THEMATIC REFERENCES
Commented editions classified into 7 themes
Essays, Pamphlets, History
1951: Le Complexe de Diane ; Érotisme ou Féminisme
Paris, Julliard, 301 pages.
In response to the male and conservative criticism leveled at Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex , Françoise d’Eaubonne, a successful young novelist, responded with this book written in a few weeks and published with much hoopla by Julliard in 1951.
In this text, Françoise rushes to the front with the ardor that has already earned her the ire of Françoise Mauriac, with whom she clashes. She attacks all the conservatisms expressed about the place of women (or, rather of “woman,” as they say) in society. And does it cleverly: psychoanalysis and communism reign supreme over the left-wing intellectual life of the time. (Vincent)
1962: Les Plus Belles Lettres de Flaubert
Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1962, 158 pages.
Françoise saw in Flaubert the first of the bourgeois writers (with time and money) to have introduced what she considers to be the cardinal value of his class in literature:: investment in time (time is money).
If she does not forget his misogyny and the atrocious pages he committed against the defeated Commune de Paris , she recognizes the merit of having devoted his time to trying to tear himself away from the mediocre thought of his time and to his class (whether he succeeded is another story, editor’s note),and she distinguishes him from his contemporaries in that he was refusing epidermally the world (unlike Sand, Balzac, Stendhal…).
Françoise, Flaubertian? Certainly not. But she recognizes its literary merits and considers it an interesting textbook case. (Vincent)
1970: Éros minoritaire
Paris, André Balland, 323 pages.
In this seminal work, Françoise d’Eaubonne affirms that homosexuality, this “minority Eros,” as she describes it, has existed at all times and in all latitudes. Like heterosexuality, it is one of the two main branches of Eros. How is it then that it was blamed for perversion, disease, abnormality, even crime, according to the cultures and the centuries, after having been honored in the ancient world? (Alain)
1972: Le Féminisme, histoire et actualité
Paris, Alain Moreau, 400 pages.
This book is a very dense essay on the history of feminism, from Antiquity to the beginnings of the American and French Women’s Liberation Movements. Françoise d’Eaubonne analyzes these “primordial historical facts” which are “phallocratism, sexism, then feminism”. Based on a very wide variety of references (psychoanalytical, anthropological, historical, literary, etc.), she analyzes both how sexist discrimination has been developed and maintained through the centuries and countries, and how much women have always tried to rebel against it – although their revolts were suppressed by various means. Incidentally, Françoise d’Eaubonne exposes the extent of the work carried out by her predecessors, retracing the cultural history of Western feminism – especially, but not only, centered on the French case – offering extracts from speeches or works and commenting on them. It is a book that tells the story of feminist revolutions, of their successive failures and repressions to to the advent of the MLF (the Feminist Liberation Movement). (Aurore)
1977: Les Femmes avant le patriarcat
Payot, 239 pages.
By creating ecofeminism, Françoise’s genius was not to bring a new concept: it was to connect us with an immemorial reality, that of the pre-patriarchal cultures of our geographical area, that the rationalism of the 15th century then the humanism of the Enlightenment will have tried to eradicate it in our Western culture, now at the forefront of dehumanization.
(Vincent d’Eaubonne, in preface to the Italian edition 2024 )
1977 : Lettre ouverte au docteur Hutter, médecin-directeur à l'Hôpital-prison de Wittlich (RFA)
Gérard Hof et Françoise d’Eaubonne, inéditions barbares.
In 1976, after having been a witness at Françoise’s marriage to Pierre Sanna (detained in the prison of Health in Paris), Gérard Hof, Françoise’s companion, was imprisoned in the hospital-prison of Wittlich (FRG) and had to resist the particular methods applied by Dr. Hutter: experimental white torture, sensory obligation, an attempt to deconstruct the personality… Released from prison, Gérard Hof will write and publish this accusing testimony for which Françoise will write the preface. (Alain)
1978 : Écologie/Féminisme - Révolution ou mutation ?
Paris, A.T.P., 224 pages.
Écologie/féminisme : révolution ou mutation ? Takes up the main eco-feminist theses that Françoise d’Eaubonne has been developing since the beginning of the 1970s, to bring them to a point of incandescence in this work with a largely prophetic and apocalyptic tone. She sets out her conviction that it is useless to continue to think about the future in the light of eroded political analyses: the revolutionary imagination has revealed its flaws from the history of the French Revolution to that of socialism. Since 1972, she has asserted that we must move on to a mutational imagination: everything must change. Because patriarchy is, according to her, the first historical cause of all social and environmental dysfunctions, because the “masculine” ideology is an exploitative and devastating ideology, feminism and the ecological struggle are the last ramparts against the environmental apocalypse that is in the making. (Aurore)
reissued under:
– D’EAUBONNE, Françoise. Écologie et Féminisme : révolution ou mutation ? . Libre & Solidaire, May 2018, 236 pages.
