Alex Hughes. Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

458

of readers aged 50 and over (46.5 per cent)

than Parisian papers (35.3 per cent) and a low

proportion of readers aged 35 and below (28.6

per cent as opposed to 36.6 per cent).

It is worth making a final point with re-

gard to the distribution of newspapers in

France: they are virtually never delivered to

readers’ homes by newsagents (although of

course they can be obtained by subscription

through the post). Distribution difficulties

probably account for the scarcity of Sunday

papers both in Paris (two titles only) and in

the provinces, where only twenty-two titles are

available, selling a total of just over 3 million

copies.

ALAN PEDLEY

See also: national press in France; regionalism

Further reading

Albert, P. (1990) La Presse française, Paris:

La Documentation Française.

Cayrol, R. (1991) Les Médias, Paris: PUF.

Mathien, M. (1986) La Presse quotidienne

régionale, Paris: PUF (a short but compre-

hensive guide).

regional writing: Breton

The dominant current in literature in Breton,

from the 1920s to the 1970s, has been the Skol

Walarn, the brainchild and lifelong struggle

of Roparz Hemon, associated with his review,

Gwalarn, and its successor Al Liamm. Hemon

denounced clichés of sacrifice and faith, the

stereotype of a primitive, rural, Catholic other.

He called for a national literature open to the

modern world, a literature modern in all re-

spects, that would make Breton worthy of be-

ing part and parcel of European culture. It

would have to be written not in imitation of

village speech but in a literary form intelligi-

ble to all educated readers of Breton, a high-

culture tongue capable of functioning in all

the ways that French is wont to do.

Fañch Elies (Abeozen), Hemon and

Maodez Glanndour are the leading poets.

Hemon’s Barzhonegoù (Poems) contain noble

meditations on the destiny of the warrior and

the poet who struggle for the eternal Brittany.

Glanndour composes powerful, complex, rich

Christian verse which evokes the simple, quo-

tidian reality of Breton life, always suffused

with the sacred, and calls for overcoming

worldly deception through a quest of the spirit

to God. Anjela Duval, a peasant who began

to write in her fifties, in Kan an douar (Song

of the Earth) and Traoñ an dour (The Dale of

Water), displays comparable mastery in por-

traying Dinglichkeit. The ‘1960s poets’ cre-

ated a literature of postmodernism: a turning

away from high art towards a more popular

rebellion. Paol Keineg’s Barzhonegoù-trakt

(Tract Poems), Mojennoù gwir (True Stories),

and Iwerzhon ar C’hreistez, Iwerzhon an

Hanternoz (Southern Ireland, Northern Ire-

land) contain dense, powerful, nightmare evo-

cations of insanity and physical torture, the

poet’s lot and the lot of his fellow Celts.

In the immediate postwar years, the lead-

ing novelists were Youenn Drezen, whose 1940

Itron Varia Garmez (Our Lady of Carmel) is a

strike novel in the line of Zola, the hero of

which is a would-be artist who cannot com-

plete his sculpture, held back by political in-

justice and his own illness. The three-volume

1972–4 Skol-louarn Veig Trebern (Little Hervé

Trebern Plays Hookey) recounts in the pica-

resque mode the adventures of two 8-year-olds,

in about 1910, who enjoy a month-long tru-

ancy from school. Hemon wrote Nenn Jani in

the realist mode, telling of little people leading

little lives in Brest; Tangi Kerviler in the fan-

tastic and utopian register, and Mari-Vorgan

(The Mermaid), a powerful, symbolic evocation

of a ship’s doctor (the unreliable homodiegetic

narrator) who goes mad, under the sway of pas-

sion for a hallucinatory creature who may or

may not be real. More recently, Per Denez plays

with narrative structures and furthers a trend

towards something approaching magical real-

ism in the 1979 Diougan Gwenc’hlan

(Gwenc’hlan’s Prophecy), a tale of a modern

regional writing: Breton

459

man possessed by the ghost of an ancestor, and

Blue Like Blue Eyes Which Were Not My Own

(Glas evel daoulagad c’hlas na oant ket ma

re), a powerful story of murder, obsession and

madness.

