Alex Hughes. Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture
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Geismar, Alain
b. 1939, Paris
Academic
A physicist and Ingénieur des Mines, Geismar
became a university teacher in Paris in 1963
and general secretary of the higher education
teachers’ union (SNESup) in 1967. He was
catapulted to notoriety as one of the triumvi-
rate (alongside Daniel Cohn-Bendit and
Jacques Sauvageot) who acted as leaders and
spokespersons for the May 1968 student
movement. His ‘Maoist’ political affiliations
in the immediate post-1968 years seem to have
had no adverse effect on his subsequent ca-
reer. He was an official in the Département
d’Education Permanente (1974–8) and vice-
president of the University of Paris VII (1982–
4). In 1985, he became assistant director-gen-
eral of the Agence de l’Informatique and later
acted as an adviser to Jack Lang, when he was
Minister of Culture.
LAURENCE BELL
See also: parties and movements
Genet, Jean
b. 1910, Paris;
d. 1986, Paris
Writer, dramatist, poet, essayist and
political activist
One of the great lyrical writers of modern
times, as well as one of the most shocking,
Genet spent much of his life creating an image
of himself as the archetypal outcast: a thief, a
traitor and a homosexual. However, even his
most meticulous biographers cannot agree on
the sequence—or, indeed, the truth—of the
major events in his life. He was certainly aban-
doned as an infant by his mother, never knew
who his father was, and was raised by a foster
family in the Morvan. His childhood was much
happier and calmer than he would have us
believe, but he had to leave the Régnier family
at the age of 13 to learn a trade; after ten days
he ran away from the school where he had been
sent to learn typography and began a life of
petty crime that resulted in him finally being
sent to Mettray Reformatory until he was 21.
He had his first homosexual experiences there,
and in his 1946 novel, Miracle de la rose, trans-
formed this borstal into a paradise of mystical
and melancholy passions. His first important
works are autobiographical novels, even
Querelle de Brest, the only novel in which
‘Genet’ is neither a character nor the narrator.
These novels can perhaps best be seen as
autofictions, as the traces of a life that was
both lived and invented, both real and imagi-
nary. In them, Genet juxtaposes confession,
imagination and scandalous provocation, cre-
ating a world in which established social and
moral systems are both inverted and (paradoxi-
cally) maintained, a fictional world which he
called—and which was—his ‘chant d’amour’.
In The Thief’s Journal (Journal du voleur), the
most evidently autobiographical of his texts,
he repeatedly insists that his aim was to make
his life a legend: for him, his ‘real’ life was only
ever the preparation for further adventures that
would find their full meaning only when writ-
ten down—and read. In fact, Genet’s true tri-
umph over a society he both despised and
needed was through language—it was in and
by his writing that he defined himself and de-
fied society.
Among his early admirers were Cocteau and
Sartre, who obtained a presidential pardon for
him in 1949. This public recognition, however,
amounted in his eyes also to recuperation of
him by society, and when it was followed in
1952 by Sartre’s monumental biography Saint
Genet, which presented him as an existential-
ist hero, he burned all the unpublished manu-
scripts he had written over the previous five
years and thereafter wrote no more fiction. At
the heart of his work lies a duality whereby
every act elicits and merits both praise and
condemnation. But Genet does not seek reso-
lution of such oppositions; rather he envisages
a transcendence of them in and through
Geismar, Alain
269
poetry. In the mid-1950s he devoted himself
to theatre, repeatedly presenting his vision of
a world divided into oppressors and oppressed,
the latter able to conceive their function only
in terms of the needs and desires of the op-
pressors. His plays all have a political dimen-
sion—notably The Blacks (Les Nègres), with
its exposition of the impotence of the blacks’
attempts at revolt, and The Screens (Les
Paravents), set in Algeria, which scandalized
French society with its indictment of colonial
conflict. While Genet’s theatre highlights the
urgent reality and importance of struggle, it is
also highly ritualized, the distinction between
illusion and reality being blurred and language
being used less as a means of communication
than as a constant fountain of incantation.
