (1991) A Constant Journey: The Fiction of Monique Wittig, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press (an indepth study of themes and literary techniques with an excellent bibliography).

Wols

b. 1913, Berlin;

d. 1951, Champigny-sur-Marne, (near Paris)

Artist and photographer, real name Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze

Of German nationality, Wols (his pseudonym taken from a torn fragment of a telegramme sent to him) was a student at the Berlin Bauhaus and went to Paris in 1933, where he was influenced by Surrealism. In 1937 he had a one-man exhibition of his photographs in Paris and was commissioned to photograph the fashion pavilion at the International Exhibition. His career as a photographer ended when he was interned in 1939 as an enemy alien, although he was freed a year later. In the early 1940s, he began to draw and paint in a style described by Sartre (who much admired the unease his works provoked) as ‘automatism’. His first exhibition in December 1945 showed tiny drawings and watercolours displayed in illuminated boxes which appear to the viewer like microscopic forms or faraway worlds. He was admired by the artist George Mathieu, and he helped pioneer L’Art Informel and Tachism in the 1950s.

DEBRA KELLY

See also: painting; photography

women and employment

By the mid-1990s, over 11 million French women were economically active, representing almost 45 per cent of the labour force. The real take-off for the growth of women’s labour market participation is generally situated in the early 1970s, when the economy was about to enter a period of restructuring. Since then, while male economic activity rates have declined, women have continued to increase their share of the labour force and have benefited from the overall shift in employment from the industrial to the service sector.

In relation to its European neighbours, France displays relatively high levels of fulltime continuous female economic activity, particularly for women in the 25–49 age group, when they are also likely to be engaged in rearing children. In the mid-1990s, after the Nordic countries, France showed the highest activity rates in the European Union for women in this age group, with over 76 per cent of French women participating in the labour force, almost regardless of the presence of young children.

The postwar constitution of 1946 enshrined the principle of equal rights in France, but women’s incorporation into the labour force has continued to be on different terms from those for men. More girls than boys gain school-leaving qualifications and a university education, but they experience greater difficulty in finding jobs. Despite the strong commitment of French women to employment, they tend to be segregated into less secure and less well-paid jobs, and they are more likely than men to be unemployed.

By the mid-1990s, over 80 per cent of women in employment were working in the service sector, where they had benefited from the expansion of jobs in retailing, education, health and welfare, but they continued to be concentrated in a relatively small number of low-status positions, particularly in clerical work and direct services to clients. A higher proportion of women than men (14.8 per cent compared with 12.6 per cent) were employed in the public sector—where more flexible working conditions and greater security of employment generally compensated for lower salaries—than in the private sector.

Part-time work is less widespread in France than in the United Kingdom, accounting for 28 per cent of female economic activity in 1995 (compared to the United Kingdom’s 44 per cent). Although part-time workers are entitled, pro rata, to the same rights as full-time workers, the attitude towards parttime work is ambiguous. While offering a convenient solution to the problem of combining paid and unpaid work, it is not infrequently imposed by employers requiring a flexible labour force.

LINDA HANTRAIS

Futher reading

Hantrais, L. (1990) Managing Professional and Family Life: A Comparative Study of British and French Women, Aldershot and Vermont: Dartmouth (a comparison of women’s employment patterns in relation to family life).

INSEE (1995) Les Femmes, Paris: INSEE, ‘Collection Contours et Caractères’ (a useful analysis of characteristics of women’s employment).

women and politics

Since French women won the right to vote and to stand for election (in October 1944), their participation in politics has evolved considerably. If a principal indicator of political participation is voting, then in the 1990s French women participate at the same rate as men. However, as far as participation in political decision-making is concerned, little has changed since 1944.

Traditionally, women voters have been associated with abstentionism and conservatism. Until 1969, female abstention rates were 7– 12 percentage points higher than male abstention rates. Women’s participation was also distinct from that of men in that they voted, in greater numbers, for the Right. For instance, this gender gap was at its greatest in the first round of the presidential elections of 1965, when the Left’s candidate, François Mitterrand, obtained 39 per cent of the women’s vote compared with 51 per cent of the men’s vote. The explanations for these early differences between male and female voting are that women were political beginners and were apprehensive about exercising their newly won rights and that they were more easily influenced in their choice of conservative candidates by the Catholic church.

