Alex Hughes. Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

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258

De Gaulle is the outstanding political figure

of modern France. Born to a conservative and

strongly Catholic family, he embarked on a

military career in 1913 and fought in World

War I. Between the two wars, he gained a

reputation as an unorthodox military thinker

and wrote a remarkable study of leadership,

Le Fil de l’épée (The Sword’s Edge). Little

known to the general public, he was plucked

in May 1940 from obscurity to a junior min-

isterial post as Undersecretary for War in the

crisis weeks that followed Germany’s invasion

of France. When the new prime minister,

Philippe Pétain, announced that the fighting

must stop, de Gaulle flew to London and on

18 June 1940 made the celebrated broadcast

inviting those of his compatriots who were

able to do so to join him in a Free French

movement whose purpose was to continue the

struggle against the enemy. This June broad-

cast is the founding moment of the de Gaulle

myth and the basis of his subsequent national

legitimacy. At the time, however, it had little

impact on a France traumatized by defeat.

Even after opposition to the German occupa-

tion began to emerge, de Gaulle had great dif-

ficulty in getting his authority accepted, not

only by other Resistance organizations but

also by the United States government, which

regarded him as the sort of military dictator

against whom the war was being fought. What

enabled him to assert his leadership was his

single-minded determination not to be pushed

aside by the Allied powers and his ability to

win the support of the domestic Resistance

movement by stressing his commitment to

postwar political and social reconstruction.

American attempts to exclude him from a role

in liberated France failed, and in 1944 he be-

came head of the provisional government of

the French Republic, which contained repre-

sentatives of the major political groupings,

including the powerful Communist Party. His

government carried out an extensive nation-

alization programme and organized the refer-

endum of October 1945 on France’s constitu-

tional future, which resulted in a massive re-

jection of a return to the Third Republic and

the election of a Constituent Assembly.

The honeymoon between de Gaulle and the

political parties did not last long. In January

1946, he stormed out of office and in June

made a speech at Bayeux which set out his

belief that only a strong presidency, independ-

ent of the parties, could give France the strong

leadership it needed. This was a challenge to

the entrenched Republican doctrine that per-

sonal power was incompatible with democracy

and that the only genuine Republic was one

based on the sovereignty of the National As-

sembly. The result was open political war be-

tween de Gaulle and the parties. In April 1947

he launched a mass political movement, the

Rassemblement Pour la France (RPF), which

became the spearhead of his campaign to re-

place the parliamentary constitution of the

Fourth Republic. Initially able to capitalize on

France’s domestic and international difficul-

ties, de Gaulle failed in his ambition of forcing

the Fourth Republic to abdicate. In 1954 he

withdrew from public life and retreated to his

austere country residence at Colombeyles-

deux-Églises, where he wrote three highly re-

garded volumes of war memoirs. It was not

the behaviour of a man with a political future.

Yet such a future was to be his. In 1958,

faced with the collapse of the authority of the

civil government in Algeria and the menace of

civil war in France, the bulk of the party lead-

ers turned to him as the one man who could

somehow ‘win’ the war against the Algerian

nationalist movement without turning France

into a military dictatorship. De Gaulle made

his return to power conditional on the right to

draw up a constitution which would enable

government (by which he meant himself) to

govern, and in 1959 became the first president

of the Fifth Republic. Between 1958 and 1962

he used referenda to win mass approval for a

series of constitutional changes designed first

to strengthen the power of the presidency and

second to put an end to the ruinous war in

Algeria. The decisive year was 1962. Algeria

became independent and de Gaulle held, and

won, a referendum providing for the direct elec-

tion of the president. By doing so, he ensured

a shift in the balance of political power away

from the National Assembly towards the

Gaulle, Charles de

259

Executive, and in particular the presidency; he

also laid the bases for a new party system. With

Algeria and a troublesome legislature out of

the way, de Gaulle was now able to realize his

core ambition of restoring France’s status as a

major, and independent, player in the interna-

tional system. To realize the grandeur inher-

ent in his ‘certain idea of France’, he challenged

the right of other powers, be they the Com-

mission of the European Community or the

president of the United States, to interfere in

French policy. He developed France’s inde-

pendent nuclear deterrent, thwarted Britain’s

ambitions to join the European Economic

Community, withdrew French troops from the

integrated command structure of NATO, and

launched an attack on the financial pre-emi-

nence of the American dollar. At the same time,

he sought to persuade Third World and Euro-

pean countries that France could be an effec-

tive champion of their independence against

the might of the superpowers and was a strong

critic of American involvement in Vietnam. For

a man who personified the military virtues of

hierarchy and order, de Gaulle showed a sin-

gular lack of respect for the conventions of the

postwar international order.

