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).

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)

Paris, Encre, 309 pages.

Daughter of an Alsatian innkeeper and former Napoleonic grenader, Antoinette Lix (1839-1909) received an unconventional education in horseback riding and weapons handling. She took part in the Polish uprising against the Russian occupiers and, on her return to France, tried in vain to join the regular army, at a time when it was out of the question for a woman to join the armed forces as a combatant. So she joined the Corps-Francs de Lamarche, where she led her men in the defense of the Vosges against the Germans during the 1870 war. In recognition of her commitment and feats of arms, she was awarded a Sword of Honor, now on display at the Armies Museum.

An extraordinary destiny worthy of Françoise’s pen and her sense of epic.

Encre, Paris, 264 pages.

Françoise traces the complex destiny of Madame Mao Zedong, from teenage actress to power-hungry woman who was “the first woman in the world to rule over so many men”. Between the courageous revolutionary and the bloody imprincess, her story is told in the first person.

Encre, collection Mémoire des Femmes, 273 pages (Reissue, original published under the title Je m’appelle Kristine, 1959).

Marguerite Yourcenar’s monumental work, Les mémoires d’Hadrien, inevitably comes 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)

Paris, Jean-Claude Simoën, 349 pages.

reissued as:
– D’EAUBONNE, Françoise. L’Éventail de fer ou la vie de Qiu Jin. Encre, 1984, 349 pages.

“Across a sumptuous and miserable China, shaken by incessant civil wars, Qiu Jin, a great feminist, commits herself totally to the side of Sun-Yat-Sen, who was to liberate her country from the imperial shackles. By turns studious young woman, wife and mother, but also poet, terrorist and tireless activist, she was beheaded at the beginning of the 20th century. L’Éventail de Fer is the fresco-like account of the real-life struggle of this young Chinese woman with an extraordinary destiny”. [4° de couverture]