This traditional model of the female voter began to fragment in the 1970s as, progressively, more women left the private sphere of home and family to enter the workforce or higher education, and the gap between male and female participation decreased. By the legislative elections of 1993 the difference in abstention rates was negligible, with 24 per cent of women abstaining compared with 23 per cent of men. The early 1970s also marked the radicalization of the female electorate. By the 1986 legislative elections, women and men voted equally for the Left, while by the second round of the 1988 presidential elections, women had overtaken men, for the first time, in voting for the Left.

While women accounted for 53 per cent of the electorate and nearly 45 per cent of the workforce in 1994, they only represented 6 per cent of députés and 5.5 per cent of sénateurs in parliament, placing France near the bottom of the league of European Union countries. Women’s exclusion from political power has been put down to historical precedents such as property-based suffrage which (from 1789) prevented women from voting and representing others, to Catholicism’s view of women’s role and responsibilities, to the refusal of political parties to promote women and to the rules of the electoral system itself.

Since 1994, the fiftieth anniversary of women’s political rights, a feminist campaign for political ‘parity’ (the equal representation of women and men in all elected assemblies) has gathered momentum. The argument that parity is the only way to renew French democracy has gained favour in a large section of the political class.

KHURSHEED WADIA

Futher reading

Allwood, G. (1995) ‘The Campaign for Parity in Political Institutions in France’ in D. Knight and J.Still (eds) Women and Representation, Nottingham: WIF Publications (an account of the campaign for gender parity in French political institutions).

Mossuz-Lavau, J. (1995) ‘Les Françaises aux urnes (1945–1994)’, Modern and Contemporary France 3, 2 (an overview of the voting patterns and political behaviour of French women over fifty years).

women and social policy

In France, women have gained access to welfare, both indirectly as the dependants of male breadwinners and as mothers, and directly as workers in their own right. Since the 1970s, the focus has been on policies to help women reconcile family life and employment.

The social security system which developed in France in the postwar period was premised on the principle of employment-related insurance rights, implying that regular employment should be rewarded by access to sickness benefits, occupational pensions and other forms of social protection. Since few women were gainfully employed outside the home, their access to welfare depended essentially on derived rights in their capacity as wives and mothers. The origins of family allowances at the turn of the century lay in the wage supplements paid to workers in industry to compensate fathers for their family responsibilities. The model of the family supported in social policy was centred on the mother as home-maker. More generous provision was made for mothers of three or more children, with the pro-natalist aim of increasing family size.

By the 1970s, women’s rights had moved on to the political agenda. Married women and women with children were joining the labour force in large numbers. Governments therefore came under increasing pressure to respond to the demands of women for protection as paid workers. Economically active women were already entitled to social security cover in their own right, and they had long been eligible to receive maternity pay. Innovative schemes were introduced, particularly in the public sector, to improve work-time organization and working conditions. Under the Socialist government, the 1983 loi Roudy reinforced and extended women’s rights. French women are legally protected against unfair dismissal and loss of status due to pregnancy. They are guaranteed reinstatement after paid maternity leave, which is taken into account in calculating pensionable service. Part-time workers are eligible to receive pro rata benefits.

Increasingly, policy has been adapted to take account of women’s dual roles as workers and mothers, and to encourage them to combine paid and unpaid work. State provision for child care and nursery schooling is extensive in France, and allowances are paid towards child-minding costs. Parental leave, with pay for parents of two or more children, is available for up to three years and can be shared between men and women. Take-up of leave has, however, remained low, and French women in the 25–49 age bracket seem to prefer to pursue continuous full-time employment careers, which give them full entitlement to welfare in their own right.

LINDA HANTRAIS

Futher reading

Hantrais, L. (1993) ‘Women, Work and Welfare in France’, in J.Lewis (ed.) Women and Social Policies in Europe, Aldershot: Edward Elgar (a survey of the postwar development of women and welfare).

Hantrais, L. and Letablier, M.-T. (1996) Families and Family Policies in Europe, London and New York: Longman (an international comparison of welfare provision for women).

