Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

Alexandra Hughes, Alex Hughes, Keith A Reader, Keith Reader

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780415263542
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134788651
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Social Sciences

More than 700 alphabetically organized entries by an international team of contributors provide a fascinating survey of French culture post 1945.
Entries include:
* advertising * Beur cinema * Coco Chanel * decolonization * écriture feminine * football * francophone press * gay activism * Seuil * youth culture
Entries range from short factual/biographical pieces to longer overview articles. All are extensively cross-referenced and longer entries are 'facts-fronted' so important information is clear at a glance. It includes a thematic contents list, extensive index and suggestions for further reading.
The Encyclopedia will provide hours of enjoyable browsing for all francophiles, and essential cultural context for students of French, Modern History, Comparative European Studies and Cultural Studies.

F

Fabius, Laurent

b. 1946, Paris

Politician

Academically accomplished and urbane, Fabius joined the Parti Socialiste (PS) in 1974. Viewed as the ambitious ‘spiritual son’ of Mitterrand and his possible successor, he has been a député since 1978 and was Minister for the Budget in 1981–3 and Minister for Industry and Research in 1983–4. As prime minister in 1984–6, he symbolized Mitterrand’s policy U-turn towards market liberalism, although he projected a technocratic image. He was president of the National Assembly from 1988 to 1992. He gained the leadership of the PS in 1992, but was ousted in 1993 following the party’s electoral débâcle. His support for Jospin in the 1995 presidential election was somewhat lukewarm. He remains a leading Socialist.

LAURENCE BELL

See also: parties and movements

Major works

Fabius, L. (1990) C’est en allant à la mer, Paris: Éditions du Seuil (outlines his vision of modern socialism).

——(1995) Les Blessures de la vérité, Paris: Flammarion (attempts to take stock of the Socialists’ experience in government).

family

The notion of the family has two interconnected meanings. The first, more restricted meaning of ‘family’ is the individuals who come together to form a home and is akin to the concept of household. The second refers to the kinship group—that is, those who share the same blood relatives. In the postwar period in France, it is the family as described in the first of these definitions that has undergone major changes.

During the first twenty years after World War II, a certain convergence of family forms took place in France around a model of early marriage and the married couple subsequently living together with two children independently from older generations. Prior to that, on the one hand, the peasantry and petite bourgeoisie in certain regions had tended to restrict their family size to one child, while on the other hand, the large family with four or more children had been common among workingclass families in industrial regions. Furthermore, in the 1950s and 1960s, divorce rates were low, as were rates of employment for mothers of young children. Couples living together without being married were also an extraordinary and morally reprehensible phenomenon. However, the mood of the country at the end of the 1960s, and particularly after May 1968, did much to change notions of the family in France. Indeed, the ‘nuclear’ family model was portrayed as constraining, particularly for young adults and for women.

Thus, from the 1970s onwards, the ‘family’ underwent a number of far-reaching transformations. First, the nature of marriage changed. French couples began to marry later, often after a period of living together or, indeed, they started increasingly not to marry at all, opting instead for unions libres. Furthermore, marriage has become increasingly unstable, with divorce rates standing at around 1 in 3 of all marriages, depending on the region of the country. Although for a certain time it was thought that marriage remained a popular institution because of the number of remarriages after divorce, the marriage rate had gone into decline in France by the 1990s. As a result of increased divorce rates, two new forms of families thus developed: the single- parent family (la famille monoparentale) and the reconstituted family (la famille recomposée), made up of stepbrothers and sisters and/or half-brothers and -sisters. The increase in divorce and marriage instability may be bemoaned by some, but to others it is simply the logical extension of the changes in the nature of marriage in France which took place in the first half of the twentieth century. At that time, marriage became less an institution whose primary function was to perpetuate the family line and transmit property across the generations, and more an institution based entirely on the affection and love existing between two partners. It is clear that the former, traditional model of marriage is more stable than the latter ‘companionship’ family model.

Second, the nuclear family of the immediate postwar period was based on a strict division of labour between husband and wife. For many (if not all) couples, the model of ‘man the breadwinner’ and ‘woman the homemaker’ did hold true. However, from the 1970s onwards, the nature of women’s employment patterns changed. In the 1950s and 1960s, mothers in France tended to give up work on the birth of their children and only return once their children were independent—if they returned at all. From the 1970s onwards, mothers in France began to work for longer and longer proportions of their child-rearing years. Indeed, it was discovered in the 1982 census that it was more common for families with children to have two working parents than to have one. The economic dependence of a woman on a man, the remaining economic function of the nuclear family in the 1950s and 1960s, was therefore disappearing.

The increase in women’s participation in the labour market, coupled with later marriage, the prospect of marriage instability and the greater availability of birth control measures, have all contributed to a steep decline in the birth rate in France since World War II. The ‘baby boom’ after the war in France is well-known. Indeed, until the 1970s the average number of births per French woman was over two. That is, it was at a rate which would not only replace, but rejuvenate, the population. However, from the 1970s onwards, the French birth rate began to drop below the replacement rate of two children per woman. Indeed, demographic decline is a question which has traditionally preoccupied French governments and a number of incentives are provided by the state to make the lives of parents easier and thus encourage them to have larger families. However, some argue that certain of these measures—for example, the state making it easier for mothers to go out to work—encourage the limiting of family size and are thus counterproductive. None the less, it should be stressed that France remains one of the more fecund countries in the European Union.

Although the birth rate has fallen in France, the population continues to grow because of its increased longevity. This more aged population, in which one marriage partner (usually the woman) outlives the other, often lives alone. Kin groups are more dispersed than in the past, which means that elderly relatives are less likely to move in with their children when they are widowed or become infirm. This phenomenon, coupled with later marriage and higher rates of divorce, means that ‘families’ (or, perhaps more accurately, ‘households’) containing a single person are set to become the dominant family form in France, particularly in large towns and cities. However, there is also evidence to suggest that, as grown-up children find it increasingly difficult to find employment, they are staying at home for longer and longer periods with their parents.