De Gaulle’s domestic agenda was designed

to promote economic modernization and po-

litical order. His enthusiasm for state-led tech-

nology and industrial modernization was

matched by his disdain for what he regarded

as the selfish demands of interest groups and

the whingeing pieties of opposition liberals.

The image he conveyed of caring much more

about France than about the French contrib-

uted to the unexpectedly good showing of the

opposition candidates (notably François

Mitterrand) in the 1965 presidential elections

and to widespread criticisms of his ‘solitary

exercise of power’. Nothing, however, prepared

him—or his political opponents—for the ex-

plosion of civil protest which rocked France

in May 1968 and cast an ironic light on his

claims to have given France unprecedented

political stability. In the short run, de Gaulle

was able to ride out the storm, thanks in part

to a last, great radio broadcast in which, as in

June 1940, he declared his refusal to submit

to the pressure of events. But the electoral land-

slide his supporters won in the June elections

was a victory much more for law and order

than for de Gaulle’s heroic vision of France.

Less than a year later, he resigned office after

the defeat of a referendum on regional reform.

During his lifetime, de Gaulle attracted

great devotion from those who regarded him

as the two-time (1940 and 1958) saviour of

France and as a political genius; he also

aroused deep hostility among those, like the

followers of Pétain, the French settlers in Al-

geria, and also the defenders of traditional

Republicanism, who paid the price of his suc-

cess. At the end of the century, there is near

consensus in France that he was the country’s

greatest twentieth-century leader.

PETER MORRIS

See also: Algerian war; constitution of the

Fifth Republic; European economic integra-

tion; European Union; parties and movements

Major works

Gaulle, C. de (1956–9) Mémoires de guerre,

Paris: Plon (de Gaulle’s own record of his

wartime career).

——(1970–1) Mémoires d’espoir, Paris: Plon

(de Gaulle records his postwar career).

——(1975) Articles et écrits, Paris: Plon (a use-

ful anthology).

Further reading

Lacouture, J. (1986) De Gaulle, 3 vols, Paris:

Éditions du Seuil. Vol. 1 translated P.O’Brian

(1993) De Gaulle: The Rebel, 1890–1944,

New York: W.W.Norton and London:

Harvill; vol. 2 translated A.Sheridan (1993)

De Gaulle: The Ruler, 1945–1970, New

York: W.W.Norton and London: Harvill (a

magisterial political biography ).

Williams, P.M. and Harrison, M. (1973) Poli-

tics and Society in de Gaulle’s Republic,

New York (the best English-language in-

troduction).

Gaulle, Charles de

260

Gaultier, Jean-Paul

b. 1952, Arcueil

Fashion designer

Known for the irreverence and humour of his

designs, Gaultier’s forte is the glamorization of

street style at couture level. He established his

house in 1977 and his first menswear line in

1984. His eclectic references range from punk

to Victorian underwear, and his corset designs

for Madonna’s ‘Blonde Ambition’ tour received

global attention. Gaultier’s technical virtuosity,

gleaned from his training at traditional French

couture houses, allows him to play with con-

ventional ideas of gender and manipulate body

forms through careful tailoring. He has hit the

headlines frequently with his skirts and corsets

for men, and also for his costumes for Besson’s

Le Cinquième Élément (1997).

NICOLA WHITE

Further reading

ACT-UP Paris (1994) Le Sida: combien de di-

visions?, Paris: Éditions Dagorno (a good

overview of the motivations and activities

of ACT-UP, written by those most directly

involved).

Darier, E. (1987) ‘The Gay Movement in

French Society Since 1945’, Modern and

Contemporary France 29 (charts the main

historical developments of gay activism up

to the mid-1980s).