women directors

Women have found it difficult to succeed as directors in the French film industry and, typically, begin their careers in some other branch. Jacqueline Audry (1908–77) was a script-girl and editor before making her first feature, Les Malheurs de Sophie, in 1946. Her adaptations of Colette’s Gigi (1948), Minne, l’ingénue libertine (1950) and Mitsou (1956) rework earlier literary genres but with La Garçonne (1957) and Le Secret du chevalier d’éon (1960), and her masterpiece Olivia (1951), are also protofeminist questionings of gender roles. Yannick Bellon edited films and directed a large number of shorts, but did not make her first feature, Quelque part, quelqu’un, until 1972. Thereafter, she specialized in ‘women’s interest’ films which considered topics such as rape, breast cancer and adultery in fictions which were often inspired by true stories: La Femme de Jean (1974), L’Amour violé (1978), L’Amour nu (1981). Nadine Trintignant (Mon amour, mon amour, in 1967) and Nina Companeez (Faustine et le bel été, 1971) were both editors, while many other women have come to film directing via acting: Juliet Berto, with Neige (1981), Cap Canaille (1983) and Havre (1986); Anna Karina, with Vivre ensemble (1973); and Jeanne Moreau, with Lumière (1976) and L’Adolescente (1978).

Agnès Varda, who trained as a photographer, was the only woman to emerge to prominence in the late 1950s, despite the emphasis placed by the Nouvelle Vague on independent film-making and low budgets. Her shorts—La Pointe courte (1954), Opéra-Mouffe (1958)— were followed by three feature films Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), Le Bonheur (1965) and Les Créatures (1966). Cléo was praised as a technical tour de force matching ‘real time’ with ‘diegetic time’ (both two hours), but all were subsequently criticized for depicting women as narcissistic and overdependent on men, and the two latter films for using a palette reminiscent of soap-powder commercials. However, after 1968 it became clear that Varda’s strength was to place two different visions of the world in a continuum. Thus, in One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (L’Une chante, l’autre pas) in 1977, an overtly feminist companion-piece to Cléo, the highly coloured and deliberately escapist world of the spectacle, similar to that imagined by Varda’s husband Jacques Demy in musicals such as Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, is contrasted with the grainy, black-and-white world of documentary photography, while her 1985 masterpiece, Vagabonds (Sans toit ni loi), is a radical questioning of the nature of ‘woman’, part road movie, part film noir and part TV documentary. Similar concerns underpin her brilliant series of documentaries dating from the 1970s and 1980s—Daguerréotypes (1975), Réponse de femmes (1975), Mur murs (1982), Les Dites cariatides (1984), all of which bear the marks of her encounter with the American women’s movement in the late 1960s, as does Jane B par Agnès V (1988) which is simultaneously a self-portrait, a portrait of a celebrated female icon, and a documentary about the actress Jane Birkin.

Like Varda, but to an even greater extent, Marguerite Duras questioned the values of a male-dominated film industry by means of a thoroughgoing minimalism based on extremely low budgets, actors who worked without fees, and very limited crews. Indeed, Duras’s most radical film Le Camion (1979), in some respects a post-1968 reworking of Godard’s La Chinoise as ‘un film en train de se faire’, is principally composed of a conversation between herself and Gérard Depardieu, in the living room of her own house, about what the film was ‘supposed to be’ (the conversation takes place in the conditional), intercut from time to time with shots of an articulated lorry at an unidentified crossroads in the Paris suburbs. Duras came to film directing after a long and successful career as a novelist and playwright and having written the screenplay for Alain Resnais’s first feature film Hiroshima mon amour (1959). The orientalism of Duras’s novels, and the lyricism of her compositions, are magisterially incorporated into her film masterpiece India Song (1975), which evokes, in an extraordinary montage of theatrical gesture and music, the life of Anne-Marie Stretter (Delphine Seyrig) and her lovers in preindependence India (in fact, a chateau in the Paris outskirts). But the film is also radically challenged by its companion piece and diptych, Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert (1976), which deploys the same soundtrack as India Song, edited over different images.

In investigating the relationship between sound and image, between the body and its representation, and between silence and speech, the films of Varda and Duras show the influence of feminist theory in the 1970s. More recently, women directors such as Coline Serreau, Diane Kurys and Josiane Balasko have been less concerned with the thematics of feminism than to make their mark in mainstream or popular genres, especially in comedy. After a documentary about women, Mais qu’est-ce qu’elles veulent? (1976), Serreau shifted to comic mode (albeit with a radical edge) with Pourquoi pas? (1977), before the immense successes of Trois hommes et un couffin (1985) and Romuald et Juliette (1989), both of which reveal her talent for acute social observation and her brilliant direction of actors, and to harder-hitting social commentary in La Crise (1992). Kurys has likewise made a name as a witty observer of social mores, from the autobiographical Peppermint Soda (Diabolo menthe) in 1977 and C’est la vie (La Baule les Pins) in 1990, to the more romanticized Coup de foudre (1983) or Après l’amour (1992). Balasko was a star of the cafétheatre and remains an impressive theatrical writer and performer. Her first film as director, Sac de noeuds (1985), casting herself and Isabelle Huppert as a couple infernal, did not meet with the success it deserved, whereas the more saccharine French Twist (Gazon maudit) of 1995 dressed up lesbian themes for a mass audience and was extravagantly praised. Balasko’s great originality, evident in her contribution to Blier’s Trop belle pour toi (1989), is to challenge typecasting, especially as regards gender roles. In this she contrasts strongly with Chantal Akerman, a Belgian who worked mainly in France in the 1970s and 1980s, who linked the lesbian themes of Je, tu, il, elle (1974) to a thoroughgoing critique of the role of women in society, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (1975), and her own relationship, as Belgian Jew, to metropolitan French culture in News from Home (1976) and Les Rendez-Vous d’Anna (1978).

