Alex Hughes. Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

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1970s, green trends were developing in France

(as elsewhere), generating debate about the

‘limits to growth’, the ‘hippy’ craze, a nostal-

gia for the terroirs and produits de pays, and

associations for the protection of animals and

nature becoming mass movements. The Amis

de la Terre (Friends of the Earth) started in

1970; three years later came WWF’s French

section (Greenpeace France had to wait until

1977). The term écologiste (environmentalist)

became popular, especially in its familiar,

slightly derogatory form of écolo.

The main area of conflicts during the 1970s

was the development of nuclear power. The

1973 Messmer Plan planned to make of nu-

clear power the main source of electricity gen-

eration (le tout-nucléaire policy). This decision

was never debated publicly, and local public

enquiries for nuclear plants were seen as rub-

ber-stamping procedures. The anti-nuclear

movement, therefore, was also a protest

against the centralized state. Many environ-

mentalists associated themselves with the lib-

ertarian ideals of the May 1968 movement,

pacifism (as the civil nuclear power pro-

gramme had never been fully separated from

the military nuclear programme) and region-

alism (especially in Brittany).

The high point of anti-nuclear campaigning

came in 1977, during the campaign against the

Creys-Malville ‘fast breeder’ reactor near Lyon.

With the arrival in power of Mitterrand in

1981, a few concessions were made, but the

nuclear programme had largely been set in

train, and the opposition foundered on the

powerful alliance of pro-nuclear interests. To-

day, France is the country with the highest pro-

portion of electricity generated from nuclear

plants. Protests were renewed only when pub-

lic authorities were accused of providing little

or misleading information about the radioac-

tive clouds from the Chernobyl disaster blow-

ing across France in 1986. During the same

period, other green issues attracted the atten-

tion of activists and the general public, espe-

cially urban pollution and the mismanagement

of dangerous waste. A number of scandals

around the import of hospital waste and illegal

chemical dumps erupted across the 1980s. The

degrading of the local natural environment by

infrastructure encroachment was increasingly

resisted—for instance, a new TGV rail track

project in the Rhône valley, an area already

cramped between existing railways, motor-

ways and canals, and not far from the Côte

d’Azur, a fragile environment destroyed by

speculative and undercontrolled developments,

was strongly opposed in the early 1990s.

From the mid-1970s, a new generation of

activists, less marked by the political issues

inherited from the 1960s, brought forward the

Greens’ political project. Green politics, which

have been marked by deep divisions and a

gradual erosion of the electoral and political

positions gained in the mid-1980s, have not

managed to alter significantly the ways in

which green issues are considered. Indeed,

‘green’ themes are used in widely differing

ways. For instance, a conservative-orientated

party, the CPNT or Chasse, Pêche, Nature,

Traditions (Hunting, Angling, Nature, Tradi-

tions), claiming to have an environmental pur-

pose by lobbying for ‘traditional’ hunting and

angling, gained 3.95 per cent of the votes in

the 1994 European elections—more than the

main Green Party (Les Verts).

The CPNT’s relative success is typical of

protest politics, but it reveals some of the spe-

cific aspects of ideologies on nature which are

very different from the usual green image.

There are 1.65 million licensed hunters in

France, who constitute a powerful and active

lobby which claims to have the protection of

nature as its main aim. Some recent conflicts

illustrate the force of such ideologies: for in-

stance, the seasonal hunting of the palombe (a

kind of migrant dove) in the southwest region

of France is, in principle, forbidden by an EU

directive, but is fiercely defended and practised

by locals. Indeed, ‘ecocentrist’ thinking, influ-

ential in Anglo-Saxon environmentalism, has

had little impact in France, and has been sub-

jected to fierce attacks, for instance by the phi-

losopher Luc Ferry. Alternative lifestyles in-

fluenced by green issues have yet to have the

same impact in France as they do in the United

Kingdom or in Germany, where problems of

pollution, energy wastage, losses of wilderness

green issues

279

or biological diversity are treated as technical

and sociopolitical problems.

FRANÇOIS NECTOUX

Further reading

Hoffmann-Martinot, V. (1991) ‘Grüne and

Verts: Two Faces of European Ecologism’,

West European Politics 14:4 (although

dealing mainly with green politics, this ar-

ticle also analyses the background in terms

of green issues).

Touraine, A. et al. (1983) Anti-Nuclear Pro-

test, Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press (a sociological analysis of the reac-

tions to the most important green issue in

France in the 1970s).

green politics

Despite heightened international concern over

the environment, the impact of green politics

in France has been limited by chronic internal

divisions.