The theatre has traditionally played a vital

role in Brittany. Jarl Priel and Hemon com-

posed a number of plays. The most brilliant

dramatist, however, is Pierre-Jakez Hélias, fa-

mous for his ‘testimony’ The Horse of Pride

(Le Cheval d’orgueil). Hélias’s dramas, first

performed and published in French, include

finely crafted demystifications of rural life such

as Mevel ar Gosker (The Top Hand of Kosker

Farm) and Katrina Lenn-zu (Katrina of the

Black Pond), and poetic visions for today of

history and legend, like An Isild a-heul (The

Second Iseult).

WILLIAM CALIN

See also: regional writing: Occitan; regional-

ism

Further reading

Denez, P. (1971) ‘Modern Breton Literature,’

in J.E.Caerwyn Williams (ed.) Literature in

Celtic Countries, Cardiff: University of

Wales Press (an informative and commit-

ted essay).

Favereau, F. (1991) Littérature et écrivains

bretonnants depuis 1945, in Skol Vreizh 20

(the most complete and up-to-date survey,

with a full bibliography).

Galand, R. (1990) Stratégie de la lecture, New

York: P.Lang (perceptive essays on Breton

and French literature).

Movannou, F. and Piriou, Y.-B. (1987) ‘La

Littérature de langue bretonne au XXe siècle’,

in J.Balcou and Y.Le Gallo (eds) Histoire

littéraire et culturelle de la Bretagne, Paris:

Champion, vol. 3, pp. 175–252 (elegant pres-

entation, especially for the earlier periods).

regional writing: Occitan

Literature in Occitan (Provençal) since World

War II is of a quality and richness unequalled

since the age of the troubadours. The leading

writers from southern France have, in general,

adhered to the programme enunciated by the

Institut d’Estudis Occitans (Institute for

Occitan Studies) associated with the review

Oc. In brief, the new writing is grounded in

modernity: realist and post-realist novels of

modern life; hard, arcane poetry in the line of

Valéry and Perse; and a serious modern thea-

tre treating serious questions in a modern way.

Implied is the repudiation of folklore and nos-

talgia for a Catholic, rural past, the latter as-

sociated with the Provençal epigones who

claim the heritage of Mistral and the Felibrige.

Two of the leading poets are René Nelli and

Bernard Manciet. Nelli’s 1981 Òbra poëtica

occitana (Poetical Works in Occitan) is a medi-

tation on fin’ amor (courtly love) and

Catharism, with the accompanying alienation,

longing and terror, wrought in a new Medi-

terranean classicism, a fusion of antiquity and

the high art of the troubadours. Manciet’s

masterpiece is the 1989 Enterrament a Sabres

(Burial in Sabres), a magnificent, baroque evo-

cation of an old lady in the village, one-half

Gascon notable, one-half local witch, and her

fierce erotic and intellectual duel with God,

an encounter highlighting the village, the

Gascon people, and the history of the race.

Since 1968, one trend has been a more simple,

populist, rhetorical and politically committed

‘Poetry of Decolonization’, best represented in

the work of Yves Rouquette and his brother,

Jean Larzac. Larzac, an ordained priest, de-

claims against French capitalism and Paris; he

also utters, in powerful sacred verse, his de-

sire for the absent God Unknown.

By general accord, Jean Boudou (Joan

Bodon) is the best of the novelists. La Grava

sul camin (The Gravel on the Roadbed) tells,

in the behaviourist mode of Hemingway or

Camus, the botched life of a young farm la-

bourer returned from the camps in Germany.