Despite mainstream successes, however, the precarious professional and artistic position of women in the film industry continues to be reflected in their interest in the socially marginal and to inspire some of their most interesting contemporary film-making. Thus Claire Denis’s three key films are oblique essays on race and sex in the context of the French colonial heritage: Chocolat (1988), in which a white French girl revisits and recalls the Cameroon of her colonial upbringing; S’en fout la mort (1990), set in the immigrant milieux of the Paris suburbs; and the magnificent J’ai pas sommeil (1993), in which a young girl from the Baltic states encounters the cosmopolitan world of the 18th arrondissement in Paris.

JILL FORBES

women’s magazines

Women’s magazines represent a unique cultural space for women. Within this space, women express themselves publicly but also encounter the values and beliefs of femininity which influence the way they think, speak and act.

Women’s magazines fall within two main categories: the haut de gamme (luxury) magazines such as Marie-Claire and Elle; and magazines populaires, such as Femme actuelle and 7 jours madame, at the cheaper end of the market.

The luxury magazines consider themselves forward-looking publications, responding to a desire on the part of modern, professional women for luxury, new lifestyles and information upon which they can make free choices. Hence, their glossy pages contain articles on prominent personalities (politicians, artists, entrepreneurs), reports on topical issues, highquality photographs and illustrations on fashion, beauty and home decoration. In the 1960s and 1970s, in particular, these magazines proclaimed themselves a vanguard for change, by discussing and campaigning around feminist issues such as abortion/contraception, women’s rights and equal opportunities in the workplace. Since the economically austere years of the 1980s, they have become less keen to protest in favour of collective women’s rights and have instead focused attention upon the successes of individual women, especially those who have managed to combine the ideals of femininity with public prominence. New additions to this category in the 1980s, such as Madame Figaro, have been particularly aggressive in marketing the ‘new feminine woman’.

On the other hand, the magazines populaires have never attempted to relay progressive thinking. They have traditionally targeted a provincial readership of full-time mothers and housewives, or women working in manual or less wellpaid white-collar occupations, giving practical advice on beauty, fashion, home crafts and personal relationships, with the aim of showing readers how an often humdrum existence can be made more fulfilling. They have offered their readers a more intimate, if not introverted world in which an exchange of information takes place between women. The 1980s brought a downturn in the fortunes of the magazines populaires as they faced competition from technically advanced media which offered the public wider perspectives on French society and the world outside it. This forced them to make the first changes: for instance, the use of quadrochromatic colour, varied format and page layout and a livelier journalistic style. While these measures stopped further decline, they were not innovative enough to promote growth, except in the case of new titles such as Femme actuelle and Prima.

In spite of the fact that women’s magazines in both categories have suffered a decline in the 1980s, they remain the jewel in the crown of the French periodical press; not only because of their high sales but also because their readers are important consumers of beauty, fashion, household and other products. This makes women’s magazines the highest earners of advertising revenue within the French magazine market.

KHURSHEED WADIA

women’s/lesbian writing

In postwar France, no single model of femaleauthored writing has predominated. Different sociohistorical moments have generated different types of writing, confirming the point made by Irma Garcia that women’s literary creativity is bound up, inextricably, with history and with women’s place within it (see Garcia 1981).

The discussion that follows covers some of the variant forms and styles of women’s writing produced at different points within the postwar era, and also addresses two specific (if, in the French context, marginal) modes of women’s writing: that produced by women within the North African community in France and writing by lesbians.

