Alex Hughes. Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture
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508
PHIL POWRIE
See also: cinema
Further reading
Morin, E. (1961) The Stars, New York: Grove
Press (a standard introduction; originally
published in French in 1957).
street papers
Macadam Journal, Le Réverbère, La Rue and
Faim de siècle, launched in rapid succession
in 1993, followed by Le Lampadaire in 1994,
are the main French street papers, commonly
referred to as la presse SDF. SDF means peo-
ple sans domicile fixe (of no fixed abode).
These alternative newspapers, championing
the cause of the homeless, are sold in the
streets by homeless vendors in return for a per-
centage of the cover price, normally 60 per
cent. Their aim is to provide a source of rev-
enue, and act as an instrument of social inte-
gration for vendors, giving them self-respect
and facilitating contacts with the public.
PAM MOORES
See also: restaurants du coeur
structuralism
An influential intellectual movement dominant
in France from the late 1950s to the early
1970s. The origins of structuralism are multi-
ple, and some commentators (such as Piaget
and Serres) rightly insist on its transdisciplinary
basis (e.g. in physics, mathematics and biology).
However, the main path of assimilation of
structuralism into the human sciences in France
was via linguistic theory, and in this version at
least it could more precisely be called linguistic
structuralism.
The basic elements of linguistic structural-
ism can be found in the pioneering work of the
Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the
Course in General Linguistics (Cours de
linguistique générale), published in 1916.
Saussure distinguished between two aspects or
levels of language, langue and parole. Parole
refers to the external and contingent aspect of
language production in activities such as speech
and writing, while langue—the principal ob-
ject of linguistic science—is the set of patterns
or rules which precedes and makes possible
the realization of language in parole. For
Saussure, langue is a system, in which it is the
relations between elements, and not the ele-
ments themselves, that are responsible for
meaning. On the semantic level, an individual
word (e.g. ‘horse’) only makes sense in terms
of its difference from other, related concepts
(e.g. donkey, ass, unicorn, automobile, etc.).
On the phonetic level, difference of meaning is
generated by the substitution of minimally dis-
tinct units of sound: ‘horse’, ‘Norse’, ‘course’,
etc. From this differential explanation of sig-
nification follows the central postulate of
Saussure’s linguistic theory, the arbitrariness
of the sign. Word and concept (or ‘signifier’
and ‘signified’) have no essential connection
other than their habitual association within the
system of langue. An important aspect of
Saussure’s distinction between langue and pa-
role is that it also implies a distinction between
the individual and the collective. Saussure re-
iterates that langue is by nature a social con-
struct, whereas parole, the exercise or execu-
tion of langue, is individual and variable.
Probably the most important mediation of
Saussurean linguistics in postwar French
thought came from the anthropologist Claude
Lévi-Strauss. Inspired by the phonological
theory of the Russian linguist Roman
Jakobson, in his first book, The Elementary
Structures of Kinship (Les Structures
élémentaires de la parenté), Lévi-Strauss argued
that it is possible to isolate a small number of
elementary and invariant structures from which
the diversity of observable kinship structures
might be derived. He then went on to extend
his application of the linguistic model to other
areas of social life. Already in the Cours
Saussure had indicated that linguistics dealt
street papers
509
with only one of a number of sign systems used
in human society, and for this reason he sug-
gested that the study of language should ulti-
mately be part of a more general science of
signs—semiology. Lévi-Strauss developed this
idea in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de
France in 1960, where he defined social an-
thropology as a semiology, that is, the study
of signs in social life. The different social prac-
tices and institutions studied by anthropolo-
gists are homologous in that, like language,
they are symbolic systems with their own in-
herent significations, ensuring communication
between members of the group. Social phenom-
ena as diverse as kinship structures, totemism
or myth could therefore be analysed in the same
way as a language. Lévi-Strauss’s most elabo-
rate application of the linguistic model can be
found in his extensive work on myth, most
remarkably in the four-volume cycle
Mythologiques, published between 1964 and
1971. According to Lévi-Strauss, traditional
interpretations of myth concentrated on the
meaning of isolated elements or themes,
whereas each myth should be considered as
an integrated system. Just as linguists isolated
the minimal constitutive units of language
(phonemes, morphemes, etc.), so the mytholo-
gist could isolate the most basic elements of a
myth (mythemes). As a system, the significa-
tion of the myth came not from any individual
element or mytheme, but from the differential
relations between these elements, more pre-
cisely their mode of combination. As in lan-
guage, this combination of elements was not
arbitrary, and followed certain definite rules.