No less powerful is the first person story of an

intellectual dying of cancer in Lo Libre dels

grands jorns (The Book of the Last Days). In

this novel and in La Santa Estèla del Centenari

(The Felibrige Centennial), however, Boudou

regional writing: Occitan

460

breaks away from realism into a more fantas-

tic mode comparable to magical realism. Simi-

larly, Robert Lafont, after Vida de Joan

Larsinhac (The Life of Jean Larsignac), a stark

tale of urban realism, in L’Icòna dins l’iscla

(The Icon on the Island), writes a futurist post-

nuclear holocaust fantasy, recounting the hor-

rible life and death of some of the last Europe-

ans on a Greek island near Crete. His master-

piece, nevertheless, is the 1983 La Festa (The

Festival), a two-volume nouveau roman lo-

cated in both the eighteenth and twentieth cen-

turies and spanning much of European topog-

raphy and history. The youngest novelist is

Jean-Claude Forêt, whose 1990 La Peira

d’asard (The Stone of Chance), also a form of

nouveau roman, is composed in three distinct

languages: modern literary Languedocian, spo-

ken northern Auvergnat and standard medi-

eval Occitan.

The theatre remains inevitably the most dif-

ficult genre to conquer in a minority language.

Lafont is the leading dramatist, with a number

of fine plays in Occitan, such as La Loba (The

She-Wolf), retelling the story of the troubadour

Peire Vidal, and others in French and Occitan,

dramas in the modern style, like La Croisade

(The Crusade), with a political message.

Writers in the Provençal or Felibrige or

Mistralian school include the poet Max-

Philippe Delavouët, author of the five-volume

Pouèmo, and the novelists Bernard Giély and

Charles Galtier.

WILLIAM CALIN

See also: Catholicism and Protestantism; re-

gional writing: Breton; regionalism

Further reading

Gardy, P. (1992) Une Écriture en archipel,

Élise-neuve-d’Isaac: Fédérop (essays by a

leading academic critic and scholar).

Kirsch, F.P. (1965) Studien zur languedokischen

und gaskognischen Literatur der Gegenwart,

Vienna, Braumüller (study of the non-Medi-

terranean strain in the tradition).

Lafont, R. and Anatole, C. (1970) Nouvelle

Histoire de la littérature occitane, 2 vols,

Paris, PUF (the standard modern literary

history).

regionalism

Regionalism has been a constant element of

French political and cultural discourse for the

past half-century, reflecting a long-standing

opposition between capital and provinces, be-

tween governing and governed. It is also the

focus for an unresolved debate about the dic-

tates of national unity and the demands for

individual and local freedoms.

It is a commonplace of modern French his-

tory that successive governments have re-

garded the concept of la république une et in-

divisible as sacrosanct. Whether its purpose

was to weld together the constituent parts of

a country as geographically, culturally and lin-

guistically diverse as France or to assert na-

tional identity in the face of the monolithic

power blocks of the United States and the So-

viet Union, the indivisible Republic symbol-

ized the coming-together of state and nation.

The legacy of historic centralization,

brought about by the age-old concentration

of political and economic power in Paris, can

be found in the rigidly hierarchical adminis-

trative system founded after the Revolution of

1789. The establishment of the commune as

the basic unit of French administration, to-

gether with the département as the main terri-

torial division, formed the basis of a central-

ized system of administration which changed

little until well after the end of World War II.

The appointment to each département of a

préfet as the authoritative representative of

central government imposed a quasi-military

discipline on the relationship between the capi-

tal and the provinces, ensuring that the term

administration locale was more appropriate

than gouvernement local.

The stability of a predominantly rural

population meant that, until World War II,

there was little pressure for change. From

1945 onwards, however, unprecedented

regionalism

461

population growth, together with industrial

advances, began to lay bare the uneven eco-

nomic development of the provinces. In the

thirty years (les trente glorieuses) from 1946

to 1975, the population grew from 40.5 mil-

lion to 52.75 million. The dramatic increases

in living standards during this period, how-

ever, tended to mask regional imbalances. As

the period of expansion drew to a close in the

mid-1970s, the first signs of a determination

to proclaim regional identities, as opposed to

a single national identity, began to emerge. Re-

gions such as Brittany, underindustrialized and

with a surplus of farm labour, and the south,

suffering from foreign competition in agricul-

ture and with declining traditional industries,

were those in which the impetus for change

and the assertion of regional identity were

most in evidence.