1978 : Contre-violence ou la résistance à l'État
Paris, Éditions tierce, 96 pages.
Contre-violence is a heterogeneous and very rhythmic work which combines poems, political texts, articles published in feminist magazines, open letters, collages of newspapers, tracts… In this essay, Françoise d’Eaubonne refuses to condemn a priori the use of violence for moral reasons, which allows her to think about the broad spectrum of violence and its consequences, without dogmatism.
She does not lead to a position of compromise, true to herself, but pleads for mutual respect of tactics and strategic choices. She who experienced and put into action acts of counter -violence and who knows the cost is here driven by an ethical concern for the use of violence. Favorable to a counter-violence that does not attack the living, she is also vigilant to contained violence, so that this violence never turns into revenge, individual release, enjoyment and ultimately into a seizure of power; so that “women’s power becomes non-power”, always at the service of diversity and multiple.(Pauline)
1980 : Histoire de la galanterie : Tome IV au temps des mignons du Roi
Geneva, Famot.
Most certainly collective work, and work with a financial incentive for Françoise. The title refers to the time of Henry III, where the term “mignon” definitely took on the pejorative connotation that we still know it to have. A connotation that did not exist before, this word, minion , meaning “faithful”, “servant”. Thus, the Jesuits were for a time very seriously called the “ministry of Jesus Christ”.
It was the criticisms, both from the Huguenots and from the members of the League, of the escapades and excesses of the formidable swordsmen who surrounded the young king that gave it this derogatory meaning. And insofar as these critics considered them effeminate and suspected them of homosexuality (which, at the time, could land them on the stake if one was not high enough in the hierarchy), it would be interesting to see how Françoise tackled the question of “gallantry”. (Vincent)
1981 : Le donne prima del patriarcato
Roma, Felina, 242 pages
Italian edition of Les Femmes avant le patriarcat. Tradotto da Flora Arcuri ; con la collaborazione di Giovanna Tato ; copertina di Sandra Galeotti.
1990 : Le Scandale d'une disparition : vie et œuvre du pasteur Doucé
Paris, Libre Arbitre, 116 pages.
Preface by Gilles Perrault.
A Protestant Baptist, Pastor Doucé founded the Center of Christ Liberator (CCL) in Paris in 1976, a space for welcoming and speaking out for believers in sexual and gender minorities. After the mysterious disappearance of the pastor in July 1990, Françoise participated with Gilles Perrault in the creation of a Committee to demand the truth about this affair. The pastor will be found murdered a few months later. (Alain)
1997 : La Liseuse et la Lyre
Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 192 pages.
In this intimate essay, Françoise returns to her passion for words. Not by navel-gazing, as René de Ceccatty rightly said in a literary review of Le Monde in 1997, but to remind us of Danièle Sallenave’s saying: “The book does not replace anything, but nothing replaces the book”.
La Liseuse et la Lyre is a magnificent essay in which Françoise, again, touches on the universal. But in a detached and almost serene tone that we knew little about him, reminding us how wide her palette was. (Vincent)
The analogy of this too abstract passion with drug addiction inspired an author of the interwar period to denounce under this title: “This unpunished vice, reading”. How could he give this warning? With a text.
1999 : Le Sexocide des sorcières
Paris, L’Esprit Frappeur, 156 pages.
In this book, Françoise retraces the masculine obsession, since the destruction of matricentric cultures, with making the feminine disappear. “It is indeed in the Christian West, future creator of the ‘state of law’, that this dream of sexocide by the stake of witches manifested the earliest and most spectacularly. (…) It was in 1484 that the bull of Innocent VIII launched the initiative for an extermination which was to depopulate Europe from part of the ‘second sex’ for two hundred years. And the Church, for which every woman is a potential witch, will soon hand over “to the executioner’s torch the thousands of women whose guilt it invents.” (Alain)
2018: Écologie et Féminisme - Révolution ou mutation ?
Paris, Libre et solidaire, 233 pages.
In this book, initially published in 1978 and following Feminism or death, Françoise theorizes her founding vision of ecofeminism.
This edition is enriched with a preface by Serge Latouche, which particularly does justice to her as a pioneer in the development of the idea of degrowth, and an afterword by Caroline Goldblum, which reminds us what a visionary woman Françoise was and what place she held in intellectual life for much of the previous century. (Vincent)
2019: Le sexocide des sorcières
Le sexocide des sorcières in Spanish
Françoise d’Eaubonne published Le sexocide des sorcières in 1999, after fifteen years of writing and political commitment, after having introduced the word phallocrat (1971) into the French language and coining the concept of ecofeminismo (1978). ( In reality, 1974, Ed.)