In 1964, the suicide of his lover Abdallah
(a young tightrope walker) devastated Genet,
who once again destroyed his manuscripts and
disappeared, reappearing as a political activ-
ist, working with the Black Panthers in the
United States and then with Yasser Arafat and
the PLO. These activities inspired his last fin-
ished work, Prisoner of Love (Un Captif
amoureux), a book in which he explicitly
swears to tell the whole truth as in a court of
law. Much more than a political book, it is a
speculation on the nature of truth, a medita-
tion on the interdependence of egoism and al-
truism, an exploration of different narrative
techniques and, above all, a hymn to love,
both erotic and fraternal. Here Genet finally
presents us with a non-erotic couple, Hamza,
a young feddai, and his mother, and the book
draws together all of Genet’s philosophical,
political, theological and mythological ideas
as well as many biographical references, into
a new vision of unity centred on a sense of
family and community. In one of the most
radical and astonishing reversals of his career,
Genet, who had often parodied the cult and
iconography of the Virgin Mary, as in his
novel Our Lady of the Flowers (Notre-Dame-
des-Fleurs), places at the centre of this, his last
book, the Christian image of the pietà and the
figure of Mary mater dolorosa, who in the
very moment of her mourning is able to for-
give everything and everyone. Several posthu-
mous works have been published, but none
has the force or the profound emotion of this
work of redemption and reconciliation.
MICHAEL WORTON
See also: autobiography; existentialism; gay
writing; theatre
Further reading
Brooks, P. and Halpern, J. (eds) (1975) Jean
Genet, Eaglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall
(an anthology of essays by such distin-
guished critics as Sartre, Bataille and Rich-
ard Coe).
Moraly, J.-B. (1988) Jean Genet: la vie écrite,
Paris: Éditions de la Différence (convinc-
ingly challenges the legend Genet made of
himself and shows how a concern with writ-
ing determined all of Genet’s life choices).
Sartre, J.-P. (1952), Saint Genet, comédien et
martyr, Paris: Gallimard. Translated B.
Frechtman (1988) Saint Genet: Actor and
Martyr, London: Heinemann (this ‘existen-
tial biography’, which continues to domi-
nate thinking on Genet, traces what it calls
the history of a liberation; for Sartre, Genet
underwent three metamorphoses: the child
became a thief, the thief became an aesthete,
and the aesthete finally became a writer).
Savona, J. (1983) Jean Genet, London:
Macmillan (an excellent introduction to the
theatre, in which each play is analysed sepa-
rately).
White, E. (1993) Jean Genet, London: Chatto
& Windus (a monumental and meticulous
biography which focuses on Genet’s homo-
sexuality; particularly interesting on
Genet’s responses to painting).
Genette, Gérard
b. 1930
Literary theorist and critic
Genette has published several important
Genette, Gérard
270
essays on literary forms. His 1972 Discours
du récit (translated in 1980 as Narrative Dis-
course), which attempts to build a comprehen-
sive theory of narrative, based on copious ex-
amples from Proust’s work, has been particu-
larly influential in the field of poetics. His
original categories for analysing time in the
novel and his concept of focalization have, for
example, been widely quoted.
BÉATRICE DAMAMME-GILBERT
See also: Barthes, Roland; Greimas, A.J.; lin-
guistic/discourse theory; structuralism
Further reading
Rimmon-Kenan, S. (1983) Narrative Fiction:
Contemporary Poetics, London and New
York: Routledge (refers extensively to
Genette’s work).
Giacometti, Alberto
b. 1901, Borgonovo, Switzerland;
d. 1966, Chur, Switzerland
Artist
Giacometti’s early work, after his move to
Paris in 1922, was influenced by Brancusi,
Cubism via Lipchitz and, more significantly,
the Surrealist movement. After the war he
produced the sculpture for which he is best
known—his attenuated, almost undifferenti-
ated, bronze figures, isolated or in groups,
seen as if from a distance and inviting com-
parisons, during this postwar period, with
concentration camp victims or displaced per-
sons. The critical recognition and interna-
tional acclaim these works received was
largely due to their endorsement by Jean-Paul
Sartre, who discerned in Giacometti’s rejec-
tion of the traditional sculptural presentation
of the human figure an assertion of the art-
ist’s existential freedom and saw in the fig-
ures themselves the spiritual isolation of the
human condition as interpreted by existen-
tialism.