The first concerted initiatives for regional

reform were private ventures: the grouping-

together of local chambers of commerce such

as the Comité d’Étude et de Liaison des Intérêts

Bretons (CELIB) in 1952 was widely imitated,

and was rapidly followed by the official rec-

ognition of Comités d’Expansion Économique.

The impact of these comités was sufficient to

bring about a new territorial division, super-

imposed on the departmental system, of

twenty-two circonscriptions d’action régionale,

eventually to be called, simply, regions.

It is clear that the impetus behind the

changes, which were not accompanied by any

attempt to democratize local decision-making,

was essentially economic, and gave currency

to the phrase l’aménagement du territoire

(town and country planning). However, the

period since the mid-1950s has also seen the

resurgence of a belief in regional identity. Geo-

graphically peripheral regions such as Brittany,

Alsace, Provence, the Basque country and Cor-

sica have seen a ground swell of support for,

and pride in, local and regional values and

traditions.

The failure of the state to respond to the

aspirations which such values represent was

perhaps one element of the social and politi-

cal turbulence of May 1968. De Gaulle’s fail-

ure to advance the cause of regional reform in

the referendum-cum-plebiscite of 1969 led not

only to his own political demise but to a dec-

ade of inaction. However, following François

Mitterrand’s victory in the presidential elec-

tion of 1981, and the decision to place regional

reform at the heart of his legislative pro-

gramme, the pace of reform quickened. The

law of July 1982 enshrined two major inno-

vations: the principle of direct election to re-

gional assemblies, and the curtailment of the

power of the préfet, whose role was limited to

an a posteriori evaluation of the legitimacy of

local decisions. The attribution of a statut

particulier (special statute) for Corsica, pro-

viding for generous representation on its re-

gional assembly, and for Paris, Lyon and Mar-

seille, offering directly elected conseils

d’arrondissements (district councils), com-

pleted the main elements of the reform. These

latter measures also ensured that, for the first

time in postwar France, a breach was created

in the principle of la république indivisible.

It should be noted that these reforms, for

all their genuinely innovatory features, did not

release the hitherto untapped sources of en-

thusiasm and dynamism among the electorate

that had been predicted at the time of their

promulgation. Neither can it be said, however,

that the major political shifts signalled by the

legislative elections of 1993 and presidential

election of 1995 revealed a desire to roll back

the reforms of the 1980s, widely seen as a

sensible modernization of an archaic and

overly rigid system. Indeed, it may reasonably

be claimed that the relationship between Paris

and the regions has undergone its first signifi-

cant modification for two centuries. The role

of the European Union in seeking to promote

inter-regional contact and co-operation, both

within and across national boundaries, seems

likely to attenuate further the influence of

France’s historic centralization.

PETER WAGSTAFF

See also: agriculture; constitution of the Fifth

Republic; demographic developments; lan-

guage and the French regions; regional eco-

nomic development; regional writing: Breton;

regional writing: Occitan

regionalism

462

Further reading

Bodineau, P. and Verpeaux, M. (1993)

Histoire de la décentralisation, Paris: PUF

(a broad-ranging but useful summary).

Scargill, I. (1995) ‘L’Aménagement du

territoire: the great debate’, Modern and

Contemporary France, NS3, 1 (an analysis

of the prospects for regional development

until the end of the twentieth century and

beyond).

Schmidt, V.A. (1990) Democratizing France:

The Political and Administrative History of

Decentralization, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press (a meticulous assessment

of the origins of the centralization/decen-

tralization debate).

Wagstaff, P. (1994) ‘Regionalism in France’,

Europa, 1, 2/3 (a survey of the relationship

between Paris and the provinces, and a con-

sideration of the impact of European Un-

ion regional policy).

Reinhardt, Django

b. 1910, Charleroi, Belgium;

d. 1953, Fontainebleau

Musician and composer,

real name Jean-Baptiste Reinhardt

Reinhardt, who led the Quintette du Hot Club

de France (1934–9), devised his singular tech-

nique on guitar after losing two fingers of his

left hand in a childhood accident. The success

of the Quintette’s swing sound played off

Reinhardt’s gypsy-prince charisma against the

lush melodics of Stéphane Grappelli’s violin,

as in the classic Nuages. After touring the

United States in 1946 at the invitation of Duke

Ellington, Reinhardt toured throughout Eu-

rope with a new Quintette until he died of a

stroke at the age of 43.

