1964: Rêve de feu

by | Updated on 29/01/2026 | Published on 04/05/1964 | 1962-1973 Je voulais être une femme, 2.1 Bibliographies, Science fiction

Hachette, coll. le rayon fantastique n°124, 238 pages.

“Is Prometheus guilty? Did the inventor of fire, who gave humanity its best defense, precipitate it down the fatal slope of atomic war, then cosmic war?”

In a techno-fascist Paris of the third millennium, a young girl dreams too much. And finds herself, in a cataleptic sleep, projected into the courtroom of a very distant future where the terrified participants know that the end of the universe is nigh. The trial is therefore about fire and its discoverer (Prometheus), our distant ancestor from before recorded history.

One after another, a Celtic warrior from before Christ, a rebel who followed Spartacus, a young Leonardo da Vinci… All condemn the Fire that turned their lives into Hell. Only our heroine will defend it…

Rêve de Feu can be read as a draft of Je ne suis pas née pour mourir. Sleep, which allows her to traverse ages and incarnated eras, enables Françoise to paint a very dark picture of our species, with all the major themes that we will find in her essays and novels over the coming decade.

i

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!“

i