The aim of structural analysis was therefore
to determine the rules of combination that
would constitute the structure of the myth.
An important feature of Lévi-Strauss’s defi-
nition of structure is that, like Saussure’s
langue, it is independent of the conscious in-
tentions and interpretations of the individual
member of the social group. This does not
mean that structure is unconscious in the
Freudian sense, that is, the subject of censor-
ship or repression; rather, it is unconscious in
the same way that the implicit rules of a lan-
guage are not conscious to the average speaker
of the language. As Lévi-Strauss asserted, it is
not individuals that speak through myths but
myths that speak through individuals.
Lévi-Strauss’s application of linguistic
theory to social and cultural formations caught
the imagination of a new generation of think-
ers in search of new models and more rigor-
ous methods of analysis. This was in a context
where the human sciences, and anthropology
in particular, were increasingly seen as a more
scientific alternative to the old humanism. Few
disciplines were left untouched by structural-
ist theory. In psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan’s
proposed return to Freud was combined with
a theory of the unconscious based on
Saussurean linguistics. In history, Fernand
Braudel described his analysis of long-term
social and economic trends as ‘structural his-
tory’. For the philosopher and historian Michel
Foucault, structuralism announced the disso-
lution of ‘man’, a comparatively recent con-
struct of Western philosophy and science. In
the field of literary studies, Roland Barthes
proposed a semiology of contemporary social
and cultural forms, applying structural analy-
sis to items of popular culture such as fashion
writing. Related to the linguistic turn in liter-
ary studies was a revival of interest in theories
of rhetoric and narrative discourse, which also
drew on the earlier work of the Russian For-
malists; this trend was evident in the work of
Genette, Greimas and Todorov.
The differences between thinkers catego-
rized as ‘structuralist’ were often very great,
and many of these thinkers themselves resisted
such assimilation and categorization. Signifi-
cantly, Lévi-Strauss was doubtful of the valid-
ity of applications of structural analysis to lit-
erature, considering this an inappropriate ex-
tension of methods specific to the object of his
own discipline, anthropology. Yet, despite such
restrictions, and despite the heterogeneity of
the thinkers involved, it can be said that dur-
ing the period in question structuralism became
the dominant paradigm in French intellectual
life. This success cannot be attributed solely to
the intrinsic merits of structuralist theory it-
self, which was open to criticism on a number
of levels, even in its original, Lévi-Straussian
structuralism
510
interpretation; it was equally a function of the
context in which structuralism first came to
prominence. As a movement, it participated
in the climate of reaction against the philo-
sophical humanism which had dominated in-
tellectual discussion in France since the war.
After the war, Jean-Paul Sartre’s version of
existentialism had emerged as the philosophy
most suited to the urgent moral questions—
questions of individual choice, responsibility
and commitment—which the experience of war
had rendered so immediate. However, as these
conflicts receded into the past and France pro-
ceeded along the path of postwar reconstruc-
tion, to many the solutions offered by existen-
tialism seemed less relevant and even inad-
equate to the moral, political and economic
complexities of the post-colonial world. In-
creasingly, intellectuals turned to the special-
ized knowledge of the human and social sci-
ences for answers which philosophy itself could
not provide. This was also a period of major
advances in the natural sciences, in new disci-
plines such as cybernetics, information theory
and molecular biology. The Sartrean version
of existentialism was primarily concerned with
the immediate experience of the individual sub-
ject in-the-world, rather than with scientific
objectifications of the world, the subject or the
society inhabited by the subject. As Lévi-Strauss
pointed out some years later, one of the sig-
nificant weaknesses of Sartre’s thought was his
failure to engage with contemporary science,
which is precisely what structuralism had done.
