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)
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)
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)
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)
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
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[qu’il] our knowing [ce texte]the reasons, this text, written in the early 1980s, had never been published. However, as Élise Thiébaut writes in her preface, “reading it I had the impression that it was the key to the whole saga, the entry point that allowed us to finally understand it in its entirety” .
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)