1988 : Les Grandes Aventurières

by | Updated on 22/03/2026 | Published on 05/08/1988 | 1980-1995, I was not born to die, 2.1 Bibliographies, Fictional biographies

Paris, Vernal/Philippe Lebaud, 234 pages.

For a long time, the term “adventuress” was reserved for what were known as “demi-mondaines”—that is, women who, viewing marriage as a “wholesale trade,” preferred the “retail trade” to escape a fate of submission and childbearing.

This is not the type of adventuress we’re talking about here. Françoise gives us a dozen portraits of women who, fighting and battling both on land and at sea, forged a name for themselves and a political or military destiny. Others still, a spiritual destiny. Some of these women were the subject of separate books in Françoise’s oeuvre, such as Isabelle Eberhardt (La Couronne de sable) and Antoinette Lix (L’Amazone sombre).

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1986 : Une femme nommée Castor – Mon amie Simone de Beauvoir

by | Updated on 18/10/2024 | Published on 05/08/1986 | 1980-1995, I was not born to die, 2.1 Bibliographies, Literature essays

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From L’Indicateur du réseau , part still unpublished: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’ve known the author of ”DDeuxième Sexe”, but I lost touch with her for quite a long time; she will recount our reunion in “La Force de l’âge”.

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1985: Louise Michel la Canaque

by | Updated on 18/10/2024 | Published on 05/08/1985 | 1980-1995, I was not born to die, 2.1 Bibliographies, Fictional biographies

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)

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