In addition to its assimilation of the methods
of structural linguistics, structuralism also drew
its inspiration from the recent achievements of
the new sciences mentioned above. Whatever
the ultimate limitations of this kind of
interdisciplinarity, it at least gave the impres-
sion of a ferment of ideas which appeared to
be absent in existentialism.
Inevitably, a polemic developed between the
two movements, crystallizing around the figures
of Sartre and Lévi-Strauss. In Tristes tropiques,
Lévi-Strauss had already attacked the
subjectivist bias of phenomenology and exis-
tentialism. A philosophy based on personal ex-
perience, he claimed, can never tell us anything
essential about society or humanity, but is sim-
ply a dramatization of the individual. A few
years later, in The Savage Mind (La Pensée
sauvage), he questioned the obsession of phi-
losophers like Sartre with history, arguing that
their conception of the historical process was
purely relative. The societies studied by ethnolo-
gists also possessed a history, but chose to rep-
resent it differently, constructing their social
identity around the repetition of archetypal situ-
ations rather than in relation to a linear sequence
of events. Sartre’s response to structuralism,
both in this local debate and more generally,
was to criticize the abstraction of structural
analysis, which ignored the dialectical realities
of concrete relations and of the historical proc-
ess. In his view, the priority structuralism gave
to autonomous and unconscious structures de-
humanized the subject and excluded the possi-
bility of individual agency. On a more general
level, he saw structuralism as a symptom of the
political stasis of France under de Gaulle’s Fifth
Republic and as the intellectual incarnation of
modern technocratic ideology.
Sartre’s resistance was by no means isolated.
He was joined by French intellectuals of diverse
persuasions (Marxist, Christian and others),
who saw in structuralism a philosophy inimi-
cal to the interests of an authentic humanism.
Despite their often valid criticisms, it was evi-
dent that the tide had turned in favour of the
human sciences as exemplified in the anthro-
pology of Lévi-Strauss. The events of May 1968
seemed to offer momentary vindication of
Sartre’s position, as for many structuralism had
become synonymous with the conservative ele-
ments of the discredited regime: one commen-
tator memorably remarked that les structures
ne descendent pas dans la rue (‘structures do
not take to the streets’). The triumph was short-
lived, however, and by the late 1960s the posi-
tion of structuralism seemed assured as it finally
received academic consecration in the post-1968
expansion of the university system.
To an extent it could be said that the de-
cline of structuralism came from within: that
is, it came from those who had enthusiasti-
cally assimilated its lessons and had come to
recognize its inherent limitations. The diverse
structuralism
511
applications of linguistic structuralism could
often be reductive and in the worse cases de-
generated into the mechanical repetition of a
preset formula. While Lévi-Strauss continued
to refine his own version of structural analysis
in the relatively specialized domain of mythol-
ogy, by the early 1970s thinkers such as
Barthes had abandoned structuralism. It re-
mains that structuralism represented a crucial
phase in postwar French thought, and it is a
measure of its historical importance that the
heterogeneous movement which succeeded it
is commonly referred to as poststructuralism.
CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON
See also: anthropology and ethnology;
Derrida; linguistic/discourse theory
Further reading
Descombes, V. (1979) Le Même et l’autre:
quarante-cinq ans de philosophic française
(1933–1978), Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
Translated L.Scott-Fox and J.M.Harding
(1980) Modern French Philosophy, Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press (essen-
tial for an understanding of the philosophi-
cal debates surrounding structuralism).
Dosse, F. (1991/2) Histoire du structuralisme,
2 vols, Paris: Éditions la Découverte (an
exhaustive if sometimes rather anecdotal
survey of the personalities, issues and de-
bates of the structuralist period).
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1955) Tristes tropiques,
Paris: Plon. Translated J. and D.Weightman
(1984) Tristes tropiques, Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
——(1962) La Pensée sauvage, Paris: Plon.
Translated R.Needham (1966) The Savage
Mind, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
——(1964–71) Mythologiques, 4 vols, Paris:
Plon. Translated J. and D.Weightman (1970–
81) Mythologiques: Introduction to a Science
of Mythology, 4 vols, London: Cape.
