1964: Chienne de jeunesse

by | Updated on 18/10/2024 | Published on 04/05/1964 | 1962-1973 Je voulais être une femme, 2.1 Bibliographies, Autobiographies

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!“

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1963: La Vie des grands peintres français

by | Updated on 07/05/2025 | Published on 04/05/1963 | 1962-1973 Je voulais être une femme, 2.1 Bibliographies, Historical essays

Paris, Éditions du Sud, Albin Michel.

Texts by Yvonne Deslandres, Françoise d’Eaubonne, Henry Certign … [et al.]; edited by Pierre Waleffe, whom Françoise would meet on many books during these years.

Again, painting, which was to run through all his work, can be found in his style, from Le cœur de Watteau (1944) to Histoire de l’art et lutte des sexes (1978).

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1963: Jusqu’à la gauche

by | Updated on 07/05/2025 | Published on 04/05/1963 | 1962-1973 Je voulais être une femme, 2.1 Bibliographies, Autobiographies

Paris, Buchet / Chastel, 391 pages.

This book can be seen as the sequel to Je voulais être une femme, published the previous year. In any case, the literary process employed here is similar.

In this opus, our heroine immerses herself in the resistance to the Algerian war, and the epic is picaresque: Mamerloy, one of the main characters, would have been worthy of a place at the table of the villa Les pamplemousses in Toulouse, where Françoise spent a colorful youth with the most whimsical characters.

Mamerloy, she would later meet again on her path: it was Roland Perrot, who founded Longo Maï, today a fine cooperative collective that had sectarian beginnings, with him in the role of guru. Françoise fought against these excesses, and the case went national.

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1963: Bonne nuit, cher prince

by | Updated on 06/05/2025 | Published on 04/05/1963 | 1962-1973 Je voulais être une femme, 2.1 Bibliographies, Miscellaneous novels

Paris, Buchet-Chastel, 278 pages.

“A writer (for want of a better word) with particular tastes in love, Nathan chooses to transpose himself into a female character to talk about his obsessions.

………

This is a novel with a double bottom, a game of mirrors in which a person moves relentlessly from life to dream, and literature to reality. The author of Je voulais être une femme has undoubtedly surpassed herself here in audacity and even brutality, but above all in pathos. “(4th cover)

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1963: Balzac que voici

by | Updated on 06/05/2025 | Published on 04/05/1963 | 1962-1973 Je voulais être une femme, 2.1 Bibliographies, Fictional biographies

Paris, Les Editions du Sud, 345 pages

This biographical novel begins with a 3-page introduction, Le 19ème siècle et le triomphe de la bourgeoisie, which ends as follows:

“Certainly, from 1830 to the first decades of our 20th century, this was the golden age of the bourgeoisie, with that unpleasant nightmare of the Commune, a desperate attempt by the “possessed” class to shake off its yoke; this was the era, of which ours has retained so much nostalgia in the heart of its middle classes, when the Franc was as firm as a rock, and consequently patriarchal morality, severe, prudish and fixed. Where the little blue flower is cultivated all the more because gold is obtained at the price of sweat and blood…”.

“A lively, lively tone… A book full of anecdotes.” (Nouvelles littéraires)

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