CAROL WILCOX
Gipsy Kings
Musicians
A paradox of the French pop scene, the Gipsy
Kings are a highly talented group of gypsy
musicians who sing in Spanish and manage to
‘represent’ France at some official cultural
events. They are based in France and provide
evidence of the multicultural heritage of their
‘adopted’ country, with its tradition of openly
welcoming artists of other nationalities. Their
latest productions are Este mundo (1991) and
Love et liberté (1993).
GÉRARD POULET
See also: song/chanson
Girard, René
b. 1923, Avignon
Philosopher and critic
In novels, primitive mythology and the Bible,
Girard discerns an essential association be-
tween violence and desire, and an opposition
between desire and knowledge. Deceit, Desire
and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary
Structures (Mensonge romantique, vérité
romanesque) of 1961 examines how literature
helps us to understand the unconscious work-
ings of desire. The essayistic Violence and the
Sacred (La Violence et le sacré) from 1972,
and 1978’s more systematic Things Hidden
Since the foundation of the World (Des Choses
cachées depuis la fondation du monde),
present the attenuation of desire through the
religious ritual of universal victimage, as em-
bodied in the scapegoat. The singularity of
Girard’s theme and his confident crossing of
Giacometti, Alberto
271
generic boundaries distance him from most
major schools of contemporary theory.
SEÁN HAND
Giroud, Françoise
b. 1916, Geneva, Switzerland
Journalist, writer and political figure
One of France’s leading journalists, Giroud
has written for a number of newspapers and
magazines, including Elle, Le Nouvel
Observateur, and L’Express, which she co-
founded with Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber.
In the 1970s, she headed the short-lived Sec-
retariat for Women, established in 1974 by
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, before becoming
Secreatary of State for Cultural Affairs (1976–
7). As well as collections of articles, she has
published literary and biographical works, in-
cluding 1981’s Une Femme honorable (An
Honourable Woman), and Alma Mahler ou
l’art d’être aimée (Alma Mahler, or the Art of
Being Loved).
ALEX HUGHES
See also: feminism (movements/groups); femi-
nist press
Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry
b. 1926, Koblenz, Germany
Politician
Giscard was president of the Republic from
1974 to 1981, and the only Fifth Republic
head of state to have gone down to defeat at a
presidential election. From an haut-bourgeois
background, and a graduate of the prestigious
École Nationale d’Administration, he rose to
prominence as an inspector in the Ministry of
Finance, becoming member of parliament for
an Auvergne constituency in 1956.
He was Finance Minister from 1962 to
1966, during which period, while loyal to the
Fifth Republic, he kept his distance from de
Gaulle through his membership of the
Républicans Indépendents (RI) party. The dis-
tinctive Giscardian style—‘French’ in its elitist
and patrician qualities, ‘American’ in being
technocratically forward-looking and in its
economic liberalism—began to emerge in these
years. Critical of Gaullist centralization,
though he refused to join the vote of censure
against the government after May 1968, he
remained in eclipse until Pompidou came to
power in 1969, when he returned as Finance
Minister, a post he was to occupy for the en-
tire Pompidou presidency.
Giscard’s political position is best encapsu-
lated by his October 1972 assertion that France
wanted to be governed from the centre, and
his 1974 election slogan of ‘change without
risk’. Such blandness, after the upheavals of
the Algerian war and 1968, was what a great
many French wanted to hear, and his victory
over Mitterrand, while an extremely narrow
one, was far from surprising. As president, he
attempted to offset his aristocratic name and
demeanour with a series of not always con-
vincing demotic gestures, such as posing in a
lounge suit for the official presidential photo-
graph, inviting the Élysée dustmen to break-
fast with him and getting himself invited to
dine, with ostentatious spontaneity, in the
homes of ‘ordinary’ French men and women.