——(1967) Les Structures élémentaires de la
parenté, Paris and La Haye: Mouton & Co/
Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Trans-
lated J.H.Bell, J.R.von Sturmer and
R.Needham (1969) The Elementary Struc-
tures of Kinship, Boston: Beacon Press.
——(1973) Anthropologie structural deux,
Paris: Plon. Translated M.Layton (1978)
Structural Anthropology 2, Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Saussure, F.de (1986) Cours de linguistique
générale, Paris: Payot. Translated R.Harris
(1983) Course in General Linguistics, Lon-
don: Duckworth.
Sturrock, J. (ed.) (1979) Structuralism and
Since: From Lévi-Strauss to Derrida, Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press (an authori-
tative collection of essays on the main lu-
minaries of structuralist thought).
student revolt of 1986
In late 1986, a bill before parliament (con-
taining proposals that might have significantly
increased university registration fees and in-
troduced measures of selective entry) pro-
voked widespread strikes in educational insti-
tutions, and brought students from universi-
ties and lycées alike on to the streets in their
hundreds of thousands, in the common cause
of protest at the infringement of the Republi-
can constitutional right to free access to non-
fee-paying higher education. It was the largest
and best co-ordinated student protest since the
events of May 1968, to which some commen-
tators began to liken it. When clashes between
demonstrators and police in Paris led to the
death of a student, the legislation was with-
drawn. The Junior Minister for Research and
Higher Education responsible, Alain
Devaquet, resigned.
RON HALLMARK
See also: education ministry; education, sec-
ondary: collèges, lycées
Further reading
Various (1987) ‘Université: le séisme: les dos-
siers complets de la crise’, Le Monde de
student revolt of 1986
512
l’éducation 134 (January): 3–20 (a full ex-
ploration of the issues).
suburbs
The banlieue, as the urban periphery outside
the urban core is called, has a history going
back to the redevelopment of city centres and
influx of rural migrants in the second half of
the nineteenth century. Later, in the interwar
period, urban peripheries expanded haphaz-
ardly with little planning. The term ‘red belt’,
referring to the Communist-voting suburbs to
the northeast of Paris, dates from this period.
It was coined by Paul-Vaillant Couturier in
articles that appeared in the Communist news-
paper L’Humanité in 1924–6 and eventually
became a reality after the 1935 municipal elec-
tions. Today, the tight network of Communist
associations and culture has come to an end
as the banlieue becomes truly part of urban
civilization, an integral extension rather than
an appendage of the city.
It was at the beginning of the 1960s that
Sarcelles, then a dormitory suburb in the Paris
agglomeration, gave its name to sarcellite, an
illness equated with the concrete gigantism
and poor living conditions of the HLM (habi-
tat à loyer modéré). ‘Banlieue’ has increasingly
operated, as the inner city has done in Britain,
as the simplified shorthand for a cluster of
social ills and problematic inhabitants. The
coupling of security and foreigner, delinquency
and immigration, violence and suburbs, has
reinforced the sense of the suburb as being
outside of normal society, a place of exclusion
for the dangerous classes. Thus banlieue
merges seamlessly into cités (estates), ghettos
and quartiers difficiles (problem areas).
Disturbances in Vénissieux (1981) and
Vaulx-en-Velin (1990)—both suburbs of
Lyon—and in Sartrouville (1991) and Man-
tes-la-Jolie (1991) maintained the suburb in
the forefront of media attention and public
policy. From 1983, the ‘Banlieue 89’ pro-
gramme, launched by Roland Castro and
Michel Cantal-Dupart, began its work on cre-
ating a new urbanism. The projects in the
‘Banlieue’ programme, of which 200 had been
undertaken in the 1980s, combined design,
sociability and cultural activities; they sought
to recentre places which had been peripheral
and connect them together. However, the
‘Banlieue 89’ programme exuded an unwar-
ranted optimism in the power of improve-
ments in the built environment to provide an
answer to inequalities and economic and so-
cial exclusion.
Not only has the banlieue come to occupy
centre stage politically, but it has also gained
prominence cinematically in the 1990s.