From the moment men appropriated fertility (through agriculture) and fertility (through reproduction), the Earth and women were exploited through the use of a productivist logic. Patriarchy has been responsible for ecological disaster and women’s slavery for 5000 years. The “caza de brujas” is an episodio más de esta domination que, pendante dos siglos, persiguió y masacró masivamente à las mujeres por el mero hecho de ser mujeres y no brujas. (Source: Incorpore)
2019 : El sexocidi de les bruxes
Le Sexocide des sorcières in Catalan
Françoise d’Eaubonne published Le Sexocide des sorcières in 1999, after fifteen years of writing and political commitment, after having introduced the word phallocrat (1971) into the French language and coining the concept of ecofeminisme ( 1978). ( In reality 1974, Ed.)
From the moment men appropriated fertility (through agriculture) and fertility (through reproduction), the Earth and women were exploited through the use of a productivist logic. Patriarchy has been responsible for ecological disaster and women’s slavery for 5000 years. The “witch hunt” is another episode of this domination that, for two centuries, persecuted and massacred women en masse for the simple fact of being women and not witches. (Source: Incorpore)
2020: Le féminisme ou la mort
Paris, Le passager Clandestin, 331 pages.
Initially published in 1974, this founding book opens up new perspectives for ecological and feminist struggles, which Françoise tells us are called to join in the fight against patriarchy which, in the same movement, subjugates women and destroys the planet.
In this book which gives a nod to René Dumont’s title L’Utopia ou la Mort , Françoise announces what is now a reality: the destruction of the world by productivism and power. Capital, now neoliberal, is only the latest avatar of a multimillenary system, of which she will detail her historical vision in Les femmes avant le patriarcat.
2021: Le Complexe de Diane
Paris, Julliard, 395 pages.
Arguing for an approach that would make it possible to reconcile “both the rational and the irrational, the intellect and the instinct”, Françoise opens the way to a process of completeness where hierarchies would finally be abolished, for the good of the humanity, and where pleasure, including sexual pleasure, would be fully honoured. And it is in the richness and depth of this thought still in gestation that this unexpected horizon that we will call ecofeminism is illuminated. (Elise)
2022: Feminism or Death
The incendiary French feminist work that defined ecofeminism — now available for the first time in English.
Originally published in French in 1974, radical feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne surveyed women’s status around the globe and argued that the stakes of feminist struggles were not about equality but about life and death — for humans and the planet. In this wide-ranging manifesto, d’Eaubonne first proposed a politics of ecofeminism, the idea that the patriarchal system’s claim over women’s bodies and the natural world destroys both, and that feminism and environmentalism must bring about a new “mutation” — an overthrow of not just male power, but the system of power itself. As d’Eaubonne prophesied, “The planet placed in the feminine will flourish for all.” (Source: Verso Books)
2022 : Il Femminismo o la Morte
Milan, Prospero Editore, 432 pages.
Released November 10, 2022, with a critical introduction by Sara Marchesi.
According to shared opinion, this introduction is very good. Sara Marchesi, beyond a careful reading of Françoise, shares with her sources of reflection, those which are not the most obvious to detect at first glance in Françoise’s work, such as the philosopher Simone Weil for example.
It is not impossible that, in the future, Sara Marchesi will meet Françoise again. After reading this introduction, we hope so. (Vincent)
2023 : Écologie/Féminisme – Révolution ou mutation ?
Paris, Le Passager Clandestin, preface Geneviève Pruvost, 349 pages.
Building upon the publication of Feminism or Death (1974) and her scholarly research in Women before Patriarchy (1976), Françoise d’Eaubonne provides a more complex elaboration of her vision of ecofeminism in this work.
In opposition to reformist feminism, which she describes as “mom’s feminism,” but also Marxist feminism, d’Eaubonne adds two dimensions to her analysis of the exploitation of nature and countries in the Global South: in her view, liberating oneself as a woman to the detriment of the planet and through the labor and exploitation of the most vulnerable is not really a true form of liberation. For how can it be forgotten that at the other end of the supply chain there are women bent over in fields on the other side of the world? (Geneviève Pruvost, 2022)
2023 : Le Sexocide des sorcières
Vauvert, Au diable vauvert, collection Nouvelles Lunes, preface Taous Merakchi, 109 pages.
The sexocide that Françoise d’Eaubonne talks about in this text, the treatment reserved for “witches” during the hunt that was carried out against them, was only a pretext. It was a perfect trick, appropriate to the times in which these events take place, to justify the torture and murder of women. Kramer and Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum would be treated today as the manifesto of an incel, released on the web a few hours before going to commit his mass murder in a place frequented mainly by women.
Taous Merakchi, 2023
2023 : Contre-violence ou la résistance à l'État
Paris, Éditions Cambourakis, preface Isabelle Cambourakis, 268 pages.
Published in 1978 in a feminist publishing house, the book brings together various writings and poems by d’Eaubonne written from 1975 in response to certain events, including the death in prison of Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) activist Ulrike Meinhof in May 1976 and that of four of her comrades in October 1977. Some of these texts were written on the spot, some were reworked several times before publication.. Reading this book raises the question of the evolutions and adjustments of d’Eaubonne’s commitment over time. (Isabelle Cambourakis, 2022)
“This book is an urgent reflection on Power and Violence. Françoise d’Eaubonne has a unique way of firing red bullets at those who, thus imprisoning all thoughts, amalgamate Counter-violence with Violence. Brilliantly dismantling the hypocrisy of our society “Non-violence is the homage that a violent world pays to the idea of a society without violence”! Continuing her reflection, she tackles the source: THE power. She points to the need to destroy HIM and take back OUR powers, the one that everyone can exercise without limit.