Martel, F. (1996) Le Rose et le noir, Paris:

Éditions du Seuil (a controversial account

of the modern French gay and lesbian cul-

tural and political scene).

Martet, C. (1993) Les Combattants du sida,

Paris: Flammarion (the history of ACT-UP

in France written by one of its founder

members).

gay activism

262

gay cinema

In the 1980s and 1990s, representations of cen-

tral lesbian, gay and bisexual characters have

become more common in mainstream French

cinema. Examples include: the La Cage aux

Folles series (I and II directed by Édouard

Molinaro in 1978 and 1980; III by Georges

Lautner in 1985); Chacun cherche son chat,

directed by Cédric Klapisch in 1996; Deux li-

ons au soleil, directed by Claude Faraldo in

1980; Josiane Balasko’s 1995 French Twist

(Gazon maudit); Tenue de soirée by Bertrand

Blier (1986); and Yannick Bellon’s La Triche

from 1984. The context of changing sexual dis-

courses, and the complexities of their reception

by gay audiences, mean that they are relevant

to any discussion of ‘gay cinema’. In addition,

classical French cinema has had its gay direc-

tors, most notably Marcel Carné. However, a

different perspective arises if we understand the

term to mean ‘films made by lesbians and gay

men with lesbian and gay subject-matter’ (see

Dyer 1990). The history of these films—distinct

in France from developments in Anglo-Saxon

countries—begins with Cocteau and Genet,

continues in marginal, politicized film-making

from 1968 to about 1981, and produces recog-

nized auteurs in the form of Chéreau, Collard,

Téchiné and Vecchiali.

Male homosexuality, first criminalized by

the Vichy regime, remained oppressed in the

postwar period, and its first cinematic expres-

sions are firmly located in high literary cul-

ture. Aestheticism, narcissism, the links be-

tween same-sex desire, poetry and death are

all on display in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée

(1949), a transposition of the Orpheus and

Eurydice myth (starring Cocteau’s lover Jean

Marais) to postwar Paris and the existentialist

heyday. Another reworking of myth, his

Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la bête) of

1946, can also be read homoerotically, espe-

cially as the three protagonists of the final

transfiguration are all played by Marais. The

elusive symbolism and anti-realism of these

films distinguish them in part from the most

famous of Genet’s sorties into cinema, Un

chant d’amour of 1950, which is silent, lasts

twenty minutes, and was not given a commer-

cial release. Scenes in a prison, where a guard

spies on men masturbating in their cells or

communicating with each other through the

walls, alternate with shots of a garland of

flowers being swung from a cell window, and

of the men in the film making love. However,

Cocteau’s influence is not far away: aestheti-

cism in Genet is combined with the

homoerotic and a poetry of the sordid, mar-

ginal and ‘lower depths’ to produce one of

cinema’s most profound meditations on the

links society constructs between homosexual-

ity and criminality, power and homophobia.

The oppressive postwar climate for homo-

sexuals began to weaken only in the aftermath

of May 1968, which also created more spaces

for independent and avant-garde film. The 1970s

were the heyday of affirmation films from the

gay movement. The GLH-PQ (Groupe de

Libération Homosexuelle—Politique et

Quotidien) organized film festivals in 1977 and

1978 in Paris which embraced pornography but

also showcased short films such as Hommes en-

tre eux, directed by Norbert Terry, and La

Banque du sperme, by Pierre Chabal and Philippe

Genet, which cheerfully played with both porn

and political or philosophical preoccupations.

Perhaps the most consistent film-maker of this

type was Lionel Soukaz, who made two films in

collaboration with Guy Hocquenghem, Race

d’ep! (backslang for ‘pederast’) in 1979, a docu-

mentary on ‘gay history’ rounded off by a cruis-

ing dialogue in the Tuileries, and Toni in 1980,

as well as Boy Friend 1 and Boy Friend 2 (1977),

Le Sexe des anges in 1978 and Ixe (1980).