Whereas in the 1960s the banlieue was an unu-
sual setting, with the exception of a few films
such as Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle
directed by Jean-Luc Godard (1966), which
examined women’s prostitution, and La
Dernière Femme (1976) by Marco Ferreri, in
the mid-1990s a new wave of French film
adopted the themes of life in the banlieue—
youth in their dealings with parents and the
law, and relationships between different eth-
nic minorities—as central concerns. Kassovitz’s
La Haine (1995) highlighted the lives of youths
from different ethnic backgrounds who, bored
and hassled on their estate, escape to the bright
lights of Paris, for which they do not possess
the necessary savoir faire. Other accounts, such
as the voyage undertaken by François Maspero
and Anaik Frantz through the Parisian
banlieue, follow the route of the RER (express
metro), presenting portraits of landscape
which, though sometimes very desolate, are
always peopled with real figures.
ELEONORE KOFMAN
See also: cinéma de banlieue; parties and
movements
Further reading
Jazouli, A. (1992) Années de banlieue, Paris:
Éditions du Seuil (polemical sociological
analysis)
Maspero, F. and Frantz A. (1993) Roissy Ex-
press: A Journey Through the Paris
suburbs
513
Suburbs, London: Verso (French edition
[1990] Les Passagers du Roissy Express,
Paris: Seuil) (a lively and thoughtful narra-
tive account).
Supervielle, Jules
b. 1884, Montevideo, Uruguay;
d. 1960, Paris
Poet, writer and dramatist
Supervielle was educated in France and lived
in France after World War II. In his poetry as
well as in his fiction, he is noted for his gra-
cious intimacy, his ability to link himself to
nature and the universe with fresh eyes, and
without grandiloquence. His friendships with
Gide, Valéry and Rilke were crucial in his for-
mation, yet he maintained a fine balance be-
tween his Uruguayan and French cultural lega-
cies. Primarily his works win readers by their
charm and simplicity. There are many volumes
of poetry, from Gravitations (1926) to 1959’s
Le Corps tragique (The Tragic Body), plus sev-
eral collections of fiction, notably the appro-
priately entitled Premiers pas de l’univers (First
Steps in the Universe) from 1950.
WALTER A.STRAUSS
Supports/Surfaces
The Supports/Surfaces group, which existed
as a coherent avant-garde between 1971 and
1972, was associated with the structuralist re-
view Tel quel and its pro-Maoist faction, the
Mouvement de Juin ’71. Marcelin Pleynet
acted as ‘bridge’ between art and literature
through his position as art critic and editor of
Tel quel. Pleynet’s Painting and System
(Système de la Peinture), which provides a
model for interpreting the history of art with
reference to Marx and Freud, was applauded
by the artists of the Supports/Surfaces group.
The Supports/Surfaces artists made two
important contributions to art practice: they
attacked the Greenbergian Modernist para-
digm (which insists upon abstraction and the
sublime as qualitative measures of ‘Modern’
art) by revealing the extent to which the sur-
face picture plane is itself constructed (falsify-
ing); and insisted upon the semantic value of
plastic practice. These projects were wrapped
up in Far Left political rhetoric by the group’s
journal, Peinture, cahiers théoriques. That the
plastic works resemble American minimal art
of the preceding decade has made it difficult
to assimilate them within an international art
market which demands aesthetic innovation,
while rejecting politics and philosophy as de-
terminants for value in art practice.
Bioulès’s Sans titre of 1971 (a diptych in
which each panel is divided in two, coloured
white, blue/white, red) would provide an ex-
ample in which the refusal of the écran pictural
is achieved through the use of acrylic washes,
absorbed by the fine linen surface, emphasiz-
ing ‘objecthood’, and denying the assumption
of colour as transcendent surface.
Bioulès ultimately resigned over the strict
imposition of a posited ‘dialectical material-
ism’, which he felt limited Freudian interpre-
tations of his pulsion towards colour.
