1979 : On vous appelait terroristes

by | Updated on 13/09/2024 | Published on 04/05/1979 | 1974-1979 Ecologie/Féminisme, Bibliographies, Historical essays

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

by | Updated on 04/08/2024 | Published on 04/05/1979 | 1974-1979 Ecologie/Féminisme, Bibliographies, Fictional biographies

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)

1978 : Contre-violence ou la Résistance à l’État

by | Updated on 13/09/2024 | Published on 04/05/1978 | 1974-1979 Ecologie/Féminisme, Bibliographies, Philosophical essays

Paris, Éditions tierce, 96 pages.

Contre-violence is an eclectic, fast-paced work combining poems, political texts, articles published in feminist magazines, open letters, newspaper collages, leaflets… In this essay, Françoise d’Eaubonne refuses to condemn the use of violence a priori on moral grounds, enabling her to consider the broad spectrum of violence and its consequences, without dogmatism.

She does not end up with a compromise position, true to herself, but pleads for mutual respect for tactics and strategic choices. Having experienced and put into action acts of counter-violence, and knowing the costs involved, she is driven here by an ethical concern for the use of violence. Favoring a counter-violence that does not attack the living, she is also vigilant about contained violence, so that this violence is never transformed into revenge, individual venting, enjoyment and, ultimately, the seizure of power; so that “women’s power becomes non-power”, always at the service of diversity and the multiple (Pauline).

1978 : Écologie/Féminisme – Révolution ou mutation ?

by | Updated on 13/09/2024 | Published on 04/05/1978 | 1974-1979 Ecologie/Féminisme, Bibliographies, Philosophical essays

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 as:
– D’EAUBONNE, Françoise. Écologie et Féminisme : révolution ou mutation ? . Libre & Solidaire, May 2018, 236 pages.