He had to contend in his early years with poor
relations with his first prime minister, Chirac
(replaced by Raymond Barre in 1976), and a
resurgent Left opposition; but their defeat in
the 1978 legislative elections and the Giscard/
Barre tandem’s image of economic competence
strengthened his position. Major reforms un-
der his rule included the breaking-up of the
ORTF into a number of smaller companies,
the legalization of abortion and France’s entry
into the European Monetary System. He felt
unable to abolish the death penalty, however,
despite proclaimed personal opposition.
As the youngest president this century,
Giscard was clearly looking forward to a lengthy
period in office, and his defeat by Mitterrand
Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry
272
in 1981—only three years after the collapse of
the Union of the Left on which the latter had
built his strategy—was all the more traumatic
for him in consequence. With neither a House
of Lords nor the equivalent of the United States’
Carter Foundation to provide a political ‘retire-
ment home’ for him, he has had to content him-
self since with the presidency of the Auvergne
Regional Assembly, and in 1995 a mortifyingly
failed attempt to capture the mayorship of
Clermont-Ferrand from the Socialists. His re-
cent publication of an erotic novel has merely
reinforced the rather sorry sense of a figure a
long way past his sell-by date.
KEITH READER
See also: abortion/contraception; parties and
movements
Major works
Giscard d’Estaing, V. (1983) Démocratie
française, ed. A.Clark, London: Methuen
(a well-annotated and well-contextualized
republication of Giscard’s 1976 political
credo).
Further reading
Duhamel, A. (1980) La République
giscardienne: anatomie politique de la
France, Paris: Grasset (the most compre-
hensive French-language work on the
Giscard years).
Frears, J.R. (1981) France in the Giscard Presi-
dency, London: Allen and Unwin (a sound
overall account).
Glucksmann, André
b. 1937, France
Philosopher
Glucksmann is the best known of the new
philosophers of the 1970s. After passing the
competitive agrégation examination in phi-
losophy in 1961, Glucksmann became a
Marxist student militant, gravitating towards
the Maoists and taking an active role in the
intellectual debates around May 1968. In the
aftermath of the events, he became one of the
leading figures of the ‘new philosophers’
movement, comprising former radicals who
developed a trenchant right-wing critique of
their own former beliefs, drawing inspiration
from Solzhenitsyn. He campaigned for causes
such as the Vietnamese ‘boat people’, and is
generally credited with promoting the recon-
ciliation of Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond
Aron in 1978. In the 1990s he wrote force-
fully on the treatment of AIDS sufferers, and
campaigned against the siege of Sarajevo by
Bosnian Serbs. His thought focuses on moral
issues, rejecting systems of lofty ideals and
proposing a permanent revolt against indiffer-
ence, oppression and other manifestations of
evil in society. His bestknown book remains
The Master Thinkers (Les Maîtres penseurs)
of 1977, whose title became a byword in the
postmodernist attack on Marx, Freud and
other proponents of systematic thought.
MICHAEL KELLY
See also: educational elitism; Marxism and
Marxian thought; revolutionary groups
Godard, Jean-Luc
b. 1930, Paris
Director and critic
Considered by many the greatest film-maker
of his generation, certainly the most prolific
and influential, Godard has produced an
oeuvre of unparalleled range, energy and am-
bition. With provocative wit and intelligence,
as well as an acute sensitivity to beauty and
form, he has consistently brought together
questions of aesthetics, politics and philoso-
phy. His is the most sustained and challenging
Glucksmann, André
273
analysis in cinema of the relations between
sound and image, and all his work—critical
and filmic—is to some extent essayistic, at
once speculative and transitional. When this
process fails, it can sometimes expose Godard
as politically naive, overintellectual, even ni-
hilistic. However, what made him such a criti-
cally important voice during the 1960s and
1970s was the fact that people could identify
with this son of the bourgeoisie negotiating
the great social and political changes of the
Fifth Republic by confronting directly French
culture and tradition.