Finally, she hits the bull’s eye with her final thrust, when she throws in the future: one day it will be the “Mutiny of women against the Society of Power ».” (Manon Soavi)
Romans
1944: Le Cœur de Watteau
Julliard, 354 pages.
Written between 1942 and 1943, this novel is a succession of detailed images and earthy dialogues. The misery of the times that Françoise navigates as best she can finds an echo in the descriptions that she makes of popular life under Louis XIV. A whole world of craftsmen, shopkeepers and rank and file soldiers comes to life in these pages against the backdrop of the life and paintings of Antoine Watteau. Women are also very present there, especially Morena, who embodies a hard-won and preserved independence. This novel, which is deftly constructed in a masterly way, is surprisingly mature for a 22-year-old author. (Vincent)
1947: Comme un vol de gerfauts
Julliard, coll. Sequana, 526 pages.
Awarded the Readers’ Prize in 1947, this roman-fleuve announces themes and forms dear to Françoise that will be found throughout her novels. The sea, its buccaneers and its shipwrecks (at her request, Françoise’s ashes will be scattered by a sailboat off the coast of Morbihan), transforms the historical novel into a psychological narrative, because she thought this form was “more accessible to our modern sensibility”, as she says in the introduction. Hence our feeling, according to Élise Thiébaut, “to live adventures from the inside”, reinforced by striking, very pictorial descriptions. (Vincent)
1949: Indomptable Murcie
René Julliard, coll. Sequana, 559 pages.
If this book is dedicated to the soul of her father, it is indeed her Spanish roots that Françoise evokes through the story of this woman, dispossessed because she was rebellious, who will go, to the head of her Cuadrilla, was killed by the French in front of Zaragoza in 1816 during the Napoleonic war of occupation.
In this novel of love, sound and fury, the “Sangre y Fuego” part making up half of the 550 pages, Françoise perfects her art of striking description, which transports us to the heart of the action, which is described with a visual meticulousness. .
1954: La Hollandaise volante
Broadcast by Radio-Lille.
Probably lost, so we can only speculate on this Flying Dutchwoman.
The Flying Dutchman is the archetype of ghost ships, prominently featured in the tales and legends passed down and still passed down to seafarers. It represents the fatal omen to not cross on one’s voyage, because it is a boat whose crew has been cursed and condemned to wander on the waves for eternity.
It is therefore most certainly a maritime tale that Françoise proposed, like Le Gabier de Surcouf 4 years later. Note that the Dutchman has become a Dutchwoman, and it’s a safe bet that she made a captain of a pirate or corsair; it is even quite possible that the entire crew was female. A curse on the men who crossed their path! (Vincent)
1955: Jours de chaleur
Paris, Éditions de Paris, coll. série blonde, 249 pages.
Spain again. This sentimental novel hides under an apparent lightness memories of Françoise’s youth: the war in Spain, the Campaign in France. The heroine of the novel hides a secret, and an ardent soul which is not unrelated to her own. The secondary characters are probably drawn from a series of encounters made at the villa Les Pamplemousses of her Toulouse childhood after the retirada, the exodus of Spanish republicans in 1939. (Vincent)
1957: Les Amours de Roméo et Juliette
Paris, Édition Rombaldi, coll. Le club de la Femme.
Here, a novel with Cyranesque accents, which is worth it for its detailed and colorful descriptions of Verona in the 15th century. Apart from that, it’s a book to support herself financially, written without passion. Living from her pen, without financial support, position or husband, may have required her to produce this work. (Vincent)
1958: Fort des Femmes
Paris, le Livre contemporain. .
Of Françoise, Mac Orlan said : “Her style is so colorful that you have to read her books with sunglasses”. What would he have said of Les Bergères de l’Apocalypse prefigured by this book? Because it is indeed about a fight of women, arms in hand: a troop of poor immigrant beggars, prostitutes and thieves who meet in the bottom of the hold of the boat in which they are fleeing poverty to building a better future in the Americas in the early 19th century. And it is not the titles of sarcastic chapters like La joie d’être mère or Le repos du guerrier that will make us doubt the intentions of the author. (Vincent)
1959 : Je m'appelle Kristine
Éditions Albin Michel, Paris, 285 pages. Reissue titled Moi, Kristine, reine de Suède, 1979
The Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar’s monument published 7 years earlier, can only come to mind when reading Françoise’s novel. And it is not the transparent clues that she left that will invalidate this observation. One could think of a stylistic imitation, when it is necessary to see there what these two great authors shared: a real knowledge of the Greeks and the Latins.
