Drawing by Françoise, 1942

Info: publication of a dedication to Colette (1951) and a letter to Françoise from the Iranian Resistance in exile (1994)

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The shock

In early 1945, Françoise was marked for life by a terrible experience that she recounts in Les Monstres de l’été (The Monsters of Summer). The 25-year-old woman, weakened by deprivation, helped carry survivors of the camps on stretchers at the Lyon-Perrache train station. She wrote a chilling account of the experience:

“Ces garçonnets rachitiques et chauves, aux oreilles décollées, au yeux fous, hypertrophiés, c’était des femmes…”‘

The history of the Jewish people haunts her work, from Le complexe de Diane to L’Evangile selon Véronique, her last book, as Danielle Roth-Johnson mentions in the first volume of Causes Comunnes. So when John Paul II asked for forgiveness (mainly on April 13, 1986, and March 26, 2000) for the atrocities committed against them, Françoise had not forgotten the deafening silence of Pius XII during the Holocaust, whose more than ambiguous attitude would be confirmed by the opening of the Vatican archives in March 2020.

And this honorable apology is not enough for her; another atrocious moment in the history of the Church must be brought to light. She publishes an Open Letter to John Paul II.

Address to John Paul II

“Votre Sainteté, Nous avons applaudi avec la plus grande joie l’amende honorable de l’Eglise devant l’infortuné peuple juif si longtemps persécuté pour la fausse accusation de déicide.

Mais il est une autre catégorie humaine comptant par dizaines de milliers les victimes accusées, torturées, et brûlées sans recours pendant deux siècles (1450-1650) qui relève également – du moins principalement – de la responsabilité papale[…] pour […] laquelle […] une amende honorable serait aussi équitable que celle concernant le peuple d’Israël.“…

This is a very formal introduction. It reflects Françoise’s complex feelings toward Christianity, the religion of her birth, which she left before joining the Communist Party in 1946.

When she wrote this letter, Françoise did not bother with the usual formalities used when addressing powerful figures. Subjectively, I see this as a concession in the form of thanks mixed with subtle humor. For after leaving it, she would never again recognize this Church, which she called Pauline, and therefore, for her, anti-physical and patriarchal. This did not prevent her from considering the spiritual as fundamental to our species, as in the RV de l’Histoire in 2004. And she showed a keen interest in the figure of Christ and the Gospels, especially the apocryphal ones.

The story of a sexocide

“…nous voulons parler du sexocide des sorcières.[…]Sexocide est le mot juste puisqu’il s’agit, sous prétexte de sorcellerie, d’une misogynie […] portée au paroxysme par les écrits des Pères de l’Église autant que par les brillants théologiens que furent Tertullien et Origène. Les insultes et les anathèmes de cette tradition où brillent Thomas d’Aquin, Jean Chrysostome et Saint Jérôme entre tant d’autres docteurs préparèrent de longue date cette « chasse aux sorcières » qui fut avant tout une « chasse aux femmes ».

Françoise has just published Le sexocide des Sorcières (The Sexocide of the Witches). In the sequel to her Letter, she revisits the history of this massacre. She evokes the Dominican Jakob Sprenger, “a sex-obsessed man bordering on psychopathology,” and Kramer, authors of Malleus Maleficarum, (an indispensable book for any good witch hunter), and Pope Innocent VIII, “who gave his imprimatur to this vast call to murder” and who “was a perfect debauchee whose orgies fueled the anguish of sin and the horror of the daughters of Eve.“

A heretical manual

She also sees in this manual, which she describes as “a prelude to Mein Kampf,” very convincing evidence of heresy:

“…un des dogmes les plus établis de l’Église est l’effacement du pêché originel par le sang du Christ. […] Or, Kramer et Sprenger attribuent à une catégorie spécifique de l’humanité un péché natif, spécifique, qui le met hors l’humain, en dépit du baptême. Pourquoi ne dénonça-t-on jamais l’outrecuidance hérétique de cette déclaration ? […] Si inique que fut la persécution du Juif, une issue lui était offerte : il pouvait se faire baptiser par l’eau saine.[…] Mais la femme était condamnée d’avance et sans pouvoir se changer en homme.[…] C’est ainsi qu’on put voir l’évêque de Trêves faire brûler des fillettes de sept ans puisqu’à cet âge elles devenaient femmes…“

Below is a list of documented abuses by region in Europe, with the proportion of women and men condemned to be burned at the stake, as well as a discussion of the parallels between the persecution of Jews and women, in which she quotes historian Jean Delumeau: “Anti-Semitism and witch hunts coincided.” Then she comes to her final point:

Allergies in women

” Mais il est un autre territoire de la malédiction auquel touche celui du féminin[…] c’est l’homosexualité. Le « péché muet », le plus horrible […] depuis la législation de Constantin {…] puise son abomination dans le fait que l’homme imite la femme, alors « qu’il a le bonheur de ne pas en être une » comme le dira un dévot de l’abbé de Choisy. Sorcellerie fait toujours supposer « bougrerie ».