Godard’s first film, Opération béton, a
twenty-minute short made in 1954 about the
construction of a dam in Switzerland, was an
undistinguished beginning, yet already antici-
pated the documentary aspect of his work. On
returning to Paris, where he had studied eth-
nology at the Sorbonne and attended the
cineclubs of the Left Bank, he worked on a
series of short films with a group of aspiring
film-makers and critics—Jacques Rivette, Éric
Rohmer, François Truffaut—who would even-
tually become known as the Nouvelle Vague
(New Wave), all united in their contempt of
the traditional French cinéma de qualité. In
1956, using the pseudonym Hans Lucas,
Godard became a regular contributor to the
magazines Arts and Cahiers du cinema and,
inspired by the work of American directors like
Hawks and Hitchcock, helped to formulate an
aesthetic policy of the auteur. In 1957, he met
the film producer Georges de Beauregard, who
financed his first feature-length film, A bout
de souffle, a homage to American ‘B’ gangster
movies starring Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul
Belmondo. Shot by Raoul Coutard in natural
light on location in Paris, the film was an un-
expected critical and commercial success. Bris-
tling with quotes and references, it used the
techniques of hand-held camera and jump-cut
to disrupt the act of narration and so create
spontaneity. Godard’s second film, Le Petit
Soldat (made in 1960, but not released until
1963), was a fierce exposé of the Algerian war,
disturbing both for its realistic depiction of
horror and for the ambiguous politics of its
protagonists. It featured the actress Anna
Karina, whom Godard later married. So be-
gan a remarkable period of uninterrupted crea-
tivity during which Godard developed a frag-
mented, intensively edited and self-ironic style
that broke down the divisions between fiction
and documentary, actor and character, narra-
tive and experimental film. The films of this
first period (almost all shot by Coutard), in-
clude Vivre sa vie (1962), an analysis of pros-
titution in twelve tableaux, the classically per-
fect Le Mépris (1963) made in Cinemascope
and mischievously employing Brigitte Bardot,
and Alphaville, une étrange aventure de
Lemmy Caution (1965), a mixture of film noir
and science fiction. The poster-bright Pierrot
le fou (1965), regarded by many as Godard’s
masterpiece, follows the love-hate relationship
between Marianne (Karina) and Ferdinand
(Belmondo) and is clearly a reflection of the
state of Godard’s marriage with Karina, then
nearing its end.
Godard was seeking to develop a material-
ist film poetics, the first signs of which are vis-
ible in 1966’s Masculin-Féminin, starring Jean-
Pierre Léaud, about the generation of ‘the chil-
dren of Marx and Coca-Cola’. In 1966–67 he
made a trilogy exploring modern alienation, in
particular the Americanization of French eco-
nomic and cultural life highlighted by the Viet-
nam war. Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle
is a social and psychological portrait of Paris
and its new suburban sprawl as seen through
the eyes of a housewife-cum-prostitute. La
Chinoise, about a Maoist cell in Paris, is an ac-
curate premonition of the student uprisings of
1968. Weekend, a savage indictment of social
violence and arguably Godard’s most extreme
film, offers an apocalyptic vision both of soci-
ety and of cinema (the closing caption reads ‘FIN
DU CINÉMA’). May 1968 saw Godard lead-
ing the protests over the dismissal of Henri
Langlois from the Cinémathèque Française, and
producing a series of cinétracts, or impromptu
collages, of revolutionary sounds, images and
slogans. Le Gai Savoir (1968), a treatise on ‘pro-
gressive’ education which heavily foregrounds
its means of production, marks the culmination
of Godard’s self-reflexive film aesthetic. He then
began to disavow his earlier work, claiming that
Godard, Jean-Luc
274
it functioned only at the level of theoretical ex-
periment rather than of social and political
struggle. His setting up with Jean-Pierre Gorin
of the Maoist film collective, the Dziga Vertov
Group, marked a complete break with commer-
cial film structures. Joint works like Pravda,
Luttes en Italie, Vent d’est, (all 1969), and
Vladimir et Rosa (1971), commissioned by Eu-
ropean television although never broadcast,
deconstructed in different ways the signs of
bourgeois ideology. Tout va bien (1972), fea-
turing Yves Montand and Jane Fonda as char-
acters and as themselves, is Godard’s most au-
thentically Brechtian film, but failed to excite
either his increasingly impatient Marxist follow-
ing or the capitalist film system which had in-
tended to welcome back a prodigal son. Godard
had reached an artistic impasse, a fact crudely
symbolized by his motorcycle accident in 1971
which left him an invalid for two years. Despite
its analytical rigour, his work was becoming less
revolutionary than simply didactic, losing its
audience in the process. The Group disbanded
and Godard left for Grenoble with Anne-Marie
Miéville, a set photographer on Tout va bien,
to set up a new production company called
Sonimage (romantically conceived as a combi-
nation of her ‘sound’ and his ‘image’).