STEVEN UNGAR

Further reading

Delaunay, C. (1982) Django Reinhardt, New

York: Da Capo (biography).

Fairweather, D. (1995) ‘Django Reinhardt’, in

I.Carr, D.Fairweather and and B.Priestley

(eds) Jazz: The Rough Guide, New York:

Penguin (contextualizing introduction).

Renaud

b. 1952, Paris

Singer-songwriter and actor,

real name Renaud Séchan

In turn anarchistic, irreverent and amusing,

this left-wing exponent of contemporary

French slang—in songs which often espouse

the cause of the working class and the under-

privileged—projects the image of a latter-day

Aristide Bruant, of an urban hooligan who can

also be considered to be the creator of an im-

ported form of song, the suburban western.

Successes include Hexagone (France), Miss

Maggie (an attack on Margaret Thatcher) and

Morgane de toi (In Love with You). Renaud

played the role of Lantier in Berri’s Germinal.

IAN PICKUP

Further reading

Loriot, N. (1993) Madeleine Renaud, Paris:

Presse de la Renaissance.

Renoir, Jean

b. 1894, Paris;

d. 1979, Beverly Hills, USA

Director

Renoir’s great period in film-making predates

World War II. However, in the 1950s, he was

canonized by the Cahiers du cinema group as

an auteur and his reputation as a reference

point in contemporary cinema marks him out

as an ongoing influence.

The son of Auguste Renoir (whose paint-

ings he sold in order to finance film projects

he had difficulty funding), critics have per-

sisted in seeing the influence of the father in

his film images. In fact, Renoir is far more in

the realist tradition and he has been hailed,

justifiably, as the precursor of neo-realism. In

this respect, Renoir preferred location shoot-

ing to studio wherever possible, and synchro-

nized rather than post-synch sound. He mostly

avoided stars, and worked with professional

and non-professional actors with equal ease.

In terms of production practices, he believed

in the principle of collective team work (thus,

for example, actors would learn to wield cam-

eras, camera operators would have small act-

ing parts, and so on). These hallmarks to his

films and production practices are ones that

readily identify his work as belonging to a

French tradition that still holds sway today

and which has been particularly influential

with Nouvelle Vague film-makers.

A pacifist, humanist and man of the Left,

Renoir made what could be termed a moral

cinema, one that asks us to examine our own

sets of values and prejudices. His prewar films

are especially enlightened in their observations

of the working and proletarian classes. Toni

(1934), Le Crime de M Lange (1935) and La

Bête humaine (1938) are among some of his

most sensitive treatments of the struggles and

hardships of these classes and also reveal the

solidarity of the working classes in an

unheroized way. Sexuality, desire and love’s

potential to exacerbate as well as heal divi-

sions between the sexes are key issues in all

his films. Renoir was also a great champion

of Republican ideals and his films have con-

sistently analysed human behaviour, particu-

larly in relation to class and to individual as

well as group aspirations, such as La Vie est a

nous (1936) and La Marseillaise (1937). His

most controversial films—La Grande Illusion

(1937) and La Règle du jeu (1939)—examine

questions of class boundaries and the artifi-

cial nature of national identities. Both were

condemned by the authorities in 1940 as de-

moralizing and pacifist and banned during the

Occupation.

Renoir went to Hollywood after the Occu-

pation of France by Germany. He became an

American citizen in 1944, although he re-

tained dual citizenship. Of the 37 films he

made during his career, 13 were made post-

war and of those only 5 were made in France.

The most successful of these attest to his con-

tinuing love of the theatre and group work—

French Cancan (1954) and Le Petit Théâtre

de Jean Renoir (1969). As a testimony to his

international status among film-makers, he

was awarded an Oscar for life achievement

in 1975.