The Socialist government’s reforms and the

consumerist appropriation of much gay culture

in the 1980s meant that, with the diminution

of gay militancy, it became less clear what a

‘gay cinema’ might be. The more positive im-

ages to be found in mainstream film were nei-

ther a way of placing gay desire dynamically in

the forefront of a postmodernist cinema, as with

Almodovar’s activities in post-Franco Spain, nor

were they to be challenged by a ‘New Queer

Cinema’ in the Anglo-Saxon sense, which would

provocatively revel in the abject. The lack of a

gay cinema

263

tradition of identity politics in Republican

France meant that directors, audiences and crit-

ics, whether straight or gay, often tended to

down-play the specificity of gay representation

in favour of an individualist, integrative or

universalist outlook. Thus Patrice Chéreau’s

L’Homme blessé of 1983, with a script co-writ-

ten by Hervé Guibert, both owes much to Genet

in its iconography and decor (the toilets of the

Gare du Nord, for example), and at the same

time situates itself in a French tradition of por-

traying the crystallization and consequences of

l’amour fou, in this case the awakening gay

passion of a teenager played by Jean-Hugues

Anglade. This approach is also to be found in

French ‘AIDS films’, such as Paul Vecchiali’s

Encore from 1988 and Cyril Collard’s Savage

Nights (Les Nuits fauves) of 1992, with their

‘bisexual’ protagonists, lack of reference to any

kind of gay or activist community, and posi-

tioning of the illness within existentialist and

Romantic narratives of self-discovery. (This is

the approach favoured by the ‘straight’ AIDS

film that is Xavier Beauvois’s N’oublie pas que

tu vas mourir of 1996.) At their best, however,

these French constructions of homosexuality

produce the films of André Téchiné, whose con-

sistent output since the 1970s depicts in ‘relaxed’

and empathetic fashion the complex social and

historical interactions that go to make up his

straight and gay characters, whether the postal

worker in 1981’s Hôtel des Amériques, the

young hustler in J’embrasse pas (1991) or the

adolescent in the 1963 setting of Les Roseaux

sauvages (1994).

The emphasis on auteurism in critical dis-

course, and the continued sexism of the French

film industry, have militated against the emer-

gence of a distinctive lesbian cinema in France.

Chantal Akerman is Belgian. Women directors

have tended not to identify as a group or (with

the exception of Varda) as feminist. Mention

should be made of Diane Kurys’s Coup de

foudre from 1983, a commercial mainstream

film portraying the relationship between two

women, played by Miou-Miou and Isabelle

Huppert, in 1950s France, but here, typically,

any sexual relations between them are merely

hinted at and never named.

BILL MARSHALL

Further reading

Dyer, R. (1990) Now You See It: Studies on

Lesbian and Gay Film, London: Routledge.

gay press

The launch of the newsletter Futur in October

1952 marked perhaps the beginnings of what

we now understand as the gay press in twen-

tieth-century France. Drawing on the works

of ‘homosexual’ writers such as Gide (thereby,

arguably, acknowledging that literature has

long been a privileged means of expressing

‘homosexual’ desire), Futur also aimed to be a

newsletter on ‘information and sexual free-

dom’ in the wake of the Kinsey Report. Legal

battles over the banning of its advertisements,

and restrictions on sales to over-18s, were to

force its closure in November 1955.

January 1955 saw the launch of Arcadie,

seeking to enlighten the French with rational

scientific arguments concerning homosexual-

ity. From an initial 1,500 subscribers, figures

rose to some 10,000 in 1960. It was to be from

these ranks that most of new gay organiza-

tions emerged in the 1970s and 1980s.

Launched in April 1983, Gai Pied, which

ceased publication in 1991, offered a weekly

overview of the main political, cultural and

social events on the gay scène in France and

the world. In recognition of the growing

power of the so-called ‘pink franc’, it also car-

ried advertising from the gay commercial

scène. Government activity in the early 1990s,

which was aimed at reducing the number of

messageries roses (‘lewd’ chatlines and small

ads), impacted on the publisher’s income base

to the extent that the magazine ceased publi-

cation, to be replaced by the intermittent La

Lettre de Gai Pied, available on subscription.