Godard then underwent a process of com-
plete self-evaluation unlike that of any other
major film-maker. After Ici et ailleurs (1974),
which used video and previously shot film of
Palestine to take personal and political stock
of the post-1968 situation, Godard and
Miéville returned deliberately in 1973 to basic
themes with Numéro deux, a stunning exposé
of the blockage in French society which incor-
porated and superimposed video within the
cinematic frame. Two major television series
followed, Six fois deux (sur et sous la commu-
nication) (1976) and France/tour/détour/deux/
enfants, (1977/8) which, although meeting
with general incomprehension and disap-
proval, revealed that Godard was seeking
above all to resolve the antagonism between
video and cinema (Cain and Abel). By the late
1970s, he was back in Switzerland (his coun-
try of citizenship). There he made Slow Mo-
tion (Sauve qui peut [la vie]) (1979), a return
to the mainstream and explicitly autobio-
graphical in nature. Produced with a minimal
crew and featuring Jacques Dutronc as
Godard’s alter ego, Paul Godard, the film used
the video technique of stop-starting images to
analyse the relations between female prostitu-
tion and male impotence, space and represen-
tation. It also included a voice-over sequence
with Marguerite Duras, illustrating Godard’s
desire to engage directly with female discourse
and, perhaps even more importantly, literature
(Godard is himself the author of six published
collections of poetry). Passion followed (1981),
a soaring tale of aesthetics, painting, class poli-
tics and religion which inspired the even more
astonishing Scénario du film ‘Passion’, a video
where Godard explores how Passion came into
being. Prénom: Carmen (1983), which won the
Lion d’Or at the 1983 Venice Film Festival,
confronts Mérimée with Beethoven to exam-
ine the relationship between (pre-)language and
identity. Its burlesque figure of Uncle Jean
marks the first of Godard’s appearances in his
own film-fictions. ‘Je vous salue, Marie’ (1983),
a contemporary reworking of the story of the
Nativity, explored the metaphysical themes of
love, faith and creativity. Although condemned
by the Pope, the film was an honest attempt
by Godard (a Protestant) to deal with the ques-
tion of divine mystery, and its dense sound-
track mixing Dvorák with Bach showcased his
total mastery of sound.
An extensive and still evolving phase of per-
sonal, historical and philosophical contempla-
tion was initiated by the video Godard made
with Miéville in 1986 entitled Soft and Hard.
Putting aside self-indulgent exercises like King
Lear and Soigne ta droite (both 1987), this fifth
period includes works like Puissance de la pa-
role (1988), a dazzling video piece exploiting
techniques of speed and pulsation; Nouvelle
Vague (1991), a paean to nature stripped of
all but the barest threads of narrative;
Allemagne année 90 neuf zero, a meditation
for television on the solitude of post-Berlin Wall
Germany and Europe; and JLG/JLG:
autoportrait de décembre (1991), an intimate
and elegiac short which is less a self-portrait
than a study of childhood, memory and loss.
Godard, Jean-Luc
275
Godard has also experimented with filmed
poems, letters, reports, contributions to col-
lective works, historical studies, work notes,
fragments of a private diary and dialogues.
However, the key work of the recent corpus is
the eight-part video Histoire(s) du cinéma.
Here, Godard, the self-styled artisan, reinvents
the cinematic process by means of an extraor-
dinary ‘videographic’ flux of clips, stills, art
reproductions, captions and photography. This
approach confirms the view of the film critic
Serge Daney that Godard is less an iconoclast
and innovator than a radical reformer tirelessly
correcting and redefining. A work of genuine
humanist commitment and passion, Histoire(s)
du cinéma has rarely been seen, suffering the
fate of much of Godard’s recent output which,
if it attracts producers, lacks adequate distri-
bution. In fact, although revered by young film-
makers such as Léos Carax, Godard is gener-
ally known less for his recent work than for
his enduring fame as a public figure, the au-
thor of axioms like ‘cinema is truth 24 times a
second’, or ‘it’s not a just image, just an im-
age’. He received the prestigious film award
of an honorary César in 1986.