Knowledge that Françoise puts at the service of her purpose, which has always been to say: Women! Be proud to be! It is thanks to this statement that I will have quite naturally, from my childhood readings, been led to consider that an epic hero could also be a heroine.
With Kristine from Sweden, Françoise paints a historical figure that lives up to her intentions. Friend and correspondent of the greatest intellectual and scientific figures of her century, linchpin of the Treaty of Westphalia, adventurous and combative, diplomat and peacemaker, Queen Kristine was undoubtedly one of the most important figures in Europe of her time. (Vincent)
1959 : J'irai cracher sur vos tombes
Éditions Seghers, Paris, 220 pages.
EIn 1946, published by Éditions du Scorpion, a book by Vernon Sullivan bearing this title. Deemed scandalous, it was then the subject of a lawsuit brought by a Cartel for social and moral action, which revealed that its real author was Boris Vian. He will be sentenced to 15 days in prison, quickly pardoned, for insulting morality. The forbidden book, Boris Vian will draw a play from it, then a film, and it is a few days before his death that he will give Françoise the authorization to write under this title a new version of his novel whose scent of scandal and the taste of the time for American thrillers will make it a literary success. (Vincent)
1971 : Drôle de meurtre
Under the pseudonym Nadine de Longueval.
Ce roman est vraiment très proche dans sa thématique et psychologiquement de The Yellow Wallpaper in several aspects. La protagoniste, Judith, celle qui écrira le carnet retrouvé par sa fille dans les premiers chapitres, se fait utiliser par les hommes à leurs convenance, perd toute agentivité lorsqu’elle se marie à un homme qui n’a absolument aucun intérêt pour elle sauf pour sa fortune d’un million de dollars : pas de contacts affectifs, pas de loisirs, pas de bons mots, uniquement une protagoniste avec une belle-famille qui lui tombe sur les nerfs, son mari qui ne parle que de lui et de son roman (qui, on le devine, ne sera jamais publié), qui l’interrompt tout le temps, ne la laisse jamais parler et la déconsidère à absolument toutes les occasions en l’humiliant par moment et se faisant servir par elle tout le temps.
Tout au long du livre, on la voit sombrer peu à peu dans la dépression et la folie, et ses espoirs s’effondrer un par un. Il n’est pas étonnant alors que le regard de la société (et de sa fille avant de la connaître) la considère alors comme folle, vu qu’elle ne peut s’exprimer, ne peut être heureuse, et est agressée en continu par tout ce qui l’entoure, n’ayant comme seul refuge un petit chien.
Dans le roman, d’Eaubonne s’attarde à expliquer ce qui se cache derrière cette “folie” d’une femme vue à travers les yeux des autres, qui peut enfin livrer son récit sans un regard extérieur ou un mari qui tente d’expliquer ses comportements. C’est une exploration psychologique extrêmement fine, qui nous amène dans le quotidien d’une femme privée de tout, mais surtout de reconnaissance de son existence, obligée de vivre pour les autres et même comme monnaie d’échange. Même si ça finit un peu en histoire d’amour hétéro (le genre de la collection oblige) juste avant le dernier chapitre, tout est crédible, finement décrit et justifié.
Le dernier paragraphe du livre est assez magnifique à mon avis puisqu’il marque la reprise du récit par sa fille, comme à la fois une manière d’inscrire le récit dans le sien, en héritage, mais aussi en souvenir, dans le but de réhabiliter, ressortir, faire exister l’histoire d’une femme sortie du regard et avec, finalement, une justice pour tous les torts qui lui ont été commis. (Nicolas)
1979 : On vous appelait terroristes
Yverdon, Kesselring, 389 pages.
A book started following the death of Ulrike Meinhof in prison, On vous appelait terroristes offers a partial biography, fictionalized and polyphonic, of the protagonists of the German Red Army Faction. Each chapter focuses on the experience that each of them has (at the death of Katrina, Ulrike Meinhof) about the movement, its creation and the first attacks. It is the fatal spiral of counter-violence that Françoise d’Eaubonne describes. She shows how these young people, militants close to non-violence at the beginning of the novel, gradually come to the conviction that armed violence is the only effective recourse left to them to fight against State crimes.
On vous appelait terroristes em is a denunciatory title: the “urban guerrillas” are not, according to d’Eaubonne, “terrorists”, but militants of “counter-violence”. (Aurore)
1979 : Moi, Kristine, reine de Suède
Encre, collection Mémoire des Femmes, 273 pages (Reissue, original published under the title Je m’appelle Kristine, 1959)
The Memoirs of Hadrian , Marguerite Yourcenar’s monumental work published 7 years earlier, can only come to mind when reading Françoise’s novel. And it is not the transparent clues that she left that will invalidate this observation. One could think of a stylistic imitation, when it is necessary to see there what these two great authors shared: a real knowledge of the Greeks and the Latins.