In 1944, women in France belatedly obtained the vote. By 1946, thirty-nine women MPs held seats in the National Assembly. In the late 1940s, therefore, it seemed as if the Liberation France had recently won might be being extended to her citoyennes. In fact, legal/political emancipation did not, in the course of the 1950s and early 1960s, bring with it the autonomy and independence many Françaises craved. For one thing, the financial affairs of married women remained under their husbands’ control. Until 1965, French women required their spouse’s permission to hold down a job, open a bank account and dispose of property. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, because contraception did not become legally available until 1967 and the right to abortion was only accorded in 1975, French women of the postwar era had little control over their sexuality and their reproductive processes.

The 1950s and 1960s saw the publication of a good many female-authored works of French literature. A number of these texts, written by authors such as Françoise Mallet-Joris and Benoîte and Flora Groult and intended for an exclusively feminine readership, offer a somewhat tame account of the realities of French women’s lives. Others, however— unsurprisingly, given the sociosexual climate within which they came into being—envision the feminine condition in a more honest, and less positive, fashion. This latter category of texts includes works by women authors such as Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Claire Etcherelli, Violette Leduc, Christiane Rochefort, Albertine Sarrazin and Françoise Sagan. In their writings—which range from the exclusively fictional to the directly autobiographical, and predominantly belong to the realist genre—these écrivaines represent the condition féminine either as resting on a desperate chasse à l’amour that brings dependency in its wake and/or is rarely permanently satisfied (see the prose fictions of Beauvoir and Sagan, and the autobiographical writings of Leduc), or as a deeply acculturated mode of being that offers little chance of escape from pre-ordained roles (see Sagan, Beauvoir, Rochefort and Duras’s Moderato Cantabile), or as a form of second-class citizenship equivalent, or even inferior, to that enjoyed by the socially marginal (cf. Etcherelli’s Elise, or the Real Life (Élise, ou la vraie vie), or as a state that is so generally unsatisfactory that it impels the female subject into various forms of revolt (see the autobiographical works of Sarrazin and Leduc). It is certainly the case that the more insightful female-authored literary creations of the 1950s and the early to mid- 1960s offer depictions of the feminine condition that can be categorized as more or less ‘feminist’. However, their ‘political’ impact is limited, by virtue of the fact that they tend simply to signal the negative aspects of women’s lives (in order implicitly to highlight and critique their sources/causes), and generally hesitate to offer radical solutions or imagine alternative ways of female being.

In the wake of May 1968, the French feminist movement—largely quiescent during the 1940s and 1950s, in spite of the publication in 1949 of de Beauvoir’s Second Sex—received a new lease of life. One of the consequences of its renascence, and of the sociosexual upheavals that hit France in the 1970s, was a kind of feminine re-entry into, or remoulding of, the sociosymbolic champ culturel (cultural arena). This phenomenon, argues Marcelle Marini, was made possible by the supportive, creative, female-centred ‘space’ the Mouvement de la Libération des Femmes allowed women writers and artists to access in the post-1968 period (Marini 1992).

During the 1970s, a new generation of écrivaines, inspired by the revolutionary times in which they were writing and also, in certain cases, by a burgeoning body of French feminist theoretical work, brought into being a corpus of literary texts which tended to the experimental, the poetic and/or the highly personal, and within which their own preoccupations as women subjects were manifestly—and courageously—on display. Produced by the likes of Hélène Cixous, Chantal Chawaf, Jeanne Hyvrard, Christiane Rochefort, Emma Santos, Monique Wittig and Marie Cardinal, these texts addressed themes such as desire, eroticism, sexuality, sexual difference, bodily being, feminine relationships, madness, and the alliance of language and patriarchy. Often, in terms of their stylistic and linguistic composition, they departed from traditional or conventional literary forms—a phenomenon which has encouraged contemporary (feminist) literary critics to categorize the works of Cixous, Chawaf, Hyvrard and even Cardinal as exercises in, and affirmations of, a kind of écriture féminine (an avant-garde writing mode deemed to be feminine-gendered, and to relate in some way to the female body). In addition, many of the female-authored literary productions of the 1970s bore witness either to the anger French women of the period felt at their oppression by and within patriarchy and its linguistic order (see the work of Cardinal, Santos and Hyvrard), or to a desire to imagine new worlds/realities wherein sexual politics, human relationships and language might be remoulded, to the detriment of the patriarchal hegemony (see the writings of Wittig and Rochefort’s Archaos). In this particular literary era, then, textual experimentation, and an imagination that was not only gynocentric but was often also distinctly utopian in its tenor, were the hallmarks of French women’s incursions into the literary domain.