JAMES WILLIAMS
See also: feminist thought; Marxism and
Marxian thought; postmodernism; prostitu-
tion
Major works
Godard, J.-L. (1980) Introduction à une
véritable histoire du cinéma, vol. 1, Paris:
Éditions Albatros (a first version of the
Histoire(s) du cinéma project).
——(1985) Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc
Godard, Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma/Éditions
de l’Étoile (a lavishly illustrated compila-
tion of all Godard’s film criticism).
Further reading
Bellour, R. and Bandy, M.L. (eds) (1992), Jean-
Luc Godard: Son+Image 1974–1991, New
York: Museum of Modern Art (the best
general collection of criticism on Godard’s
work post-1974).
Douin, J.-L. (1994) Jean-Luc Godard, Paris:
Rivages (a solid and highly readable over-
view of Godard’s oeuvre).
MacCabe, C. (1980) Jean-Luc Godard: Im-
ages, Sounds, Politics, London: British Film
Institute (an excellent analysis of Godard’s
work up to the late 1970s).
Goldmann, Jean-Jacques
b. 1951, Paris
Singer-songwriter
Goldmann is a prolific songwriter and a per-
former. He started his career in 1975 with the
group Tai Phong, where he first met the Welsh
guitarist Michael Jones. In 1981, Goldmann
started a solo and highly successful career for
ten years and then formed a new group
Fredericks, Goldmann et Jones. A talented
musician, he gives the traditional poetical
chanson a modern musical idiom. Against his
own wishes he is perceived as a leading voice
of the new moral generation.
GÉRARD POULET
See also: song/chanson
Gorz, André
b. 1924, Vienna, Austria
Political philosopher,
real name Gérard Horst
Gorz left his homeland when it was annexed
by Hitler in 1938 and it was in 1946, during
his exile in Switzerland, that Gorz met Jean-
Paul Sartre, thus beginning a long association
with Les Temps modernes. Gorz’s books are
concerned mainly with the nature of work in
Gorz, André
276
post-industrial societies: he examines the emer-
gence of and tendency towards societies hav-
ing to contend with mass unemployment in
economies experiencing jobless growth. His
analysis extends also to changing class struc-
tures in such societies, and discusses how work
should be more equitably distributed. Gorz’s
name has in more recent years become associ-
ated with the ecology movement.
MARTYN CORNICK
See also: employment; green issues
Major works
Gorz, A. (1980) Ecology as Politics (Écologie
et politique), Boston: South End Press.
——(1982) Farewell to the Working Class: An
Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism, Lon-
don: Pluto.
——(1988) Métamorphose du travail: quête
du sens, Paris: Galilée.
——(1994) Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology
(Capitalisme, socialisme, écologie), trans.
C.Turner, London: Verso.
Gracq, Julien
b. 1910, St-Florent-le-Vieil
Writer, real name Louis Poirier
Gracq is the author of novels and essays, was
initially close to Surrealism (he was a friend of
André Breton) and is noted for his rare poetic
style and his individual vision of literature. In
1950 he delivered a violent attack on the Pa-
risian literary establishment in Literature in
the Gut (La Littérature a l’estomac) and later
refused the Goncourt prize awarded for his
1951 novel The Opposing Shore (Le Rivage
des Syrtes). Standing apart from all literary
trends, his work has moved from fiction to-
wards original forms of personal and reflec-
tive writing.
BÉATRICE DAMAMME-GILBERT
See also: literary prizes
Further reading
Murat, M. (1992) Julien Gracq, Paris: Pierre
Belfond (an approachable and penetrating
overview of Gracq’s entire work).