Louis Cane’s Toiles découpées from 1970
(large felt squares, with the centre cut to form
a protrusion on the floor and a ‘frame’ on the
wall) negotiate the Matisse inheritance and its
Freudian corollary through ‘cutting’, as well
as invoking Stella’s shaped canvases (and
thereby asserting the ‘objecthood’ of the work,
its material reality as opposed to its transcend-
ent aesthetic value). They question through
their three-dimensional quality not only the
Renaissance Véduta (window on the world)
as structure in painting but also the Modern-
ist critical intolerance of sculpture’s
physicality. For a political interpretation to be
defended, it is necessary to see Cane’s earlier
Tampons (rubber stamp marks which read
‘Louis Cane, artiste peintre’) of 1967 as posit-
ing the artist as artisan-worker: the repetitive
manual operation is seen as analogous to the
‘skilled ouvrier’ emergent under Pompidou,
Supports/Surfaces
514
their identity disappearing in the almost infi-
nite repetition of their ‘Fordist’ mechanized
gesture.
Dezeuze was already a long way into his
systematic investigations by the time he made
his Échelle de bois verte et brune (Brown and
Green Wooden Ladder) in 1971. The disrup-
tion of the categories painting/sculpture/archi-
tectural space may once again be seen as a re-
fusal of Modernist critical preoccupations with
transcendence and its analogous exclusion of
non-codified genres. The concern with relocat-
ing the stretcher as structurally meaningful is
clearer here than in almost any Supports/Sur-
faces work: the absorption of wood dyes for
colour, affirming the rejection of the primacy
of the surface screen (which is absent), the
rolled-up part of the piece insisting upon a re-
fusal of narrative closure, a refusal of mastery,
the undetermined presence of excess.
Valensi’s tressages (weavings) and objet
d’analyses (analytical objects) of 1970 engage
strongly with questions of language, text(ile),
intertextuality and refusal of narrative closure.
Particularly, this artist may be seen to take on
board the notion of ‘system’ as a scientific ap-
proach to a research-based art, seeking to ex-
plore the effects of stitching, knotting, weav-
ing and layering materials traditionally asso-
ciated with painting. There is no place here
for ‘bourgeois’ aesthetic bliss. This work is
functional, not in the propagandizing manner
of socialist realism, but rather after the fash-
ion of science ameliorating understanding in
the domain of the arts, a position very much
at one with the contradictory French cultural
context of its moment.
Viallat’s Disparitions multiples (Multiple
Disappearances) of 1970 engages with not
only a refusal of the surface through the use
of absorbed colours, not only with the refusal
of closure which is implicit in the multilay-
ered recto-verso work, not only with the re-
fusal of surface narrative through the use of
his repetitive non-referential form, but also
with the notion of an acquired material narra-
tive, liberated through this series of refusals.
His Pochoir de filet sur toile métis of 1972
cross-references his rope/knot pieces with his
‘disparition’ pieces by using the trace of an
absent knotted rope net to indicate the absence
of his non-referential forms (the marks form-
ing in effect the tessellated outline of the usual
pattern). His recuperation of materials and lib-
eration of their narrative value uses a
Derridean displacement to effect a structural
revelation of semantic excess usually covered
by painting.
Viallat never made any specific claims for
the political value of his work, and this proved
to be a stumbling block for his participation
in the group. It should be noted that it was a
political commitment to a culturally distinct
Midi, rather than an absence of political
stance, which was at stake. This ‘other’ politi-
cal domain is expressed most clearly not in his
painted/theoretical works but rather in his
drawings, where the representation of bull-
fighting is central. Viallat’s separation of poli-
tics from art is reflected in his separation of
art and drawing, where the former is deemed
intellectual and theoretical, and the latter an
expression of reality as lived by the artist.
These examples of the Supports/Surfaces
group’s practice are intended to be representa-
tive rather than exhaustive. It should be noted
that, while the group formally existed only
between 1971 and 1972, its impact on French
art practice was dominant throughout the
1970s. Its significance may be measured by
the strength of its legacy, a legacy of
postmodern art practice which works freely
with shattered cultural narrative, as if its pre-
vious seeming coherence had never needed to
be questioned.