[…]

Touchant d’un côté à la question juive et de l’autre à la condamnation de l’homosexualité, la sorcière a donc représenté pendant deux siècles d’horreurs et de supplices infligés par une culture intégriste, le summum de l’allergie au féminin déjà si largement manifestée, et au plus haut niveau, depuis les premiers siècles de l’Église triomphante.”

[…]

“L’indignation qu’éprouvent les femmes aujourd’hui, surtout si elles appartiennent à cette Église ou cette religion, est d’autant plus véhémente que l’Évangile, « sur lequel Pierre a bâti son Église », est de tous les livres sacrés que connaît le monde le seul qui soit féministe.”

Was Françoise familiar with the Anglo-Saxon ecofeminist theologians who have been active since the 1980s? She may have heard of them, but probably did not read their works, as they had not been translated until recently. A search of her unpublished works related to Christianity may help to clear up this uncertainty.

And she concluded as she had begun:

“Voilà pourquoi nous attendons de Votre Sainteté une amende honorable de la même inspiration qui lui dicta la déploration du génocide médiéval des Juifs lavés de leur accusation de déicide, alors que les « sorcières » ne le furent jamais d’une accusation encore plus insensée. Et nous assurons Votre Sainteté de votre confiance en Son sens de la Justice dont elle a donné précisément un si équitable et si parfait exemple.”

A Letter That Stood the Test of Time

Almost thirty years later, the fundamental question raised in this Letter remains relevant. While recent historical research has reduced the number of victims and shed new light on the reality of the trials and the functioning of institutions, the fact remains that hostility towards women, and more broadly fear of the feminine, was indeed the fundamental reason behind this episode, since it was an integral part of the Church.

How much of this fear does she still carry today, and for how long? Is it a sign of her condemnation, or will she find a way to wash away the father of all her sins?

*** Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator***

Announced as a publishing project in 2022, Histoire de l’art et lutte des sexes (Art History and the Battle of the Sexes) has been published. In the meantime, it has undergone considerable critical analysis and significant iconographic enrichment. Les Presses du Réel, which specializes in art books, has turned it into a beautiful object with high-quality pictorial representations.

If the essayist who coined the neologism ecofeminism is now regularly cited, large parts of her work remain in the shadows, including her reflections on painting and its role in society. Thanks to Fabienne Dumont, art historian, author and/or editor of seven books, numerous articles and exhibition catalogs, art critic, and professor of contemporary art history at the university, this gap has been filled.

Because she is convinced that the paint analyses carried out by Françoise 50 years ago are as serious as they are original. Fabienne confirms how visionary she was, once again: ” This book is groundbreaking” (in her day), she says, in that it shows how women’s bodies are all the more represented in works of art because women are erased as creators. A pioneer, therefore, but ignored and even erased until very recently, this ” a “milestone” in the history of feminist art that “has no equivalent” in France.

Françoise’s early interest in the arts emerged from the fertile ground of a family where artistic vocations left their mark, such as the paintings of Lucien d’Eaubonne and the work of set designer Jean d’Eaubonne, who collaborated with a host of famous filmmakers. Françoise, for her part, made painting her secret garden, so secret that very few people can claim to have had access to it during her lifetime. Using pencils, watercolors, gouaches, and felt-tip pens, on scraps of paper as well as on high-quality media, she produced probably hundreds of small works.

Histoire de l’art et lutte des sexes marks a turning point in her literary output. The style foreshadows the great mastery she would demonstrate, particularly in La Liseuse et la Lyre and L’Évangile selon Véronique, her penultimate novel published in 2003.

Françoise’s seventieth work strikes a chord with our times. Under neoliberalism, in the name of “the crisis,” the brief period when institutional culture was a space for reinvention has given way to “profitable” art, which is therefore required to be commodified. Major public museums are being swallowed up by specialists in cultural market analysis, and everyone is working hard on their “segment,” relegating works of art to the role of interchangeable supports for promoting the luxury industry, or as a showcase for the great families of finance and arms manufacturing, who see their patronage as a way to restore their tarnished image.