The company responsible for Gai Pied’s

gay press

264

publication, Les Éditions du Triangle Rose,

continues its publishing activities in other ar-

eas, for example with the bilingual Guide gai

covering the scene in France, Belgium and

Switzerland, and Minitel services.

Illico, published monthly in A5 format, of-

fers a good overview of events, with editorial

comment and articles on burning issues of the

day. Broadsheet format Exit (le journal), pub-

lished monthly since 1993, carries national and

international news and current affairs items.

A more recent arrival has been Têtu, the first

colour monthly for lesbians and gays, launched

in Easter 1995. Edited by Didier Lestrade of

ACT-UP, it aims to inform and entertain, call-

ing for greater involvement in activities by mem-

bers of the lesbian and gay community. Indeed,

it was launched with a challenge to gays and

lesbians to demonstrate their sexuality con-

cretely by buying the magazine and helping to

ensure its survival. Despite an apparently rocky

start, sales have grown slowly.

Since the 1950s, then, the gay press has

moved from initial tentative moves to explore

discussion of homosexuality to a more

upfront, open interaction, with events nation-

ally and internationally. The growth in the

visibility of the ‘pink franc’ has aided this phe-

nomenon, which is far from over.

STEVE WHARTON

See also: AIDS; gay activism; lesbian press

gay writing

Although less established as a genre than in

the Anglo-American world, gay writing—un-

derstood here as literature written by or about

male homosexuals—is increasingly recognized

in France. This is due to a number of factors:

literary giants of the earlier part of the twenti-

eth century like Proust, Gide and Genet can,

notwithstanding their own different positions

and allegiances, be identified as key contribu-

tors to a specifically gay tradition, alongside a

constellation of other, almost equally emi-

nent—and prolific—writers with at least in-

termittently specific ‘gay themes’: Marcel

Jouhandeau, Henri de Montherlant, Jean

Cocteau, Julien Green, Michel Tournier, Roger

Peyrefitte. A second factor is the substantial

oeuvre of more recently established writers,

who use particular forms of writing, such as

variants on the first-person narrative, journal

or diary, and particular themes, such as eroti-

cism, violence and AIDS, to explore and ques-

tion different forms of identity and sexuality.

Particularly notable here are Renaud Camus,

Conrad Detrez, Dominique Fernandez, Hervé

Guibert, Guy Hocquenghem, Hugo Marsan

and Yves Navarre. Third, against this back-

ground of real or fictionalized biographies, and

of the increasing ‘intertextual’ cross-fertiliza-

tion of literary and non-literary genres, the

work of eminent critics such as Roland Barthes

and social analysts such as Michel Foucault is

being similarly mined for its implications for

gay identity and culture. As a wide-ranging ac-

count of the different discourses surrounding

the evolving notion of homosexuality, from

classical to contemporary, Foucault’s (1976–

84) three-volume History of Sexuality (Histoire

de la sexualité) is, moreover, a landmark for

gay studies. Fourth, by emphasizing the gen-

der-relatedness of thinking and production

across the humanities, the social sciences and

the sciences, feminist, lesbian and queer theo-

rists from both sides of the Atlantic have helped

give gender-related writing—écriture gaie, by

analogy with écriture féminine—and particu-

lar forms of gendered intertextuality (such as

fiction and medicine in ‘the AIDS novel’) a

clearer space and a stronger platform. Finally,

there is no doubt that the strength of gay writ-

ing in France goes with the heightened gay vis-

ibility, energy and creativity in many parts of

the globe, from San Francisco to Sydney.

Despite—or perhaps because of—this rela-

tive visibility, at least in the cities, the issue of

growing up/‘coming out’ as gay is an impor-

tant theme. Although evocations of adolescent

or post-adolescent sexuality may be accompa-

nied by a 1960s sense of liberated eroticism as

in Roger Peyrefitte’s 1979 Roy (admittedly set

in California), such newly discovered sexual-

ity can also be intensely problematic, either

gay writing

265

because it is associated with young male vio-

lence, as in Éric Jourdan’s 1984 Les Mauvais

Anges (The Bad Angels) (banned since 1956)