The origins of French political ecology lie

in the ‘new social movements’ of the late

1960s, particularly environmentalism, anti-

nuclear protest, pacifism and feminism. Unre-

solved tensions within the green movement

over appropriate forms of activism—be it

through direct action, associations, pressure

groups or mainstream politics—have resulted

in ambivalent strategies. Structured political

parties emerged late. Of the two main parties,

the Verts (the Greens) was formed in 1984,

and Génération Écologie (GE) in 1990. The

former retains strong elements of grassroots

democracy and has a radical platform (oppo-

sition to French nuclear power, to the rush for

economic growth, to collaboration with the

parties of government, advocacy of cancelling

Third World debt). The latter is centralized,

focused on its founder, Brice Lalonde, reform-

ist in orientation and accepts civil uses of nu-

clear power (Lalonde was Environment Min-

ister under the Socialists during 1989–92).

However, both parties agree on the need for

global environmental strategies, more work-

sharing and a deepening of democracy.

Despite the greening of the French public

as measured by opinion surveys, between

1974 and 1988 no single ecology party or can-

didate polled 5 per cent in a major election.

The breakthrough came in the 1989 European

elections (with 10.6 per cent of votes, the Verts

returned nine MEPs), followed by success in

the 1992 regional elections, where ecology

parties attracted nearly 15 per cent of voters.

In both years, ecologists benefited from the

popularity of environmental issues and pro-

portional representation. But the 1993 parlia-

mentary elections (only 7.6 per cent of votes

in the first round and no seats won) and the

1995 presidential elections (3.3 per cent for

Dominique Voynet) constituted serious set-

backs. Explanatory factors for these disap-

pointing performances included inexperience

in major elections, poor communication of

policy, the aftermath of recession, the first-

past-the-post electoral system and the resur-

gence of the Right.

But the major weakness of French political

ecology has been its ever-increasing fragmen-

tation, with green politicians more intent on

ideological finesse and factional disputes than

on formulating environmental policy. These

divisions prevented the election of a single

green MEP in the 1994 European elections.

By that year, there was a green party for most

shades of the political spectrum, with the Verts

moving leftwards, GE drifting to the centre,

CPNT (a hunting lobby) and the Nouveaux

Écologistes firmly on the Right, while Antoine

Waechter’s Mouvement Écologiste

Indépendant sought to be on neither Left nor

Right. Although this is a fair reflection of the

competing constituencies that form the envi-

ronmental movement, it has led to voter con-

fusion, the marginalization of green parties

and the dilution of their influence on decision-

makers, despite the continued saliency of na-

tional and global environmental problems.

JOSEPH SZARKA

green politics

280

See also: green issues; parties and movements

Further reading

Cole, A. and Doherty, B. (1995) ‘Pas comme

les autres—the French Greens at the Cross-

Roads’, in D.Richardson and C.Rootes

(eds) The Green Challenge: The Develop-

ment of Green Parties in Europe, London:

Routledge (studies the greens within the

context of the French political system).

Sainteny, G. (1992) Les Verts, Paris: PUF (de-

tailed history and development of the

Verts).

Szarka, J. (1994) ‘Green Politics in France’,

Parliamentary Affairs 47, 3 (June) (on elec-

toral performance and political positioning

of green parties).

Greimas, A.J.

b. 1917, Tula, Lithuania;

d. 1992

Linguist

An influential French semanticist and

semiologist who taught at the École Pratique

des Hautes Études and worked in the 1960s

alongside Barthes, Todorov and Genette on

the structure of narratives. Two of his theo-

retical models exploring deep and surface

structures, the semiotic square and the

actantial model, have been widely used and

applied to a range of subdisciplines within

semiotics.

BÉATRICE DAMAMME-GILBERT

See also: linguistic/discourse theory; structur-

alism

Further reading

Rimmon-Kenan, S. (1983) Narrative Fiction:

Contemporary Poetics, London and New

York: Routledge (has several sections on

Greimas’s work and a bibliography).

Groult, Benoîte

b. 1920, Paris

Journalist, novelist and essayist

The author of novels co-written with her sis-

ter Flora in the 1960s—Diary in Duo (journal

a quatre mains); Feminine Plural (Le Féminin

pluriel); II était deux fois (Twice Upon a

Time)—as well as of single-authored fictions—

including 1972’s La Part des chases (All

Things Considered), and the erotic novel Salt

on Our Skin (Les Vaisseaux du coeur), pub-

lished in 1988—Groult is perhaps best known

for two feminist essays. These texts—Ainsi

soit-elle (So Be She) and Le Féminisme au

masculin (Feminism in the Masculine Mode)—

contributed to the rise of feminist awareness

in 1970s France. A dedicated campaigner for

equal rights, Groult became president of the

Commission for the Feminization of Job Des-

ignations in 1985.

