Paris, Des Femmes–Antoinette Fouque, 650 pages .
1978.
Contrairement à beaucoup de lectrices et lecteurs bien plus lucides que moi, ce roman, à sa sortie, me passe au-dessus de la tête ; je m’attendais à quelque chose d’aussi charmant que Le Satellite de l’Amande et suis décontenancé. Avec ma lenteur d’esprit habituelle (pour reprendre une expression que Françoise avait employée avec fausse modestie envers elle-même), il m’aura fallu attendre 2022 et cette réédition par Des Femmes-Antoinette Fouque pour découvrir ce que je considère dorénavant être un véritable chef d’œuvre. I have one small regret left: that of not having been able to tell Françoise of my overflowing enthusiasm. (Alain)
Les Bergères de l’Apocalypse is the main opus in the Losange Trilogy, which also includes Le Satellite de l’Amande and Un bonheur viril, as well as various short stories. Françoise’s mastery of pictorial depictions of intense scenes is here of a dark intensity that yields nothing to Valérie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto or Virginie Despentes’ Baise-moi.
Les Bergères is one of the 17 titles she published between 1974 and 1979, all the while leading a life of activism punctuated by numerous feats of arms. Written in one go, with little proofreading, she described it as “… modestly, an epic, which I wrote to let off steam… because I’m carrying around masses of fantasies, and I thought it would be good to have a bit of fun”.
Four years earlier, in 1974, in the throes of an eco-anxiety that was all the less named for the fact that she was practically the only one to experience it, Françoise created the neologism ecofeminism and conceptualized its meaning. Despite all her efforts, the term’s reception in France was virtually nil. Moreover, in 1976, the death of Ulrike Meinhoff, found hanged in her cell, caused her heartbreak. Les Bergères de l’Apocalypse is, I believe, a response to all this.
In a nutshell, women, rebelling “not so much for the wrong done to them, but for the wrong done to the planet and to life itself”, start an all-out planetary war against men that will lead to their disappearance.
A sequence in a literary programa clearly shows how the book was received at the time. Even if the exchanges are hushed, Françoise’s UFO is frightening in this frigid world that is largely unaware of violence against women, when it is not simply massacred, as the slow worldwide awakening of awareness is showing today.
To illustrate this hallucinatory saga, we needed nothing less than Mathilde’s great and beautiful voice in one of her most poignant songs. Françoise would have been a fan. (Vincent)