or because it leads to a sense of isolation and

rootlessness: Loïc Chotard’s first novel Tiers

Monde (1994) (Third World) follows the des-

ultory, almost despairing, erotico-sentimental

flâneries of a group of youngsters in a cocoon-

ing but anonymous Paris. Equally problematic

is the viewing of adolescent sexuality from the

perspective of the potentially exploitative older

male partner. Even if, as Christopher Robinson

has indicated, adolescent sex ‘is not, in a French

text, automatically a pederastic theme’, the

older male tends to be either provocatively self-

justificatory, as in Tony Duvert’s Journal d’un

innocent (Diary of an Innocent) of 1976; maso-

chistic and wistful, as in Julien Green’s 1974

Youth (Jeunesse); or reproaching himself with

the suicide of the younger partner, as in Roger

Vrigny’s Le Garçon d’orage (The Storm-Boy)

from 1994. The voyeurism and the power of

the older male is, however, repudiated in

Guillaume Le Touze’s Comme ton père (Like

Your Father), also of 1994. The dying Giuseppe

takes refuge, along with his mother, Claudia,

in the retreat of his gay father, Paul, in a re-

mote part of Africa—the fusion of gay, straight

and cross-generational bonds gives all the char-

acters new strength and serenity. In Michel

Braudeau’s 1992 Le Livre de John (John’s

Book) and 1993 Mon ami Pierrot (My Friend

Pierrot), intimacy between different genera-

tions of males raises the issue of homoeroticism

in actual or adoptive paternities. The novel of

sexual initiation is thus opening up and out

into more general questions about male-to-

male relationships, masculinity, fatherhood,

homosexuality—and gay writing.

Another way of interrogating (gay) male

identity is by associating it with violence,

whether the violence of social stigmatization,

as in Navarre’s 1980 Goncourt-winning

Cronos’ Children (Le Jardin d’acclimatation),

or the violence of self-oppressive masochism,

or ‘natural’ male violence converted into ritu-

alized, sadistic male-to-male relationships. In-

ternalized, masochistic violence is shown to

be a source of pain, self-reappraisal and crea-

tive energy in writers such as Marcel Proust,

André Gide, Julien Green and the Japanese

writer influential in France, Yukio Mishima

(Confessions of a Mask). Ritualized or con-

senting/unconsenting violence, in the écrivain

maudit tradition exemplified by Sade,

Mirbeau and Bataille, features in Tony

Duvert’s Paysage de fantaisie (Imagined Coun-

try) of 1973; Jean Genet’s Funeral Rites

(Pompes funèbres) and The Thief’s Journal

(Journal du voleur) from 1947 and 1949;

Hervé Guibert’s Vous m’avez fait former des

fantômes (You Made Me Invent Ghosts) from

1987; Pierre Guyotat’s 1970 Éden, Éden,

Éden; and Éric Jourdan’s Charité (1991),

Révolte (1991) and Sang (1992). Here the

main characters, who usually (but not invari-

ably) self-identify as gay, foreground their

position of outsiders and outlaws through a

violence which can, like gay SM, be seen as

either gender-stereotypical or as self-ironizing

and subversive. This writing—as, for exam-

ple, in Guyotat’s incorporation of blood and

semen—also reflects an attempt to write (with)

the male body and ‘to put the sex back into

homosexuality’ in forceful and intentionally

shocking ways. A celebrated example of this

is Renaud Camus’s Tricks (1988), whose de-

scription of some forty-six one-night stands

achieves a certain verbal and psychological

violence through relentless repetition, even if

actual physical violence is absent from the

‘tricks’ themselves.