Grand Magic Circus, Le
Theatre company
An anarchic, lively company led by Jérôme
Savary, whose aim was to bring culture to the
people by ridiculing the existing cultural es-
tablishment. Collectively scripted shows were
designed to shock middle-class audiences, and
used the music-hall tradition of song, dance,
stage effects, clowning and pantomime for
which shows such as its 1973 De Moïse a
Mao, and its 1981 Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
are particularly famous.
ANNIE SPARKS
See also: theatre
Further reading
Savary, J. (1974) Album du Grand Magic Cir-
cus, Paris: Belfond.
Grappelli, Stéphane
b. 1908, Paris
d. 1997, Paris
Musician
A legendary jazz violinist who formed an un-
forgettable partnership with the guitarist
Django Reinhardt in the 1930s. The two of
them were members of the Hot Club de France
Quintet which was formed in 1934 and stayed
Gracq, Julien
277
together until the war (when Grappelli came
to England). Reformed in 1946, the Quintet
continued to perform until Reinhardt’s retire-
ment in 1950, since when Grappelli pursued a
solo career, working with the likes of Duke
Ellington, Oscar Peterson, Barney Kessel, Earl
Hines, Yehudi Menuhin and Claude Bolling
until his death in December 1997.
IAN PICKUP
See also: jazz
Gréco, Juliette
b. 1926, Montpellier
Singer and actor
Known in her early years as the ‘muse of St-
Germain-des-Prés’, Juliette Gréco began her
career in the late 1940s and early 1950s per-
forming songs with words by Jean-Paul Sartre
and Raymond Queneau. Having alienated the
French bourgeoisie in her early years, Gréco
progressively captivated a wider public, sing-
ing songs by Brel, Prévert, Guy Béart,
Gainsbourg, Aznavour, and others. An out-
standing stage performer, Gréco projected the
image of the archetypal ‘liberated’ woman. She
is also important as an ambassador of French
song abroad and (to a lesser extent) as a film
star. Gréco was married to Michel Piccoli.
IAN PICKUP
See also: song/chanson
green issues
Green issues emerged as part of France’s so-
cial and political agenda in the 1960s, al-
though the debate about the relationship be-
tween nature and society is an old one. Mod-
ern environmentalism, which followed the
growth of the nature protection movements,
has been shaped by a number of specific fac-
tors, especially the role of the state and the
conflicts around nuclear power.
The relationship between society and the
natural environment has been a much-debated
issue for a long time. Indeed, it was pivotal
during the Enlightenment period; Rousseau,
with his vision of humans as ‘good in Nature’
in Le Contrat social and in Émile, differed from
the modernism of the Encyclopedists such as
Diderot or D’Alembert, for whom ‘reason’ and
‘industry’ control ‘nature’. In the Romantic
period, this debate was continued from all
sides. The impulse to ‘preserve’ nature can be
dated back to the creation of the first nature
reserve in the forest of Fontainebleau in 1853,
after a long campaign by well-known artists
and writers such as George Sand and Victor
Hugo. Later, the deeply rural character of
French society strongly marked the relation-
ship with the natural environment. However,
the ambient modernism which, from the 1950s,
presided over the ‘30 Glorious’ years of eco-
nomic growth, and which at first reacted
against the ‘ruralist’ ideology of the
collaborationist Vichy regime of World War II
(which had a wheatsheaf as its symbol), had
soon to respond to the deep environmental
changes provoked by industrialization and
urbanization. These changes, which acceler-
ated the disappearance of traditional rural so-
ciety, assured the continued popularity of
works extolling the values of doomed rural
cultures in touch with ‘nature’—hence the suc-
cess of writings by authors such as Pagnol,
Genevoix, Giono and Ramuz. On the other
hand, it became obvious that the natural and
human environments were threatened through
pollution and degradation, and that a serious
policy response had to be developed.
In this context, two dates are particularly
relevant. In 1960, the act creating the national
parks was voted in. The first, the Parc National
de la Vanoise, was established in the Alps in
1963, to be followed by six other national
parks and many regional parks and nature re-
serves. In 1963, Jean Dorst’s book Avant que
nature se meure (Before Nature Dies) rivalled
Carson’s Silent Spring in the Anglo-Saxon
world. At the end of the 1960s and in the early
green issues