SIMEON HUNTER
See also: Derrida; painting
Supports/Surfaces
515
Tapie, Bernard
b. 1945, Paris
Businessman and politician
Tapie was the archetypal ‘Socialist’ million-
aire, at least until his fall from grace in 1994.
The owner (among other things) of France’s
biggest manufacturer of sporting footwear, his
support for Mitterrand (who appointed him
minister with special responsibility for cities)
and demolition of Jean-Marie Le Pen in a tel-
evised debate made him one of the Left’s lead-
ing standard-bearers in Marseille, one of
whose constituencies he represented in parlia-
ment and whose football team he owned. Dis-
graced successively by his involvement in
match-rigging and by a spectacular bank-
ruptcy, he began serving a prison sentence in
1997. He embarked upon a screen acting ca-
reer in Claude Lelouch’s Hommes, femmes:
mode d’emploi (1996), for which he agreed to
accept a percentage of the takings by way of
payment.
KEITH READER
See also: parties and movements; sport
Tardieu, Jean
b. 1903, Ain;
d. 1995, Paris
Playwright and poet
Tardieu is known for his translation of
Hölderlin’s poetry in the 1930s, and after the
war for short absurdist plays, experimenting
with language and form. These include Le
Guichet (The Ticket Office), La Serrure (The
Lock) and Le Sonate et les trots messieurs (The
Sonata and the Three Gentlemen).
ANNIE SPARKS
See also: theatre; Theatre of the Absurd
Further reading
Esslin, M. (1968) The Theatre of the Absurd,
London: Pelican (Chapter 5 discusses
Tardieu’s drama in relation to this move-
ment).
Tati, Jacques
b. 1908, Le Pecq, Yvelines;
d. 1982, Paris
Director and actor
Tati is one of the great French comedians, with
an original comic style close to mime. He made
only nine films, and is best remembered for
his incarnation of the accident-prone Hulot,
first in the anthology of gags Mr Hulot’s
T
516
Holiday (Les Vacances de M.Hulot) in 1953,
followed by a critique of the gadgets in mod-
ern life in Mon Oncle (1958), which received
a Special Jury prize at Cannes and an Oscar.
His greatest film is Playtime (1967), a power-
ful portrait of Americanized France.
PHIL POWRIE
See also: cinema
Tavernier, Bertrand
b. 1941, Lyon
Director
Tavernier’s films, many of them scripted by
the key scriptwriters of the 1950s, Aurenche
and Bost, hark back to the French quality tra-
dition. His career took off with L’Horloger de
Saint-Paul (1973), starring Noiret, which
won the Prix Delluc. Subsequent films were
either similar social analyses, e.g. the drug
squads in L627 (1991), or historical films,
such as his nostalgic Un dimanche à la
campagne (1984) set in 1912, which won a
César, or 1989’s Life and Nothing Else But
(La Vie et rien d’autre), set in World War I,
again starring Noiret.
PHIL POWRIE
See also: cinema; cinéma de qualité
Further reading
Douin, J.-L (1988) Tavernier, Paris: Édilig
(analysis of the films).
Téchiné, André
b. 1943, Valence-d’Agen
Director
‘A man of taste and culture rather than the crea-
tor of a universe’ (according to the Larousse
Dictionnaire du cinéma), Téchiné remains one
of contemporary French cinema’s outstanding
directors of female actors, and it was for him
that Catherine Deneuve gave two of her best
performances in Hôtel des Amériques (1981)
and Ma saison préférée (1993). He used Jeanne
Moreau to good effect in the Brechtian Souve-
nirs d’en France (1975), and showed a sensitiv-
ity to adolescent—especially homosexual—
anxieties in the autobiographically based Les
Roseaux sauvages (1994).
KEITH READER
See also: cinema; gay cinema
Tel Quel group
This group of writers and critics associated with
the review Tel quel was particularly influential
in the late 1960s and early 1970s and proposed
a radical theory and practice of writing.
