Paris, Dagorno, 1135 pages.

A whole century (or almost)! This voluminous collection brings together the various volumes of Françoise d’Eaubonne’s memoirs already published at different times in her life: Chienne de jeunesse (covering the period from 1930 to 1945), Les Monstres de l’été (from 1945 to 1965), L’Indicateur du réseau (which covers different periods up to 1978), as well as a volume published here for the first time, Les Feux du crépuscule (in which the author, nearing the end of her life, looks back on the 20th century one last time).

One or two other autobiographical manuscripts have never been published so far. (Alain)

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 In the still unpublished part (submitted to IMEC), Françoise, emphasizing her “fervor for this counter-literature that is Science Fiction”, specified that science fiction, “like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)

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)

Paris, Julliard, 376 pages.

This first volume of his memoirs revisits his childhood, up to 1944. It opens with Green Paradise, in which the Garden plays a key role as God’s finished work on earth. It is “the natural state of a beloved child, well nourished, in immediate contact with nature“.

Then, with the move to Toulouse, came Le temps de l’ennui. The economic crisis of the ’30s pauperized the d’Eaubonne family, and the lack of everything (” Ah, those children who are always hungry! “This time of boredom was unbearable for Françoise’s ardent soul. This time of boredom was an unbearable suffocation for the ardent soul of little Françoise, who found refuge and consolation in books, writing and the spectacle of the world, some of whose bewildering specimens frequented the house, like the mythomaniac Christian, one of her main characters in Le Quadrille des Matamores. However, these restrictions did not prepare her for what was to follow after a brief happy interlude: war was declared.

In her deprived Toulouse, with parents who were not very resourceful, she experienced hunger – real hunger – and the cold (which took the life of her father and grandmother) like so many others of her generation. She received the full force of the revelation that the death camps were beyond horror. But she also experienced the Resistance, the solidarity of the poor, and her first real literary contract.

From this crucible will emerge a Françoise free of puritanical moralism and illusory propriety, determined to cry out “To the last breath, to the last rattle, to the rifle squad or the drone of the wake: fuck you!“

Paris, Buchet / Chastel, 391 pages.

Note: Awaiting annotation.