SUSAN HAYWARD

renovation projects

Architectural and urban conservation is an

area of cultural affairs in which France can

renovation projects

464

claim to have established a ‘model and exem-

plar’ for other European countries to follow

(see Kain 1982, 1993). At the end of World

War II, France had already enjoyed almost

exactly a century of European supremacy in

this field, during which one of the first Euro-

pean ‘lists’ of protected historic buildings was

drawn up (1837) and the idea of extending

protection to the buildings and streets which

surrounded a listed building was first enacted

(Kain 1986).

In the immediate post-World War II period,

France, in common with most other European

countries, suffered chronic housing shortages

(due in part to the fact that about a quarter of

the total housing stock was either war-dam-

aged or destroyed). The 1950s solution was

‘comprehensive redevelopment’ involving

slum removal and rehousing in the now noto-

rious grands ensembles of high-rise apartments

on the peripheries of cities (see Scargill 1983;

Pariset 1991). Properties demolished could be

both slum housing in social amenity terms and

of significant historical and/or architectural

value, notwithstanding their run-down physi-

cal condition.

It was against this background of the mass

destruction of the historic quarters of French

cities in the name of housing improvement

that, in 1962—at precisely the time that this

activity was at its apogee—the French govern-

ment once again enacted reforms which were

radical not only for France but for the whole

of Europe (see Kain 1981). An act, known

since as the Malraux act after André Malraux

(then Minister of Cultural Affairs, and its chief

sponsor), provided for the designation of

secteurs sauvegardés (conservation zones)

within historic towns and gave powers for

state intervention to enhance their historic

qualities.

The Malraux act involved much more than

the mere repair and preservation of old build-

ings. It also envisaged the demolition of eye-

sores within secteurs sauvegardés; the conver-

sion of old buildings to adapt them to modern

uses; the upgrading of housing by providing

baths, sanitation and proper sewage disposal;

the management of traffic and parking; and,

most radically, provision for the integration

of new buildings with the old where restora-

tion was not practicable. Of fundamental sig-

nificance were attempts to introduce new eco-

nomic activities to help retain populations and

provide some positive functional role for

secteurs sauvegardés within the wider urban

context. It was certainly not the intention that

they become open-air museums of historic ar-

chitecture, but that their historic qualities be

retained in a restructured functional context.

From the perspective of today we can judge

that the secteur sauvegardé approach to ur-

ban and architectural conservation, while un-

doubtedly producing some spectacular indi-

vidual beauties, has not brought about the

general renaissance of the French urban past

that André Malraux had planned. Designation

has been slow (only some 75 secteurs

sauvegardés exist out of about 400 initially

envisaged), and the work of enhancement has

progressed equally slowly and has been

dogged by political problems, not least the fact

that local communities had little say in what

the central, Paris-based authorities intended to

happen in each town. There has also been

equally powerful popular political protest at

the social changes that conservation in secteurs

sauvegardés encouraged. However, any criti-

cism should take account of the fact that the

political and economic worlds of the present

and thirty years ago are very different, par-

ticularly in the sense that the threats to his-

toric quarters of towns today come less from

the comprehensive redevelopers than from the

inexorable processes of physical decay fuelled

by economic stagnation and decline in inner-

city areas. Nevertheless, the very limited pub-

lic participation and an equally low order of

local input to the decision-making process in

secteurs sauvegardés are now politically un-

acceptable (Tuppen 1988).

In 1975, in what proved to be an analysis

of the first importance, Nora and Eveno

(1976) reported to the French government

that, despite all the attempts in the thirty years

since the end of World War II, 39 per cent of

the national housing stock was still substand-

ard. Their report underlined the (perhaps not

renovation projects

465

unexpected) fact that it was the lowest income

sector of the population, particularly the eld-

erly, who suffered the worst conditions and

who were effectively trapped. Nora and Eveno

highlighted the scale of the reservoir of old,

and often ‘historic’ housing stock for rehabili-

tation, and argued for rehabilitation rather

than renewal on social and economic grounds,

as well as for reasons of cultural heritage con-

servation.