The review Tel quel was created in 1960 at
Éditions du Seuil as a rival to the Nouvelle
Revue française, but soon began, under the
dominance of Philippe Sollers, to celebrate the
(then) literary avant-garde nouveau roman. By
1966, Tel quel had divested itself of this influ-
ence, developed its own experimental literary
practice in the novel (Sollers, Jean-Louis
Baudry, Jacques Henric) and in poetry
(Marcelin Pleynet, Denis Roche), and become
a vital context for innovative critical practices
such as those of structuralist critics Genette and
Barthes (who would remain a close ally of the
group until his death). A key moment was the
1965 publication, in the ‘Tel quel’ series, of
translations of the Russian Formalists, affirm-
ing the autonomy of literary practice. The limi-
tations of structuralism and Formalism were
soon bypassed, however, when in 1968 the
review radicalized itself, articulating a complex
theoretical ‘programme’, which appealed to the
burgeoning theoretical apparatuses of
Althusser, Lacan, Derrida and Kristeva (who
became one the principal forces of the group
Tavernier, Bertrand
517
with Sollers and Pleynet). Linking textual revo-
lution to social revolution, also in 1968 the
group engaged in an uneasy alliance with the
Communist Party, only to move away from
this position, in a spectacular and somewhat
hysterical manner, and towards Maoism in
1971 (culminating in a trip to China in 1974
which was to puncture the ideological fantasy
of China as revolutionary utopia). After 1971,
the group’s rhetoric became increasingly an-
archic and terroristic, as if under the delayed
pressure of the events of May 1968. A symp-
tom of this was the more Rabelaisian or
Joycean style of the group’s fiction, and a criti-
cal focus on writers such as Joyce and Céline
in the 1970s. With the growing importance of
psychoanalysis and of the work of Lacan, the
review became more and more critical of po-
litical systems, and emphasized the subjective
dimension in literature and thought. This im-
plied the abandonment of the group’s politi-
cal positions and a focus on forms of subjec-
tive excess or jouissance, notably in relation
to sexuality and religion. This focus on the
subject as exception also resulted in the dis-
persal of the group. In 1983, the review
changed name and publisher to L’Infini at
Gallimard, and is still published at present,
with Sollers in overall control, affirming lit-
erature as an exceptional force resistant to cul-
tural or social homogeneity.
PATRICK FFRENCH
See also: literary journals; Marxism and
Marxian thought; poststructuralism
Further reading
ffrench, P. (1995) The Time of Theory: A His-
tory of ‘Tel quel’, Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press (a critical analysis of the literary
theory proposed by the Tel Quel group in
its context).
Forest, P. (1995) Histoire de ‘Tel quel’, Paris:
Éditions du Seuil (a highly detailed account
of the history of Tel quel).
Sollers, P. (1983) Théorie des exceptions,
Paris: Gallimard.
Tel quel (1960–82) Paris: Éditions du Seuil
(quarterly review).
——(1968) Théorie d’ensemble, Paris:
Éditions du Seuil.
television
For most of the postwar period French televi-
sion was organized as a state monopoly which
in practice was closely controlled by the gov-
ernment. From the middle of the 1980s, pri-
vate sector competition was introduced, new
channels were established and the balance of
the system tilted towards commercial players.
French television increasingly operates as part
of a European audiovisual market, which
opens up commercial opportunities for some
companies but also poses problems for the
defence of French content and culture.
French television was officially established
in 1935, though regular broadcasts did not
take place until after the end of World War II.
The medium was slow to make an impact on
French society and it was not until the late
1950s that a television set began to be per-
ceived as an essential household item. By the
end of the 1960s, television viewing had be-
come a routinized part of leisure activity.
Its hold on the nation’s attention has in-
creased ever since, with the result that, in line
with other western European countries, France
has fully embraced the audiovisual era. The
number of households with at least one televi-
sion set has attained saturation level (over 95
per cent), while about 65 per cent also possess
a video cassette recorder. The provision of na-
tional terrestrial networks has increased from
1 in the early 1960s to 6 by the mid-1990s,
while cable offers its subscribers at least an-
other 20 channels. The amount of television
programming available on terrestrial televi-
sion alone has jumped from 2,760 hours per
year in 1960 to over 50,000 hours in 1993. In
return, by the mid-1990s a French adult
watched television for an average of more than
three hours per day.
During its formative years, French television
television