Another form of violence which inevitably

questions both identity and its inscriptions

(both written and visual) can be found in

works which treat AIDS. The most well-

known of these are, perhaps, Hervé Guibert’s

three novels—To the Friend Who Did Not

Save My Life (A l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la

vie) of 1990, which, notoriously, evokes

Foucault via the character of Muzil; The

Compassion Protocol (Le Protocole

compassionnel) from 1991 and

Cytomégalovirus (1992)—together with his

1992 televised film-journal of his own body

with AIDS, La Pudeur ou l’impudeur (Mod-

esty or Immodesty). Guibert’s surgically pre-

cise self-analyses contrast with the exuberant

gay writing

266

brinkmanship of Cyril Collard’s Savage

Nights (Les Nuits fauves), both in its novel

(1989) and his highly successful film version,

with himself in the lead role (1992). Different

again are other works by well-known writers,

such as Dominique Fernandez’s 1987 La

Gloire du paria (The Glory of the Pariah),

Guy Hocquenghem’s Ève (1987), Yves

Navarre’s Ce sont amis que vent emporte (It is

Friends the Wind Bears Away) from 1991,

and Alain-Emmanuel Dreuilhe’s 1987 Corps

à corps: journal du sida (Body to Body—An

AIDS Diary). In most of these, anger at medi-

cal inadequacy and social ostracization tends

to recede before the loyalty and devotion pro-

voked (within the partnerships affected) by

the prospect of death. In Fernandez’s La

Gloire du paria, moreover, the onset of AIDS

reassures the older, ‘neo-romantic’ partner,

Bernard, that he is still different, still the eter-

nal rebel, still the outlaw—a theme repeated

in his racy provocatively decadent historical

novel, Le Dernier des Médicis (1994). In Ève

and Ce sont amis que vent emporte death

from AIDS is at least partly redeemed by the

presence of a healthy daughter or son to con-

tinue life in their father’s place. Elsewhere, in

Hugo Marsan’s 1995 Les Absents (The Ab-

sent Ones) and Jean-Noël Pancrazi’s 1990 Les

Quartiers d’hiver (Winter Quarters), very dif-

ferent clandestine bars (La Maison Rose and

Le Vagabond respectively) are haunted by a

sense of AIDS-associated death: instead of the

visible, lived illness of Guibert, AIDS infil-

trates as an image of nostalgia, inertia and

decay. Rather than being etched in and on the

body, AIDS contributes to the embodiment of

an aesthetic.

By endowing both past pleasures and

present intimacies with a sense of irretrievable

loss, AIDS novels also develop two related

leitmotifs of gay, gay-authored or at least

sexually ambivalent fiction—the cultivation

of a moral, physical or aesthetic asceticism

and of a certain erotico-philosophical mysti-

cism—evident, for example, in the very differ-

ent works of Gide, Green, Mauriac,

Montherlant and even Proust. This combina-

tion of asceticism, eroticism and mysticism

also links to the topos of the ‘gay martyr’,

evoked by the title of Sartre’s Saint Genet

(1952) and described with relish by Mishima

(the St Sebastian theme) and Jourdan. An ini-

tially more positive version of the same com-

bination can be found in novels such as

Michel Tournier’s Les Météores (1975) where

the homosexual Alexandre seeks to sexualize

social rejection in a hunt for ‘exogamic’ part-

ners and to sublimate his sense of abjection

through ‘endogamic’ fraternal union.

Alexandre does, however, achieve neither of

these unions, since he is murdered mid-

‘chasse aux garçons’ in North Africa. Erotico-

mystical unions, whether through brother-

twins (Les Météores), boy pairings (Jourdan’s

Les Mauvais Anges) or doubling across gen-

erations (the two Adams in Hocquenghem’s

Ève, and the various Romans in Jourdan’s

Révolte and Sang), fail ultimately to shield

men from the sterility and death which haunt

Marsan’s Les Absents and Pancrazi’s Les

Quartiers d’hiver. A more humorous, satirical

version of this erotico-mystical union is to be

found in Conrad Detrez’s 1975 Les Plumes

du coq (Cockfeathers), where the supposedly

closed world of the Catholic boarding school

is the incongruous launch pad for revolt, vio-

lence and farmyard intimacies. In Renaud

Camus’s Le Chasseur de lumières (The Light

Tracker) of 1993, it is again the setting of the

novel, here the semi-spiritualized countryside

of Gascony, which offers glimpses of erotico-

mystical union between its interlinked charac-

ters, notably between the young chasseur de

lumières and landscape photographer Vin-

cent, and the older, impecunious, semi-aristo-

cratic Adam. Despite Vincent’s reappearance

in Camus’s L’Épuisant Désir de ces choses

(The Draining Desire for Such Things), con-

tact between the characters is here even more

spasmodic and elusive: mystical union gives

way to self-conscious intertextual play and

eroticism to an unspecified longing in ab-

sence. The combination of asceticism, eroti-

cism and mysticism has itself been absorbed

into a self-conscious narrative style—whether

the baroque extravaganzas of Detrez or the

impressionistic kaleidoscopes of Camus.