The indictment of the failings of postwar

housing improvement in France by the Nora-

Eveno report and the recognition of the politi-

cal opposition and the social problems conse-

quent on the secteur sauvegardé approach

brought about a radical change of government

policy in the late 1970s. First, in 1976, a new

single body, the Fonds d’Aménagement

Urbain, was instituted to be responsible for

the administration of all government funding

of urban works; part of its brief was to estab-

lish a socially just approach to restoration.

Opérations Programmées d’Amélioration de

l’Habitat (OPAH) introduced in 1977 were

designed both to avoid the local opposition

which was slowing down work so much in

the secteurs sauvegardés and to do something

more in quantitative terms to improve the

poor housing stock of French towns. The aims

of OPAH are much more modest than those

of the secteurs sauvegardés, and the areas they

cover much smaller—perhaps about 300

dwellings on average. Gone also is the sweep-

ing curetage of ‘alien’ structures built in re-

cent times to return a secteur sauvegardé to a

‘pure’ state in which it was known to have (or

more likely imagined to have) existed at a par-

ticular time in its past. Instead, the object with

OPAH is to upgrade existing buildings to

statutory norms of amenity and effect neces-

sary structural repairs to buildings, providing

that the continued survival of the indigenous

population can be assured (see Kain 1993).

In practice, however, reality does not match

up to these ideals. The voluntary principle

which underpins them means that municipali-

ties can declare OPAH but are not obliged to

do so. Furthermore, even where an OPAH has

been declared, owners are not required to do

work on their properties. In the three OPAH

of Bordeaux, for example, Michel Genty

(1989) finds that all the restoration activity of

the 1980s has resulted in only a modest

number of rehabilitations of low-rented dwell-

ings. By contrast, some 500 dwellings a year

for uncontrolled letting have been produced

and this process is bringing about substantial

changes in the socioeconomic structure of

these historic areas. In place of low-income

families, there is a temporary and transient

population of students, single people and

childless couples who value a city-centre liv-

ing environment, appreciate the historic aura

engendered by the old buildings and are pre-

pared and able to pay for it. Plus ça change?

ROGER KAIN

Further reading

Genty, M. (1989) ‘Stratégies immobilières et

mutations résidentielles dans les quartiers

historiques de Bordeaux’, Revue

Géographique des Pyrénées et du Sud-

Ouest 60 (detailed historical piece).

Kain, R.J.P. (1982) ‘Europe’s Model and Ex-

emplar Still?—The French Approach to

Urban Conservation, 1962–1981’, Town

Planning Review 55.

——(1986) ‘Développement des politiques de

restauration du patrimoine historique des

villes d’Europe occidentale’, in P.Claval

(ed.) Géographie Historique des Villes

d’Europe Occidentale, Paris: Université de

Paris-Sorbonne.

——(1993) ‘Conserving the cultural heritage

of historic buildings and towns in France

since 1945’ in M.Cook (ed.) French Cul-

ture since 1945, Exeter: University of Ex-

eter Press, (a well-illustrated overview).

Nora, P. and Eveno, B. (1976) L’Amélioration

de l’habitat ancien, Paris: La Documenta-

tion Française (a government publication

that led to major social and policy discus-

sion.)

Pariset, J.-D. (1991) Reconstructions et

renovation projects

466

modernisations: la France après les ruines

1918…1945…, Paris: Archives Nationales.

Scargill, I. (1983) Urban France, London:

Croom Helm (a study of urban France).

Tuppen, J. (1988) France Under Recession

1981–1986, Basingstoke: Macmillan (a

study of social conditions).

Resnais, Alain

b. 1922, Vannes

Director

Resnais’s use of close-ups, tracking shots and

subjective montage makes his style among the

most distinctive in contemporary French cin-

ema. He has always worked from pre-written

screenplays—a metteur-en-scène in the full

sense of the word—in which the exploration

of time, place, memory and imagination looms

large. Those factors, of course, are associated

not only with the Nouvelle Vague, of whom

Resnais is a close cousin, but also with the

nouveau roman, and it is not surprising that

his first two feature films, after a remarkable

series of documentaries including the harrow-

ing concentration-camp record Nuit et

Brouillard (1955), should have been scripted

by nouveaux romanciers. Hiroshima man

amour (1959) adapts a Marguerite Duras

screenplay about a French actor whose love

affair with a Japanese in Hiroshima rekindles

the memory of her German lover, killed dur-

ing the war. If the audacious equation of per-

sonal with historical trauma is Durassian, the

slow tempo of filming, and cuts back and forth

between remembered past and lived present,

became recognized as Resnais’s trademarks.