JAN WINDEBANK

See also: abortion/contraception; child care; demographic developments; marriage/cohabitation; women and employment; women and social policy

Further reading

Hantrais, L. (1982) Contemporary French Society, Basingstoke: Macmillan (a discussion of the developments in French society from 1945 to the late 1970s; includes texts in French).

Fanon, Frantz

b. 1925, Fort-de-France, Martinique;

d. 1961, Bethesda, USA

Psychiatrist and writer

A psychiatrist and writer turned militant nationalist and socialist revolutionary, Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la terre) of 1961 earned him international attention. Converted to the cause of self-determination for Algeria through his work as director of the psychiatric hospital at Blida-Joinville between 1953 and 1956, his understanding of clinical alienation disclosed the depersonalization suffered by Algerians under French colonial rule.

In Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs), in 1952, Fanon had already criticized the human consequences of encounters with racism he had known in Martinique and France by linking the interplay of self-consciousness and recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind and the dynamics of prejudice analysed by Sartre in Anti-Semite and Jew (Réflexions sur la question juive) in order to account for the torment of black women and men subjected to racism under the culture of colonial rule. Long before he advocated militancy and revolution, Fanon denounced racism as part of a more general cultural system to be resisted and overcome.

By the time he died in 1961, Fanon had evolved from a supporter of the négritude movement linked to Aimé Césaire and the journal Présence africaine to a proponent of socialist revolution in Africa whose views on violence were in line with those taken up in the United States by individuals associated with the Black Power movement. After resigning his post at Blida-Joinville, Fanon attended the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris before moving to Tunis, where he wrote for the Algerian National Liberation Front newspaper, El Moudjahid. In 1960, he was appointed ambassador of the Provisional Algerian Government to Ghana. The same year, he contracted leukaemia and completed The Wretched of the Earth before dying outside Washington DC, where he had been sent for medical treatment.

There were, in David Caute’s apt words, three successive Fanons: the de-alienated man of Black Skins, White Masks, the Algerian citizen of A Dying Colonialism (L’An Cinq de la révolution algérienne) of 1959, and the committed socialist revolutionary of The Wretched of the Earth. Among these, the most enduring remains the final Fanon who came to see the ‘wretched of the earth’ of Third World peasantry alluded to in the opening line of the Internationale as the class of authentic revolution in Africa. Renewed interest in Fanon’s writings, in evidence since the mid-1980s has resituated them with regard to theories of the post-colonial and a revised politics of identity.

STEVEN UNGAR

See also: Algerian war; decolonization

Further reading

Bhabha, H. (1994) ‘Interrogating Identity: Frantz Fanon and the Postcolonial Prerogative’ , in The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge (essay by Fanon’s leading post-colonial exponent).

Caute, D. (1970) Frantz Fanon, New York: Viking (essential reading).

Gendzier, I. (1973) Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study, New York: Pantheon (a critical study and biography).

Farge, Arlette

b. 1941, France

Feminist historian and journalist

Focusing in the main on the eighteenth century, Farge’s work foregrounds women’s history. Her publications include Le Miroir des femmes (Women’s Mirror), La Vie fragile: violence, pouvoir et solidarité a Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Fragile Life: Violence, Power and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris) and Dire et mal dire: l’opinion publique au XVIIIe siècle (Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France). She works at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris.

ALEX HUGHES

See also: feminist thought

fashion

France’s leading role in the international fashion industry, and the special status of fashion in French society, make this apparently epiphenomenal activity of significance in understanding French culture. Fashion also has an economic importance which belies its ephemeral nature, and as political and social correctness spreads in France the work of some designers has provoked polemical comment.

It is useful to consider what is understood by la mode in France: first, fashion is the industry and society of la haute couture; second, fashion as le prêt a porter is what is worn by people in everyday life; third, fashion is informal leisurewear, or streetwear—clothing worn as a kind of inverted badge of social distinction. Each of these reflexes of fashion has produced companion corpuses of clothing in cinema and photography especially, and also in literature. The place of fashion in French intellectual life is indicated by the way in which it has inspired literary critics and philosophers such as Roland Barthes and Gilles Lipovetsky: Barthes formulated a semiotic analysis of a corpus of articles from the women’s fashion magazines Jardin des modes and Elle, elaborated in 1967 in The Fashion System (Système de la mode), and Lipovetsky has interpreted modern democracy in the light of fashion and trends.

Arguably the first connotation of fashion in France is haute couture. Historically, European and American fashion has been dominated by French style and expertise, and an important component of the contemporary image of La Maison France (France plc) is her production of luxury clothing, perfume, accessories and toiletries. Not for nothing is the fashion, wine and spirits conglomerate owning Givenchy (Louis-Vuitton-Moët-Hennessey or LVMH) now one of France’s largest companies: fashion houses are controlled by big businesses—YSL is owned by the petrochemicals giant Elf-Sanofi. Surprisingly, given the high profile of the industry, fashion houses of couture-création (fabrication and design) number only twenty or so, of which only Azzedine Alaïa remains independent. The haute couture industry employs some 30,000, and overall (taking account of the production of prêt a porter and accessories) French fashion has an annual turnover of 20 billion francs. Contemporary French culture has been irrigated by the trickledown glitter of the fashion houses of Balenciaga (founded 1937), Balmain (1945), Cardin ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Editorial team
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Classified contents list
• A
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F
• G
• H
• I
• J
• K
• L
• M
• N
• O
• P
• Q
• R
• S
• T
• U
• V
• W
• X
• Y