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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1963: La Vie de Franz Liszt

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

Paris, Éditions du Sud, Albin Michel, 335 pages

“Just as Jacobin and Napoleonic expansion had tended to liberate peoples before giving them a new discipline, the School of Five broke the chains with which Italian and Classical tyranny had burdened the realm of music; in this sense Balakirev and his satellites, Borodin, Moussorgsky, César Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov were the heirs … of the French Berlioz and the Frenchized Hungarian Franz Lizt. The former was dead: the latter recognized his own. …

…Franz Lizt represents the second generation of musical Romanticism. …Freedom of interpretation, a legacy of 19th-century Romantic individualism, is an achievement due to Lizt and him alone. “

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1962 : Cristina de Suecia

by | Updated on 10/06/2025 | Published on 04/05/1962 | 2.1 Bibliographies, Spanish

Éditions Renacimiento, 283 pages

Spanish translation of Je m’appelle Kristine by Leonor T. de Paiz.

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 readings, been led to consider that an epic hero could just as well be a heroine.

With Cristina de Suecia Françoise paints a historical figure that lives up to her intentions. A friend and correspondent of the greatest intellectual and scientific figures of her century, the driving force behind the Treaty of Westphalia, adventurous and combative, diplomat and peacemaker, Queen Kristine was without doubt one of the most important figures in the Europe of her time. (Vincent)

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1962 : Eros Noir

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

Paris, Le Terrain Vague, 326 pages.

Dedicated to Christiane Rochefort, whose “Repos du guerrier” was burned in a Catholic South American state.

Book’s main subjects : Donatien Alphonse François de Sade (1740-1814) ; Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, (1836-1895) ; L’Arétin (1492-1556) ; Nicolas-Edme Rétif de La Bretonne (1734-1806). Many of the great figures of recent centuries are also evoked.

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