Last Year in Marienbad (L’Année dernière a

Marienbad) of 1961, from a Robbe-Grillet

script, carries the earlier film’s experimenta-

tion with time several stages further, to the

point where past, present and future, remem-

bered and imagined, cease to be clearly distin-

guishable. The flurry of possible interpreta-

tions this provoked contributed as much as

the unforgettable performance of Delphine

Seyrig to the film’s reputation.

Resnais’s subsequent work has often had a

more overtly political dimension, as with

Muriel (1963), dealing with among other

things the aftermath of the Algerian war, or

La Guerre est finie (1966), in which Yves

Montand plays a disabused Spanish Republi-

can veteran. He has tackled the problems

posed by accelerated social mobility in Giscard

d’Estaing’s France (Mon oncle d’Amérique,

with Depardieu, in 1980), the question of the

boundary between life and death (L’Amour a

mort in 1984) and latterly adaptations of

bourgeois theatre (1986’s Mélo, after Henri

Bernstein, and the Alan Ayckbourn-scripted

duo Smoking/No Smoking of 1993). His cur-

rent companion Sabine Azéma has prominent

roles in the three last-named.

For all this wide range of subject matter,

Resnais’s films are generally instantly recog-

nizable as his. No other film-maker is quite so

readily associated with the inescapability and

elusiveness of memory, a theme dominant in

contemporary French culture, as the obsession

with the Occupation and Resistance and the

centrality of psychoanalysis both show (in dif-

ferent ways). By turns solemn and humorous,

his films almost always repay repeated

viewings.

KEITH READER

Further reading

Higgins, L.A. (1996) New Novel, New Wave,

New Politics, Lincoln and London: Univer-

sity of Nebraska Press (this integrates

Resnais’s earlier work suggestively with the

cultural and political climate of its period ).

Monaco, J. (1978) Alain Resnais, London and

New York: Secker and Warburg/Oxford

University Press (a well-documented study

of the role of imagination).

Oms, M. (1988) Alain Resnais, Paris and

Marseille: Rivages (a handy guide with full

cinematography and bibliography).

Resnais, Alain

467

restaurant guides

The first and most famous of France’s restau-

rant guides was the red Guide Michelin, which

made its first appearance in 1900 and whose

annual awarding of stars up to a maximum of

three still causes much suspense and heart-

searching. Michelin was long associated with

the rich traditional style of la haute cuisine, to

which the polemical embracing of nouvelle

cuisine by the Guide Gault-Millau (founded

in 1972) represented something of a riposte.

Gault-Millau awards toques (chef’s hats) up

to a maximum of four, along with marks out

of twenty. Unlike Michelin, which contents it-

self with a brief list of the principal dishes of

each listed restaurant, Gault-Millau provides

often lengthy discursive accounts of the speci-

alities, atmosphere, decor and development of

its choices. A more recent wave of guides ca-

tering for the young and/or financially chal-

lenged includes the ‘Petit futé’ series, dealing

not only with restaurants but also with shops,

accommodation and a variety of services on a

town-by-town basis, and the ‘Guides du

routard’, whose Liberation-like use of lan-

guage and happy-go-lucky cover designs clearly

target the discriminating backpacker market.

Other noteworthy guides include the Bottin

gourmand (founded in 1983), the Guide Kléber

(1954–82) and that produced by the motoring

magazine, Auto-Journal, available from news-

stands rather than booksellers. However, the

unquestioned market leaders would appear to

be Michelin, with a circulation of 500,000, and

Gault-Millau (200,000).

KEITH READER