Knowledge that Françoise puts at the service of her purpose which, always, will have been to say: Women ! Be proud to be! It is thanks to this statement that I will have quite naturally, from my childhood reading, been led to consider that an epic hero could just as well be a heroine.
With Kristine from Sweden, Françoise paints a historical figure that lives up to her intentions. Friend and correspondent of the greatest intellectual and scientific figures of her century, linchpin of the Treaty of Westaphalia, adventurous and combative, diplomat and peacemaker, Queen Kristine was unquestionably one of the most important figures in the Europe of her time. (Vincent)
1982 : Je ne suis pas née pour mourir
Paris, Denoël/Gonthier, 286 pages
This 1982 novel tells the story of an Amazon, Thécla, who, after drinking a certain potion, goes through time and encounters great moments in history. For the first time, the myth of immortality is embodied by a woman. This prodigious adventure novel leads us to meet Alexander the Great, to the discovery of America by the Vikings, to the formidable machines designed by Leonardo da Vinci, to the war in Vendée,… up to Nazism and then to May-68.
1983 : À la limite des ténèbres
Paris, Encre, 278 pages.
“I am a killer. More than an assassin: a demon, a ferocious animal, a being who draws his life only from the blood of others, like vampires… I killed twenty-seven people, mostly women; always in darkness, at nightfall. » This is how the cursed hero of one of the most incredible brief news stories in the annals of crime expresses himself.
Françoise d’Eaubonne endeavored to paint the intimate tragedy of this schizophrenic character, the evolution between genius and madness of the dark forces of mental disorder. He will end up exhausting his own violence and become, bitterly, the spectator of his delirium.
(4th cover)
1983 : L'amazone sombre, vie d'Antoinette Lix
Paris, Encre, 309 pages.
Interesting presentation of Antoinette Lix in this podcast, which sheds light on Françoise’s interest in the character.
1992 : Toutes les sirènes sont mortes
Paris, Editions de Magrie, 208 pages.
Collection les Nuées Volantes.
Françoise gives us a refined, deep and sensitive novel. In a lost locality in Brittany, a writer tries to escape her demons, but a very innocent investigator, a toy in the hands of her boss, comes to upset her nightmares. “Powerful, moving, with a rare sensitivity” (letter from Gilles Perrault to Françoise). (Alain)
2023 : Je ne suis pas née pour mourir
Paris, Le Seuil, pocket, preface Pauline Harmange, septembre 2023
This 1982 novel tells the story of an Amazon, Thécla, who, after drinking a certain potion, goes through time and encounters great moments in history. For the first time, the myth of immortality is embodied by a woman. This prodigious adventure novel leads us to meet Alexander the Great, to the discovery of America by the Vikings, to the formidable machines designed by Leonardo da Vinci, to the war in Vendée,… up to Nazism and then to May-68.
Biographies
1944: Le Cœur de Watteau
Julliard, 354 pages.
Written between 1942 and 1943, this novel is a succession of detailed images and earthy dialogues. The misery of the times that Françoise navigates as best she can finds an echo in the descriptions that she makes of popular life under Louis XIV. A whole world of craftsmen, shopkeepers and rank and file soldiers comes to life in these pages against the backdrop of the life and paintings of Antoine Watteau. Women are also very present there, especially Morena, who embodies a hard-won and preserved independence. This novel, which is deftly constructed in a masterly way, is surprisingly mature for a 22-year-old author. (Vincent)
1979 : Moi, Kristine, reine de Suède
Encre, collection Mémoire des Femmes, 273 pages (Reissue, original published under the title Je m’appelle Kristine, 1959)
The Memoirs of Hadrian , Marguerite Yourcenar’s monumental work published 7 years earlier, can only come to mind when reading Françoise’s novel. And it is not the transparent clues that she left that will invalidate this observation. One could think of a stylistic imitation, when it is necessary to see there what these two great authors shared: a real knowledge of the Greeks and the Latins.
Knowledge that Françoise puts at the service of her purpose which, always, will have been to say: Women ! Be proud to be! It is thanks to this statement that I will have quite naturally, from my childhood reading, been led to consider that an epic hero could just as well be a heroine.
With Kristine from Sweden, Françoise paints a historical figure that lives up to her intentions. Friend and correspondent of the greatest intellectual and scientific figures of her century, linchpin of the Treaty of Westaphalia, adventurous and combative, diplomat and peacemaker, Queen Kristine was unquestionably one of the most important figures in the Europe of her time. (Vincent)
1985: Louise Michel la Canaque
Paris, Encre, 238 pages.
1873. Louise Michel, sentenced to deportation, arrives in New Caledonia, where she will stay for seven years. In this island which was not yet conquered by the military, her fortitude allowed her to find great joy in the luxuriant nature and especially among the Kanak people, she being the only one to support them in 1878 when the former communards joined forces with the jailers to exterminate them. Under the pen of Françoise, Louise finds a life worthy of the exceptional woman she was. (Vincent)
1986 : Une femme nommée Castor – Mon amie Simone de Beauvoir
Paris, Encre, 366 pages.