ALEX HUGHES

See also: erotic writing; feminist thought;

women’s/lesbian writing

Grumberg, Jean-Claude

b. 1939, Paris

Playwright

Over three decades, Grumberg has been writ-

ing plays, such as Zone libre (Free Zone) and

Linge sale (Dirty Linen), television scripts and

a screenplay in 1988 (Les Années sandwichs).

His work displays differing formats and sub-

jects, employing humour to make social ob-

servation.

ANNIE STEPHENSON

Greimas, A.J.

281

Further reading

Boulé, J.-P. (1995a) ‘A l’ami qui ne m’a pas

sauvé la vie’ and Other Writings, Glasgow:

University of Glasgow French and German

Publications (this focuses on the best

known of his ‘AIDS novels’ ).

——(1995b) ‘Hervé Guibert’, Nottingham

French Studies 34, 1 (edited collection of

articles and bibliography).

Guignols de l’info, Les

Television programme

Les Guignols de l’info is a puppet-based satire

programme which emulates the United King-

dom’s Spitting Image. Broadcast nightly on the

pay-TV channel Canal Plus in an unencrypted

form, it pokes fun at politicians, media per-

sonalities and show-business stars. It is

watched by a smaller, younger and more left-

wing audience than its competitor on TF1, the

Bébête-Show. During the 1995 presidential

campaign the possible electoral impact of the

programme’s portrayal of the leading candi-

dates became a topic of media and political

debate. The format of Les Guignols has been

exported to other countries with considerable

success.

RAYMOND KUHN

Further reading

European Commission (1995) Social Protec-

tion in Europe, Luxembourg: Office for

Official Publications of the European Com-

munities (a wide-ranging review covering

current debates on social protection).

Wilsford, D. (1991) ‘The Continuity of Crisis:

Patterns of Heath Care Policymaking in

France, 1978–1988’, in J.S.Ambler (ed.)

The French Welfare State. Surviving Social

and Ideological Change, New York and

London: New York University Press (a

thorough analysis of an important period

of change in the development of the French

health care system).

Hersant, Robert

b. 1920, France;

d. 1996

Press baron

A controversial right-wing figure, Hersant suc-

cessfully circumvented anti-concentration leg-

islation, and in the early 1990s controlled

roughly 30 per cent of French dailies, includ-

ing Le Figaro, France-Soir and numerous re-

gional titles, as well as advertising agencies,

printing plants and radio stations. Despite a

suspect past and wartime collaboration, he

held political office locally and nationally. His

newspaper career began with the creation of

the successful motorists’ monthly L’Auto-

Journal in 1950. He built his empire by buy-

ing up and ruthlessly restructuring or merging

newspapers in difficulty (over fifty titles in

Hersant, Robert

286

forty years). His holdings extended to Bel-

gium, Spain and eastern Europe.

PAM MOORES

See also: advertising; national press in France;

regional press in France

Heure de vérité, L’

Television programme

A current affairs programme which started in

1982. Broadcast on Antenne 2 (later France

2) the format was based on a studio interview

between a leading politician and three jour-

nalists. The peculiarity of the programme lay

in its use of public opinion as an active ele-

ment in the discussion. For example, from

1985 onwards the programme included an

instant audience opinion poll on the views

expressed by politicians, concluding with a

verdict on their ability to produce convincing

arguments.

RAYMOND KUHN

Further reading

Marshall, B. (1996) Guy Hocquenghem, Lon-

don: Pluto (essential reading).

horse racing

French horse racing is dominated by its state-

run and café-based system of pool betting, the

Pari Mutuel Urbain (PMU), which forbids pri-

vate bookmaking. The weekly gambling high-

light is the televised Sunday tiercé, a 1–2–3

forecast bet which attracts some 8 million

punters. This may focus on anything from a

humble handicap to one of the great events in

the racing calendar, such as the Prix de

l’Amérique (a showcase for French trotting,

the country’s most popular form of racing),

Heure de vérité, L’

287

or the culmination of the European flat-rac-

ing season, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.

PHILIP DINE

Further reading

INSEE (1993) ‘Cadre de vie’, La Société

française: données sociales 1993, Paris:

INSEE, (a collection of informative contri-

butions covering various aspects of hous-

ing in France).

Humanité, L’

Newspaper

Originally a Socialist newspaper, founded in

1904 by Jean Jaurès, it became Communist in

1920, and has been the official newspaper of

the French Communist Party since 1923. Its

Humanité, L’