Texts by Françoise

1972. The MLF has existed for three years; the FHAR is in full decline. Dissensions and controversies: Daniel Guérin leaves him, Françoise d’Eaubonne too. The author and activist will temporarily join the newspaper Le Fléau social, but will leave it when it moves away from political life. In n° 2 of this journal, published in October 1972, Françoise wonders about “femininity” by highlighting her conviction that there is no such thing as a “woman’s nature”:
“There is no more essential woman than there is a predisposed proletarian or a born criminal.”

Francoise d’Eaubonne

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In this text published in 1977 in Les Cahiers du Grif, Françoise claims to have been an “indifferent mother” instead of having been a “castrator in the kitchen, laundry, mending…“. However, she experienced what she calls “the maternal instinct”, “at the most animal level possible”. But she denounces what male society has made of this instinct: a “means of oppression and alienation which reduces the woman to the rank of egg-laying female“. This text is followed by the Appeal of the women of the Eco-feminist Movement to the maternity strike (already published in 1974 in Charlie-Hebdo).

“This maternal instinct, therefore, I know is real, but mystified, distorted, alienated and manipulated. When a woman speaks of her desire to have a child, I always ask her to look closely at the root of this desire. It can be authentic; there is a good chance that it is not”

Francoise d’Eaubonne

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In this short flamboyant text written at the age of 58, Françoise evokes her “woman’s body open to the whole world on the future of history of which her death is a part“. Her body, which “lived everything defying the enemy and straightened up singing“.

Her “only friend with writing [who] have never failed me, nor the most exacting love…that of armed insurrection…billions of wolves doused in oil and flaming. “

She calls on all women to be proud of their body, reminding them that it IS… even though the REVOLUTION is not yet.

When everything is said about Françoise, her 100 published books, her words bequeathed to the French language, her visionary theorizations, this fact remains: she was an incarnation of life outside the norm, a tellurism, a primordial force.

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In 1980, issue 20 of Sorcières, les femmes vivants published 6 pages by Françoise. She summarizes her long work to flush out the root causes of our aberrations. The passage of time only strengthens her pen and, despite anthropological reminders that can sometimes be dated, she gets to the point in the last two dazzling pages.

“To attack Capital is only to attack the point of the weapon which wounds us and tears us apart; the handle of the weapon plunges into the mists of time, it is called patriarchy, it is called male civilization with a universal pattern (…) Maintaining the industrial age (…) means the end of the terrestrial world in thirty to fifty years. We cannot go beyond that age while maintaining a profit system. We cannot abolish this system of profit by preserving a society of classes, namely a need for power. We cannot abolish power by preserving the patriarchal and masculine world. C.Q.F.D. The future of the species is in our hands.“

Francoise d’Eaubonne

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In the early 1990s, when the rejection of the other, racism, hatred, had more and more right of citizenship in the media and in the public debate, Françoise published in the May 1992 issue of L’ Imbécile de Paris (“journal of humor and opinions forbidden to journalists”) a short article explaining why she had always refused to put a ballot in the ballot box, even to block the emotional plague

“‘The people give up their power the moment they think they are exercising it.‘ It was Sun Yat-Sen who wrote this aphorism after studying the mechanism of French elections, before overthrowing the oldest feudal power in the world, China, in 1911.

Francoise d’Eaubonne

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Novelist born in 1907 and died in 1972, Violette Leduc had a strong impact on Françoise d’Eaubonne. The two writers were also friends. For a Violette Leduc symposium organized at the Charles-de-Gaulle University in Lille, on March 15 and 16, 1996, Françoise wrote this text about the difficult reception by the French public of the remarkable work “of a writer so prodigiously gifted”

“Hunger for love, suffocation of a solitary, endless rehashing of this ‘ocean of tears’ as she called herself, that was what irritated and disconcerted the French reader of those years. If La Bâtarde brought Violette a just revenge , it was above all because of the boldness of the tables of manners and the cruel mirror in which the author dared to reflect herself in order to offer her reader an unexpected example of looking at herself.”

Francoise d’Eaubonne

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