Latterly, in an era that is conceivably ‘postfeminist’ and is certainly significantly less dominated by issues of gender politics than the 1970s, French women’s writing seems to have changed course or, at least, to have diversified. Many of the feminist écrivaines whose literary careers began in the late 1960s and early 1970s and who were associated for one reason or another with écriture féminine have continued to publish in the 1980s and 1990s; however—as is evidenced by the work of other key women writers of the contemporary period, such as Marguerite Duras, Danièle Sallenave, Florence Delay and Annie Ernaux—the post-1980 publications of Cixous, Chawaf and Wittig are by no means representative of women’s literary creativity in the late twentieth century. Duras’s 1980s publications certainly address ‘the feminine’ in so far as they regularly focus on female desire/eroticism, but, with the possible exception of The Lover (L’Amant), they eschew in so doing the celebratory style associated with écriture féminine. Neither Sallenave nor Delay appears particularly preoccupied with representing the condition féminine; the work of both women has on the other hand been linked with a retour au romanesque (i.e. with a move towards a kind of writing which is manifestly less experimental and self-referential than that of the nouveau romanciers). For all that she refuses to accept that gender issues play a dominant role within her literary oeuvre, Ernaux’s work is more gynocentric than that of her contemporaries and, by virtue of this fact, stands in some kind of relation to those literary texts born out of 1970s French neo-feminism. It does not, however, display the lyrical, experimental qualities or the affirmation d’une écriture spécifiquement féminine that characterized French women’s writing in the post-1968 era. Ernaux’s autobiographical fictions, especially those in which her family history constitutes a key focus, foreground a realist, documentary, almost anthropological style, which leaves her reader with the sense that he or she is being offered insights not only into the personal trajectory of Ernaux herself but also into diverse aspects of French society and its social mores.

A not insignificant body of texts has been produced in the 1980s by women writers who either are beurs or who, born in North Africa, live and work in France. Authors belonging to this category include Leïla Sebbar (who is not herself a beur but has written several texts in which the fate of second-generation North African women is a central focus), Farida Belghoul, Sakina Boukhedenna, Djura, Leïla Houari, Tassadit Imache, Antoinette Ben Kerroum, Soraya Nini and Ferrudja Kessas. Like the writings of contemporaries such as Ernaux, their highly personal, autobiographically inflected literary creations often display a distinctly documentary quality. Themes and topics addressed within them include:

the experience of cultural alienation/schizophrenia (an experience encountered by the heroines of beur novels not only in France but also in their so-called pays d’origine;
the need for and pursuit of freedom, access to which is often associated with education and with the literary act; and
the relation to her body of the female beur subject (the body being the symbolic focus par excellence of a parental, especially paternal, authority that is generally represented as oppressive and resented).

In postwar France, a manifest lesbian politico- theoretical and literary culture has been largely lacking. The reasons for this are threefold. First, with the exception of the essays Monique Wittig published in the 1970s and early 1980s, little theoretico-analytical, conceptual French feminist work has displayed a strong lesbian dimension. Second, lesbian political activism—partly because, historically, the lesbian movement has existed within the women’s movement rather than as a separate entity— has not enjoyed the visibility of gay politics. Third, those texts within France’s literary ‘canon’ in which lesbianism is an issue/theme have in the main been male-authored, date back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and lack the ‘authentic’ perspective on female homosexuality present, arguably, in the work of Colette (see Marks 1979). It is highly probable that these phenomena have adversely affected lesbian creativity in the modern era. It is certainly true that in the 1960s and 1970s fictional and autobiographical accounts of lesbian love were written by Leduc, Wittig and Rochefort. The writings of these authors, whether or not they bear witness to a political consciousness inspired by the feminist revolution of the early 1970s, have engendered the existence of a powerful corpus of texts wherein lesbian eroticism and desire are given a femaleauthored voice and gender positions are addressed and reworked in an increasingly radical way. Newer additions to this corpus include the novels of Jocelyne François, Hélène de Monferrand and Mireille Best. However, as Elula Perrin argues, in the late twentieth century French lesbian literary artefacts are something of a rarity (see Perrin 1995), a fact which suggests that in today’s France the lesbian creative voice which emerges from the work of the women cited above is being stifled by and within a (deeply misogynistic) cultural climate that has failed to accommodate it.

ALEX HUGHES

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