gay writing

267

Given that the interrogation of identity has

been one of the hallmarks of gay writing from

Proust and Gide through to Pancrazi and

Guibert, it is appropriate that this interroga-

tion be accompanied by a corresponding ex-

ploration of literary forms, notably the first-

person narration. The commodiousness and

the flexibility of first-person narrative allows

for the identity of author and characters to be

inextricably fused and confused—as in

Collard’s Les Nuits fauves—or simultane-

ously revealed and masked—as in Duvert’s

Journal d’un innocent—or for the writer to be

both exposed and distanced as in the multi-

person Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes

(1975) and in nearly all Guibert’s oeuvre. The

first-person narrative also allows for very dif-

ferent representations of the male body, from

René Crevel’s surreal Mon corps et moi

(1925) to Navarre’s 1979 wistfully melan-

cholic Le Temps voulu (Time Willed), and to

Jouhandeau’s erotic Chronique d’une passion

(1949) and Tirésias (1954). The first-person

narrative also allows for intermittent or ex-

tended flashbacks to point to the pain or the

pleasures of memory (Camus, Navarre),

while the juxtaposition of multiple-person

narratives within the one novel creates com-

plementary or divergent perspectives: Le

Touze, Marsan, Tournier. When these are

combined with a rich vein of third-person

narratives, whether formally conventional

(Navarre, Pancrazi, Vrigny) or unconven-

tional (Camus, Detrez), or simply flamboy-

antly erotic (Éric Jourdan’s Sexuellement in-

correct of 1995) it can be seen that gay writ-

ing in France is sufficiently substantial and

varied for its explorations of the gay self, the

gay body and gay identity to offer a map and

a platform for the future.

OWEN HEATHCOTE

See also: autobiography; gay cinema; wom-

en’s/lesbian writing

Further reading

Heathcote, O., Hughes, A. and Williams, J.

(eds) (1998) Gay Signatures, Oxford: Berg

(essays on a range of French gay and les-

bian writers and film-makers; a general

theoretical and analytical introduction).

Larivière, M. (ed.) (1984) Les Amours

masculines: anthologie de l’homosexualité

dans la littérature, preface by Dominique

Fernandez, Paris: Lieu Commun (includes

extracts from some fifty twentieth-century

writers, mainly French but not exclu-

sively).

Lévy, J. and Nouss, A. (eds) (1994) Sida-Fic-

tion: essai d’anthropologie romanesque,

Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon (use-

ful, wide-ranging, essentially descriptive

survey; bibliography).

Lilly, M. (1993) Gay Men’s Literature in the

Twentieth Century, Basingstoke:

Macmillan.

Malinowski, S. (ed.) (1994) Gay and Lesbian

Literature, Detroit and London: St James

Press.

Maxence, J.-L. (1995) Les Écrivains sacrifiés

des années sida, Paris: Bayard (short, read-

able review-style accounts of Aron,

Collard, Detrez, Dreuilhe, De Duve,

Foucault, Guibert and Hocquenghem).

Robinson, C. (1995) Scandal in the Ink: Male

and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-

Century French Literature, London:

Cassell. (very useful overview)

Schehr, L. (1995a) Alcibiades at the Door: Gay

Discourses in French Literature, Stanford:

Stanford University Press (identifies and

analyses a homosexual poiesis in Crevel,

Sartre, Gide, Barthes and Guibert; bibliog-

raphy ).

——(1995b) The Shock of Men: Homosexual

Hermeneutics in French Writing, Stanford:

Stanford University Press (tests the idea of

homosexuality as a mode of interpretation

and subversion in Gide, Foucault, Proust,

Barthes, Renaud Camus and Tournier; bib-

liography).

Stambolian, G. and Marks, E. (eds) (1979)

Homosexualities in French Literature,

Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell (early

seminal collection of essays).

gay writing