As Paul B. Preciado so aptly puts it, in these “necromuseums, archives of our global destruction,” exchange value and the rewriting of history have devoured the work. Françoise, for her part, would have preferred “public ruin to private profitability” and would have invited people to occupy these ruins in order to “erect barricades of meaning,” because, as she wrote, “Every struggle that goes to its logical conclusion encounters others.”

*** Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator ***

Photo credit: Des Femmes – Antoinette Fouque

All I do now is make short-term plans. Back in my homeland, I expect to be arrested or murdered every day by organized crime in league with the state. Exile? Impossible! If I die, I won’t be the first, and that will have a political price for the Milei government.

This is what Moira Ivana Millán told us when I met her with Ariel Salleh at Des Femmes – Antoinette Fouque, with the complicity of Christine Villeneuve. It was certainly the most important moment of Ariel’s Paris tour.

Moira is Mapuche (the persons “che” from “Mapu”, the land, in the Mapudungun language), a people of four million souls who live in the Wallmapu region, occupied by Chile to the south and Argentina to the north, for some fourteen thousand years. While contemporary Chilean policy is generally assimilationist, granting a few rights to the original peoples only to dissolve them into the colonial culture, Argentina’s is far more brutal, with countless disappearances, violence and abuse of all kinds.

This part of the country colonized by Argentina is home to Moira, weychaffe (self-defense warrior, appoximative translation) and leader of the Women’s Movement and Indigenous Minorities for Buen-Vivir (Good Living). She fights for an alterNATIVE world, against Terricide, in a struggle with and for Bodies-Territories that expresses the same deep concerns as queer, decolonial and antispeciesist ecofeminism, woke: the desire for total and irreversible abolition of patriarchy, total refusal of illimitism and Power (hello Françoise).

Her book, Terricide, which is a must-read, speaks of the reappropriation of identity, of children, old people, women, men and Two-Spirits people, a word still virtually unknown in France. The Two-Spirits a generic term coined at the end of the last century by the assembly of the original peoples of Abya-Yala, expresses people who don’t fit into any of the binary categories. They have always existed and been recognized in as many terms as there are native languages. Among the Mapuche, in the Mapudungun language, these are the weye.

Terricide bears witness to a politics, cosmogony and spirituality that inspire us to think about tomorrow, when we will be living on the ruins of capitalism. We might as well make the best of it, and Moira helps us to do so by contributing a stone to the world’s sociodiversity, whose impoverishment, like that of biodiversity, is at the root of Terricide. (transleted with DeepL)

Mari mari kom pu lamgen ka kom pu che. (Greetings, sisters, brothers, others, greetings to everyone) (1)

(1) Quote from Terricides by Moira Millán, Paris, éditions Des Femmes – Antoinette Fouque, 2025

Translated by Anna Bracher, Le féminisme ou la mort becomes Feminismo ou morte at Bazar do Tempo in Rio de Janeiro. And here is their presentation of the book (excerpt):

“The French Françoise d’Eaubonne (1920-2005) is a pioneer of feminist thought who perceived the harmful effects of patriarchy not only on the relationships between men and women, but also on the environment. In Le féminisme ou la mort (Feminism or Death), a 1974 work in which she founded the concept of ecofeminism, the author asserts that women not only resist the patriarchal-capitalist system, but are essential forces in transforming this model.

For her, the oppression of women and the destruction of the environment stem from the same logic of domination, which makes the emancipation of women a crucial element in preserving life on the planet. Their historical experience of fighting against oppressive structures places them at the forefront of building new forms of social and environmental organization, based on care, cooperation, and sustainability. Thus, women become the protagonists in creating alternatives that break with the current predatory logic, making the ecofeminist revolution not only possible, but necessary… “

Caroline Goldblum’s book “Françoise d’Eaubonne and Ecofeminism” is now available in Turkish. Translated by Can Berk Işık. Publisher: @yeniinsanyayinevi

Publisher’s presentation:

“A lprolific writer, seasoned activist, pioneer of the feminist movement and degrowth, Françoise d’Eaubonne (1920-2005) is the originator of the concept of ecofeminism. The patriarchal oppression of women and the capitalist exploitation of the planet would stem from the same mechanisms of domination and must therefore be fought together.

Misunderstood or even ridiculed in France, her project to mutate towards a self-managed society, based on gender equality, equality of peoples, and preservation of nature, largely echoes the ideals of degrowth.

Caroline Goldblum shows us the relevance and timeliness of ecofeminist ideas and modes of action in a context of climate emergency.