Shocked by the disappearance of Simone de Beauvoir in 1986, in this book Françoise insisted on describing for us the one whose The Second Sex had marked her so much. The friendship that united them, Beauvoir’s literary work and his intimate relationship with Sartre, as well as the few theoretical disagreements that the two authors may have had are delicately approached. (Alain)
From L’Indicateur du réseau , part still unpublished:
It was during the turbulent period of the various “peace in Algeria” movements (…) that I entered, for the first time, Simone de Beauvoir’s place. I have known and been with since 1947 the author of Second Sex , but I lost sight of her long enough; she will recount our reunion in La Force de l’âge.
1990 : Le Scandale d'une disparition : vie et œuvre du pasteur Doucé
Paris, Libre Arbitre, 116 pages.
Preface by Gilles Perrault.
A Protestant Baptist, Pastor Doucé founded the Center of Christ Liberator (CCL) in Paris in 1976, a space for welcoming and speaking out for believers in sexual and gender minorities. After the mysterious disappearance of the pastor in July 1990, Françoise participated with Gilles Perrault in the creation of a Committee to demand the truth about this affair. The pastor will be found murdered a few months later. (Alain)
Autobiographies
1966: Les Monstres de l’été
Paris, Julliard, 464 pages.
The second part of Françoise’s “early memoirs” begins with these words:
“East Berlin, March 12, 1965 (my birthday). – My guide absolutely wants to offer to name a street in East Berlin after me. I did not deserve “this excess of honor”; if I accept it, it is because for most it will be an “indignity”. »
In this text, the author continues writing her memories of the end of the Second War in the early 1960s, after a first volume, Chienne de jeunesse, which retraced her journey from 1930 to 1945. (Alain)
1978 : L'Indicateur du réseau
Paris, Encre, 350 pages.
The third volume of Françoise d’Eaubonne’s memoirs, L’Indicateur du réseau traces important events in her life starting from the names of the places where they took place: with humour, she speaks of a “topographical assessment”. The story advances along the alphabetical thread of station names, and we meet her successively at different ages in her life: her childhood, her family, her loved ones, the war, her first relationships – more than failed – with men, her books, her writing, her struggles. We learn in this memoir how much writing is, for her, a weapon of resistance.
This text has so far never been published in its entirety. In the still unpublished part (submitted to IMEC), Françoise, emphasizing her “fervor for this counter-literature that is Science Fiction”, specified that science fiction, “like everything that is against, rejuvenates and refreshes the old form, and that is why I choose here the name of counter-memorials”. (Aurore and Alain)
1997 : La Liseuse et la Lyre
Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 192 pages.
Although it is not strictly speaking an autobiography, this intimate essay is sufficiently enlightening on Françoise’s relationship with words to have a place here.
Françoise comes back to her passion for words, not out of navel-gazing, as René de Ceccatty rightly says in a literary review of Le Monde in 1997, but to remind us of Danièle Sallenave’s saying: “The book does not replace anything, but nothing replaces the book”.
La Liseuse et la Lyre is a magnificent essay in which Françoise, again, touches on the universal. But in a detached and almost serene tone that we knew little about her, reminding us how wide her palette was. (Vincent)
The analogy of this too abstract passion with drug addiction inspired an author of the interwar period to denounce under this title: “This unpunished vice, reading”. How could he give this warning? With a text.
2001 : Mémoires irréductibles - De l'entre-deux guerres à l'an 2000
Paris, Dagorno, 1135 pages.
A whole century (or almost)! This voluminous collection brings together the various volumes of memoirs by Françoise d’Eaubonne already published at different times in her life: Chienne de jeunesse (for the period from 1930 to 1945), Les Monstres de l’été (from 1945 to1965), L’Indicateur du réseau (which covers different eras up to 1978), as well as a volume published here for the first time, Les Feux du crépuscule (where the author, approaching the end of her life, turns one last time to her 20th century).
One or two other autobiographical manuscripts have never been published so far. (Alain)
Science fiction
1960: Planète sans adieu
Paris, Arthème Fayard, 26 pages.
Pages 23 to 46 in a collective work. Short story from SF: time travel, a heroine, and a fun imaginative game about the influence of glaciations on the development of Homo .
If the text is of no great consequence, Françoise’s touch is there. And it could have been a relaxing writing game for her, a recreation of her basic work of those years. (Vincent)
1975: Le Satellite de l’Amande
Paris, Des Femmes , 253 pages.
All the men have disappeared. That is to say: all the males. In this novel, where they reproduce by ectogenesis (a means of reproduction that allows them to do without men), women, after having brought life back to an Earth devastated by pollution, Capital and patriarchy, set off to explore a small strange planet far from our solar system. This voyage will contain many surprises for readers of this philosophical tale. “Passionate, imperious. In frescoes and reliefs!” (Victoria Therame). Le Satellite de l’amande is the first part of a saga which will be continued by Les Bergères de l’apocalypse and by a third part not yet published. (Alain)
2022: Le Satellite de l'Amande
Paris, Des Femmes–Antoinette Fouque, 176 pages .
1975. I am 21 years old, I have known Françoise for several months and we have already become inseparable. Des Femmes publish Le Satellite de l’Amande , a science fiction novel set in a world of women only. I’m excited. The exploration of the small exoplanet, the philosophical questions of the narrator, the light pen of the author, everything charms my tumultuous youth. 47 years later, Des Femmes editions are republishing this book, and it is therefore with particular pleasure that I set off again to discover this d’Eaubonnesque universe. (Alain)
2022: Les Bergères de l'Apocalypse
Paris, Des Femmes–Antoinette Fouque, 650 pages .
1978. Unlike many readers much more lucid than me, this novel, when it comes out, goes over my head; I was expecting something as charming as Le Satellite de l’Amande and was taken aback. With my usual slowness of mind (to use an expression that Françoise had used with false modesty towards herself), I had to wait until 2022 and this reissue by Des Femmes-Antoinette Fouque to discover what I now consider to be a true masterpiece. I have one small regret left: that of not having been able to tell Françoise of my overflowing enthusiasm. (Alain)
2022 : Un bonheur viril
Paris, Des Femmes–Antoinette Fouque, 250 pages.
Released on November 10, this third volume closes (almost) the saga of the Without
It is about the global war of the sexes from the point of view of the enemy camp, through the neurotic vision of the founder of Gynophobia (a whole program…). We can draw a parallel with the work of Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985.
Thanks to the IMEC who allowed us to exhume this manuscript, to Élise Thiébaut, as well as to Alain for his valuable proofreading work.. (Vincent)
Poetry
1942: Colonnes de l'âme
Editions Lutetia, coll. Itinéraire n°1.
Handwritten preface by Joë Bousquet. The series Itinéraires under the direction of Jacques Aubenque, who wrote the afterword to this collection.
Eighteen poems by Françoise, aged 22, divided into four themes (Love, Faith, Dream, Revolt), each illustrated with a drawing by the author. (Vincent)
1954: Une pomme rouge : mon cœur
Paris, Pierre Seghers (coll. Poésie 54 n°374), 15 pages.
Titled with a verse by Nazim Hickmet and dedicated to Henri Lefèbvre, nine poems in three sections. The first on love, its struggles and its sufferings, the second in memory of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (four years later, Françoise will choose “Julius” as a middle name for her son). The last section, Trois poèmes pour mon Parti (Françoise was then a member of the Communist Party), contains a long poem in memory of her father to tell him what she owes him for her communist commitment. (Vincent)
Youth
1958: Chevrette et Virginie
Hachette, coll. Bibliothèque verte n°46, 253 pages.
This first novel intended for young people is adorned with a cover whose reading could be much less innocent today than at the time. And it is the story of two adventurous and shipwrecked women that is told to us. We can even venture to think that Françoise would have done well without the character of the Chevalier de La Barre, who seems to be there to save appearances and preserve the moral purity of our dear darlings… But wouldn’t this be an anachronism or speculation on possible intentions still unconscious in the author? (Vincent)
1959: Le Gabier de Surcouf
Bruxelles, Éditions Brepols (Bruxelles), 138 pages.
This children’s book would have had its place in the Bibliothèque Verte. The story takes place in the Ile de France, which will become Mauritius. We find there the famous corsair, a young gabier, a young philosopher, etc., and a certain Mr. Piston, incarnation of one of Françoise’s ancestors.
Attached to her Breton and maritime roots, the author would have loved this song by Michel Tonnerre in this very beautiful interpretation by Thalie (who knows Françoise and appreciates her). Thank you to this one for allowing me to insert it here, and to Michel’s heirs. (Vincent)
1961: Les Fiancés du Puits-Doré
Hachette, coll. Bibliothèque verte n°185, 187 pages.
Alongside Don Quixote and Cyrano de Bergerac, the honoured bandit Mandrin Belle-Humeur has his place in Françoise’s pantheon. She also dedicated a book to him in 1957. Our French Robin Hood shares the limelight here with an 11-year-old girl who displays an audacity, courage and commitment “not expected of people of her sex”, to paraphrase an 18th-century phrase.
This novel from the Bibliothèque Verte, much better written than the rest of the collection as far as I remember, is very much in line with Françoise’s other children’s books: colorful and meticulous descriptions, realistic historical context, adventures and twists in all chapters. A book quite suited to instilling a taste for literature. (Vincent)
1962: L’Amazone bleue
Hachette, coll. Bibliothèque verte n°208, 249 pages.
Françoise was very marked by Victor Hugo, and in particular by his vision of the Vendée wars. This is why, while siding with the Republic, it paints a picture that is not Manichean. She also moves certain protagonists of her story from one camp to another, whose figurehead is a young woman who fights and plots, finding herself wherever the destiny of France is at stake. (Vincent)